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Category: Climate Change

Fossil fuel companies are quietly scoring big money for their preferred climate solution: carbon capture and storage

Fossil fuel companies are quietly scoring big money for their preferred climate solution: carbon capture and storage

Inside Climate News reports: Over the last year, energy companies, electrical utilities and other industrial sectors have been quietly pushing through a suite of policies to support a technology that stands to yield tens of billions of dollars for corporate polluters, but may do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These policies have fast-tracked environmental reviews and allocated billions in federal funding for research and development of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technologies that pull carbon dioxide out of…

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How water shortages are brewing wars

How water shortages are brewing wars

Sandy Milne writes: Speaking to me via Zoom from his flat in Amsterdam, Ali al-Sadr pauses to take a sip from a clear glass of water. The irony dawning on him, he lets out a laugh. “Before I left Iraq, I struggled every day to find clean drinking water.” Three years earlier, al-Sadr had joined protests in the streets of his native Basra, demanding the authorities address the city’s growing water crisis. “Before the war, Basra was a beautiful place,”…

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First-ever water cuts declared for Colorado River in historic drought

First-ever water cuts declared for Colorado River in historic drought

CNN reports: The federal government on Monday declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time, triggering mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest, as climate change-fueled drought pushes the level in Lake Mead to unprecedented lows. Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US by volume, has drained at an alarming rate this year. At around 1,067 feet above sea level and 35% full, the Colorado River reservoir is at its lowest since the…

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The biggest climate change threat increasingly comes from the leaders of China and India

The biggest climate change threat increasingly comes from the leaders of China and India

Pankaj Mishra writes: As apocalyptic wildfires raged in Greece, California and Turkey last week, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered a sobering assessment of the damage inflicted by human beings on their planet since the industrial revolution. Certainly, as droughts parch entire countries, fuel civil wars that spill across national borders and drive uncontrolled migration, collaborative action seems imperative, regardless of which countries industrialized first and kick-started the process of climate change. But the…

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The UN’s terrifying climate change report

The UN’s terrifying climate change report

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In 1988, the World Meteorological Organization teamed up with the United Nations Environment Programme to form a body with an even more cumbersome title, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or, as it quickly became known, the I.P.C.C. The I.P.C.C.’s structure was every bit as ungainly as its name. Any report that the group issued had to be approved not just by the researchers who collaborated on it but also by the governments of the member countries,…

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What would it take to break up Big Oil?

What would it take to break up Big Oil?

The Guardian reports: Ayisha Siddiqa doesn’t want fossil fuel companies to determine her future anymore. The industry has promoted climate denial for longer than the 22-year-old has been alive. Rather than watch companies pad their profits as the world burns, Siddiqa has a radical solution in mind. “Abolish these oil companies, finish them, get rid of them, no more,” she said. The report found that 25 oil and gas industry organisations spent at least $9.5m to place more than 25,000…

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The UN climate panel tries to cut through the smog

The UN climate panel tries to cut through the smog

Bill McKibben writes: We all live in two worlds: a physical one and a social one. The new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released on Monday, is ostensibly about the physical world. It states—even more clearly and forcefully than it has stated in all its reports back to 1995—that humans are wrecking that physical world. Setting it on fire. But precisely because none of that is news, especially after the climate events of this northern-hemisphere…

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Acceleration of global warming signals ‘code red’ for humanity

Acceleration of global warming signals ‘code red’ for humanity

Phys.org reports: We ignored the warnings, and now it’s too late: global heating has arrived with a vengeance and will see Earth’s average temperature reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels around 2030, a decade earlier than projected only three years ago, according to a landmark UN assessment published on Monday. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bombshell—landing 90 days before a key climate summit desperate to keep 1.5C in play—says the threshold will be breached around 2050, no…

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IPCC climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean

IPCC climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean

What might seem like small changes, like a degree of warming, can have big consequences. AP Photo/John McConnico By Robert Kopp, Rutgers University Humans are unequivocally warming the planet, and that’s triggering rapid changes in the atmosphere, oceans and polar regions, and increasing extreme weather around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in a new report. The IPCC released the first part of its much anticipated Sixth Assessment Report on Aug. 9, 2021. In it, 234 scientists…

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Rising seas and melting glaciers: these changes are now irreversible, but we have to act to slow them down

Rising seas and melting glaciers: these changes are now irreversible, but we have to act to slow them down

Shutterstock/slowmotiongli By Nick Golledge, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington After three years of writing and two weeks of virtual negotiations to approve the final wording, the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms that changes are happening in Earth’s climate across every continent and every ocean. My contribution was as one of 15 lead authors to a chapter about the oceans, the world’s icescapes and sea level change — and this…

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Scientists understood physics of climate change in the 1800s – thanks to a woman named Eunice Foote

Scientists understood physics of climate change in the 1800s – thanks to a woman named Eunice Foote

Eunice Foote described the greenhouse gas effects of carbon dioxide in 1856. Carlyn Iverson/NOAA Climate.gov By Sylvia G. Dee, Rice University Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis. The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force…

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Russia’s vast wildfires could pump a record amount of climate-warming CO2 into the atmosphere

Russia’s vast wildfires could pump a record amount of climate-warming CO2 into the atmosphere

The Wall Street Journal reports: The smoke from the fires in Russia’s northeast is so thick it has blotted out the sun, plunging swaths of the region into darkness during the brief summer. A state of emergency has been declared in the city of Yakutsk, where freezing winter temperatures have given it the reputation of being the coldest constantly inhabited city on the planet. Residents have been told to stay indoors while volunteers and firefighters brave temperatures surpassing 100 degrees…

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The complexity of the biodiversity crisis

The complexity of the biodiversity crisis

Nature reports: Scientists say it’s clear that there’s a biodiversity crisis, but there are many questions about the details. Which species will lose? Will new communities be healthy and desirable? Will the rapidly changing ecosystems be able to deal with climate change? And where should conservation actions be targeted? To find answers, scientists need better data from field sites around the world, collected at regular intervals over long periods of time. Such data don’t exist for much of the world,…

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Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds

Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds

The Guardian reports: Facebook failed to enforce its own rules to curb an oil and gas industry misinformation campaign over the climate crisis during last year’s presidential election, according to a new analysis released on Thursday. The report, by the London-based thinktank InfluenceMap, identified an increase in advertising on the social media site by ExxonMobil and other fossil-fuel companies aimed at shaping the political debate about policies to address global heating. InfluenceMap said its research shows the fossil-fuel industry has…

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Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

The Guardian reports: Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points. The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown. Such an event would have catastrophic consequences…

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In the infrastructure bill, a recognition: Climate change is a crisis

In the infrastructure bill, a recognition: Climate change is a crisis

The New York Times reports: The bipartisan infrastructure deal struck this week provides new money for climate resilience unmatched in United States history: Tens of billions of dollars to protect against floods, reduce damage from wildfires, develop new sources of drinking water in areas plagued by drought, and even relocate entire communities away from vulnerable places. But the bill is remarkable for another reason. For the first time, both parties have acknowledged — by their actions, if not their words…

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