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Category: Climate Change

Point of no return: Hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ getting closer, scientists say

Point of no return: Hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ getting closer, scientists say

The Guardian reports: The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very…

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Trump to direct Pentagon to buy coal in bid to revive industry

Trump to direct Pentagon to buy coal in bid to revive industry

Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump will unveil plans to use government funding and Pentagon contracts to sustain US coal-fired power plants as he seeks to drive domestic reliance on the fossil fuel. The marquee initiative, set to be announced Wednesday, will come through an executive order, as Trump directs Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to enter into agreements to purchase electricity from coal plants to power military operations, according to a White House official. The move is expected to tap special…

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Nature’s ‘engine is grinding to a halt’ as climate change gains pace, says study

Nature’s ‘engine is grinding to a halt’ as climate change gains pace, says study

Phys.org reports: Many ecologists hypothesize that, as global warming accelerates, change in nature must speed up. They assume that as temperatures rise and climatic zones shift, species will face local extinction and colonize new habitats at an ever-increasing rate, leading to a rapid reshuffling of ecological communities. A new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and published in Nature Communications shows this is emphatically not the case. The researchers analyzed a massive database of biodiversity surveys,…

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Trump allies near ‘total victory’ in wiping out U.S. climate regulation

Trump allies near ‘total victory’ in wiping out U.S. climate regulation

The New York Times reports: In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declaring that global warming posed a “clear and present danger” to the United States. But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more…

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We need Greenland. But not in the way Trump imagines

We need Greenland. But not in the way Trump imagines

A year ago, Paul Bierman wrote: Donald Trump has a thing for Greenland. First, he wanted to buy the Arctic island. Then, his son visited for a photo-op. Now, he refuses to rule out using the U.S. military to seize it. Decades ago, the value of Greenland was indeed its strategic location between superpowers and its unique mineral resources. No longer. Today, Greenland’s value is the ice that covers 80 percent of the island. Keeping Greenland’s ice frozen preserves at…

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Hundreds of iceberg earthquakes detected at the crumbling end of Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier

Hundreds of iceberg earthquakes detected at the crumbling end of Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier

Copernicus / ESA, CC BY By Thanh-Son Pham, Australian National University Glacial earthquakes are a special type of earthquake generated in cold, icy regions. First discovered in the northern hemisphere more than 20 years ago, these quakes occur when huge chunks of ice fall from glaciers into the sea. Until now, only a very few have been found in the Antarctic. In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, I present evidence for hundreds of these quakes in Antarctica…

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How big a threat is AI to the climate?

How big a threat is AI to the climate?

The Guardian reports: During a golden sunset in Memphis in May, Sharon Wilson pointed a thermal imaging camera at Elon Musk’s flagship datacentre to reveal a planetary threat her eyes could not. Free from pollution controls, the gas-fired turbines that power the world’s biggest AI supercomputer were pumping invisible fumes into the Tennessee sky. “It was jaw-dropping,” said Wilson, a former oil and gas worker from Texas who has documented methane releases for more than a decade and estimates xAI’s…

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The Amazon is shifting into a ‘hypertropical’ state unseen for millions of years

The Amazon is shifting into a ‘hypertropical’ state unseen for millions of years

Science Alert reports: A new study of the Amazon rainforest has found the region is shifting toward a ‘hypertropical’ state as droughts become longer, hotter, and more frequent. These conditions have “no current analogue” according to the international team of researchers behind the study. Trees are becoming exposed to whole new levels of stress, and the Amazon’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide is being reduced, too. So drastic are the contemporary and impending changes, based on data gathered across the…

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How rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is

How rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is

Peter Brannen writes: Some 4 billion years after its creation, a small planet circling an unexceptional star in the outlying Orion-Cygnus spiral arm of the Milky Way enjoyed a brief and bustling season of complex life. The planet blushed with a breathable atmosphere, and for a few hundred million years it also hosted temperatures that somehow stayed within a surprisingly narrow window — one amenable to a biosphere that now teemed with energetic, multicellular creatures. For its entire prior history,…

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Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is getting closer and closer to irreversible collapse

Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is getting closer and closer to irreversible collapse

Wired reports: Known as the “Doomsday Glacier,” the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers on Earth, and its future evolution is one of the biggest unknowns when it comes to predicting global sea level rise. The eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier is supported at its northern end by a ridge of the ocean floor. However, over the past two decades, cracks in the upper reaches of the glacier have increased rapidly, weakening…

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Trump’s shuttering of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is Stalinist

Trump’s shuttering of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is Stalinist

  Michael Mann and Bob Ward write: The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin would no doubt have understood and even appreciated the latest attack by the Trump administration on climate researchers and their work. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, is to be dismantled after more than 50 years at the forefront of global research on climate science and monitoring. This is the latest step in the administration’s climate Lysenkoism and its relentless purge of climate researchers who…

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Trump regime plans to break up ‘global mothership’ of climate science

Trump regime plans to break up ‘global mothership’ of climate science

Nature reports: The administration of US President Donald Trump intends to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a world-leading Earth-science centre in Boulder, Colorado. The centre’s modelling and Earth observations underpin a wide range of US and global research, especially on climate. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” wrote Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director, announcing the planned closure in a post yesterday on the social-media platform X. In a statement,…

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Decades-long droughts doomed one of the world’s oldest civilizations

Decades-long droughts doomed one of the world’s oldest civilizations

Live Science reports: A series of severe, decades-long droughts ushered the end of the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the world’s oldest civilizations, a new study finds. This Indus Valley Civilization (also known as the “Harappan” civilization) flourished between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago in a region that stretched across the modern-day India-Pakistan border. Its people created cities, such as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, which had sophisticated water-management systems. They also created a written script, which remains undeciphered by modern…

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Thousands of toxic sites across America at risk of coastal flooding

Thousands of toxic sites across America at risk of coastal flooding

The Guardian reports: More than 5,500 toxic sites nationwide could face coastal flooding by 2100 due to rising sea levels, according to new research. The study, published on Thursday in Nature Communications and led by scientists at the University of California, warns that if heat-trapping pollution continues unabated, rising seas will flood a wide range of hazardous facilities including those handling sewage, toxic waste, oil and gas, as well as other industrial pollutants. The analysis relies on projections of a…

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Where a de facto policy of climate-change acceleration is leading us

Where a de facto policy of climate-change acceleration is leading us

Vann R. Newkirk II writes: Earlier this year, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a graveyard was spared by the fire that sent thousands of Los Angeles residents fleeing into the coal-black night. Here, in Mountain View Cemetery, lie the bones of Octavia Butler, the famed science-fiction writer who spent her life in Pasadena and Altadena, both of which had burned. Trinkets offered by fans often decorate Butler’s unassuming grave. A footstone is inscribed with a quotation from…

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Governments and billionaires are still failing to meet the challenge of climate change

Governments and billionaires are still failing to meet the challenge of climate change

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In the lead-up to this year’s COP, every country was supposed to announce an emissions target for itself, extending through 2035. The U.S.submitted such a target in the last month of the Biden Administration; it is now considered largely meaningless. Last week, China submitted its target, which was widely described as inadequate. Brazil’s target, too, has been criticized as insufficient. And, just a few weeks ago, the Brazilian government decided, for the first time, to allow oil…

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