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Category: Climate Change

From sea ice to ocean currents, Antarctica is now undergoing abrupt changes – and we will all feel them

From sea ice to ocean currents, Antarctica is now undergoing abrupt changes – and we will all feel them

By Nerilie Abram, Australian National University; Ariaan Purich, Monash University; Felicity McCormack, Monash University; Jan Strugnell, James Cook University, and Matthew England, UNSW Sydney Antarctica has long been seen as a remote, unchanging environment. Not any more. The ice-covered continent and the surrounding Southern Ocean are undergoing abrupt and alarming changes. Sea ice is shrinking rapidly, the floating glaciers known as ice shelves are melting faster, the ice sheets carpeting the continent are approaching tipping points and vital ocean currents…

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Earth’s continents are drying out at an unprecedented rate, new study warns

Earth’s continents are drying out at an unprecedented rate, new study warns

Science Alert reports: All over the world, fresh water is disappearing, and a new analysis reveals that much of it is entering the ocean, with drying continents now contributing more to the alarming rise in global sea levels than melting ice sheets. The research team, led by Earth system scientist Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar from FLAME University in India, says that urgent action is required to prepare for much drier times ahead, thanks to climate change and human groundwater depletion. Using more…

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‘Sponge city’: How Copenhagen is adapting to a wetter future

‘Sponge city’: How Copenhagen is adapting to a wetter future

E360 reports: In just two hours on July 2, 2011, a torrential, once-in-a-millennium storm battered and flooded Copenhagen, pounding parts of Denmark’s capital with more than 5 inches of rain. Critical infrastructure at the city’s largest hospital was swamped, as were major roads, basements, and businesses. The city that had been engaged with advanced sustainability planning for decades, it turned out, was woefully unprepared for the fierce rainfall, which caused $1.8 billion in damages. Shaken by the calamity, the city…

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On controlling fire, new lessons from a deep indigenous past

On controlling fire, new lessons from a deep indigenous past

Yale Environment 360 reports: Climate change is extending the season during which hot and dry weather encourages fire across North America. At the same time, a long post-settlement history of stamping out wildfires has changed much of the continent’s landscape: Forests are thicker, which allows fires to spread up into the canopy, and more uniform, with fewer bare patches that might otherwise slow a fire’s progress. As a result, wildfires now tend to grow hotter and bigger: Some say we…

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Trump regime making plans to destroy NASA satellites designed for monitoring greenhouse gases

Trump regime making plans to destroy NASA satellites designed for monitoring greenhouse gases

NPR reports: The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere. The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They…

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EPA moves to terminate $7 billion in grants for solar energy

EPA moves to terminate $7 billion in grants for solar energy

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is preparing to terminate $7 billion in federal grants intended to help low- and moderate-income families install solar panels on their homes, according to two people briefed on the matter. The Environmental Protection Agency is drafting termination letters to the 60 state agencies, nonprofit groups and Native American tribes that received the grants under the “Solar for All” program, with the goal of sending the letters by the end of this week,…

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EPA plans to drive ‘a dagger into the heart of the climate change’ regulations

EPA plans to drive ‘a dagger into the heart of the climate change’ regulations

Axios reports: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Tuesday he’s issuing draft plans to overturn the agency’s 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare — a move guaranteed to spark litigation. Why it matters: It’s President Trump’s most direct effort to rip out climate regulations root and branch — and make it harder for a successor to impose new ones. The “endangerment finding” provides a key legal underpinning for regulating heat-trapping gases from cars, power plants and more under the Clean…

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Delusions are getting crafted into legislation that’s designed to obscure the reality of climate change

Delusions are getting crafted into legislation that’s designed to obscure the reality of climate change

NBC News reports: For years, outlandish theories about the U.S. government using airplanes to spray harmful chemicals over U.S. homes or powerful elites controlling the weather were relegated to the fringes of society. Not anymore. As the internet has provided rocket fuel for such claims, Republican lawmakers across the country are introducing, passing and enacting laws to ban “weather modification” and environmental geoengineering and allude to the use of “chemtrails,” a longtime theory that planes are spreading chemical agents on…

