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Category: Climate Change

EU Commission President: ‘Our current fossil-fuel economy has reached its limit’

EU Commission President: ‘Our current fossil-fuel economy has reached its limit’

The Wall Street Journal reports: The European Union and China presented sweeping plans to limit greenhouse-gas emissions that will increase costs for industry and consumers, though they drew criticism from environmentalists as not going far enough to slow climate change. The moves, while both long discussed and still months or years from full implementation, show a new urgency to regulate emissions in two of the world’s biggest economies. They come as the Biden administration promises its own bold initiatives but…

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Brazil’s Amazon is now a carbon source, unprecedented study reveals

Brazil’s Amazon is now a carbon source, unprecedented study reveals

Mongabay reports: The Amazon has long done its part to balance the global carbon budget, but new evidence suggests the climate scales are tipping in the world’s largest rainforest. Now, according to a study published July 14 in Nature, the Amazon is emitting more carbon than it captures. “The Amazon is a carbon source. No doubt,” Luciana Gatti, a researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and lead author of the study, told Mongabay. “By now we can…

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China’s extreme weather warnings avoid talk of climate change

China’s extreme weather warnings avoid talk of climate change

Bloomberg reports: As unprecedented heatwaves sweep across large parts of the Northern Hemisphere, China is telling its people to brace for another summer of dangerous floods and droughts. China’s National Climate Center this month predicted “generally poor weather conditions” for the rest of the summer and warned that the country will face more extreme weather events than usual. In some areas, precipitation is estimated to be 20% to 50% higher than normal. Some major rivers, including the Yellow River that…

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Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Rebecca Solnit writes: Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping…

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Like in ‘postapocalyptic movies’: Heat wave killed marine wildlife en masse

Like in ‘postapocalyptic movies’: Heat wave killed marine wildlife en masse

The New York Times reports: Dead mussels and clams coated rocks in the Pacific Northwest, their shells gaping open as if they’d been boiled. Sea stars were baked to death. Sockeye salmon swam sluggishly in an overheated Washington river, prompting wildlife officials to truck them to cooler areas. The combination of extraordinary heat and drought that hit the Western United States and Canada over the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of marine animals and continues to threaten…

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Heatwaves and drought are killing trees at an alarming rate

Heatwaves and drought are killing trees at an alarming rate

Juniper trees, common in Arizona’s Prescott National Forest, have been dying with the drought. Benjamin Roe/USDA Forest Service via AP By Daniel Johnson, University of Georgia and Raquel Partelli Feltrin, University of British Columbia Like humans, trees need water to survive on hot, dry days, and they can survive for only short times under extreme heat and dry conditions. During prolonged droughts and extreme heat waves like the Western U.S. is experiencing, even native trees that are accustomed to the…

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Climate change is about greed. It’s time for big oil to pay us back

Climate change is about greed. It’s time for big oil to pay us back

Jeffrey Sachs writes: Four interconnected pieces of climate change-related news from the past two weeks reveal America’s predicament. And they also show the way forward, which ultimately must include oil companies’ paying restitution for damage that they have done to the climate and humanity for decades. The first of the four pieces of climate news is the deadly heat wave hitting the western US and Canada, killing hundreds to date. According to the United Nations, there has been a “staggering…

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Human-driven climate change sent Pacific Northwest temperatures soaring

Human-driven climate change sent Pacific Northwest temperatures soaring

Science News reports: The deadly heat wave that baked the Pacific Northwest in late June would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, an international team of scientists announced July 7. In fact, the temperatures were so extreme — Portland, Ore., reached a staggering 47° Celsius (116° Fahrenheit) on June 29, while Seattle surged to 42° C (108° F) — that initial analyses suggested they were impossible even with climate change, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate scientist with…

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Sixty years of climate change warnings — the signs that were missed (and ignored)

Sixty years of climate change warnings — the signs that were missed (and ignored)

Alice Bell writes: In August 1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”. The diagnosis was dramatic. It warned of the emergence of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration (which, in turn, would cause more unrest). The new era the agency imagined wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures; the CIA had heard from scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. But the direction in…

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The North American heatwave shows we need to know how climate change will change our weather

The North American heatwave shows we need to know how climate change will change our weather

NASA By Christian Jakob, Monash University and Michael Reeder, Monash University Eight days ago, it rained over the western Pacific Ocean near Japan. There was nothing especially remarkable about this rain event, yet it made big waves twice. First, it disturbed the atmosphere in just the right way to set off an undulation in the jet stream – a river of very strong winds in the upper atmosphere – that atmospheric scientists call a Rossby wave (or a planetary wave)….

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Lawmaker threatens to subpoena Exxon after revelations from secret video

Lawmaker threatens to subpoena Exxon after revelations from secret video

The New York Times reports: The chairman of a House subcommittee is demanding that executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell, Chevron and other major oil and gas companies testify before Congress about the industry’s decades-long effort to wage disinformation campaigns around climate change. Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said Friday he was prepared to use subpoena power to compel the companies to appear before lawmakers if they don’t do so voluntarily. The move comes a day after a secretive…

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How to live in a climate ‘permanent emergency’

How to live in a climate ‘permanent emergency’

David Wallace-Wells writes: The phrase Jay Inslee used was “permanent emergency.” This was before Lytton — the town that had, days earlier, set Canada’s all-time heat record, drawing waves of “heat tourists” as witnesses to “desert heat” north of 120 degrees in a place where typical June highs were in the mid-70s — burned to the ground just 15 minutes after the arrival of smoke. It was before wildfires raging in British Columbia produced their own pyrocumulus thunderstorms, which produced…

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Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price

Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price

Chris McGreal reports: After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way. Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern…

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The heat in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver is off the charts

The heat in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver is off the charts

The New York Times reports: Heat waves and the “heat domes” that can cause them aren’t rare, but the recent weather that’s been smothering the Pacific Northwest has little precedent in at least four decades of record-keeping. To understand the magnitude of the departure from historical norms, it helps to visualize it. The map above, created by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, analyzes temperatures since 1979. It shows the extent of the…

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Summer is being replaced by the season of extreme heat

Summer is being replaced by the season of extreme heat

Kathy Baughman McLeod writes: Summer is hot. This is among the most basic weather concepts that we learn as children and accept without question. Heat and even heat waves have always been a reliable hallmark of the season between the June solstice and the September equinox. And yet recent weather has far outstripped that norm. For most of last week, the daily high temperature in Phoenix reached or exceeded 115 degrees, breaking records even in that desert city. This weekend,…

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The Civilian Climate Corps is a big government plan that all Americans can embrace

The Civilian Climate Corps is a big government plan that all Americans can embrace

The people are on our side and they know what’s at stake. ⁰⁰We need to pass an infrastructure bill that invests in communities and creates a robust #CivilianClimateCorps. Just so we're clear @POTUS, we’re coming to D.C. tomorrow. We’ll be the ones in black. Can't miss us 😈 pic.twitter.com/aAYuchnovC — Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) June 27, 2021 Jim Lardner writes: It was a rare case of Presidential understatement in the unveiling of a program: the Secretary of Agriculture and the…

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