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Category: Climate Change

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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July was the hottest month in human history — and our addiction to fossil fuels is only getting worse

July was the hottest month in human history — and our addiction to fossil fuels is only getting worse

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Eric Holthaus writes: July 2019 is now the hottest month in recorded history, the U.N. confirmed on Thursday. At a press conference in New York, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres announced that the month of July had reached 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a figure that “at least equaled if not surpassed the hottest month in recorded history,” according to data released by the World Meteorological Organization. Temperature information from July is still streaming in, but preliminary data show…

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BlackRock lost $90bn investing in fossil fuel companies, report finds

BlackRock lost $90bn investing in fossil fuel companies, report finds

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The Guardian reports: BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, has lost an estimated $90bn over the last decade by ignoring the serious financial risk of investing in fossil fuel companies, according to economists. A report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has found that BlackRock has eroded the value of its $6.5tn funds by betting on oil companies that were falling in value and by missing out on growth in clean energy investments. The report found that…

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How climate change could trigger the next global financial crisis

How climate change could trigger the next global financial crisis

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Robinson Meyer writes: A few years ago, Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs director who now leads the Bank of England, sounded a warning. Global warming, he said, could send the world economy spiraling into another 2008-like crisis. He called for central banks to act aggressively and immediately to reduce the risk of climate-related catastrophe, taking the warming planet as seriously as they would a cooling economy. Adam Tooze, a history professor at Columbia University, knows quite a bit about…

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