Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: Global emissions of carbon dioxide are reaching the highest levels on record, scientists projected Wednesday, in the latest evidence of the chasm between international goals for combating climate change and what countries are doing. Between 2014 and 2016, emissions remained largely flat, leading to hopes that the world was beginning to turn a corner. Those hopes appear to have been dashed. In 2017, global emissions grew 1.6 percent. The rise in 2018 is projected to be…

Read More Read More

Michael H Fuchs writes: Imagine that US leaders were told that hundreds of nuclear weapons were set on a timer to detonate across the planet, progressively and in increasing numbers, over the coming years and decades. The lives of millions would be upended, if not made nearly impossible to survive, by transformed weather patterns and resource scarcity. Tens of millions would become migrants as regions became uninhabitable. Millions would die, more and more as time went on. If this science…

Read More Read More

Andrew Revkin writes: Thirty years ago, the potentially disruptive impact of heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels and rain forests became front-page news. It had taken a century of accumulating science, and a big shift in perceptions, for that to happen. Indeed, Svante Arrhenius, the pioneering Swedish scientist who in 1896 first estimated the scope of warming from widespread coal burning, mainly foresaw this as a boon, both in agricultural bounty and “more equable and better climates, especially as regards…

Read More Read More

Pacific Standard reports: After consuming more than 153,000 acres, including nearly 14,000 residences, and accounting for 88 fatalities, the Camp Fire has finally been contained. But while communities can now commit fully to recovering from the catastrophic blaze, the landscape itself may have a harder time doing so. Blame climate change. A growing body of research suggests that, thanks to various environmental symptoms of climate change, America’s forests are increasingly at a disadvantage when it comes to recovering from devastating…

Read More Read More

An editorial in the Financial Times says: Seventeen of California’s 20 worst recorded fires have struck since the start of this century — five of those in the past 18 months. The most recent, which destroyed the poignantly named town of Paradise in Northern California, has taken at least 76 lives so far. More than 1,000 people in the area are still missing. The signs are that the breathtaking scale and spread of the so-called Camp Fire is a harbinger…

Read More Read More

Bill McKibben writes in The New Yorker: Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity…

Read More Read More