Top News: UN Chief Says Ban Fossil Fuel Ads as Warming Rate Hits All-Time IT'S TIME TO THINK! IT'S TIME TO READ!

Wednesday, June 5, 2024 ■ Today's Top News  Rate of Global Warming Reaches All-Time High, Report Shows "The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding, and heatwaves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal," the report's author said. By Edward Carver Climate scientists published a report Wednesday showing that the rate of global warming reached an all-time high in the 10 years up to and including 2023 and that the record-breaking heat of last year was primarily due to that human-caused heating rather than other factors such as El Niño. The scientists found that from 2014 to 2023, the Earth warmed 0.26°C—higher than any previous 10-year period. The report, published in Earth System Science Data, was completed by 57 scientists who used the methods of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces major reports only every five to 10 years, with the next one expected in 2027. The report authors sought to fill the gap and, at least in one case, to galvanize climate action. "Rapidly reducing emissions of greenhouse gases towards net zero will limit the level of global warming we ultimately experience. At the same time, we need to build more resilient societies," lead author Piers Forster, a climate physicist at the University of Leeds in the U.K. and an IPCC author, said in a statement. "The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding, and heatwaves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal." Over the course of 2023, temperatures were on average 1.43°C above preindustrial levels, Forster and co-authors found, with an estimated 1.31°C of that due to human-caused global warming, and the relatively small remainder due to variability from events such as El Niño and La Niña. The report also shows that the Earth's remaining "carbon budget"—how much can be emitted before reaching 1.5°C of warming, the Paris agreement target—is now roughly 200 gigatonnes, which will take only five years or so for the global population to use. This is down from the 500 gigatonnes that the IPCC estimated remained in the budget as of 2020. Adam Vaughan, environment editor at The Times, a U.K. newspaper, drew attention to the short time period in which humanity has to act, writing on social media that the 1.5°C target could be "blown" if emissions didn't go down. In a guest post in Carbon Brief, Forster and another co-author explained that their report was "nothing short of alarming, yet it does contain some encouraging news." "Greenhouse gas emissions have not yet risen beyond pre-pandemic levels and there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the past decade has slowed compared to the 2000s," they said. Forster, who also led the annual report in its first iteration last year, spoke to reporters in such a way as to avoid doomsday rhetoric. "If you look at this world accelerating or going through a big tipping point, things aren't doing that," he told The Associated Press. "Things are increasing in temperature and getting worse in sort of exactly the way we predicted." However, the climate news remains dire: Researchers working with even more up-to-date data—through May—have found that the average temperature increase above preindustrial levels is now 1.6°C, and each of the last 12 months has been the hottest on record for that month. Those findings are from data released by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service and reported byThe Washington Post. UN Chief Calls for Global Ban on Fossil Fuel Advertising "There is no longer any cover for agencies to say that they are doing the right thing when working with polluters," said one campaigner. "Everyone knows this is wrong, and everyone needs to act." By Julia Conley Jewish US Army Major Explains Why He Resigned Over Gaza "I knew that as long as I stayed, I'd be contributing to this campaign that had already demonstrated basically it was going to be indiscriminately killing civilians at an industrial scale," said Harrison Mann. By Jessica Corbett US Agencies Urged to Tackle Medicare Advantage, Other 'Outrageous' Healthcare Greed "There is much the Biden administration can and must do to address the national embarrassment that is for-profit healthcare in the U.S.," said Public Citizen's healthcare policy advocate. By Jake Johnson Biden Claims Israel Isn't Starving Gazans. Rights Groups Say 'It Is Clear as Day' "The fact that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza is not in contention," said a Human Rights Watch researcher. By Jake Johnson 'Dystopian': UAE Used Global Climate Summit to Push $100 Billion in New Oil Deals "Make no mistake, COP28 was hijacked by the interests of the fossil fuel industry," said one campaigner. By Julia Conley JOIN THE MOVEMENT As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover the issues the corporate media never will. Your contribution supports this bold media model—free, independent, and dedicated to reporting the facts every day. Stand with us in the fight for economic equality, social justice, human rights, and a more sustainable future. JOIN WITH US TODAY ■ More News 'Unhinged' Trump Floats Imprisoning Political Foes FAKE NEWS! MUST READ! Israeli Government Funded Covert Influence Campaign Targeting US Lawmakers: NYT Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs organized and paid for a digital campaign to influence U.S. lawmakers, especially Democrats who are Black, The New York Timesreported on Wednesday. The ministry allotted $2 million to the operation in October and hired Stoic, a Tel Aviv-based political marketing firm, to carry it out. Stoic established fake news websites and hundreds of fake accounts on X, Instagram, and Facebook that posted pro-Israeli messages, trying to push lawmakers such as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the House minority leader, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) to fund Israel's military and support its war efforts, the Times reported. The influence campaign had been reported by a few news and nonprofit organizations in recent months, but the Times article, which drew from operation documents and interviews with current and former diaspora ministry officials, was the first to show that Israel's government was behind it. Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, published a related story one hour later on Wednesday. Critics condemned the Israeli government for its role in the disinformation campaign. "So in addition to the pro-Israel lobby spending tens of millions to defame and defeat progressives in Congress, we now learn that Israel creates fake media to target friends and opponents by inundating with fake news supporting Israeli positions," James Zogby, co-founder of the Arab American Institute, wrote on social media. The disinformation campaign comes amid other efforts by pro-Israel groups to influence U.S. politics during its assault on Gaza, notably the lobbying and campaign money spent by groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates. The Israeli disinformation campaign also drew comparisons to Russia's well-known attempt to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which was a central focus of the U.S. political commentariat in the years that followed. Ishmael Daro, an editor at Democracy Now!, made a tongue-in-cheek prediction that the reaction from the U.S. political establishment would be similar this time. Last week, both Meta and OpenAI issued reports on Stoic's disinformation campaign and said they had blocked the company's network from further activity. Meta said it had closed more than 500 fake Facebook accounts and OpenAI called Stoic a "for-hire Israeli threat actor," NBC Newsreported. Stoic's users remain active on X, the Times reported. Many of the fake social media posts were generated using ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot owned by OpenAI, and much of the language in the posts was "stilted" and repetitive, the Times reported. The covert scheme has also been characterized as "sloppy" and "ineffective," and it made little penetration with the general public or government figures. "We found and removed this network early in its audience building efforts, before they were able to gain engagement among authentic communities," Meta wrote in its report. The Times did not explain that the covert influence campaign was discovered in February by the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and by Marc Owen Jones, a professor in Middle East studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, according to social media posts. FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation watchdog, followed up those initial discoveries with a March report on the campaign's activities, including the fake social media accounts and creation of the online platforms—Non-Agenda, The Moral Alliance, and Unfold Magazine—that created or republished news from a pro-Israel perspective, focusing on, for example, purported links between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and Hamas. The findings were reported in Haaretz at the time. That Israel "ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible," Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter, told the Times. He characterized it to Haaretz as "amateurish" and "anti-democratic." FakeReporter in fact issued a second report on Wednesday showing that Stoic's influence network may have gone further than the Times reporting shows. The watchdog group uncovered four additional websites, apparently Stoic-affiliated, that contain Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content. DFRLab had issued a report in March which also cited pro-Israeli disinformation and Islamophobic rhetoric, in that case targeted largely at Canadians. The new report concluded that the influence network has "apparently developed into a large-scale effort to target various groups, some outside the U.S., using Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content." 'What Are They Afraid Of?': Columbia Law Review Board Shuts Down Website Over Nakba Article 'We Can Get There': Medicare for All Advocates See Resurgence in National Movement VIEW ALL NEWS ■ Opinion Open Letter to Joe Biden on Behalf of Jewish Americans: Stop Sending Israel Offensive Weapons The continuation of violence will continue to increase the heart-wrenching death toll, increase the number of calls for a ceasefire, and decrease your poll numbers — straight through the election. By Jamie Beran Is Carbon Capture Just Climate Delusion? Direct air capture and similar technologies come with glossy brochures and lofty promises but we must not be fooled. They are a distraction and a scam orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry. By Basav Sen,Jim Walsh A Jury of 12 Upheld the Rule of the Law. Don't Hold Your Breath for the Right-Wing Supreme Court So many thanks to the dozen anonymous everyday people in New York who courageously did what the nation's highest court likely will not. 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