Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: NASA scientists announced Wednesday that the Earth’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest in nearly 140 years of record-keeping and a continuation of an unmistakable warming trend. “The five warmest years have, in fact, been the last five years,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA group that conducted the analysis. “We’re no longer talking about a situation where global warming is something in the…

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The New York Times reports: After weeks of unrelenting heat and bushfires across the continent, torrential rain and flooding in northern Australia have forced hundreds of residents to evacuate their homes in what weather officials describe as an “unprecedented” event. Between Jan. 26 and the morning of Feb. 4, there was close to four feet of rain in Townsville, a coastal city in the state of Queensland, eclipsing records set in 1998 during a flood known as the “Night of…

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Richard Flanagan writes: As I write this, fire is 500 metres from the largest King Billy pine forest in the world on Mt Bobs, an ancient forest that dates back to the last Ice Age and has trees over 1,000 years old. Fire has broached the boundaries of Mt Field national park with its glorious alpine vegetation, unlike anything on the planet. Fire laps at the edges of Federation Peak, Australia’s grandest mountain, and around the base of Mt Anne…

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Jonathan Watts writes: David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic depiction of a world made uninhabitable by climate chaos caused an outcry when it was published in New York magazine in 2017. Based on the worst-case scenarios foreseen by science, his article portrayed a world of drought, plague and famine, in which acidified oceans drown coastal homelands, dormant diseases are released from ancient ice, conflicts surge, economies collapse, human cognitive abilities decline and heat stress becomes more intolerable in New York City than in…

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Bill McKibben writes: Vermont’s Middlebury College announced on Wednesday that it was divesting its holdings in fossil fuel companies. Given that more than a thousand institutions with endowments totaling more than $8tn have made similar pledges, it might not seem so newsworthy – but Middlebury was one of the first to reverse course. Six years ago the college flatly rejected divestment, and the shift makes it clear why big oil’s purchase on our economy and our society is eroding. Much…

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Australian Associated Press reports: January was Australia’s hottest month on record, the Bureau of Meteorology has said. The mean temperature last month, averaged across the country, exceeded 30C for the first time for any month. A senior climatologist at the bureau, Andrew Watkins, said January’s heat was unprecedented. “We saw heatwave conditions affect large parts of the country through most of the month, with records broken for both duration and also individual daily extremes,” he said on Thursday. [Continue reading…]

Mark Muro, David G. Victor, and Jacob Whiton write: As a new Congress and the 2020 presidential election cycle gear up, much of Washington is likely to focus on topics where political polarization is high. Yet there may be surprises. Take climate change, a top priority for many Democrats. The standard story is that the high-tech “blue” states are pushing a green wave of massive investment to cut emissions of gases that cause climate change. Meanwhile, the GOP-leaning “red” states…

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E&E News reports: Droughts, heat waves and other extreme climate-related events are growing concerns in a warming world. Studies have found climate change is already fueling an increase in some extreme events and that they’re likely to worsen as temperatures continue to climb. Now, new research suggests the reverse may also be true—these events, themselves, could also worsen climate change. Weather and climate events tend to affect the amount of moisture contained in the soil, according to the study published…

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The New York Times reports: A record number of Americans understand that climate change is real, according to a new survey, and they are increasingly worried about its effects in their lives today. Some 73 percent of Americans polled late last year said that global warming was happening, the report found, a jump of 10 percentage points from 2015 and three points since last March. The rise in the number of Americans who say global warming is personally important to…

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Bloomberg reports: Climate change isn’t all downside for the largest U.S. companies. Many of those that filed reports with CDP [formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project] said they believe climate change can bolster demand for their products. For one thing, more people will get sick. “As the climate changes, there will be expanded markets for products for tropical and weather related diseases including waterborne illness,” wrote Merck & Co. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment. More…

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The Guardian reports: Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought, with the pace of ice loss increasing four-fold since 2003, new research has found. Enormous glaciers in Greenland are depositing ever larger chunks of ice into the Atlantic ocean, where it melts. But scientists have found that the largest ice loss in the decade from 2003 actually occurred in the southwest region of the island, which is largely glacier-free. This suggests surface ice is simply melting as global temperatures…

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