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Category: Climate Change

Exxon says global climate goals are destined to fail

Exxon says global climate goals are destined to fail

Grist reports: Exxon Mobil projected that greenhouse-gas emissions and the efforts to keep the planet’s temperature from rising beyond an increase of 2 degrees Celsius by 2050 is destined to fail in a report released by the oil giant on Monday. Oil and natural gas are projected to meet more than half of the world’s energy needs in 2050, or 54 percent, because of their “utility as a reliable and lower-emissions source of fuel for electricity generation, hydrogen production, and…

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Antarctica warming much faster than models predicted in ‘deeply concerning’ sign for sea levels

Antarctica warming much faster than models predicted in ‘deeply concerning’ sign for sea levels

The Guardian reports: Antarctica is likely warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the world and faster than climate change models are predicting, with potentially far-reaching implications for global sea level rise, according to a scientific study. Scientists analysed 78 Antarctic ice cores to recreate temperatures going back 1,000 years and found the warming across the continent was outside what could be expected from natural swings. In West Antarctica, a region considered particularly vulnerable to warming with…

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Climate-linked ills threaten humanity

Climate-linked ills threaten humanity

The Washington Post reports: The floods came, and then the sickness. Muhammad Yaqoob stood on his concrete porch and watched the black, angry water swirl around the acacia trees and rush toward his village [Bagh Yusuf, in Sindh province, Pakistan] last September, the deluge making a sound that was like nothing he had ever heard. “It was like thousands of snakes sighing all at once,” he recalled. At first, he thought villagers’ impromptu sandbags, made from rice and fertilizer sacks,…

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Betting against worst-case climate scenarios is risky business

Betting against worst-case climate scenarios is risky business

David Spratt writes: Would you live in a building, cross a bridge, or trust a dam wall if there were a 10 percent chance of it collapsing? Or five percent? Or one percent? Of course not! In civil engineering, acceptable probabilities of failure generally range from one-in-10,000 to one-in-10-million. So why, when it comes to climate action, are policies like carbon budgets accepted when they have success rates of just 50 to 66 percent? That’s hardly better than a coin…

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Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow

Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow

The Washington Post reports: In the aftermath of extreme weather events, major insurers are increasingly no longer offering coverage that homeowners in areas vulnerable to those disasters need most. At least five large U.S. property insurers — including Allstate, American Family, Nationwide, Erie Insurance Group and Berkshire Hathaway — have told regulators that extreme weather patterns caused by climate change have led them to stop writing coverages in some regions, exclude protections from various weather events and raise monthly premiums…

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Biden tours Florida hurricane damage: ‘Nobody can deny impacts of climate crisis’

Biden tours Florida hurricane damage: ‘Nobody can deny impacts of climate crisis’

The Guardian reports: Joe Biden said that no one can deny the impacts of the climate crisis anymore after he visited Florida on Saturday and surveyed the damage left behind by Hurricane Idalia. Speaking to reporters in front of fallen trees and debris, the US president pointed to this year’s extreme weather events and disasters, saying: “Nobody can deny the impact of climate crisis. There’s no real intelligence to deny the impacts of the climate crisis anymore.” “Just look around…

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What your insurer is trying to tell you about climate change

What your insurer is trying to tell you about climate change

Juliette Kayyem writes: Having worked for decades in conservation nonprofits, Beth Pratt, who lives high in the Sierra Foothills in Midpines, California, understands how climate change is putting her home at ever greater risk. Her community is experiencing what she calls “climate whiplash”: forest fires, record heat, massive snow dumps, mudslides, rockslides, and even a tornado. When Pratt, now 54, bought her 1,400-square-foot house in 1999, she thought the setting was ideal: on a big lot near Yosemite National Park….

