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Category: Climate Change

What’s better than a ban on Russian oil imports? Ending our dependence on fossil fuels

What’s better than a ban on Russian oil imports? Ending our dependence on fossil fuels

In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times says: Biden needs to think bigger and pursue more ambitious measures to deploy clean energy in the United States and Europe within months to a year. That means quickly ramping up programs that make it easy and attractive for people to switch from gas-fueled cars to electric vehicles and replace natural-gas-fueled water heaters and furnaces with energy-efficient electric heat pump models. These actions will fight climate change, save American families money and insulate…

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Is the Amazon approaching a tipping point? A new study shows the rainforest growing less resilient

Is the Amazon approaching a tipping point? A new study shows the rainforest growing less resilient

Georgina Gustin writes: The world’s largest rainforest is losing its ability to bounce back from droughts and fires, pushing it farther toward a threshold where it could transform into arid savannah, releasing dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases in the process. A study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the Amazon has become less resilient as deforestation has continued and rising temperatures have worsened drought. The authors said the rainforest’s ability to recover from such events has…

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Climate change is intensifying Earth’s water cycle at twice the predicted rate, research shows

Climate change is intensifying Earth’s water cycle at twice the predicted rate, research shows

The Guardian reports: Rising global temperatures have shifted at least twice the amount of freshwater from warm regions towards the Earth’s poles than previously thought as the water cycle intensifies, according to new analysis. Climate change has intensified the global water cycle by up to 7.4% – compared with previous modelling estimates of 2% to 4%, research published in the journal Nature suggests. The water cycle describes the movement of water on Earth – it evaporates, rises into the atmosphere,…

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IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown

IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown

The Guardian reports: Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said. Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes of the natural world and rendering many areas unliveable, according to the landmark report published on Monday. “The scientific evidence…

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U.S. oil industry uses Ukraine invasion to push for more drilling at home

U.S. oil industry uses Ukraine invasion to push for more drilling at home

The New York Times reports: Russian troops hadn’t yet begun their full-on assault on Ukraine late Wednesday when the rallying cry came from the American oil and gas industry. “As crisis looms in Ukraine, U.S. energy leadership is more important than ever,” the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful industry lobby group, wrote on Twitter with a photo that read: “Let’s unleash American energy. Protect our energy security.” The crux of the industry’s argument is that any effort to restrain drilling…

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Researchers say science skewed by racism is increasing the threat of global warming to people of color

Researchers say science skewed by racism is increasing the threat of global warming to people of color

Inside Climate News reports: Black, Brown and Indigenous people have been systematically excluded from earth sciences, magnifying their exposure to the most severe impacts of climate change, said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, lead author of a recent commentary in the journal Nature Geosciences. That adds to the burden of global warming that people of color already bear more heavily than other populations because the world for centuries has been “geographically delineated based on racism, and resultant slavery and colonialism,” Berhe said….

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Climate change is seen as the most worrying threat to global security

Climate change is seen as the most worrying threat to global security

Bloomberg writes: Climate change is seen as a bigger threat than war by a majority of people living in some of the world’s top economies, according to new data being presented to diplomats and military officials who convene Friday for a key security meeting in Germany. The poll commissioned by the Munich Security Conference listed concern over global warming, habitat destruction and extreme weather as the top three risks named by 12,000 people surveyed globally in November. The results are…

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Understanding planetary intelligence

Understanding planetary intelligence

Adam Frank, Sara Walker, and David Grinspoon write: Almost a century ago, the revolutionary idea of the biosphere gained a foothold in science. Defined as the collective activity of all life on Earth—the tapestry of actions of every microbe, plant, and animal—the biosphere had profound implications for our understanding of planetary evolution. The concept posits that life acts as a potent force shaping how the planet changes over time, on par with other geological systems like the atmosphere, hydrosphere (water),…

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U.S. sea levels will rise rapidly in the next 30 years, new report shows

U.S. sea levels will rise rapidly in the next 30 years, new report shows

CNN reports: A new report provides an alarming forecast for the US: Sea level will rise as much in the next 30 years as it did in the past 100 — increasing the frequency of high-tide flooding, pushing storm surge to the extreme and inundating vulnerable coastal infrastructure with saltwater. The interagency report, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows how scientists are increasingly confident that US coasts will see another 10 to 12 inches of sea level…

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U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

Reuters reports: Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green. President Joe Biden’s administration is reviewing policies on biofuels as part…

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West megadrought worsens to driest in at least 1,200 years

West megadrought worsens to driest in at least 1,200 years

The Associated Press reports: The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, a new study finds. A dramatic drying in 2021 — about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region — pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record-holder for megadroughts in the late 1500s and shows no signs of…

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Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

Nature reports: Methane concentrations in the atmosphere raced past 1,900 parts per billion last year, nearly triple preindustrial levels, according to data released in January by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Scientists says the grim milestone underscores the importance of a pledge made at last year’s COP26 climate summit to curb emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas at least 28 times as potent as CO2. The growth of methane emissions slowed around the turn of the millennium,…

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Experiment demonstrates that nuclear fussion is no longer a pipedream solution for the climate crisis

Experiment demonstrates that nuclear fussion is no longer a pipedream solution for the climate crisis

CNN reports: There’s no silver bullet to the climate crisis, but nuclear fusion may be the closest thing to it. In the quest for a near-limitless, zero-carbon source of reliable power, scientists have generated fusion energy before, but they have struggled for decades to sustain it for very long. On Wednesday, however, scientists working in the United Kingdom announced that they more than doubled the previous record for generating and sustaining nuclear fusion, which is the same process that allows…

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Rightwing lobby group ALEC driving laws to blacklist companies that boycott the oil industry

Rightwing lobby group ALEC driving laws to blacklist companies that boycott the oil industry

The Guardian reports: The influential rightwing lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) is driving a surge in new state laws to block boycotts of the oil industry. The group’s strategy, which aims to protect large oil firms and other conservative-friendly industries, is modelled on legislation to punish divestment from Israel. Since the beginning of the year, state legislatures in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Indiana have introduced a version of a law drafted by Alec, called the Energy Discrimination…

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What if the world phased out meat consumption over 15 years? The numbers are stunning — and instructive

What if the world phased out meat consumption over 15 years? The numbers are stunning — and instructive

Emma Bryce writes: The climate impact of livestock is so powerful, that if we phased out the consumption of meat over the next 15 years, we could start stabilising greenhouse gas emissions from 2030 onwards. This would require a difficult culinary sacrifice — but it would get us more than halfway to achieving the emissions reductions laid out by the Paris Climate Agreement. These bold findings come from a recent study published in PLOS Climate, which joins several recent papers…

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How fires across the world have grown weirder

How fires across the world have grown weirder

Daniel Immerwahr writes: The hundreds of bush fires that hit southern Australia on 7 February 2009 felt, according to witnesses, apocalyptic. It was already hellishly hot that day: 46.4C in Melbourne. As the fires erupted, day turned to night, flaming embers the size of pillows rained down, burning birds fell from the trees and the ash-filled air grew so hot that breathing it, one survivor said, was like “sucking on a hairdryer”. More than 2,000 homes burned down, and 173…

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