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Category: Climate Change

Wildfire smoke is becoming a nationwide health threat

Wildfire smoke is becoming a nationwide health threat

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An image from the International Space Station captures plumes of smoke from California wildfires on August 4, 2018. NASA Richard E. Peltier, University of Massachusetts Amherst The impacts of recent forest fires in California reach well beyond the burned areas. Smoke from the Camp Fire created hazardous air quality conditions in San Francisco, more than 170 miles to the southwest – but it didn’t stop there. Cross-country winds carried it across the United States, creating hazy conditions in locations as…

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The stark message from California’s wildfires

The stark message from California’s wildfires

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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…

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How extreme weather is shrinking the planet

How extreme weather is shrinking the planet

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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…

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Time for a Green New Deal?

Time for a Green New Deal?

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Grist reports: Democrats successfully flipped the House last week, and they’ve set their priorities for January: reforming voting, government ethics, and campaign finance laws. Surprise! Climate change isn’t on the list. Not exactly a shocker considering that Democrats don’t even have an economy-wide plan to tackle climate change yet. Guess who does? Young people and newly elected Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A group of 150 youth activists held an hour-long sit-in in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office in D.C….

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A very grim forecast on global warming

A very grim forecast on global warming

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Bill McKibben writes: Though it was published at the beginning of October, Global Warming of 1.5°C, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a document with its origins in another era, one not so distant from ours but politically an age apart. To read it makes you weep not just for our future but for our present. The report was prepared at the request of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the end…

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Bitcoin: Are we really going to burn up the world for libertarian nerdbucks?

Bitcoin: Are we really going to burn up the world for libertarian nerdbucks?

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Eric Holthaus writes: The continued growth of power-hungry Bitcoin could lock in catastrophic climate change, according to a new study. The cryptocurrency’s growth, should it follow the adoption path of other widely used technologies (like credit cards and air conditioning), would alone be enough to push the planet to 2-degree C warming, the red line value the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord. Bitcoin essentially converts electricity into cash, via incredibly complex math problems designed to eliminate…

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Startling new research finds large buildup of heat in the oceans, suggesting a faster rate of global warming

Startling new research finds large buildup of heat in the oceans, suggesting a faster rate of global warming

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The Washington Post reports: The world’s oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday. Over the past quarter-century, Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought, said Laure Resplandy, a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the startling study published Wednesday in the journal…

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Trump’s failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity

Trump’s failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity

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Jeffrey Sachs writes: President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and others who oppose action to address human-induced climate change should be held accountable for climate crimes against humanity. They are the authors and agents of systematic policies that deny basic human rights to their own citizens and people around the world, including the rights to life, health, and property. These politicians have blood on their hands, and the death toll continues to rise. Trump remains…

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‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss

‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss

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The Washington Post reports: Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest’s insect-eating animals have gone missing, too. In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past…

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Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require deep emissions cuts

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require deep emissions cuts

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Climate Central reports: The Paris Climate Change Agreement set a goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C (2.7°F).” In that agreement, world leaders asked the IPCC, the preeminent climate science body, “to provide a Special Report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways.” After being formally…

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World to install over one trillion watts of clean energy by 2023

World to install over one trillion watts of clean energy by 2023

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Bloomberg reports: The world could install more than a trillion watts of renewable power over the next five years, more than the entire current generation capacity of the European Union. The International Energy Agency’s latest annual report on renewables forecasts as much as an extra 1.3 terawatts of clean energy will be installed by 2023 under one scenario. Even in its more conservative central forecast, the agency predicts that global renewable energy capacity will grow by 1 terawatt, driven by…

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The Trump administration has entered Stage 5 climate denial

The Trump administration has entered Stage 5 climate denial

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Dana Nuccitelli writes: Several years ago, I wrote about the five stages of climate denial: In 2013 @dana1981 wrote about the 5 stages of #climatechange denial. Stage 1: Deny the Problem ExistsStage 2: Deny We're the CauseStage 3: Deny It's a ProblemStage 4: Deny We can Solve ItStage 5: It's too Late Look where the Trump Administration is.https://t.co/FRQGZ8gQ4r — Michael Brown (@MJIBrown) September 28, 2018 To date, the Trump administration has pinballed between Stages 1, 2, and 3, calling climate…

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To tackle the climate crisis, human civilization must transform faster than ever before

To tackle the climate crisis, human civilization must transform faster than ever before

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The New York Times reports: A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.” The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders,…

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Human-caused climate change severely exposes the U.S. national parks

Human-caused climate change severely exposes the U.S. national parks

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Trees have died in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colo., as climate change has intensified bark beetle infestations and drought. Patrick Gonzalez, CC BY-ND By Patrick Gonzalez, University of California, Berkeley Human-caused climate change is disrupting ecosystems and people’s lives around the world. It is melting glaciers, increasing wildfires, and shifting vegetation across vast landscapes. These impacts have reached national parks around the world and in the United States. Until now, however, no analysis had examined climate change trends across all…

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Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100

Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100

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The Washington Post reports: Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century. A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses….

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Satellite images show ‘runaway’ expansion of coal power in China

Satellite images show ‘runaway’ expansion of coal power in China

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The Guardian reports: Chinese coal-fired power plants, thought to have been cancelled because of government edicts, are still being built and are threatening to “seriously undermine” global climate goals, researchers have warned. Satellite photos taken in 2018 of locations in China reveal cooling towers and new buildings that were not present a year earlier at plants that were meant to stop operations or be postponed by orders from Beijing. The projects are part of an “approaching tsunami” of coal plants…

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