Regardless of all other factors, higher global temperatures alone will cause an increase in the price of food in the range of 0.9% to 3.2% per year, a price that will add between 0.3% and 1.2% per annum to inflation, according to a study by Maximilian Kotz from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, done in collaboration with the European Central Bank (“Food Is Costing More Due to Climate Change—Prices Will Keep Rising”, New Scientist, March 30, 2024).
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The Quadra Project – The Climate Costs of Russian’s War
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a military and an environmental disaster. A team of researchers has made an effort to measure the climate impacts of the first two years of the war initiated by Russia (Michael LePage, “Russia Faces a $32 Billion Climate Bill”, New Scientist, June 22, 2024). Vladimir Putin’s failed “special military operation” has now stretched into a protracted conflict, with horrendous consequences not only for the planet’s ecology but for the global community of nations. The latter should be briefly noted, for it, too, is sobering.
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The Quadra Project: The Climate Olympics
Whether or not we acknowledge it or not, we are all participants in the Climate Olympics. And we’re not doing so well because we’re not trying hard enough. We have the capabilities, but we lack the effort and the focus.
The original purpose of the Olympic games, founded in Greece some 2,800 years ago, was to pay homage to humanity, and thereby to celebrate and honour the remarkable capabilities and achievements of a being that the Greeks believed to be the embodiment of nature’s perfection. The motto brought forward from those idealistic days of self-congratulations was “Swifter. Higher. Stronger.”
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The Quadra Project: The PFAS Folly
All too often our ingenuity seems to outwit our wisdom. A case in point is the discovery and production of PFAS chemicals. Its first iteration was created in 1938 by Roy J. Plunkett, the accidental result of some scientific tinkering while searching for a better refrigerant gas. He had inadvertently discovered an artificial compound that was “impervious to heat and chemical degradation and also extremely slippery”, as well as being water and oil repellent (Graham Lawton in New Scientist “Everyday Toxins”, May 11, 2024). We know this substance as the commercial product called Teflon, now produced at more than 200,000 tonnes per year.
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The Quadra Project: Temperature
Several years ago the editors of The Guardian Weekly, an independent British news magazine noted for its objective credibility, decided that the global warming subject was serious enough to warrant special coverage—not to understate the seriousness of the situation, their preference has been to call it “global heating”. They have not disappointed. In their May 17, 2024, edition they reported on a survey they undertook to sample the opinion of hundreds of climate scientists about their personal assessment of our situation. Their assessment is sobering.
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