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Category: Climate Change

How Lyme disease the first epidemic of climate change

How Lyme disease the first epidemic of climate change

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Mary Beth Pfeiffer writes: In the tally of species that will evolve or perish as temperatures rise, now consider the moose. The lumbering king of the deer family, known for antlers that can span six feet like giant outstretched fingers, the moose faces a litany of survival threats, from wolves and bears to brain worms and liver fluke parasites. But in the late 1990s in many northern states and Canada, something else began to claim adult cows and bull moose…

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Land degradation by human activities pushing Earth into sixth mass extinction and undermining well-being of 3.2 billion people

Land degradation by human activities pushing Earth into sixth mass extinction and undermining well-being of 3.2 billion people

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  Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): Worsening land degradation caused by human activities is undermining the well-being of two fifths of humanity, driving species extinctions and intensifying climate change. It is also a major contributor to mass human migration and increased conflict, according to the world’s first comprehensive evidence-based assessment of land degradation and restoration. The dangers of land degradation, which cost the equivalent of about 10% of the world’s annual gross product in 2010 through…

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Mike Pompeo is a ‘great climate skeptic’

Mike Pompeo is a ‘great climate skeptic’

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The New York Times reports: The fall of Rex W. Tillerson from the Trump administration — on Tuesday, Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, was tapped to replace him as secretary of state — removes one the last remaining presidential advisers whose views on global warming are in line with the rest of the world. Mr. Pompeo has questioned the scientific consensus that human activity is changing the climate, and he has strongly opposed the Paris Agreement, a pact among nearly…

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We’re climate researchers and our work was turned into fake news

We’re climate researchers and our work was turned into fake news

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rawpixel.com / shutterstock By Michael Grubb, UCL Science is slow. It rests on painstaking research with accumulating evidence. This makes for an inherently uneasy relationship with the modern media age, especially once issues are politicised. The interaction between politics and media can be toxic for science, and climate change is a prominent example. Take the recent “deep freeze” along the US east coast. To scientists, it was one more piece of a larger jigsaw of climate change disrupting weather systems…

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Trump officials try to mute scientific warnings on climate change

Trump officials try to mute scientific warnings on climate change

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The Washington Post reports: A U.S. Geological Survey study documenting how climate change has “dramatically reduced” glaciers in Montana came under fire from high-level Interior Department officials last May, according to a batch of newly released records under the Freedom of Information Act, as they questioned federal scientists’ description of the decline. Doug Domenech, assistant secretary for insular areas at Interior, alerted colleagues in a May 10 email to the language the USGS had used to publicize a study documenting…

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MIT project claims nuclear fusion power will be on the grid within 15 years

MIT project claims nuclear fusion power will be on the grid within 15 years

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The Guardian reports: The dream of nuclear fusion is on the brink of being realised, according to a major new US initiative that says it will put fusion power on the grid within 15 years. The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private company, will take a radically different approach to other efforts to transform fusion from an expensive science experiment into a viable commercial energy source. The team intend to use a new class of high-temperature…

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Welcome to the age of climate migration

Welcome to the age of climate migration

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Jeff Goodell writes: In 2017, a string of climate disasters – six big hurricanes in the Atlantic, wildfires in the West, horrific mudslides, high-temperature records breaking all over the country – caused $306 billion in damage, killing more than 300 people. After Hurricane Maria, 300,000 Puerto Ricans fled to Florida, and disaster experts estimate that climate and weather events displaced more than 1 million Americans from their homes last year. These statistics don’t begin to capture the emotional and financial…

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How solar, wind and hydro could power the world, at lower cost

How solar, wind and hydro could power the world, at lower cost

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RenewEconomy reports: Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and Aalborg University in Denmark have updated and expanded their analysis on how the world – well, at lest 139 countries – could be powered entirely by solar, wind and hydro resources. The study, whose earlier version caused controversy and a strident critique by rival academics, now includes further modelling and a range of scenarios that include hydrogen storage, heat pumps and battery storage,…

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Nor’easters are now just as dangerous as hurricanes

