Browsed by
Category: Climate Change

New York air quality among worst in world as haze from Western wildfires shrouds city

New York air quality among worst in world as haze from Western wildfires shrouds city

The Guardian reports: New York City air quality was among the worst in the world as cities across the eastern US were shrouded in smoke from wildfires raging several thousand miles away on the country’s west coast. State officials in New York advised vulnerable people, such as those with asthma and heart disease, to avoid strenuous outdoor activity as air pollution soared to eclipse Lima in Peru and Kolkata in India to be ranked as the worst in the world…

Read More Read More

The Northern Hemisphere has a punishing heat wave infestation

The Northern Hemisphere has a punishing heat wave infestation

The Washington Post reports: As viewed on a weather map of the globe, no fewer than five powerful heat domes are swelling over the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. These zones of high pressure in the atmosphere, intensified by climate change, are generating unforgiving blasts of heat in North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously. The heat domes, in a number of instances, are the source of record high temperatures and are contributing to swarms of wildfires in western North America…

Read More Read More

How a powerful U.S. lobby group helps big oil to block climate action

How a powerful U.S. lobby group helps big oil to block climate action

Chris McGreal reports: When Royal Dutch Shell published its annual environmental report in April, it boasted that it was investing heavily in renewable energy. The oil giant committed to installing hundreds of thousands of charging stations for electric vehicles around the world to help offset the harm caused by burning fossil fuels. On the same day, Shell issued a separate report revealing that its single largest donation to political lobby groups last year was made to the American Petroleum Institute,…

Read More Read More

Regulate business to tackle climate crisis, urges former Bank of England chief

Regulate business to tackle climate crisis, urges former Bank of England chief

The Guardian reports: Governments must step up their regulation of businesses to tackle the climate crisis, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has urged, because the financial free markets will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions alone. Carney, who left the Bank of England last year before the first Covid-19 lockdown, is now one of the most influential figures working on Cop26, the vital UN climate talks to be held in Glasgow in November. He is a UN envoy…

Read More Read More

Across Siberia, extreme summer heat is feeding enormous fires, thawing the permafrost

Across Siberia, extreme summer heat is feeding enormous fires, thawing the permafrost

The New York Times reports: For the third year in a row, residents of northeastern Siberia are reeling from the worst wildfires they can remember, and many are left feeling helpless, angry and alone. They endure the coldest winters outside Antarctica with little complaint. But in recent years, summer temperatures in the Russian Arctic have gone as high as 100 degrees, feeding enormous blazes that thaw what was once permanently frozen ground. Last year, wildfires scorched more than 60,000 square…

Read More Read More

For Napa winemakers, climate change spells calamity

For Napa winemakers, climate change spells calamity

The New York Times reports: Last September, a wildfire tore through one of Dario Sattui’s Napa Valley wineries, destroying millions of dollars in property and equipment, along with 9,000 cases of wine. November brought a second disaster: Mr. Sattui realized the precious crop of cabernet grapes that survived the fire had been ruined by the smoke. There would be no 2020 vintage. A freakishly dry winter led to a third calamity: By spring, the reservoir at another of Mr. Sattui’s…

Read More Read More

In the West, baby hawks, too young to fly, are leaping from their nests to escape the extreme heat

In the West, baby hawks, too young to fly, are leaping from their nests to escape the extreme heat

The Washington Post reports: One wildlife rehabilitation center in rural Oregon says it got “three months’ worth of birds” in three days. Another, in northern California, declared a “hawkpocalypse” in June. And earlier in the summer, Portland Audubon, a nonprofit environmental organization, took in more than 100 Cooper’s hawks over four days as temperatures soared to record highs in the 110s. Normally they might get a dozen in a year. Around the West, young birds of prey have been jumping…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More