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Category: Climate Change

Climate pledges are falling short as we head toward environmental catastrophe

Climate pledges are falling short as we head toward environmental catastrophe

The New York Times reports: Countries around the world are failing to live up to their commitments to fight climate change, pointing Earth toward a future marked by more intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction, according to a report issued Wednesday by the United Nations. Just 26 of 193 countries that agreed last year to step up their climate actions have followed through with more ambitious plans. The world’s top two polluters, China and the United States,…

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Climate change and the threat to civilization

Climate change and the threat to civilization

Daniel Steel, C. Tyler DesRoches, and Kian Mintz-Woo write: In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary António Guterres lambasted “the empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world” and warned that “we are on a fast track to climate disaster”. Although stark, Guterres’ statements were not novel. Guterres has made similar remarks on previous occasions, as have other public figures, including Sir David Attenborough, who warned in 2018 that…

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The Mediterranean has become so hot, it’s forming carbonate crystals

The Mediterranean has become so hot, it’s forming carbonate crystals

Matt Simon writes: If you stand on the coast of Israel and gaze out across the Mediterranean Sea, you’ll spy deep-blue, calm waters that have sustained humans for millennia. Beneath the surface, though, something odd is unfolding: A process called stratification is messing with the way the sea processes carbon dioxide. Think of this part of the Mediterranean as a cake made of liquid, essentially. Fierce sunlight heats the top layer of water that sits on cooler, deeper layers below….

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Why some countries are leading the shift to green energy

Why some countries are leading the shift to green energy

Berkeley News reports: Oil and gas prices skyrocketed following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022, creating a global energy crisis similar to the oil crisis of the 1970s. While some countries used the price shock to accelerate the transition to cleaner sources of energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal, others have responded by expanding the production of fossil fuels. A new study appearing today in the journal Science identifies the political factors that allow some countries to…

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Pakistan’s ‘End of Days’ 2022 monsoon season

Pakistan’s ‘End of Days’ 2022 monsoon season

  “Terrible devastation.” With those two words, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif summed-up the 2022 monsoon season in Pakistan, home to one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable societies … and one having made only scant contributions to the mounting carbon dioxide emissions at the heart of human-caused climate change. On top of historically damaging flooding in 2010, this year brought a far worse monsoon season to the country, which has the most glaciers (7,253) of any country outside of the…

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What does sustainable living look like? Maybe like Uruguay

What does sustainable living look like? Maybe like Uruguay

Noah Gallagher Shannon writes: Let’s say you live in the typical American household. It doesn’t exist, not in any sense except in a data set, but it’s easy enough to imagine. Maybe it’s your aunt’s, or your neighbor’s, or a bit like your own. Since more than half of us live outside big cities, it’s probably in a middle-class suburb, like Fox Lake, north of Chicago. You picked it because it’s affordable and not a terrible commute to your job….

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Nord Stream’s sabotage was a climate disaster. What it signals could be worse

Nord Stream’s sabotage was a climate disaster. What it signals could be worse

Inside Climate News reports: A growing number of international officials and global security experts believe Russia sabotaged its own natural gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea, resulting in the release of an estimated 300,000 metric tons of methane gas into the atmosphere. Researchers say that amounts to the largest-ever release of the potent greenhouse gas during a single event, with an impact similar to the annual emissions of 1 million cars. Because methane is 81 times more potent than carbon…

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Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Photo: Jaana Dielenberg, Author provided By Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, Western Sydney University; Jaana Dielenberg, Charles Darwin University; Jonathan Lenoir, Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV); Mark G Tjoelker, Western Sydney University, and Rachael Gallagher, Western Sydney University To anyone who has stepped off a hot pavement into a shady park, it will come as little surprise that trees (and shrubs) have a big cooling effect on cities. Our study published today in Nature Climate Change found climate change will put 90-100%…

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Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aims

Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aims

The Guardian reports: Criticism in the US of the oil industry’s obfuscation over the climate crisis is intensifying after internal documents showed companies attempted to distance themselves from agreed climate goals, admitted “gaslighting” the public over purported efforts to go green, and even wished critical activists be infested by bedbugs. The communications were unveiled as part of a congressional hearing held in Washington DC, where an investigation into the role of fossil fuels in driving the climate crisis produced documents…

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Pakistan’s devastating floodwaters could take six months to recede

Pakistan’s devastating floodwaters could take six months to recede

HuffPost reports: Catastrophic floods in Pakistan have submerged large swaths of farmland, swallowed whole villages and turned some communities into islands ― and the water likely won’t be gone anytime soon. Floodwaters will take an estimated three to six months to fully recede, Sindh province’s chief minister Syed Murad Ali Shah said in a statement, according to CNN. As of late August, the southern province had already gotten almost six times as much rainfall as its 30-year annual average. Those…

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Chaos researchers can now predict perilous points of no return

Chaos researchers can now predict perilous points of no return

Ben Brubaker writes: Predicting complex systems like the weather is famously difficult. But at least the weather’s governing equations don’t change from one day to the next. In contrast, certain complex systems can undergo “tipping point” transitions, suddenly changing their behavior dramatically and perhaps irreversibly, with little warning and potentially catastrophic consequences. On long enough timescales, most real-world systems are like this. Consider the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, which transports warm equatorial water northward as part of an…

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‘Timber cities’ might help decarbonize the world

‘Timber cities’ might help decarbonize the world

Inside Climate News reports: Buildings constructed with more wood, and less cement and steel, would help decarbonize the construction and housing industries in line with global goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050, new research shows. The paper, published Aug. 30 in Nature Communications, explains that building mid-rise wood dwellings to meet the demand from rapidly expanding urban populations could avoid about 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions through 2100—about…

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New study more than triples estimated costs of climate change damages

New study more than triples estimated costs of climate change damages

Yale Climate Connections reports: A peer-reviewed analysis by two dozen experts more than triples – from $51 per ton of carbon dioxide to $185 per ton – the federal government’s estimate of the “social cost of carbon” (SCC). The climate science, economics, and statistics experts’ paper in the prestigious journal Nature updates the best estimate of how much each ton of carbon dioxide costs society as a result of climate change damages. Their conservative best estimate is 3.6 times higher…

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Global warming could trigger four climate ‘tipping points,’ new research warns

Global warming could trigger four climate ‘tipping points,’ new research warns

CBS News reports: Even if the world somehow manages to limit future warming to the strictest international temperature goal, four Earth-changing climate “tipping points” are still likely to be triggered with a lot more looming as the planet heats more after that, a new study said. An international team of scientists looked at 16 climate tipping points — when a warming side effect is irreversible, self-perpetuating and major — and calculated rough temperature thresholds at which they are triggered. None…

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As king, will Charles continue speaking out on the environment and climate change?

As king, will Charles continue speaking out on the environment and climate change?

The Associated Press reports: The laws and traditions that govern Britain’s constitutional monarchy dictate that the sovereign must stay out of partisan politics, but Charles has spent much of his adult life speaking out on issues that are important to him, particularly the environment. His words have caused friction with politicians and business leaders who accused the then-Prince of Wales of meddling in issues on which he should have remained silent. The question is whether Charles will follow his mother’s…

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Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’ — now the EU must admit it

Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’ — now the EU must admit it

Greta Thunberg et al write: Next week the future of many of the world’s forests will be decided when members of the European parliament vote on a revised EU renewable energy directive. If the parliament fails to change the EU’s discredited and harmful renewables policy, European citizens’ tax money will continue to pay for forests around the globe to literally go up in smoke every day. Europe’s directly elected representatives now have to choose: they can either save the EU’s…

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