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Category: Climate Change

House Democrats plan to develop a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century

House Democrats plan to develop a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century

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Think Progress reports: House Democrats on Tuesday announced they plan to develop policies to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century, a sweeping target in the fight to address climate change. The goal marks a step forward on climate action for lawmakers, but falls short of the 2030 timeline championed by some progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and environmental groups like the youth-led Sunrise Movement. Moreover, the announced target does not amount to a formal plan and Democrats declined to give…

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Restoration of forested land at a global scale could help capture carbon and mitigate climate change

Restoration of forested land at a global scale could help capture carbon and mitigate climate change

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Science News reports: A whopping new estimate of the power of planting trees could rearrange to-do lists for fighting climate change. Planting trees on 0.9 billion hectares of land could trap about two-thirds the amount of carbon released by human activities since the start of the Industrial Revolution, a new study finds. The planet has that much tree-friendly land available for use. Without knocking down cities or taking over farms or natural grasslands, reforested pieces could add up to new…

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Letter to the future: ‘We know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.’

Letter to the future: ‘We know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.’

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Brian Kahn reports: We’ve reached the point in our wild planetary experiment where humans are memorializing the things we’re knowingly wiping out. Iceland has lost its first glacier to rising temperatures. Now, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to install a plaque near the sad pile of ice and snow formerly known as Ok Glacier. The researchers say it’s the first memorial to a disappearing glacier, but climate change ensures it almost certainly will not be the last….

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Trump drilling leases could create more climate pollution than EU does in a year

Trump drilling leases could create more climate pollution than EU does in a year

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The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s leases of public lands and waters for oil and gas drilling could lead to the production of more climate-warming pollution than the entire European Union contributes in a year, according to a new report. The Wilderness Society estimates heat-trapping emissions from extracting and burning those fossil fuels could range between 854m and 4.7bn metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, depending on how much development companies pursue. The 28 nations in the European Union produced about…

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Airplane contrails (not ‘chemtrails’) are changing the climate

Airplane contrails (not ‘chemtrails’) are changing the climate

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Dawn Stover writes: Those wispy stripes left behind by airplanes have a surprisingly forceful, albeit short-lived, effect on the climate. After accounting for factors such as aircraft improvements that are expected to reduce soot emissions, climate researchers at the German Aerospace Center recently estimated that the heat-trapping effects of cirrus cloudiness caused by contrails will “increase significantly over time” because of the large projected increases in air traffic—which is growing so fast that efforts to make airplanes less polluting won’t…

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‘Nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history,’ says director of biodiversity conservation group

‘Nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history,’ says director of biodiversity conservation group

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The Guardian reports: From the tops of trees to the depths of the oceans, humanity’s destruction of wildlife is continuing to drive many species towards extinction, with the latest “red list” showing a third of all species assessed are threatened. The razing of habitat and hunting for bushmeat has now driven seven primates into decline, while overfishing has pushed two families of extraordinary rays to the brink. Pollution, dams and over-abstraction of freshwater are responsible for serious declines in river…

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The giant carbon footprint belonging to people who fly

The giant carbon footprint belonging to people who fly

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The Guardian reports: Taking a long-haul flight generates more carbon emissions than the average person in dozens of countries around the world produces in a whole year, a new Guardian analysis has found. The figures highlight the disproportionate carbon footprint of those who can afford to fly, with even a short-haul return flight from London to Edinburgh contributing more CO2 than the mean annual emissions of a person in Uganda or Somalia. 2019 is forecast to be another record-breaking year…

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India’s terrifying water crisis

India’s terrifying water crisis

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Meera Subramanian writes: India’s water crisis offers a striking reminder of how climate change is rapidly morphing into a climate emergency. Piped water has run dry in Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and 21 other Indian cities are also facing the specter of “Day Zero,” when municipal water sources are unable to meet demand. Chennai, a city of eight million on the Bay of Bengal, depends on the fall monsoon to provide half of the…

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News organizations are timidly changing their approach to covering climate crisis

News organizations are timidly changing their approach to covering climate crisis

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The New York Times reports: As Europe heats up, Greenland melts and the Midwest floods, many news organizations are devoting more resources to climate change as they cover the topic with more urgency. In Florida, six newsrooms with different owners have taken the unusual step of pooling their resources and sharing their reporting on the issue. They plan to examine how climate change will affect the state’s enormous agriculture sector as well as “the future of coastal towns and cities…

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One climate crisis disaster happening every week, UN warns

One climate crisis disaster happening every week, UN warns

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The Guardian reports: Climate crisis disasters are happening at the rate of one a week, though most draw little international attention and work is urgently needed to prepare developing countries for the profound impacts, the UN has warned. Catastrophes such as cyclones Idai and Kenneth in Mozambique and the drought afflicting India make headlines around the world. But large numbers of “lower impact events” that are causing death, displacement and suffering are occurring much faster than predicted, said Mami Mizutori,…

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Ecologists are racing to restore the world’s tropical rainforests

Ecologists are racing to restore the world’s tropical rainforests

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Forest restoration is underway in Biliran, Leyte, Philippines led by the local community with support from international researchers and government agencies. Robin Chazdon, CC BY-ND By Robin Chazdon, University of Connecticut The green belt of tropical rainforests that covers equatorial regions of the Americas, Africa, Indonesia and Southeast Asia is turning brown. Since 1990, Indonesia has lost 50% of its original forest, the Amazon 30% and Central Africa 14%. Fires, logging, hunting, road building and fragmentation have heavily damaged more…

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Amazon asserts its contribution to climate change is a trade secret

Amazon asserts its contribution to climate change is a trade secret

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The Register reports: Amazon has refused to publish data about the energy consumption and carbon emissions of its business in Australia, including vast server farms, claiming its contribution to climate change is a trade secret. The company has asked the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) – the country’s agency tasked with regulating carbon emissions and encouraging clean energy use – to keep its data from publication, arguing that this involves proprietary information on reducing energy use. Amazon’s cloudy offspring AWS landed…

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Greta Thunberg welcomes OPEC chief’s ‘greatest threat’ label

Greta Thunberg welcomes OPEC chief’s ‘greatest threat’ label

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The Guardian reports: Greta Thunberg and other climate activists have said it is a badge of honour that the head of the world’s most powerful oil cartel believes their campaign may be the “greatest threat” to the fossil fuel industry. The criticism of striking students by the trillion-dollar Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) highlights the growing reputational concerns of oil companies as public protests intensify along with extreme weather. Mohammed Barkindo, the secretary general of Opec, said there…

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Tree planting ‘has mind-blowing potential’ to tackle climate crisis

Tree planting ‘has mind-blowing potential’ to tackle climate crisis

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The Guardian reports: Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas. As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that…

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Anchorage has never reached 90 degrees. That could change this week

Anchorage has never reached 90 degrees. That could change this week

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The New York Times reports: In more than 100 years of Anchorage history, weather stations have never recorded a single 90-degree reading. If current forecasts hold, it could happen multiple times in the coming days. With the combined forces of climate change that has disrupted temperature trends around the state, a remarkable dearth of ice in the Bering Sea and weather patterns generating a general heat wave, Alaska is facing a Fourth of July unlike any before. Anchorage has canceled…

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June was hottest ever recorded on Earth, European satellite agency announces

June was hottest ever recorded on Earth, European satellite agency announces

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The Independent reports: Last month was the hottest June ever recorded, the EU’s satellite agency has announced. Data provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the EU, showed that the global-average temperature for June 2019 was the highest on record for the month. The data showed European-average ​temperatures for June 2019 were more than 2C above normal and temperatures were 6-10C above normal over most of France,…

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