Nor’easters are now just as dangerous as hurricanes

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Eric Holthaus writes: On Friday and Saturday, the winter storm now moving up the East Coast will unleash hurricane-force winds on Washington, blizzard conditions across parts of New York and New England, and inflict the worst coastal flood in Boston’s history. By all accounts, this storm is a monster. It’s also the latest sign that New England’s long-feared coastal flooding problem is already here — and it’s time to admit climate change is its primary cause. The storm’s strongest winds…

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Conservation efforts are failing to address the importance of preserving intact forests

Conservation efforts are failing to address the importance of preserving intact forests

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Morgan Erickson-Davis reports: When it comes to habitat quality and ecosystem services, research has shown that natural landscapes do it best. A new study, published recently in Nature, adds fodder to this argument, describing how intact forests are critically important for mitigating climate change, maintaining water supplies, safeguarding biodiversity, and even protecting human health. However, it warns that global policies aimed at reducing deforestation are not putting enough emphasis on the preservation of the world’s dwindling intact forests, instead relying…

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Glacial melting isn’t someone else’s problem

Glacial melting isn’t someone else’s problem

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By Dana J. Graef High in the Ecuadorian Andes, the peak of Cotacachi was once reliably white. But by the early 2000s, the glacier on top of this dormant volcano, which reaches more than 16,200 feet, had disappeared. This made it—as anthropologist Robert E. Rhoades and his co-authors Xavier Zapata Ríos and Jenny Aragundy Ochoa wrote in the 2008 book Darkening Peaks—one of “the first Andean mountains in the past half-century to completely lose its glacier as a result of…

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As China reduces its domestic reliance on coal, it’s building hundreds of coal-fired power plants overseas

As China reduces its domestic reliance on coal, it’s building hundreds of coal-fired power plants overseas

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The New York Times reports: Across a narrow channel from this historic port town, where baobabs tower over the forest and tiny crabs skitter in and out of the mangroves, Kenya could soon get its first coal-fired power plant, courtesy of China. The plan’s champions, including senior Kenyan officials, say the plant will help meet the country’s fast-growing demand for electricity and draw investment. Its critics worry that it will damage the area’s fragile marine ecosystem, threaten the livelihoods of…

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Arctic temperatures soar 45 degrees above normal, flooded by extremely mild air on all sides

Arctic temperatures soar 45 degrees above normal, flooded by extremely mild air on all sides

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The Washington Post reports: While the Eastern United States simmers in some of its warmest February weather ever recorded, the Arctic is also stewing in temperatures more than 45 degrees above normal. This latest huge temperature spike in the Arctic is another striking indicator of its rapidly transforming climate. On Monday and Tuesday, the northernmost weather station in the world, Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland, experienced more than 24 hours of temperatures above freezing according to…

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As the U.S. weakens protections for wilderness, Peru moves to protect ‘one of the last great intact forests’

As the U.S. weakens protections for wilderness, Peru moves to protect ‘one of the last great intact forests’

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The New York Times reports: The remote rain forests in Peru’s northeast corner are vast — so vast that the clouds that form above them can influence rainfall in the western United States. The region contains species, especially unusual fish, that are unlike any found elsewhere on Earth. Scientists studying the area’s fauna and flora may gain insights into evolutionary processes and into the ecological health and geological history of the Amazon. Now the area has become home to one…

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As climate change intensifies droughts, Cape Town’s water crisis may signify a new normal

As climate change intensifies droughts, Cape Town’s water crisis may signify a new normal

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Laura Poppick writes: Last June, Piotr Wolski began transforming his Cape Town swimming pool into a water storage tank for his home. By September, he had directed all gutters from his roof to flow into the pool and had installed a pump to transport water into the house where he lives with his family of four. Wolski works as a hydrologist studying regional rainfall patterns at the University of Cape Town, but his retrofit was no research experiment. Rather, he…

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We’re killing our lakes and oceans

We’re killing our lakes and oceans

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Eelco Rohling and Joseph Ortiz write: On January 5, 2018, a paper published in the journal Science delivered a sobering message: The oxygenation of open oceans and coastal seas has been steadily declining during the past half century. The volume of ocean with no oxygen at all has quadrupled, and the volume where oxygen levels are falling dangerously low has increased even more. We’re seeing the same thing happen in major lakes. The main culprits are warming and — especially…

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