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Category: Climate Change

‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves

‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves

The Guardian reports: For the past few weeks, Nazeer Ahmed has been living in one of the hottest places on Earth. As a brutal heatwave has swept across India and Pakistan, his home in Turbat, in Pakistan’s Balochistan region, has been suffering through weeks of temperatures that have repeatedly hit almost 50C (122F), unprecedented for this time of year. Locals have been driven into their homes, unable to work except during the cooler night hours, and are facing critical shortages…

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A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

Inside Climate News reports: Lichens that help hold together soil crusts in arid lands around the world are dying off as the climate warms, new research shows. That would lead deserts to expand and also would affect areas far from the drylands, as crumbling crusts fill winds with dust that can speed snowmelt and increase the incidence of respiratory diseases. Biologically rich soil crusts, sometimes called cryptobiotic soils or biocrusts, are spread out across dry and semi-dry regions of every…

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Getting real on climate means facing necessity

Getting real on climate means facing necessity

Bill McKibben writes: “Realism” is the high ground in politics—a high ground from which to rain down artillery fire on new ideas. To wit, this week the New York Times profiled Canadian energy analyst Vaclav Smil, who—alongside others like Daniel Yergin—has long insisted that the transformation from fossil fuels to hydrocarbons must take a long time. Smil is a good writer and a smart historian; he’s documented the many-decades-long transitions from, say, wood to coal, and coal to oil as…

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How climate change impacts pandemics

How climate change impacts pandemics

Ed Yong writes: For the world’s viruses, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity. An estimated 40,000 viruses lurk in the bodies of mammals, of which a quarter could conceivably infect humans. Most do not, because they have few chances to leap into our bodies. But those chances are growing. Earth’s changing climate is forcing animals to relocate to new habitats, in a bid to track their preferred environmental conditions. Species that have never coexisted will become neighbors, creating thousands…

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Why you should care about the insect crisis

Why you should care about the insect crisis

Allie Wilkinson writes: Imagine a world without insects. You might breathe a sigh of relief at the thought of mosquito-free summers, or you might worry about how agriculture will function without pollinators. What you probably won’t picture is trudging through a landscape littered with feces and rotting corpses — what a world devoid of maggots and dung beetles would look like. That’s just a snippet of the horrifying picture of an insect-free future that journalist Oliver Milman paints in the…

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Twitter bans ‘misleading’ ads about climate change

Twitter bans ‘misleading’ ads about climate change

The Verge reports: Twitter levied a new ban today on “misleading” advertisements “that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.” “We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” the company said in a blog post today. Its decisions about what’s legit content in regard to climate change will be guided by “authoritative sources,” it says, including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)….

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‘What we now know … they lied’: How big oil companies betrayed us all

‘What we now know … they lied’: How big oil companies betrayed us all

The Guardian reports: There is a moment in the revelatory PBS Frontline docuseries The Power of Big Oil, about the industry’s long campaign to stall action on the climate crisis, in which the former Republican senator Chuck Hagel reflects on his part in killing US ratification of the Kyoto climate treaty. In 1997, Hagel joined with the Democratic senator Robert Byrd to promote a resolution opposing the international agreement to limit greenhouse gases, on the grounds that it was unfair…

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Fewer Americans see climate change as a priority than they did a year ago, CBS News poll

Fewer Americans see climate change as a priority than they did a year ago, CBS News poll

CBS News reports: With issues like the economy and inflation, crime, and the war in Ukraine weighing most on Americans’ minds, the percentage who think climate change needs to be addressed right now has dipped some since one year ago. This dip in urgency, while not steep, is widespread. Fewer people across age, race, and education groups, as well as partisan stripes, think climate change needs to be addressed right away than thought so a year ago. Still, most Americans…

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The renewable energy revolution will need renewable storage

