Browsed by
Category: Climate Change

What changes have climate scientists made to their own lives to tackle the climate emergency?

What changes have climate scientists made to their own lives to tackle the climate emergency?

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

Shell’s natural ecosystems fund is blatant greenwash

Shell’s natural ecosystems fund is blatant greenwash

Comments 0 Comment

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….

Read More Read More

Young climate protesters are rattling the DNC

Young climate protesters are rattling the DNC

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

‘Climate apartheid’: UN expert says human rights may not survive

‘Climate apartheid’: UN expert says human rights may not survive

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

Oregon’s legislative chaos has senators fleeing to Idaho and a militia threatening the capitol

Oregon’s legislative chaos has senators fleeing to Idaho and a militia threatening the capitol

Comments 0 Comment

Slate reports: Oregon’s state legislature appeared to be on track last week to pass a sweeping climate change bill aimed at curbing emissions in the state. At least until Republicans in the state Senate decided to go to extremes to prevent a vote, making a move that resulted in the governor calling in Oregon State Police. And the drama didn’t end there: Democrats cancelled a session Saturday over safety threats from a far-right militia group. The bill would make Oregon…

Read More Read More

Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change

Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change

Comments 0 Comment

Politico reports: The Trump administration has refused to publicize dozens of government-funded studies that carry warnings about the effects of climate change, defying a longstanding practice of touting such findings by the Agriculture Department’s acclaimed in-house scientists. The studies range from a groundbreaking discovery that rice loses vitamins in a carbon-rich environment — a potentially serious health concern for the 600 million people world-wide whose diet consists mostly of rice — to a finding that climate change could exacerbate allergy…

Read More Read More

World scientists’ warning to humanity on microorganisms and climate change

World scientists’ warning to humanity on microorganisms and climate change

Comments 0 Comment

An editorial in Nature says: In 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC, and more than 1,700 researchers, issued the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. It cautioned that humans were inflicting “harsh and often irreversible damage” on the environment, and that current practices were endangering humanity’s future. More than 21,000 scientists have so far endorsed a widely publicized and equally stark second warning, issued in 2017. This week, part of the Scientists’ Warning movement calls attention to a…

Read More Read More

A climate change bill sets off tumult: Republicans flee, police follow

A climate change bill sets off tumult: Republicans flee, police follow

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Tensions boiled over in the Oregon Capitol this week as Republican state senators vanished in an effort to delay a vote on a climate change bill they oppose. On Thursday, Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, ordered the state police to find them and bring them back. It was only the latest chapter in a season of partisan division and frustration in the nation’s statehouses, where, for the first time in more than a century, all…

Read More Read More

Himalayan glacier melting doubled since 2000, research finds

Himalayan glacier melting doubled since 2000, research finds

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: The melting of Himalayan glaciers has doubled since the turn of the century, with more than a quarter of all ice lost over the last four decades, scientists have revealed. The accelerating losses indicate a “devastating” future for the region, upon which a billion people depend for regular water. The scientists combined declassified US spy satellite images from the mid-1970s with modern satellite data to create the first detailed, four-decade record of ice along the 2,000km (1,200-mile)…

Read More Read More

How the Sunrise Movement changed the Democratic conversation

How the Sunrise Movement changed the Democratic conversation

Comments 0 Comment

Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna writes: “When we were taught about the civil rights movement as kids, it was told to us as if a few big marches just happened and then the laws changed,” Emily LaShelle told me last weekend as she smoked a cigarette. Behind her, a group of her peers played Frisbee in a field while the sun set behind them. “But there was so much more work and effort by activists behind the scenes,” she said. “And that’s the…

Read More Read More

Trump’s relentless war against science

Trump’s relentless war against science

Comments 0 Comment

The Hill reports: President Trump is directing all agencies to cut their advisory boards by “at least” one third. The executive order issued Friday evening directs all federal agencies to “evaluate the need” for each of their current advisory committees. The order gives agencies until Sept. 30 to terminate, at a minimum, one-third of their committees. Committees that qualify for the chopping block include those that have completed their objective, had their work taken up by other panels or where…

Read More Read More

Greenland just lost 2 billion tons of ice

Greenland just lost 2 billion tons of ice

Comments 0 Comment

CNN reports: Over 40% of Greenland experienced melting yesterday, with total ice loss estimated to be more than 2 gigatons (a gigaton is equal to 1 billion tons). While Greenland is a big island filled with lots of ice, it is highly unusual for that much ice to be lost in the middle of June. The average “melt season” for Greenland runs from June to August, with the bulk of the melting occurring in July. To visualize how much ice…

Read More Read More

Pope Francis declares ‘climate emergency’ and urges action

Pope Francis declares ‘climate emergency’ and urges action

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Pope Francis has declared a global “climate emergency”, warning of the dangers of global heating and that a failure to act urgently to reduce greenhouse gases would be “a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations”. He also endorsed the 1.5C limit on temperature rises that some countries are now aiming for, referring to warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of “catastrophic” effects if we crossed such a threshold. He said a…

Read More Read More

Climate change poses major risks to financial markets, regulator warns

Climate change poses major risks to financial markets, regulator warns

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: A top financial regulator is opening a public effort to highlight the risk that climate change poses to the nation’s financial markets, setting up a clash with a president who has mocked global warming and whose administration has sought to suppress climate science. Rostin Behnam, who sits on the federal government’s five-member Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a powerful agency overseeing major financial markets including grain futures, oil trading and complex derivatives, said in an interview…

Read More Read More

Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011

Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Carbon emissions from the global energy industry last year rose at the fastest rate in almost a decade after extreme weather and surprise swings in global temperatures stoked extra demand for fossil fuels. BP’s annual global energy report, an influential review of the market, revealed for the first time that temperature fluctuations are increasing the world’s use of fossil fuels, in spite of efforts to tackle the climate crisis. The recorded temperature swings – days which are…

Read More Read More

Planet is entering ‘new climate regime’ with ‘extraordinary’ heat waves intensified by global warming, study says

Planet is entering ‘new climate regime’ with ‘extraordinary’ heat waves intensified by global warming, study says

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: Simultaneous heat waves scorched land areas all over the Northern Hemisphere last summer, killing hundreds and hospitalizing thousands while intensifying destructive and deadly wildfires. A study published this week in the journal Earth’s Future concludes that this heat wave epidemic “would not have occurred without human-induced climate change.” The alarming part? There are signs record-setting heat waves are beginning anew this summer — signaling, perhaps, that these exceptional and widespread heat spells are now the norm….

Read More Read More