2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #11

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

A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 10, 2024 thru Sat, March 16, 2024.

Story of the week

This week we’ll give you a little glimpse into how we collect links to share and eventually wrap them up into this weekly compilation. This all started as a manual process where members from our team – especially John Hartz – scoured the internet looking for worthwhile articles to share on our Facebook page. To share that load, we also created a Google form via which articles could be submitted for the publication queue. As the submissions end up in a Google sheet, it is easy enough to use some sheet functions to build the post content for Facebook and elsewhere. It is also possible to build the underlying HTML-code needed for bullet lists items.

Scouring the internet for articles and building this blog post was however still a more or less manual and somewhat time-consuming process. This is when Doug Bostrom had a few very good ideas:

1. Make use of publications’ RSS-feeds to help with identifying suitable articles to share
2. Run a script once per hour to generate an updated list of articles also indicating the ones already queued
3. Partially automate filling-out the Google form based on the RSS feed information
4. Use a script to build the below bullet list grouped by publication dates of the articles

Each of these steps leverages some aspect of the Google sheet, making everything fall into place nicely so that we can more efficiently identify and share articles we deem interesting. Obviously, there’s also still the option to manually add items missed by the already wide-ranging RSS feeds!

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before March 10

• Rains Are Scarce in the Amazon. Instead, Megafires Are Raging., Climate, New York Times, Ana Ionova & Manuela Andreoni. “Hundreds of square miles of the rainforest have burned as countries in the region battle a record number of fires fueled by extreme weather.”
• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #10 2024, Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack. Our latest #ClimateResearch roundup, features 150 articles in 74 journals by 907 contributing authors
• Does climate change trigger earthquakes?, Climate, Vox, Paige Vega. “This and more reader questions on climate change, explained.”
• More solar shenanigans*, RealClimate, Gavin Schmidt.
• U.S. has warmest winter on record – and no, that’s not a good thing, NPR Topics: Climate, Lauren Sommer. Warmer winters sound pleasant— until we add up negative impacts spanning parasite, agricultural disruption and water supplies.
• The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I., Daily Comment, The New Yorker Magazine, Elizabeth Kolbert. How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?
• Are we stressing the wrong metrics for climate change?, Science & Health, Salon, Matthew Rosza. “Experts say rising temperatures due to burning fossil fuels only explains part of the ways we’re cooking our planet”