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Category: Climate Change

Climate change may change the way ocean waves impact 50% of the world’s coastlines

Climate change may change the way ocean waves impact 50% of the world’s coastlines

By Mark Hemer, CSIRO; Ian Young, University of Melbourne; Joao Morim Nascimento, Griffith University, and Nobuhito Mori, Kyoto University The rise in sea levels is not the only way climate change will affect the coasts. Our research, published today in Nature Climate Change, found a warming planet will also alter ocean waves along more than 50% of the world’s coastlines. If the climate warms by more than 2℃ beyond pre-industrial levels, southern Australia is likely to see longer, more southerly…

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Fires in the Amazon, the planet at risk

Fires in the Amazon, the planet at risk

Tierra Curry writes: In Brazil, the Amazon rainforest is now burning at a record rate. The greedy, short-sighted policies of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro are jeopardizing indigenous peoples and countless plants and animals. Indeed, in the midst of a climate emergency, Bolsonaro’s policies to slash environmental protections and develop the Amazon for mining, ranching and farming jeopardize the future of life on Earth as we know it. North America has already lost nearly 300 species to extinction. The toll…

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Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says

CNN reports: Fires are raging at a record rate in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, and scientists warn that it could strike a devastating blow to the fight against climate change. The fires are burning at the highest rate since the country’s space research center, the National Institute for Space Research (known by the abbreviation INPE), began tracking them in 2013, the center said Tuesday. There have been 72,843 fires in Brazil this year, with more than half in the Amazon region,…

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How improving tools make it easier to discern climate change’s impact on specific weather events

How improving tools make it easier to discern climate change’s impact on specific weather events

MIT Technology Review reports: A week after heat waves toppled records across Europe late last month, scientists were ready to declare that climate change almost certainly drove the deadly hot stretch. On August 2, while the same heat wave was turning Greenland’s ice sheets into slush, World Weather Attribution reported that decades of greenhouse-gas emissions had raised the odds of such extreme weather by a factor of as much as 100 in some regions. “Over France and the Netherlands, such…

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Climate change advancing faster than scientists previously thought

Climate change advancing faster than scientists previously thought

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Naomi Oreskes, Michael Oppenheimer, and Dale Jamieson write: Recently, the U.K. Met Office announced a revision to the Hadley Center historical analysis of sea surface temperatures (SST), suggesting that the oceans have warmed about 0.1 degree Celsius more than previously thought. The need for revision arises from the long-recognized problem that in the past sea surface temperatures were measured using a variety of error-prone methods such as using open buckets, lamb’s wool–wrapped thermometers, and canvas bags. It was not until…

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How the auto industry is challenging Trump’s effort to weaken pollution regulations

How the auto industry is challenging Trump’s effort to weaken pollution regulations

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The New York Times reports: The White House, blindsided by a pact between California and four automakers to oppose President Trump’s auto emissions rollbacks, has mounted an effort to prevent any more companies from joining California. Toyota, Fiat Chrysler and General Motors were all summoned by a senior Trump adviser to a White House meeting last month where he pressed them to stand by the president’s own initiative, according to four people familiar with the talks. But even as the…

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U.S. scientist to file whistleblower complaint after agency halts his climate work

U.S. scientist to file whistleblower complaint after agency halts his climate work

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Reuters reports: A climate scientist for the Trump administration’s health protection agency who was ordered to drop work on climate issues will file a whistleblower complaint this week with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, his lawyers said on Wednesday. George Luber, who ran the climate and health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is an expert on the health impacts of climate change including risks to hospitals and public health infrastructure and of diseases borne by…

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Amazon deforestation and Brazilian President Bolsonaro’s attack on science

Amazon deforestation and Brazilian President Bolsonaro’s attack on science

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Doug Boucher writes: Science is always a potential threat to authoritarian rulers, because it uncovers truths that contradict their lies. Recently we’ve seen a dramatic example of this conflict in Brazil, where the director of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has been fired by the country’s new President, Jair Bolsonaro, for releasing data showing a substantial increase in Amazon deforestation. INPE has been providing the world with measurements of deforestation, based on detailed analysis of satellite photos, for…

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Huge wildfires in the Arctic and far North send a planetary warning

Huge wildfires in the Arctic and far North send a planetary warning

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Smoke from wildfires in Siberia drifts east toward Canada and the U.S. on July 30, 2019. NASA By Nancy Fresco, University of Alaska Fairbanks The planet’s far North is burning. This summer, over 600 wildfires have consumed more than 2.4 million acres of forest across Alaska. Fires are also raging in northern Canada. In Siberia, choking smoke from 13 million acres – an area nearly the size of West Virginia – is blanketing towns and cities. Fires in these places…

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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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