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Category: Climate Change

A new solution to climate science’s biggest mystery

A new solution to climate science’s biggest mystery

Robinson Meyer writes: The project began, in one telling, five years ago, in a castle that overlooks the Bavarian Alps, where three dozen of the world’s most successful and rivalrous earth scientists came together for a week of cloistered meetings. They gathered, in part, out of embarrassment. For the past four decades, their field—the study of Earth’s natural phenomena, including its land, ocean, and climate—had boomed. Generations of young researchers who once would have become nuclear physicists or oil geologists…

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How Biden’s climate plan makes clean energy by 2035 ‘very doable’

How Biden’s climate plan makes clean energy by 2035 ‘very doable’

NBC News reports: When Hillary Clinton proposed a climate plan in the run-up to the 2016 election that included $60 billion for clean energy infrastructure and $30 billion more to redevelop coal-mining communities, it was met with mixed reviews: an “ambitious” plan but one with “holes.” The plan proposed some of the largest investments in clean energy tech put forward by a major presidential candidate, a sign of how far the topic of climate change had come in politics but,…

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How Earth’s climate changes naturally (and why things are different now)

How Earth’s climate changes naturally (and why things are different now)

Howard Lee writes: Earth has been a snowball and a hothouse at different times in its past. So if the climate changed before humans, how can we be sure we’re responsible for the dramatic warming that’s happening today? In part it’s because we can clearly show the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions from human activity and the 1.28 degree Celsius (and rising) global temperature increase since preindustrial times. Carbon dioxide molecules absorb infrared radiation, so with more of them…

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Trump weakens environmental law to speed up permits for pipelines and other infrastructure

Trump weakens environmental law to speed up permits for pipelines and other infrastructure

CNBC reports: President Donald Trump on Wednesday finalized a rollback to the country’s landmark environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, by speeding up approval for federal projects like pipelines, highways and power plants. NEPA was signed into law by President Richard Nixon 50 years ago and requires federal agencies to consider the environmental consequences of infrastructure projects before they are approved. The law has also been vital in allowing communities to weigh in on how such projects impact climate…

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Methane rises to highest level on record

Methane rises to highest level on record

The Guardian reports: Animal farming and fossil fuels have driven global emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane to the highest level on record, putting the world on track for dangerously increased heat levels of 3C to 4C. Since 2000 discharges of the odourless, colourless gas have risen by more than 50m tonnes a year, equivalent to 350m cars or double the total emissions of Germany or France, according to the latest Methane Budget study by a global team of…

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New Biden plan sees millions of jobs in aggressive climate action

New Biden plan sees millions of jobs in aggressive climate action

The Verge reports: On Wednesday, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden revealed a revamped climate and energy plan that raises spending, expands efforts to address racial disparities, and sets an earlier deadline for cutting greenhouse gases. Biden’s plan aims to eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035. Biden had previously committed to reaching a 100 percent “clean energy economy” by 2050. The plan comes with a $2 trillion price tag over four years, higher than his previous ten-year…

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I’ve seen a future without cars, and it’s amazing

I’ve seen a future without cars, and it’s amazing

Farhad Manjoo writes: As coronavirus lockdowns crept across the globe this winter and spring, an unusual sound fell over the world’s metropolises: the hush of streets that were suddenly, blessedly free of cars. City dwellers reported hearing bird song, wind and the rustling of leaves. (Along with, in New York City, the intermittent screams of sirens). You could smell the absence of cars, too. From New York to Los Angeles to New Delhi, air pollution plummeted, and the soupy, exhaust-choked…

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Solving the climate crisis is about everything and everyone

Solving the climate crisis is about everything and everyone

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson writes: The Black Lives Matter movement is not a distraction from saving the planet. We can’t solve the climate crisis without people of color, but we could probably solve it without racists. Whether it’s Hurricane Katrina or air pollution, storms and exposure to toxins cause much greater harm to communities of color. (Although, yes, in the longer term, climate change is coming for us all, even if you have a bunker in New Zealand.) So it follows…

