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Category: Climate Change

Bill McKibben on Climate Crisis: How we got here and what we can do now

Bill McKibben on Climate Crisis: How we got here and what we can do now

  Over forty years ago, the publication of ‘The End of Nature’ popularized a topic that was then largely unfamiliar to the general public. The book’s author, Bill McKibben, brought the subject of global warming to light and has advocated for climate solutions ever since. In this #EarthDay special on environmental protection, he talks about the oil industry’s PR campaign, how renewable energies can not only help the planet but also curb power abuse, and why global warming is an…

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California wants to harness more than half its land to combat climate change by 2045. Here’s how

California wants to harness more than half its land to combat climate change by 2045. Here’s how

The Los Angeles Times reports: California has unveiled an ambitious plan to help combat the worsening climate crisis with one of its invaluable assets: its land. Over the next 20 years, the state will work to transform more than half of its 100 million acres into multi-benefit landscapes that can absorb more carbon than they release, officials announced Monday. The so-called nature-based solutions will span natural and working lands such as forests, farms, grasslands, chaparral, deserts and other types of…

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2023 was even hotter than predicted, raising fears we’re in uncharted territory

2023 was even hotter than predicted, raising fears we’re in uncharted territory

Science Alert reports: Last year Earth warmed around 0.2 °C more than climate models predicted. While that may not seem like much in isolation, when you consider it’s a measure across an entire planet it amounts to a heck of a lot of unexplained heat. “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has,” writes NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt in an article for Nature. “The 2023 temperature anomaly…

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The paradox that’s supercharging climate change

The paradox that’s supercharging climate change

Wired reports: No good deed goes unpunished—and that includes trying to slow climate change. By cutting greenhouse gas emissions, humanity will spew out fewer planet-cooling aerosols—small particles of pollution that act like tiny umbrellas to bounce some of the sun’s energy back into space. “Even more important than this direct reflection effect, they alter the properties of clouds,” says Øivind Hodnebrog, a climate researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “In essence, they make the clouds…

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World set to quadruple oil and gas production by 2030, led by new U.S. projects

World set to quadruple oil and gas production by 2030, led by new U.S. projects

Oliver Milman writes: The world’s fossil-fuel producers are on track to nearly quadruple the amount of extracted oil and gas from newly approved projects by the end of this decade, with the US leading the way in a surge of activity that threatens to blow apart agreed climate goals, a new report has found. There can be no new oil and gas infrastructure if the planet is to avoid careering past 1.5C (2.7F) of global heating, above pre-industrial times, the…

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Save our seabed – the bottom of the ocean needs to become a top priority, and the UN agrees

Save our seabed – the bottom of the ocean needs to become a top priority, and the UN agrees

Seagrass meadows are a hugely important store of blue carbon – and so is the rest of the ocean sea floor. Philip Schubert/Shutterstock By William Austin, University of St Andrews “The science we need for the ocean we want” – this is the tagline for the UN Ocean Decade (2021-2030), which has just held its first conference in Barcelona, Spain. Marine scientists from around the world, including me, gathered alongside global leaders to chart the progress of this ten-year mission…

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Fears of massive ‘forest collapse’ event as Western Australia’s record dry spell continues

Fears of massive ‘forest collapse’ event as Western Australia’s record dry spell continues

  ABC News (AU) reports: After a record-breaking hot summer and significant dry spell, ecologists are warning large pockets of WA’s central to south-west coast are facing a potential forest collapse event, where trees and other smaller plants get so dry they die. One expert has likened it to coral bleaching on land, and just like in the ocean, such an event can have serious implications on the wider ecosystem, impacting breeding habitats and potentially populations of entire species. Murdoch…

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Exxon declares war on its dissenting investors

Exxon declares war on its dissenting investors

The Lever reports: ExxonMobil has launched an extraordinary lawsuit against two investment firms for the alleged offense of filing climate-focused shareholder proposals. The fossil fuel giant’s underlying goal: killing a federal regulatory effort that would make it easier for all U.S. shareholders to voice environmental and social concerns about the companies they own. Critics say the company is also trying to intimidate shareholders from ever proposing such resolutions again in the future — under threat of being tied up in…

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European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction

European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction

BBC News reports: A group of older Swiss women have won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of heatwaves linked to climate change. The court said Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate. It is the first time the powerful court has ruled on global warming. Swedish campaigner Greta…

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Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists

Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists

The Guardian reports: Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health. Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1C higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming…

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In countries facing scorching heat, shade trees and cheap cooling strategies gain traction

In countries facing scorching heat, shade trees and cheap cooling strategies gain traction

E&E News reports: When the capital of Sierra Leone launched a major campaign to provide shade amid sweltering heat, officials came up with a catchy slogan of what they hoped the city would become: Freetown the Treetown. The West African city had been denuded by rapid population growth, conflict and unregulated development, increasing its vulnerability to rising temperatures. The tree planting plan uses an app to generate jobs and is helping a fast-urbanizing city fend off the dangers of climate…

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Climate change is changing how we keep time

Climate change is changing how we keep time

Science News reports: Climate change may be making it harder to know exactly what time it is. The rapid melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica, as measured by satellite-based gravitational measurements, is shifting more mass toward Earth’s waistline. And that extra bulge is slowing the planet’s rotation, geophysicist Duncan Agnew reports online March 27 in Nature. That climate change–driven mass shift is throwing a new wrench into international timekeeping standards. The internationally agreed-upon coordinated universal time, or…

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Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

Gavin Schmidt writes: When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has. For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records…

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The rising cost of the oil industry’s slow death

The rising cost of the oil industry’s slow death

By Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main This story was originally published by ProPublica. In the 165 years since the first American oil well struck black gold, the industry has punched millions of holes in the earth, seeking profits gushing from the ground. Now, those wells are running dry, and a generational bill is coming due. Until wells are properly plugged, many leak oil and brine onto farmland and into waterways and emit toxic and explosive gasses,…

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The obscene energy demands of AI

The obscene energy demands of AI

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In 2016, Alex de Vries read somewhere that a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as the average American household uses in a day. At the time, de Vries, who is Dutch, was working at a consulting firm. In his spare time, he wrote a blog, called Digiconomist, about the risks of investing in cryptocurrency. He found the energy-use figure disturbing. “I was, like, O.K., that’s a massive amount, and why is no one talking about…

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Why is the sea so hot?

Why is the sea so hot?

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In early 2023, climate scientists—and anyone else paying attention to the data—started to notice something strange. At the beginning of March, sea-surface temperatures began to rise. By April, they’d set a new record: the average temperature at the surface of the world’s oceans, excluding those at the poles, was just a shade under seventy degrees. Typically, the highest sea-surface temperatures of the year are observed in March, toward the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. Last year,…

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