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Category: Climate Change

How methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

How methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

Rob Jackson reports: Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within…

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Shell oil non-profit donated to anti-climate groups behind Project 2025

Shell oil non-profit donated to anti-climate groups behind Project 2025

The Guardian reports: A US foundation associated with the oil company Shell has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to religious right and conservative organizations, many of which deny that climate change is a crisis, tax records reveal. Fourteen of those groups are on the advisory board of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint proposing radical changes to the federal government, including severely limiting the Environment Protection Agency. Shell USA Company Foundation sent $544,010 between 2013 and 2022 to organizations that…

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Project 2025 promises billions of tonnes more carbon pollution, study finds

Project 2025 promises billions of tonnes more carbon pollution, study finds

The Guardian reports: Project 2025 promises billions of tonnes more carbon pollution – study Experts say climate policies contained within rightwing manifesto would wreck US climate targets and cost jobs The impact of Donald Trump enacting the climate policies of the rightwing Project 2025 would result in billions of tonnes of extra carbon pollution, wrecking the US’s climate targets, as well as wiping out clean energy investments and more than a million jobs, a new analysis finds. Should Trump retake…

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This oil tycoon brings in millions for Trump, and may set his agenda

This oil tycoon brings in millions for Trump, and may set his agenda

The Washington Post reports: After Donald Trump asked the oil industry to contribute $1 billion to his presidential campaign in April, oil baron Harold Hamm immediately started working the phones. Hamm, the billionaire founder of Continental Resources, called other oil executives and encouraged them to attend fundraisers and open their wallets, according to people with knowledge of the outreach who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. “We’ve got to do…

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‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy

‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy

The Guardian reports: Fossil fuel companies are running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” so that countries will slow down the adoption of renewable energy and the speed with which they “transition away” from a carbon-intensive economy, the UN has said. Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, said that talk of a global “backlash” against climate action was being stoked by the fossil fuel industry, in an effort to persuade world leaders to delay emissions-cutting policies. The…

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Physicists pinpoint the quantum origin of the greenhouse effect

Physicists pinpoint the quantum origin of the greenhouse effect

Joseph Howlett writes: In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere — the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ central conclusion: that every time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere doubles, Earth’s temperature will rise between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius. Still, the physical reason why CO2 behaves this way has remained a mystery, until recently. First, in 2022, physicists settled…

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Tim Walz broke through on America’s biggest climate challenge

Tim Walz broke through on America’s biggest climate challenge

Tim McDonnell writes: Vice President Kamala Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate elevates a politician with one of the strongest state-level records on clean energy in the US. In 2023, Walz signed into law a target for Minnesota to get 100% of its power from zero-carbon sources, including nuclear, by 2040, and coal has fallen behind renewables and nuclear as the state’s top sources of power for the first time during his tenure. He set…

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Antarctic temperatures rise 10C above average in near record heatwave

Antarctic temperatures rise 10C above average in near record heatwave

The Guardian reports: Ground temperatures across great swathes of the ice sheets of Antarctica have soared an average of 10C above normal over the past month, in what has been described as a near record heatwave. While temperatures remain below zero on the polar land mass, which is shrouded in darkness at this time of year, the depths of southern hemisphere winter, temperatures have reportedly reached 28C above expectations on some days. The globe has experienced 12 months of record…

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Food as you know it is about to change

Food as you know it is about to change

David Wallace-Wells writes: From the vantage of the American supermarket aisle, the modern food system looks like a kind of miracle. Everything has been carefully cultivated for taste and convenience — even those foods billed as organic or heirloom — and produce regarded as exotic luxuries just a few generations ago now seems more like staples, available on demand: avocados, mangoes, out-of-season blueberries imported from Uruguay. But the supermarket is also increasingly a diorama of the fragility of a system…

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How the U.S. became the world’s biggest fossil fuel producing state

How the U.S. became the world’s biggest fossil fuel producing state

The Guardian reports: To witness how the United States has become the world’s unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire’s home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana. Allaire’s looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas (or LNG) plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo…

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How ‘carbon cowboys’ are cashing in on protected Amazon forest

How ‘carbon cowboys’ are cashing in on protected Amazon forest

The Washington Post reports from Portel, Brazil: Over the past two decades, a new financial commodity known as carbon credits has become one of the world’s most important tools in the fight against climate change. Companies and organizations seeking to offset their emission of carbon have spent billions of dollars on them. The Amazon rainforest, because of its size and global environmental importance, has increasingly drawn those pursuing carbon credits. Here, these people are called “carbon cowboys.” They’ve launched preservation…

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Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science

Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science

Scientific American reports: Project 2025, the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency, would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education. It would impose religious and conservative ideology on the federal civil service to such an extent that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, dubiously, tried to distance himself from the plan. But in 2022 Trump said the Heritage Foundation—the think tank that authored Project 2025—would “lay the…

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The people who feed America are going hungry

The people who feed America are going hungry

Grist reports: Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an…

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NOAA is under threat from Project 2025

NOAA is under threat from Project 2025

Zoë Schlanger writes: In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasts are a freely accessible government amenity. The National Weather Service issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio, or newspaper can know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, whether a hurricane is heading toward their town, or if a drought has…

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Earth’s water is rapidly losing oxygen, and the danger is huge

Earth’s water is rapidly losing oxygen, and the danger is huge

Science Alert reports: Supplies of dissolved oxygen in bodies of water across the globe are dwindling rapidly, and scientists say it’s one of the greatest risks to Earth’s life support system. Just as atmospheric oxygen is vital for animals like ourselves, dissolved oxygen (DO) in water is essential for healthy aquatic ecosystems, whether freshwater or marine. With billions of people relying on marine and freshwater habitats for food and income, it’s concerning these ecosystems’ oxygen has been substantially and rapidly…

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Climate crisis is making days longer, study finds

Climate crisis is making days longer, study finds

The Guardian reports: The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet. The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years. The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and…

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