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Category: Climate Change

California’s longer, hotter summers spark deadly, destructive fire season

California’s longer, hotter summers spark deadly, destructive fire season

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The Ventura County Star reports: California wildfires tore through mountains and foothills and into neighborhoods this week as record-breaking heat combined with increasingly dry conditions in the Golden State. On Friday, fires burned out of control, stretching resources thin in areas and forcing thousands to leave their homes. “We have a number of big destructive wildfires burning in very different parts of the state,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “There’s a lot going on right now in…

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Actually, Republicans do believe in climate change

Actually, Republicans do believe in climate change

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Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman write: It is widely believed that most Republicans are skeptical about human-caused climate change. But is this belief correct? In 2014 and 2016, we conducted two national surveys of more than 2,000 respondents on the issue of climate change. We found that most Republicans agreed that climate change is happening, threatens humans and is caused by human activity — and that reducing carbon emissions would mitigate the problem. To be sure, Democrats agreed more…

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Extreme global weather is ‘the face of climate change’ says leading scientist

Extreme global weather is ‘the face of climate change’ says leading scientist

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The Guardian reports: The extreme heatwaves and wildfires wreaking havoc around the globe are “the face of climate change”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has declared, with the impacts of global warming now “playing out in real time”. Climate change has long been predicted to increase extreme weather incidents, and scientists are now confident these predictions are coming true. Scientists say the global warming has contributed to on the scorching temperatures that have baked the UK and northern…

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The media’s failure to connect the dots on climate change

The media’s failure to connect the dots on climate change

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Emily Atkin writes: A record-breaking heat wave killed 65 people in Japan this week, just weeks after record flooding there killed more than 200. Record-breaking heat is also wreaking havoc in California, where the wildfire season is already worse than usual. In Greece, fast-moving fires have killed at least 80 people, and Sweden is struggling to contain more than 50 fires amid its worst drought in 74 years. Both countries have experienced all-time record-breaking temperatures this summer, as has most…

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Trump to seek repeal of California’s smog-fighting power

Trump to seek repeal of California’s smog-fighting power

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Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration will seek to revoke California’s authority to regulate automobile greenhouse gas emissions — including its mandate for electric-car sales — in a proposed revision of Obama-era standards, according to three people familiar with the plan. The proposal, expected to be released this week, amounts to a frontal assault on one of former President Barack Obama’s signature regulatory programs to curb emissions that contribute to climate change. It also sets up a high-stakes battle over California’s…

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Fueled by climate change, wildfires erode air quality gains

Fueled by climate change, wildfires erode air quality gains

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E&E News reports: Fourteen years ago, University of Washington researcher Daniel Jaffe installed an air pollution monitor on a mountainside outside Eugene, Ore. His intention was to measure pollution levels, with a particular focus on tracking emissions from China that drift into the United States in the spring. But in recent years, the monitor has unexpectedly produced a second and more urgent data set: tracking fine particle pollution from wildfires in the western United States. “We spend more of our…

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Trump and Putin are clearly in cahoots — over propping up fossil fuels

Trump and Putin are clearly in cahoots — over propping up fossil fuels

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Eric Holthaus writes: Whether Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 is not up for serious debate — numerous intelligence agencies, both foreign and domestic, concluded it did. During a joint press conference with President Donald Trump in Helsinki on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin went a long way toward answering why. “I did [want Trump to win] because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal,” Putin said. That statement was widely covered, but I’m…

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Where have all Britain’s insects gone?

Where have all Britain’s insects gone?

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Robin McKie reports: When Simon Leather was a student in the 1970s, he took a summer job as a postman and delivered mail to the villages of Kirk Hammerton and Green Hammerton in North Yorkshire. He recalls his early morning walks through its lanes, past the porches of houses on his round. At virtually every home, he saw the same picture: windows plastered with tiger moths that had been attracted by lights the previous night and were still clinging to…

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Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in serious trouble

Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in serious trouble

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The Washington Post reports: Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday. The melt rate has tripled in the past decade, the study concluded. If the acceleration continues, some of scientists’ worst fears about rising oceans could be realized, leaving low-lying cities and communities with less time to prepare than…

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‘Shocking’ die-off of Africa’s oldest baobabs

‘Shocking’ die-off of Africa’s oldest baobabs

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AFP reports: Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees — a few dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks — have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, researchers said Monday. The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and some as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated. “We report that nine of the 13 oldest… individuals have died, or at least their oldest…

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Climate change can be stopped by turning carbon dioxide pollution into gasoline

Climate change can be stopped by turning carbon dioxide pollution into gasoline

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The Atlantic reports: A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company Carbon Engineering announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere. If their technique is successfully implemented at scale, it could transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change. It could give people a decisive new tool in the race against a warming planet, but could also unsettle the issue’s delicate politics, making it…

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IKEA unveils ambitious climate goals

IKEA unveils ambitious climate goals

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GreenBiz reports: Swedish furniture giant IKEA has promised to outlaw single-use plastic products across its entire product range and in-store eateries by 2020 and ensure zero emission home deliveries as standard by 2025, as part of a sweeping set of new sustainability goals. The firm also promised to design all its products in line with circular principles and using renewable and recycled materials, and reduce the climate footprint of its wares by an average of 70 percent per product by…

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‘Carbon bubble’ could spark global financial crisis, study warns

‘Carbon bubble’ could spark global financial crisis, study warns

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The Guardian reports: Plunging prices for renewable energy and rapidly increasing investment in low-carbon technologies could leave fossil fuel companies with trillions in stranded assets and spark a global financial crisis, a new study has found. A sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2035 is likely, according to the study, given the current global investments and economic advantages in a low-carbon transition. The existence of a “carbon bubble” – assets in fossil fuels that are currently overvalued because,…

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World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds

World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds

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HuffPost reports: Leading global forecasts widely underestimate the future costs of climate change, a new paper warns. The findings, to be released Monday in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, say projections used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on outdated models and fail to account for “tipping points” ― key moments when global warming rapidly speeds up and becomes irreversible. The IPCC, established in 1988, is the leading international body for assessing climate change,…

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‘We can’t see a future’: Group takes EU to court over climate change

‘We can’t see a future’: Group takes EU to court over climate change

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The Guardian reports: Lawyers acting for a group including a French lavender farmer and members of the indigenous Sami community in Sweden have launched legal action against the EU’s institutions for failing to adequately protect them against climate change. A case is being pursued in the Luxembourg-based general court, Europe’s second highest, against the European parliament and the council of the European Union for allowing overly high greenhouse gas emissions to continue until 2030. The families, including young children, claim…

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