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Teaching endangered ibises a new and safer migration path

Teaching endangered ibises a new and safer migration path

The New York Times reports: Johannes Fritz, a maverick Austrian biologist, needed to come up with a plan, again, if he was going to prevent his rare and beloved birds from going extinct. To survive the European winter, the northern bald ibis — which had once disappeared entirely from the wild on the continent — needs to migrate south for the winter, over the Alps, before the mountains become impassable. But shifting climate patterns have delayed when the birds begin…

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Human activities — not volcanic eruptions — are the primary cause of climate change

Human activities — not volcanic eruptions — are the primary cause of climate change

Patrick Pester writes: The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in January 2022 was one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. Detonating underwater with the force of 100 Hiroshima bombs, the blast sent millions of tons of water vapor high into the atmosphere. Some commentators have speculated in recent weeks that the volcano is to blame for searing summer temperatures and are even using the volcano to cast doubt on the role humans are playing in climate change, as reported…

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‘Catastrophic’ loss: Huge colonies of emperor penguins saw no chicks survive last year as sea ice disappears

‘Catastrophic’ loss: Huge colonies of emperor penguins saw no chicks survive last year as sea ice disappears

CNN reports: As rapidly warming global temperatures help push Antarctica’s sea ice to unprecedented lows, it’s threatening the very existence of one of the continent’s most iconic species: emperor penguins. Four out of five emperor penguin colonies analyzed in the Bellingshausen Sea, west of the Antarctic Peninsula, saw no chicks survive last year as the area experienced an enormous loss of sea ice, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment. This widespread “catastrophic…

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What happens when the heat repeats?

What happens when the heat repeats?

Kylie Mohr writes: For two years now, scientists, shellfish managers, and tribes have been working to understand how the heat dome that settled over the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021 affected the places where the ocean and land meet. That heat wave was like nothing in memory. Temperatures soaring as high as 121 degrees Fahrenheit buckled roads, melted power cables, and scorched forests. By the time the heat subsided, 650 people had died in the U.S. and Canada,…

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Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’

Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’

The Guardian reports: Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets. Amid growing evidence that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating and can sometimes be linked to alleged human rights concerns, there is a growing pile of carbon credits equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth largest polluter, that are unused in the unregulated voluntary market,…

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‘Climate change agenda is a hoax,’ says surging GOP candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, at debate

‘Climate change agenda is a hoax,’ says surging GOP candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, at debate

Rolling Stone reports: Vivek Ramaswamy presents himself as a man for this political moment — a 38-year-old entrepreneur without the baggage of a politician, who is not a “SuperPAC puppet” (as he calls Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) and can tell the truth. But faced with an unexpected question about climate change at the first GOP presidential primary debate, Ramaswamy chose to lie. “The climate-change agenda,” he declared, “is a hoax.” Republicans being wrong on climate change is nothing new, of…

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How bad do things have to get for Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency?

How bad do things have to get for Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency?

Eric Lutz writes: A summer of extreme weather in the United States is coming to a close with a one-two punch of historic disasters: the Maui wildfires, which have displaced thousands, killed more than a hundred, and left more than 800 still missing; and Hilary, the hurricane-turned-tropical storm that is bringing catastrophic flooding to Southern California and the desert southwest. The devastation from both is ongoing, but they carry the same message as the hazardous heat and stinging smoke that…

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White House is torn over Joe Manchin’s fury at climate law he crafted

White House is torn over Joe Manchin’s fury at climate law he crafted

The Washington Post reports: The obscure federal agency that oversees the nation’s immense tangle of pipelines, power lines and transfer stations is unfamiliar to most Americans. But it has very much been on Sen. Joe Manchin III’s mind. By the end of last year, the West Virginia Democrat had become deeply displeased with how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was helping the Biden administration advance its aggressive climate goals. Manchin, a staunch ally of fossil fuel interests, was particularly critical…

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Dead trees around the world are shocking scientists

Dead trees around the world are shocking scientists

Katarina Zimmer writes: As we hang far above the ground on a sunny October day, it would be easy to focus on the blue crests of hills and the small towns tucked in between. But Richard Peters, who’s with me inside a metal gondola mounted onto the maneuverable arm of a crane, points me instead to the tree canopy below, flushed with the gold and copper shades of fall. “That guy is definitely on his way to die,” he says…

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