2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46

Posted on 17 November 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 33 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, November 10, 2024 thru Sat, November 16, 2024.

Story of the week

Our Story of the Week is completely “meta” (no, not that Meta). It’s about our exploring how to improve the utility of the feature you’re reading right now.

Sharp-eyed or possibly even distracted regular readers of our weekly climate news roundup will have noticed some distinct differences in the prior two editions to this latest, compared with the past 634 releases. 

Typically our weekly listing of news and analysis centered on climate change has been displayed in chronological order, more-or-less following the sequence of original article publication dates. This is a perspective that sometimes affords readers a sense of the development of particlarly prominent stories, a useful view of major developments.

There are other ways of measuring the weight and meaning of news about our climate. Given that many of us are likely to have special areas of interest, it can be particularly helpful when articles are categorized by their common themes of topic matter (click here or the thumbnail for an example). Our readers have remarked on this and we’d certainly like to follow through on worthy suggestions for improvements. But categorization means effort— time taken from the scanty and overcommited budget of minutes afforded by the all-volunteer crew running our weekly features.

For the past three weeks we’ve experimented with creating digests of the respective week’s news via “AI” services, first with Google’s Gemini and then (when Gemini proved unreliable) OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Neither method produces exactly what we’d like to see, which ideally would be comprehensive categorization of thematically related news and analysis, with direct link access to component articles of each category and with “lede” elements offering readers a hint of why they might be interested in reading any given item.  We’re left with a twist on the old “80:20” rule; here the last 20% of what we need is quite materially important to our objectives. 

We’re going to continue tinkering with what we think may well end up as an improved “product.” The semi-automated work flow behind the Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup is well suited to an additional integration step. It’s a plain fact that uncategorized information is harder for readers to access, so if there’s a way to achieve this improvement we’ll seek to follow it.

In connection with any decision to use the current achingly energy inefficient generative LLMs, it’s worth taking energy usage into account. Kilowatt hours in still mean kilograms of CO2 out despite whatever handwaving about offsets or other accounting tricks are used to salve our consciences. An astute reader pointed this out in comments, unsurprisingly given that AI industry “demands” for power are reaching absurd levels definitely needing to be questioned and possibly denied permission. The answer to this, in our context? It may come as a surprise, but even with the generosity of ignoring embodied carbon costs for creating a human capable of productively spending an hour at a computer keyboard it appears that for our context here, it’s likely more efficient to use a stochastic parrot as an assistant. 

At any rate we’ve paused our experimentation to step back and consider where to go next, and so this week’s liisting is in the chronological format we’ve been using for the past few months— similar to that of the prior 600 or so editions. Meanwhile we’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on where we might best go with this feature, AI-augmented or not. 

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before November 10

• How is climate misinformation evolving? (a podcast), BBC, Jordan Dunbar. Climate science and reporting are vital to understanding how our climate is changing. But false information spread online is causing big problems and it’s getting harder to spot.
• Experts: What does a Trump presidency mean for climate action?, Carbon Brief, Molly Lempriere. The Republican candidate Donald Trump has been elected as the 47th US president, beating his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in a “historic comeback”.
• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #45 2024, Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack. Skeptical Science’s weekly survey of newly published research on climate change.
• Brazil Hopes to Make the Amazon a Model for a Green Economy, Yale Environment 360, Fred Pearce. “As he prepares to host the G20 summit, Brazil’s president is championing initiatives to promote a ‘bioeconomy’ in the Amazon that protects biodiversity and helps Indigenous residents. The goal: To get governments to commit to a new economic vision that is truly sustainable.”
• WHO demands urgent integration of health in climate negotiations ahead of COP29, WHO News Release, Staff.

November 10

• 2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45, Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler, Doug Bostrom & John Hartz. A listing of 33 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, November 3, 2024 thru Sat, November 9, 2024.
• Climate Advocacy Groups Say They’re Ready for Trump 2.0, Justice & Climate, Inside Climate News, Georgina Gustin. “Disheartened, worried, even scared, activists and strategists are nevertheless better prepared this time around and bracing for a long fight.”
• Cop29: what are carbon credits and why are they so controversial?, Explainer/Environment, The Guardian, Patrick Greenfield. “Once heavily scorned because of fraud and poor outcomes, carbon trading is likely to be high on the agenda in Baku”