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Category: Climate Change

‘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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Why planetary problems need a new approach to politics

Why planetary problems need a new approach to politics

Jonathan S Blake and Nils Gilman write: ‘Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,’ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared to the World Health Assembly on 29 November 2021, quoting Albert Camus’s The Plague. ‘Outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics are a fact of nature,’ Tedros, the director-general of the World Health Organization since 2017, continued in his own words. ‘But that does not mean we are helpless to prevent them, prepare for them or mitigate their impact.’ Exuding…

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Temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months, data shows

Temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months, data shows

The Guardian reports: The world has baked for 12 consecutive months in temperatures 1.5C (2.7F) greater than their average before the fossil fuel era, new data shows. Temperatures between July 2023 and June 2024 were the highest on record, scientists found, creating a year-long stretch in which the Earth was 1.64C hotter than in preindustrial times. The findings do not mean world leaders have already failed to honour their promises to stop the planet heating 1.5C by the end of…

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How the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision benefits the fossil fuel industry

How the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision benefits the fossil fuel industry

L. Delta Merner writes: Last Friday, the Supreme Court overruled the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, fundamentally changing the landscape of federal regulatory power. This decision, reached with a 6-3 majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts, marks a significant shift in administrative law and has profound implications for environmental regulations and climate accountability. Ironically, the downfall of the Chevron doctrine will give Chevron and other major oil and gas corporations more latitude to slow down and block regulations, allowing them to…

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What it’s like living through a 121 degree day

What it’s like living through a 121 degree day

NPR reports: If you ask Ansar Khan, he will tell you that the heat killed his baby daughter Ina. She didn’t wake up from her afternoon nap in late May, on the dusty scrap of land she knew as home, with only a blue plastic sheet to shade her. It was the hottest day he’d ever experienced, and a hot wind blew. It was 121 degrees in New Delhi that day. “She was crying a bit, so we gave her…

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