Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Bayou Bridge pipeline will carry oil across southern Louisiana from Lake Charles, near the Texas border, to St. James along the Mississippi River. Rosinski’s home in Arcadia Parish is west of the Atchafalaya Basin, an environmentally sensitive National Heritage Area. Construction there continues despite an ongoing legal challenge against building the pipeline through the basin.
Overall, the consensus in the scientific literature is that climate change will increase the number of people exposed to extreme events and, therefore, to subsequent psychological problems, such as worry, anxiety, depression, distress, loss, grief, trauma and even suicide.
We are living in extraordinary times and transformation is already happening and accelerating all around us. Many technological, social, and environmental changes are racing up the steep end of the exponential curve. I
The impacts are serious. A slow-down in deepwater ocean circulation “would accelerate sea level rise off the northeastern United States, while a full collapse could result in as much as approximately 1.6 feet of regional sea level rise,” as the authors of the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) explained in November.
Why do we “March for Science”? A central impulse is to fight the exercise of power for private gain at the expense of broad interest; oil companies ought not determine the quality of climate science!
A few miles off the coast of the rapidly warming Antarctic Peninsula, scientists are getting their first-ever detailed look at one of the most mysterious mammals on the planet, minke whales.
David Vardy is one of those rare individuals who believes that when a government makes a catastrophic mistake, all citizens are responsible. The 78-year-old former civil servant also argues “that in a democracy the true patriot is the one who dissents openly and is not silenced by fear and acceptance.”
These stories have three things in common. They reverse climate change by gaining new respect for the element carbon upon which all life depends. They are powered by human ingenuity, working as part of, not against, nature. They are driven and emboldened by the astonishing, illimitable, force of youth.
In Africa, unlike the weather here, it’s always nice and bright, there is lots of sun available all year round, so we can use the solar energy. What we’ve also devised is a hybrid system, which also uses wind energy. So what happens in Africa – or anywhere – is the winds are often there when it’s raining. When there’s no solar, the wind power kicks in.
So how does hitting warming of 1.5°C a decade from now square with the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”? In two words, it doesn’t.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the gold-standard for mainstream climate science. Problem is, the last IPCC report came out way back in 2013. As it turns out, we’ve learned a lot about our climate since then, and most of that new information paints an increasingly urgent picture of the need to slash fossil-fuel emissions as soon as possible.
Meeting the Paris Agreement’s aspirational target of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels could “substantially” reduce the risk of sea ice-free summers in the Arctic, research shows. Two new studies find that, under 1.5C of warming, Arctic waters could experience ice-free summers around 2.5% of the time, or one in every 40 years.
