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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
The Guardian reports: The vast expanse of sea ice around Antarctica has suffered a “precipitous” fall since 2014, satellite data shows, and fell at a faster rate than seen in the Arctic. The plunge in the average annual extent means Antarctica lost as much sea ice in four years as the Arctic lost in 34 years. The cause of the sharp Antarctic losses is as yet unknown and only time will tell whether the ice recovers or continues to decline….
NBC News reports: An oppressive heat wave baked Western Europe this week, setting record high temperatures in France, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. In India, a severe drought has choked water supplies in the city of Chennai, exposing its 9 million residents to a major shortage. And after the United States’ wettest 12-month stretch on record, towns across the Midwest and the Great Plains are reeling from devastating floods. The reasons behind these extreme weather events are complex, but…
Carolyn Kormann reports: Early Tuesday morning, in Oregon, Shilpa Joshi, the coalition director of Renew Oregon, a clean-energy advocacy organization, rented a minivan from a lot on the outskirts of Portland, picked up a group of high-school students, and headed for the state capitol building, in Salem, where they’d be staging a protest. She was anxious and deeply concerned. “This might be a really sad day for us,” she said, en route. A major climate-change bill, which she had worked…
Prof Dave Reay writes: I’ve worked on climate change for nearly 25 years. My first degree was in marine biology and I went on to study warming in the Southern (Antarctic) Ocean, simulating future climates. Now my specialism is land use, agriculture and climate change – not just in terms of emissions from the food that’s produced, but also the impact of climate change on our food system, and the uptake of carbon from the atmosphere by soils, trees and…
George Monbiot writes: It is hard to believe it needs stating, but it does. The oil industry is not your friend. Whatever it might say about its ethical credentials, while it continues to invest in fossil fuels, it accelerates climate breakdown and the death of the habitable planet. You would think this point was obvious to everyone. But over the past few weeks, I have spoken to dozens of environmentalists who appear to believe that Shell is on their side….
BuzzFeed News reports: The young protesters who have increasingly become the face of an urgent new movement to combat the climate crisis rattled the Democratic Party’s central institution this week, camping out on the steps of its headquarters and sending jitters through its senior staff ranks. About a dozen protesters in black T-shirts stood vigil Tuesday and Wednesday night outside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, and more than a hundred watched the debate on a screen outside the locked Washington…
The Guardian reports: The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said. Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of…