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Category: Climate Change

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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Ancient mass extinction tied to ozone loss, warming climate

Ancient mass extinction tied to ozone loss, warming climate

Science reports: The end of the Devonian period, 359 million years ago, was an eventful time: Fish were inching out of the ocean, and fernlike forests were advancing on land. The world was recovering from a mass extinction 12 million years earlier, but the climate was still chaotic, swinging between hothouse conditions and freezes so deep that glaciers formed in the tropics. And then, just as the planet was warming from one of these ice ages, another extinction struck, seemingly…

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What a week’s disasters tell us about the climate crisis and the pandemic

What a week’s disasters tell us about the climate crisis and the pandemic

The New York Times reports: The hits came this week in rapid succession: A cyclone slammed into the Indian megacity of Kolkata, pounding rains breached two dams in the Midwestern United States, and on Thursday came warning that the Atlantic hurricane season could be severe. It all served as a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 325,000 people so far, is colliding with another global menace: a fast-heating planet that acutely threatens millions of people, especially the world’s…

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Parts of Siberia are hotter than Washington, with temperatures nearly 40 degrees above average

Parts of Siberia are hotter than Washington, with temperatures nearly 40 degrees above average

The Washington Post reports: Siberia is in the throes of a heat wave that would be considered warm even by the standards of those living outside the Arctic Circle. In Washington, for example, the temperature has been stuck in the 60s all week, reaching a maximum of 73 degrees Thursday. Yet several stations in North Central Siberia, including areas near or above the Arctic Circle, are seeing temperatures climb well into the 80s. On Friday, the town of Khatanga, Siberia,…

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Lockdowns trigger dramatic fall in global carbon emissions

Lockdowns trigger dramatic fall in global carbon emissions

The Guardian reports: Carbon dioxide emissions have fallen dramatically since lockdowns were imposed around the world due to the coronavirus crisis, research has shown. Daily emissions of the greenhouse gas plunged 17% by early April compared with 2019 levels, according to the first definitive study of global carbon output this year. The findings show the world has experienced the sharpest drop in carbon output since records began, with large sections of the global economy brought to a near standstill. When…

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Thanks to climate divestment, Big Oil finally runs out of gas

Thanks to climate divestment, Big Oil finally runs out of gas

Bill McKibben writes: People used to worry that the fossil-fuel industry would hit “peak oil” and we’d run out of crude. It now seems far more likely that it’s going to run out of money instead. Thanks to Covid-19 and the lockdowns, oil-laden tankers swing at anchor outside major ports hoping demand and price will go up to justify offloading their cargo. But long before the pandemic kicked in, the economic future had begun to sour for the petroleum majors,…

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How Michael Moore became a hero to climate deniers and the far right

How Michael Moore became a hero to climate deniers and the far right

George Monbiot writes: Planet of the Humans, whose executive producer and chief promoter is Michael Moore, now has more than 6 million views on YouTube. The film does not deny climate science. But it promotes the discredited myths that deniers have used for years to justify their position. It claims that environmentalism is a self-seeking scam, doing immense harm to the living world while enriching a group of con artists. This has long been the most effective means by which…

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Even the Anthropocene is nature at work transforming itself

Even the Anthropocene is nature at work transforming itself

Beth Lord writes: In his book Novacene (2019), James Lovelock writes: ‘We must abandon the politically and psychologically loaded idea that the Anthropocene is a great crime against nature … The Anthropocene is a consequence of life on Earth; … an expression of nature.’ This insight resonates with the 17th-century philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Lovelock is the inventor of Gaia theory, the idea that the Earth is one living organism that regulates and strives to preserve itself. Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ is…

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‘A bomb in the center of the climate movement’: Michael Moore damages our most important goal

‘A bomb in the center of the climate movement’: Michael Moore damages our most important goal

Bill McKibben writes: If you’re looking for a little distraction from the news of the pandemic — something a little gossipy, but with a point at the end about how change happens in the world — this essay may soak up a few minutes. I’ll tell the story chronologically, starting a couple of weeks ago on the eve of the 50th Earth Day. I’d already recorded my part for the Earth Day Live webcast, interviewing the great indigenous activists Joye…

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Energy: A silver lining in the pandemic

Energy: A silver lining in the pandemic

Michael T. Klare writes: Energy analysts have long assumed that, given time, growing international concern over climate change would result in a vast restructuring of the global energy enterprise. The result: a greener, less climate-degrading system. In this future, fossil fuels would be overtaken by renewables, while oil, gas, and coal would be relegated to an increasingly marginal role in the global energy equation. In its World Energy Outlook 2019, for example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that, by…

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When confronting a pandemic, we must save nature to save ourselves

When confronting a pandemic, we must save nature to save ourselves

Sahir Doshi and Nicole Gentile write: The COVID-19 pandemic has brutally and tragically exposed the extent to which the health and well-being of every family in America depends on the health and well-being of nature—both here at home and around the world. Nature is connected to human health, from the inherent mechanisms through which ecosystems regulate the emergence of new pathogens to the health benefits of spending time outdoors. But in our destruction of earth’s natural resources, we are losing…

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An Earth Day reminder on how the Republicans have abandoned the environment

An Earth Day reminder on how the Republicans have abandoned the environment

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: The idea for Earth Day came to Gaylord Nelson all of a sudden one day in the middle of 1969. That summer, “teach-ins” about the Vietnam War were all the rage. It occurred to Nelson, then the junior U.S. senator from Wisconsin: How about a “teach-in” about the environment? To attract the widest possible audience, Nelson, a Democrat, invited Representative Pete McCloskey, a Republican from California, to co-chair the event. The response was way more enthusiastic than…

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Bill McKibben on Earth Day at 50

Bill McKibben on Earth Day at 50

  Bill McKibben writes: On the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, let’s think for a moment about the Earth—backdrop for our busy and dramatic life, but also a planet. One can observe it dispassionately, through scientific instruments, as if it were any other planet. And here’s how it looks, these past five decades: The white ice at the northern pole, one of the most obvious features on the planet, has shrunk dramatically: at least half the summer sea…

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