The renewable energy revolution will need renewable storage

Matthew Hutson writes: The German word Dunkelflaute means “dark doldrums.” It chills the hearts of renewable-energy engineers, who use it to refer to the lulls when solar panels and wind turbines are thwarted by clouds, night, or still air. On a bright, cloudless day, a solar farm can generate prodigious amounts of electricity; when it’s gusty, wind turbines whoosh neighborhoods to life. But at night solar cells do little, and in calm air turbines sit useless. These renewable energy sources…

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Seed banks — the last line of defense against a global food crisis

Seed banks — the last line of defense against a global food crisis

The Guardian reports: As the risks from the climate crisis and global conflict increase, seed banks are increasingly considered a priceless resource that could one day prevent a worldwide food crisis. Two in five of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction, and though researchers estimate there are at least 200,000 edible plant species on our planet, we depend on just three – maize, rice and wheat– for more than half of humanity’s caloric intake. There are roughly…

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Energy requirements of a good life are surprisingly low

Energy requirements of a good life are surprisingly low

Anthropocene magazine reports: The average global energy consumption—79 gigajoules per person per year—is sufficient to power a healthy, comfortable life for everyone on the planet, according to a new study. The analysis is part of a growing body of research aimed at figuring out how to achieve climate goals while also providing modern energy resources to those who lack it. The findings suggest that this balance might be easier than expected to strike: the world doesn’t need a massive expansion…

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Rep. Jamie Raskin on the climate crisis: ‘We’ve got to save democracy in order to save our species’

Rep. Jamie Raskin on the climate crisis: ‘We’ve got to save democracy in order to save our species’

The Guardian reports: When it comes to fighting for democracy and climate change – two of Jamie Raskin’s top priorities – the whole thing feels a bit like a game of chicken and egg to the Democratic congressman. On the one hand there is the planet, heating up quickly past the limit that is safe and necessary for human survival, while Congress stalls on a $555bn climate package. On the other, a pernicious movement, spurred by Donald Trump and other…

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Democratic state activists are working to decarbonize trillions. They don’t need Joe Manchin’s permission

Democratic state activists are working to decarbonize trillions. They don’t need Joe Manchin’s permission

The Nation reports: Republican state leaders are on the warpath against BlackRock, the largest financial asset manager in the nation. The company’s sin? Statements by BlackRock leadership that climate change is a long-term threat, and that the company will pursue investments that promote a reduction in emissions. In January, West Virginia declared that it was barring the company from managing its state pension funds. Texas passed legislation in February prohibiting any firm divesting from fossil fuels from managing state assets….

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Fossil fuels v. our future — young Montanans wage historic climate fight

Fossil fuels v. our future — young Montanans wage historic climate fight

The Guardian reports: When Grace Gibson-Snyder was 13, she launched an independent project in her home town of Missoula, Montana, to encourage restaurants not to use single-use plastic containers. She found that youth activism enabled her to press the adults in her life to take the climate crisis seriously. Even if she was too young to vote, she could still be heard. Three years later Gibson-Snyder upped the ante by teaming up with 15 other young people on a novel…

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Thawing permafrost is roiling the Arctic, driven by hidden changes beneath the surface as the climate warms

Thawing permafrost is roiling the Arctic, driven by hidden changes beneath the surface as the climate warms

Permafrost and ice wedges have built up over millennia in the Arctic. When they thaw, they destabilize the surrounding landscape. Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images By Mark J. Lara, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some…

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Putin’s war shows autocracies and fossil fuels go hand in hand. Here’s how we can tackle both

Putin’s war shows autocracies and fossil fuels go hand in hand. Here’s how we can tackle both

Bill McKibben writes: At first glance, last autumn’s Glasgow climate summit looked a lot like its 25 predecessors. It had: A conference hall the size of an aircraft carrier stuffed with displays from problematic parties (the Saudis, for example, with a giant pavilion saluting their efforts at promoting a “circular carbon economy agenda”). Squadrons of delegates rushing constantly to mysterious sessions (“Showcasing achievements of TBTTP and Protected Areas Initiative of GoP”) while actual negotiations took place in a few back…

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