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Category: Climate Change

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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How China became the world’s leader on renewable energy

How China became the world’s leader on renewable energy

Isabel Hilton writes: Last November, Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua and U.S. climate envoy John Kerry shook hands on a pledge to triple renewable energy globally by 2030. It was hailed as a welcome revival of climate cooperation between the world’s biggest and second-biggest emitters of greenhouse gases and offered hope that the two veteran climate negotiators had found a way through a blizzard of negative diplomatic exchanges to keep alive the prospects for greater global ambition on tackling climate…

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Climate change matters to more and more people – and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election

Climate change matters to more and more people – and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election

Young people demonstrate ahead of a climate summit in New York in September 2023. Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images By Matt Burgess, University of Colorado Boulder If you ask American voters what their top issues are, most will point to kitchen-table issues like the economy, inflation, crime, health care or education. Fewer than 5% of respondents in 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys said that climate change was the most important problem facing the country. Despite this, research that I conducted…

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Insure Our Future: A global movement says the insurance industry could be the key to ending fossil fuels

Insure Our Future: A global movement says the insurance industry could be the key to ending fossil fuels

Inside Climate News reports: Roishetta Ozane would have rather been sitting in a rocking chair at home in Louisiana with her seven-month old grandbaby than standing outside of a multinational insurance company’s office in New York City, surrounded by dozens of police officers, speaking to a rally. But she’d traveled to New York City to fight for the future of her new grandchild and six children. “I came here because decisions being made in this building impact my community miles…

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Inside Big Oil’s plot to keep their emissions confidential

Inside Big Oil’s plot to keep their emissions confidential

The New Republic reports: The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday voted 3–2 to finalize a rule on what companies disclose about their greenhouse gas emissions and how climate change stands to impact their business. On its face, that wouldn’t seem to be much cause for alarm. Companies are already required to disclose information on their management structures, overall financial health, and the kinds of risks facing their business. Large segments of the oil and gas industry, though, as well…

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The worst wildfire in Texas’ history has a complex link with climate change

The worst wildfire in Texas’ history has a complex link with climate change

BBC Future reports: The worst wildfire in Texas’ history is leaving wide scars on the landscape. Why is the blaze so extreme? Temperatures dropped and snow began to fall on the Texas panhandle, dusting the scorched grasslands, thousands of dead cattle, and hundreds of burnt-out buildings with a fine layer of white powder. It was a welcome relief – and an apocalyptic image – for the state, which has been battling its worst wildfire in history. The Smokehouse Creek fire,…

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Pivotal moment for humanity as disasters threaten to converge

Pivotal moment for humanity as disasters threaten to converge

Science Alert reports: A new review of literature on global climate change written by an international team of more than 200 researchers leaves no room for doubt: humanity is heading for disaster, unless significant steps are taken to change that course. How disastrous? The research team mentions trillions of US dollars in climate-related damage, billions of people pushed into hardship around the world, and millions of lives lost as a result of a rapidly warming planet. The report focuses specifically…

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Indigenous peoples deserve as much protection as the threatened environments they inhabit

Indigenous peoples deserve as much protection as the threatened environments they inhabit

Robert Williams writes: Over 600,000 tourists travel to Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area each year, and many will catch a glimpse of the Great Migration: the famed trek of more than one million wildebeests and thousands of zebras, gazelles and other animals crossing over the Mara River into Kenya and back. Yet the Tanzanian government believes it can attract many more tourists seeking the safari adventure of a lifetime: five million by 2025, bringing $6 billion with them per year, according…

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