Browsed by
Category: Climate Change

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

Water is a cosmic gift. Climate change is turning it into a weapon

Water is a cosmic gift. Climate change is turning it into a weapon

Marina Koren writes: Water gave every living thing on Earth the gift of existence. And yet, of late, it seems determined to wipe us out. The Atlantic hurricane season, widely predicted to be a fierce one, is here, and early this morning the first named storm, Alberto, made landfall in northeastern Mexico and drenched everything in its path. And in Florida last week, it was as if the heavens had turned on the tap and simply left it running. The…

Read More Read More

Could the global boom in greenhouses help cool the planet?

Could the global boom in greenhouses help cool the planet?

Fred Pearce writes: The world is awash with greenhouses growing fresh vegetables year-round for health-conscious urbanites. There are so many of them that in places their plastic and glass roofs are reflecting sufficient solar radiation to cool local temperatures — even as surrounding areas warm due to climate change. The extent of this accidental climate engineering is becoming ever more apparent as analysis of satellite images dramatically increases estimates of the area of the planet swathed in greenhouses. From southern…

Read More Read More

Wildfire smoke killed more than 50,000 Californians over a decade

Wildfire smoke killed more than 50,000 Californians over a decade

Yale E360 reports: A new study finds that more than 50,000 Californians died from exposure to wildfire smoke over a little more than a decade. Smoke contains tiny particles, small enough to enter the bloodstream when inhaled, that can raise the risk of dying from heart or lung disease. For the study, researchers modeled particulate pollution from wildfires across California from 2008 to 2018. They then compared their model with local mortality numbers to infer the number of deaths from…

Read More Read More

Fossil fuel companies are trying to rig the marketplace

Fossil fuel companies are trying to rig the marketplace

Andrew Dessler writes: Many of us focused on the problem of climate change have been waiting for the day when renewable energy would become cheaper than fossil fuels. Well, we’re there: Solar and wind power are less expensive than oil, gas and coal in many places and are saving our economy billions of dollars. These and other renewable energy sources produced 30 percent of the world’s electricity in 2023, which may also have been the year that greenhouse gas emissions…

Read More Read More

The heat wave scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night

The heat wave scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night

Jeff Goodell writes: On a recent Thursday evening, a freakish windstorm called a derecho (Spanish for “straight ahead”) hit Houston, a city of more than two million people that also happens to be the epicenter of the fossil fuel industry in America. In a matter of minutes, winds of up to 100 miles per hour blew out office building windows, uprooted trees and toppled electric poles and transmission towers. Nearly a million households lost power. Which meant that not only…

Read More Read More

Vermont becomes first state to enact law requiring oil companies pay for damage from climate change

Vermont becomes first state to enact law requiring oil companies pay for damage from climate change

The Associated Press reports: Vermont has become the first state to enact a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather. Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature late Thursday, saying he is very concerned about the costs and outcome of the small state taking on “Big Oil” alone in what will likely…

Read More Read More

2023 set record for U.S. heat deaths, killing in areas that used to handle the heat

2023 set record for U.S. heat deaths, killing in areas that used to handle the heat

The Associated Press reports: David Hom suffered from diabetes and felt nauseated before he went out to hang his laundry in 108-degree weather, another day in Arizona’s record-smashing, unrelenting July heat wave. His family found the 73-year-old lying on the ground, his lower body burned. Hom died at the hospital, his core body temperature at 107 degrees. The death certificates of more than 2,300 people who died in the United States last summer mention the effects of excessive heat, the…

Read More Read More

Pollution paradox: How cleaning up smog drives global warming

Pollution paradox: How cleaning up smog drives global warming

Fred Pearce writes: They call it “The Blob.” A vast expanse of ocean stretching from Alaska to California periodically warms by up to 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees F), decimating fish stocks, starving seabirds, creating blooms of toxic algae, preventing salmon returns to rivers, displacing sea lions, and forcing whales into shipping lanes to find food. The Blob first formed in 2013 and spread across an area of the northeast Pacific the size of Canada. It lasted for three years…

Read More Read More

Warm water is sneaking underneath the Thwaites Glacier — and rapidly melting it

Warm water is sneaking underneath the Thwaites Glacier — and rapidly melting it

Science News reports: In Antarctica, the warm ocean is stealthily attacking a major glacier through a previously unknown route — undermining its foundation on a daily basis. As each rising tide lifts the coastal terminus of the southern continent’s Thwaites Glacier a tiny bit off the seafloor, warm salty water squeezes in underneath, satellite measurements reveal. This inrush of seawater forces its way many kilometers inland as it melts the ice from beneath. The melt water and seawater are then…

Read More Read More

Where the ocean exhales

Where the ocean exhales

Nautilus: When one thinks of Antarctica, one imagines a vast landscape in shades of blinding white, ice and snow stretching as far as the eye can see. But to really consider Antarctica is to consider its water. The Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, is where the ocean exhales. It is the primary place where the water of the deep oceans rises to the surface, mingles with the atmosphere in a kind of embrace, and then sinks back into the depths….

Read More Read More

Crypto’s ‘huge moment’ scrambling U.S. politics

Crypto’s ‘huge moment’ scrambling U.S. politics

Politico reports: Cryptocurrency is used by a fraction of the American electorate. But it’s starting to have an outsize impact on U.S. politics and policy. The crypto industry won several eye-catching victories this month that showcased its growing influence on the levers of power in Washington — something that’s poised to expand as it prepares to spend more than $80 million on the 2024 elections. The wins come as the Federal Reserve said this week that only 7 percent of…

Read More Read More

Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought, report finds

Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought, report finds

The Guardian reports: The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found. A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C…

Read More Read More