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Category: Climate Change

Tasty seaweed reduces cow methane emissions by 99% — and it could soon be a climate game-changer

Tasty seaweed reduces cow methane emissions by 99% — and it could soon be a climate game-changer

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Good News Network reports: A puffy pink seaweed that can stop cows from burping out methane is being primed for mass farming by Australian researchers. The particular seaweed species, called Asparagopsis, grows prolifically off the Queensland Coast, and was the only seaweed found to have the effect in a study five years ago led by CSIRO. Even a small amount of the seaweed in a cow’s diet was shown to reduce the animal’s gases by 99%. Associate Professor Nick Paul,…

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‘Kochland’ examines the Koch brothers’ early, crucial role in climate-change denial

‘Kochland’ examines the Koch brothers’ early, crucial role in climate-change denial

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Jane Mayer writes: If there is any lingering uncertainty that the Koch brothers are the primary sponsors of climate-change doubt in the United States, it ought to be put to rest by the publication of “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” by the business reporter Christopher Leonard. This seven-hundred-and-four-page tome doesn’t break much new political ground, but it shows the extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence that Charles and David Koch have exerted to cripple government action…

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‘We’re literally watching the Greenland ice sheet disappear right before our very eyes’

‘We’re literally watching the Greenland ice sheet disappear right before our very eyes’

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  The Associated Press reports: The fields of rippling ice 500 feet below the NASA plane give way to the blue-green of water dotted with irregular chunks of bleached-white ice, some the size of battleships, some as tall as 15-story buildings. Like nearly every other glacier on Greenland, the massive Kangerlussuaq is melting. In fact, the giant frozen island has seen one of its biggest melts on record this year. NASA scientist Josh Willis is now closely studying the phenomenon…

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Dont burn trees to fight climate change — let them grow

Dont burn trees to fight climate change — let them grow

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Bill McKibben writes: Of all the solutions to climate change, ones that involve trees make people the happiest. Earlier this year, when a Swiss study announced that planting 1.2 trillion trees might cancel out a decade’s worth of carbon emissions, people swooned (at least on Twitter). And last month, when Ethiopian officials announced that twenty-three million of their citizens had planted three hundred and fifty million trees in a single day, the swooning intensified. Someone tweeted, “This should be like…

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Hollywood is undermining climate action

Hollywood is undermining climate action

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Cara Buckley writes: Humans ruined everything. They bred too much and choked the life out of the land, air and sea. And so they must be vaporized by half, or attacked by towering monsters, or vanquished by irate dwellers from the oceans’ polluted depths. Barring that, they face hardscrabble, desperate lives on a once verdant Earth now consumed by ice or drought. That is how many recent superhero and sci-fi movies — among them the latest Avengers and Godzilla pictures…

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Extreme climate change has arrived in America

Extreme climate change has arrived in America

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The Washington Post reports: Before climate change thawed the winters of New Jersey, this lake hosted boisterous wintertime carnivals. As many as 15,000 skaters took part, and automobile owners would drive onto the thick ice. Thousands watched as local hockey clubs battled one another and the Skate Sailing Association of America held competitions, including one in 1926 that featured 21 iceboats on blades that sailed over a three-mile course. In those days before widespread refrigeration, workers flocked here to harvest…

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Restoring soil can help address climate change

Restoring soil can help address climate change

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No-till farming conserves soil by greatly reducing erosion. USDA NRCS South Dakota/Eric Barsness, CC BY-SA By David R. Montgomery, University of Washington It’s time to take soil seriously. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with very high confidence in its latest report, land degradation represents “one of the biggest and most urgent challenges” that humanity faces. The report assesses potential impacts of climate change on food production and concludes that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will reduce crop…

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Trump administration significantly weakens Endangered Species Act

Trump administration significantly weakens Endangered Species Act

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law and making it harder to protect wildlife from the multiple threats posed by climate change. The new rules would make it easier to remove a species from the endangered list and weaken protections for threatened species, the classification one step below endangered. And, for the first time, regulators would be…

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From heat waves to ‘eco-apartheid’: Climate change in Israel-Palestine

From heat waves to ‘eco-apartheid’: Climate change in Israel-Palestine

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Matan Kaminer, Basma Fahoum, and Edo Konrad report: July 2019 was, according to European climate researchers, the hottest month ever recorded. Coming just one year after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its landmark report warning of an impending climate catastrophe, temperatures soared to unprecedented levels in places like Alaska and Sweden, forests incinerated in Siberia, glaciers melted in Greenland, and entire cities in India went without water. Faced with rising temperatures, addressing climate breakdown and its effects…

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To halt warming and ensure food supplies, land-use practices must change

To halt warming and ensure food supplies, land-use practices must change

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E&E News reports: What’s good for the planet’s climate is also good for its food systems. Halting global warming and feeding the world’s rapidly growing population both require major overhauls to the way that humans manage the land they live on, according to a much-anticipated report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report, released this morning, tackles the broad connections between climate change and land. With contributions from more than 100 scientists who reviewed thousands of research papers,…

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Trump’s politicization of climate science poses a threat to the future of agriculture

Trump’s politicization of climate science poses a threat to the future of agriculture

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Politico reports: One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice is losing nutrients because of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised…

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A quarter of humanity faces looming water crises

A quarter of humanity faces looming water crises

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The New York Times reports: Countries that are home to one-fourth of Earth’s population face an increasingly urgent risk: The prospect of running out of water. From India to Iran to Botswana, 17 countries around the world are currently under extremely high water stress, meaning they are using almost all the water they have, according to new World Resources Institute data published Tuesday. Many are arid countries to begin with; some are squandering what water they have. Several are relying…

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Here’s how the hottest month in recorded history unfolded around the globe

Here’s how the hottest month in recorded history unfolded around the globe

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The Washington Post reports: During the hottest month that humans have ever recorded, a local television station in the Netherlands aired nonstop images of wintry landscapes to help viewers momentarily forget the heat wave outside. Officials in Switzerland and elsewhere painted stretches of rail tracks white, hoping to keep them from buckling in the extreme heat. At the port of Antwerp, two alleged drug dealers called police for help after they got stuck inside a shipping container filled with cocaine…

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We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report

We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report

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The Guardian reports: Attempts to solve the climate crisis by cutting carbon emissions from only cars, factories and power plants are doomed to failure, scientists will warn this week. A leaked draft of a report on climate change and land use, which is now being debated in Geneva by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states that it will be impossible to keep global temperatures at safe levels unless there is also a transformation in the way the world…

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Ethiopia plants 350 million trees in a day to help tackle climate crisis

Ethiopia plants 350 million trees in a day to help tackle climate crisis

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The Guardian reports: About 350m trees have been planted in a single day in Ethiopia, according to a government minister. The planting is part of a national “green legacy” initiative to grow 4bn trees in the country this summer by encouraging every citizen to plant at least 40 seedlings. Public offices have reportedly been shut down in order for civil servants to take part. The project aims to tackle the effects of deforestation and climate change in the drought-prone country….

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The cost of climate change is being paid by the wrong people

The cost of climate change is being paid by the wrong people

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Henry Farrell writes: Last week, CNN announced plans to host a climate crisis town hall with the Democratic presidential candidates on September 4. MSNBC scheduled a multiday climate change forum with the presidential hopefuls later that month. In both venues, some version of the perpetual question will undoubtedly be raised: “How will you pay for the costs of dealing with climate change?” Despite its pervasiveness, this is a profoundly wrongheaded line of inquiry. Asking how to pay for the impact…

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