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Hurricane Helene and subsequent cleanup efforts have decimated North America’s most biodiverse waters

Hurricane Helene and subsequent cleanup efforts have decimated North America’s most biodiverse waters

Inside Climate Change reports: In Knoxville, Tennessee, there’s a minuscule warehouse tucked off the side of the road. Its tiny gravel parking lot is full. In the back of the cramped, wood-paneled building are dozens of aquarium tanks filled with endangered, threatened, imperiled, and at-risk fish species. This is Conservation Fisheries Incorporated (CFI), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Appalachian freshwater diversity. It began as a graduate school project in the 1980s and has grown into a conservation powerhouse. One of…

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An EPA rule change would eliminate the government’s ability to fight climate change

An EPA rule change would eliminate the government’s ability to fight climate change

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal a fundamental scientific finding that gives the United States government its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change, according to two people familiar with the plan. The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration known as the “endangerment finding,” which scientifically established that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives. That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s…

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Governments are legally required to address climate change, top global court says

Governments are legally required to address climate change, top global court says

Inside Climate News reports: Tuesday’s landmark advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on climate change came as residents of some island nations are already “scraping barnacles off our grandfathers’ graves” as sea-level rise accelerates, said Julian Aguon, an Indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam, in a poem he recited outside the Peace Palace as the judges started their two-hour presentation. That sense of urgency for action also came through in the 15-judge panel’s unanimous opinion. The…

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What to know about extreme flooding — and ways to stay safe

What to know about extreme flooding — and ways to stay safe

Science News reports: July has washed across the United States with unusually destructive, deadly torrents of rain. In the first half of the month alone, historically heavy downpours sent rivers in Central Texas spilling far beyond their banks, causing at least 130 deaths. Rains prompted flash flooding across wildfire-scarred landscapes in New Mexico and flooded subway stations in New York City. Roadways in New Jersey turned into rivers, sweeping two people to their deaths as the floodwaters carried away their…

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Trump regime says it won’t publish major climate change reports on NASA website as promised

Trump regime says it won’t publish major climate change reports on NASA website as promised

The Associated Press reports: The Trump administration on Monday took another step to make it harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people. Earlier this month, the official government websites that hosted the authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments went dark. Such sites tell state and local governments and the public what to expect in their backyards from a warming world and how best to adapt to it. At the…

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The world is investing more in clean energy than fossil fuels

The world is investing more in clean energy than fossil fuels

Canary Media reports: As the Trump administration doubles down on fossil fuels, the rest of the world is investing more and more in clean energy. This year, $2.2 trillion will be invested in clean energy, efficiency, and electrification globally, according to the International Energy Agency — double the $1.1 trillion that will flow toward fossil fuels. It’s a remarkable change from a decade ago. Back in 2015, fossil fuels still attracted more money than clean energy. In 2016, perhaps galvanized…

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Trump is attacking weather science and weakening disaster response capabilities

Trump is attacking weather science and weakening disaster response capabilities

The New York Times reports: In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say. Staff reductions, budget cuts and other changes made by the administration since January have already created holes at the National Weather Service, which forecasts and warns of dangerous weather. Mr. Trump’s budget proposal for the next…

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Melting glaciers might trigger volcanic eruptions around the globe, study finds

Melting glaciers might trigger volcanic eruptions around the globe, study finds

Live Science reports: Melting glaciers could make volcanic eruptions more explosive and frequent, worsening climate change in the process, scientists have warned. Hundreds of volcanoes in Antarctica, Russia, New Zealand, and North America rest beneath glaciers. But as the planet warms and these ice sheets melt and retreat, these volcanoes are likely to become more active, according to the authors of a new study analyzing the activity of six volcanoes in southern Chile during the last ice age. The researchers…

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