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Rapid Arctic meltdown in Siberia alarms scientists

Rapid Arctic meltdown in Siberia alarms scientists

The Washington Post reports: Alexander Deyev can still taste the smoke from last year’s wildfires that blanketed the towns near his home in southeastern Siberia, and he is dreading their return. “It just felt like you couldn’t breathe at all,” said Deyev, 32, who lives in Irkutsk, a Siberian region along Lake Baikal, just north of the Mongolian border. But already this year, fires in the spring arrived earlier and with more ferocity, government officials have said. In the territory…

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What Facebook and the oil industry have in common

What Facebook and the oil industry have in common

Bill McKibben writes: Why is it so hard to get Facebook to do anything about the hate and deception that fill its pages, even when it’s clear that they are helping to destroy democracy? And why, of all things, did the company recently decide to exempt a climate-denial post from its fact-checking process? The answer is clear: Facebook’s core business is to get as many people as possible to spend as many hours as possible on its site, so that…

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How Facebook allows climate misinformation to bypass its fact-checking process

How Facebook allows climate misinformation to bypass its fact-checking process

E&E News reports: A team of climate scientists working as approved fact checkers for Facebook evaluated a post last year by a White House-connected group that claims the world needs to burn more fossil fuels. The researchers found that the post by the CO2 Coalition was based on cherry-picked information to mislead readers into thinking climate science models are wrong about global warming. The post, which was published originally in the conservative Washington Examiner, was an opinion piece that had…

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Who is really to blame for climate change?

Who is really to blame for climate change?

Jocelyn Timperley writes: One of the most frustrating things about the climate crisis is that the fact that earlier action could have prevented it. With every passing year of inaction, the emissions cuts needed to limit global warming to relatively safe levels grow steeper and steeper. Many groups have been accused of being at blame for this ongoing lack of action, from fossil fuel companies and wealthy countries, to politicians, rich people and sometimes even all of us. Others may…

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Siberia’s record-shattering hot streak, foreshadows more heat elsewhere

Siberia’s record-shattering hot streak, foreshadows more heat elsewhere

The Washington Post reports: A northeastern Siberian town is likely to have set a record for the highest temperature documented in the Arctic Circle, with a reading of 100.4 degrees (38 Celsius) recorded Saturday in Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle and about 3,000 miles east of Moscow. Records at that location have been kept since 1885. If verified, this would be the northernmost 100-degree reading ever observed, and the highest temperature on record in the Arctic, a region that…

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Emissions are surging back as countries and states reopen

Emissions are surging back as countries and states reopen

The New York Times reports: After a drastic decline this spring, global greenhouse gas emissions are now rebounding sharply, scientists reported, as countries relax their coronavirus lockdowns and traffic surges back onto roads. It’s a stark reminder that even as the pandemic rages, the world is still far from getting global warming under control. In early April, daily fossil fuel emissions worldwide were roughly 17 percent lower than they were in 2019, as governments ordered people to stay home, employees…

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Coronavirus and the climate crisis

Coronavirus and the climate crisis

Gaurab Basu and Samir Chaudhuri write: There are many ways in which the impacts of COVID-19 will make previously existing climate-related health threats in India worse. For instance, COVID-19 compounds the grave threat climate change poses to global food security. In India, 38 percent of children already show signs of chronic malnutrition. The World Food Programme has just reported that the pandemic will nearly double the number of people facing food insecurity worldwide, from 135 million to 265 million. Likewise,…

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Coronavirus, heat wave and locusts form a perfect storm in India

Coronavirus, heat wave and locusts form a perfect storm in India

The Associated Press reports: As if the coronavirus wasn’t enough, India grappled with scorching temperatures and the worst locust invasion in decades as authorities prepared for the end of a monthslong lockdown despite recording thousands of new infections every day. This triple disaster drew biblical comparisons and forced officials to try to balance the competing demands of simultaneous public health crises: protection from eviscerating heat but also social distancing in newly reopened parks and markets. The heat wave threatens to…

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