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Category: Climate Change

Swift victory in Colombian Supreme Court could pave way for further legal action on climate around the world

Swift victory in Colombian Supreme Court could pave way for further legal action on climate around the world

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Pacific Standard reports: In Colombia, a group of 25 children and young people have just made legal history: They successfully put their government on trial for causing climate change and thereby endangering the fundamental rights of its citizens. Colombia’s Supreme Court agreed with the young plaintiffs that the government had done too little to halt deforestation in the Amazon, despite its commitment to achieve net-zero deforestation by 2020. This, the justices decided, amounted to a threat to the plaintiffs’ rights…

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How the science of persuasion could change the politics of climate change

How the science of persuasion could change the politics of climate change

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MIT Technology Review reports: Jerry Taylor believes he can change the minds of conservative climate skeptics. After all, he helped plant the doubts for many in the first place. Taylor spent years as a professional climate denier at the Cato Institute, arguing against climate science, regulations, and treaties in op-eds, speeches, and media appearances. But his perspective slowly began to change around the turn of the century, driven by the arguments of several economists and legal scholars laying out the…

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She tried to report on climate change but Sinclair told her to be more ‘balanced’

She tried to report on climate change but Sinclair told her to be more ‘balanced’

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BuzzFeed reports: Sinclair Broadcast Group executives reprimanded and ultimately ousted a local news reporter who refused to seed doubt about man-made climate change and “balance” her stories in a more conservative direction. Her account, detailed in company documents she provided to BuzzFeed News, offers a glimpse at the inner workings of a media giant that has sought to both ingratiate itself to President Donald Trump and cast itself as an apolitical local news provider — a position the documents undermine….

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Ocean heat waves are becoming more common and lasting longer

Ocean heat waves are becoming more common and lasting longer

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The Washington Post reports: Heat waves over the world’s oceans are becoming longer and more frequent, damaging coral reefs and creating chaos for aquatic species. A study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications found a 54 percent increase in the number of days in which heat waves have cooked the oceans since 1925. The rise in these marine heat waves has occurred while ever more heat is stored in the ocean because of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere….

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The oceans’ circulation hasn’t been this sluggish in 1,000 years. That’s bad news

The oceans’ circulation hasn’t been this sluggish in 1,000 years. That’s bad news

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The Washington Post reports: The Atlantic Ocean circulation that carries warmth into the Northern Hemisphere’s high latitudes is slowing down because of climate change, a team of scientists asserted Wednesday, suggesting one of the most feared consequences is already coming to pass. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has declined in strength by 15 percent since the mid-20th century to a “new record low,” the scientists conclude in a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature. That’s a decrease of 3…

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Environmental Defense Fund is launching satellite to measure methane from oil and gas operations

Environmental Defense Fund is launching satellite to measure methane from oil and gas operations

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The Washington Post reports: When the Environmental Defense Fund told commercial space guru Tom Ingersoll that it wanted to launch a satellite to measure methane from oil and gas operations, he says his reaction was “Whoa! You guys want to do what?” Yet that’s what the EDF is doing. It is well on its way toward raising about $40 million. It has tapped into the work of Harvard University researchers to fine tune sensors. And it has reached out to…

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Apple now runs completely on renewable energy. Here’s how it got there

Apple now runs completely on renewable energy. Here’s how it got there

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Fast Company reports: You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, dark rooms–more than 50 of them–filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their…

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In America’s new civil war, one side must win

In America’s new civil war, one side must win

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Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira write: This is no ordinary political moment. Trump is not the reason this is no ordinary time — he’s simply the most obvious symptom that reminds us all of this each day. The best way to understand politics in America today is to reframe it as closer to civil war. Just the phrase “civil war” is harsh, and many people may cringe. It brings up images of guns and death, the bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers….

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Shell scientists foresaw a storm like Sandy, as well as climate lawsuits

Shell scientists foresaw a storm like Sandy, as well as climate lawsuits

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E&E News reports: Two decades ago, a group of researchers envisioned a violent storm ripping through the East Coast with such force that it would transform young people into climate activists, spark lawsuits and cause government leaders to turn on fossil fuel companies. They were only off by two years. They also worked for Shell Oil Co. In 1998, Shell researchers wrote an internal memo about future scenarios that could harm their business. They determined that “only a crisis can…

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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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