China air pollution: Beijing records its cleanest air ever
Zachary Davies Boren, Greenpeace Energydesk
For the first time ever, Beijing has met its air pollution target.
Ahead of the city’s grand celebration on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, the state both shut down industrial facilities in the region and cut down on car emissions — all because it wants the sky to be ‘Parade Blue’ on September 3…
Global sea levels have risen 8cm since 1992, Nasa research shows
Reuters via The Guardian
Sea levels worldwide have risen an average of nearly eight centimetres (three inches) since 1992 because of warming waters and melting ice, a panel of Nasa scientists said on Wednesday.
In 2013 a United Nations panel predicted sea levels would rise from between 0.3 and 0.9 metres by the end of the century. The new research shows that sea level rise would probably be at the high end of that, said a University of Colorado geophysicist, Steve Nerem…
How Cities Can Beat the Heat
Hannah Hoag, Nature magazine
The greenhouses that sprawl across the coastline of southeastern Spain are so bright that they gleam in satellite photos. Since the 1970s, farmers have been expanding this patchwork of buildings in Almería province to grow produce such as tomatoes, peppers and watermelons for export. To keep the plants from overheating in the summer, they paint the roofs with white lime to reflect the sunlight.
That does more than just cool the crops. Over the past 30 years, the surrounding region has warmed by 1 °C, but the average air temperature in the greenhouse area has dropped by 0.7 °C.
It’s an effect that cities around the world would like to mimic…
Middle East faces water shortages for the next 25 years, study says
John Vidal, The Guardian
Water supplies across the Middle East will deteriorate over 25 years, threatening economic growth and national security and forcing more people to move to already overcrowded cities, a new analysis suggests.
As the region, which is home to over 350 million people, begins to recover from a series of deadly heatwaves which have seen temperatures rise to record levels for weeks at a time, the World Resources Institute (WRI) claims water shortages were a key factor in the 2011 Syria civil war.
“Drought and water shortages in Syria likely contributed to the unrest that stoked the country’s 2011 civil war. Dwindling water resources and chronic mismanagement forced 1.5 million people, primarily farmers and herders, to lose their livelihoods and leave their land, move to urban areas, and magnify Syria’s general destabilisation,” says the report…
Total divestment: French energy giant ditches coal
Helle Abelvik-Lawson, Greenpeace Energydesk
It’s not been a great year for the world’s coal giants. We’re hearing that China is using less coal and the value of their shares has plummeted.
Now one of the world’s biggest energy companies has given up on producing coal altogether.
Total SA, the French oil company and one of the six “Supermajor” fossil fuels companies, has confirmed it is no longer producing coal.
The Total divestment from coal (geddit?) is marked by the closing sale of their last mine operator Total Coal South Africa, approved on the day dubbed Black Monday because of the collapse of global shares – especially coal ones…
Overfishing and Climate Change, Combined, Intensify Ocean Threats
Press Release, Worldwatch Institute
The combination of overfishing and climate change may be putting the oceans’ health—and our own wellbeing—at risk. As State of the World 2015 contributing author Katie Auth explains, protecting lives and livelihoods will require urgent and concerted action to improve the oceans’ condition.
“Our sense of the oceans’ power and omnipotence—combined with scientific ignorance—contributed to an assumption that nothing we did could ever possibly impact it,” writes Auth. “Over the years, scientists and environmental leaders have worked tirelessly to demonstrate and communicate the fallacy of such arrogance.”…
New NASA videos show stark ice loss from Earth’s ice sheets
Roz Pidcock, Carbon Brief
The US space agency, NASA, yesterday released brand new images showing the pace of ice loss from Earth’s two vast ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica.
The amount of ice lost from the frozen expanses at the very north and south of the planet is accelerating, say the scientists, and together have helped raise global sea level by more than 7cm since 1992…
Greenland Ice Mass Loss: Jan. 2004 – June 2014
Antarctic Ice Mass Loss: Jan. 2004 – June 2014
Carly Fiorina did a 4-minute riff on climate change. Everything she said was wrong.
David Roberts, Vox
Katie Couric recently interviewed Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, and the subject of climate change came up. They discussed it for over four minutes, likely marking the longest any national GOP political figure has spent talking about climate change in the past five years.
Conservatives are delighted with Fiorina’s performance. Thrilled. Pumped. They think she crushed Couric and showed how to outwit liberals on climate change.
In fact, Fiorina’s comments are a farrago of falsehoods and red herrings, a derp different in character from science-denial derp, but no less derpy…
From the dazzling array, I have chosen a representative (but not exhaustive) sample of 10 misleading or false statements to address below.
Psych Warfare
Becky Hagan-Egyir, Makeshift
Just before 5 a.m., Dr. Saleem Al-Nuaimi enters his office at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, Canada. As the northern sky starts its shift from darkness to daybreak, most of his local patients remain in bed.
Saleem turns on his computer, and opens Skype. Half a world away in Syria, it’s 2 p.m., and the first patient of the day greets him from the pop-up window.
The psychiatrist regularly connects this way with 300 refugees and internally displaced people in northern Syria and the border town of Reyhanli, Turkey. Over the internet, he and doctors like him provide counseling and mental health assessments in a region where grief, mood disorders, depression, and trauma from war often go untreated. Saleem prescribes medications, too, though he’s not able to actually dispense them…
Happy New World? Human capital and the corruption of happiness
William Davies, The Ecologist
A transformative, progressive political agenda focused on human wellbeing has morphed into a new form of behavioral management, writes William Davies. Happiness itself has been packaged, commoditised and put to the service of capital – and if you haven’t got it, the Happy New World has no place for you…
Here’s What Happened When A Neighborhood Decided To Ban Cars For A Month
Adele Peters, Co.Exist
Two years ago, an average neighborhood in the South Korean city of Suwon embarked on a radical experiment: For one month, the neighborhood suddenly got rid of every car.
Called the Ecomobility Festival, it was created as a way to help the city move much more quickly to a low-carbon future by helping citizens get a visceral sense of how that future could look…
The planning process took nearly two years and countless meetings to get support from skeptics. Finally, in September of 2013, 1,500 cars were moved out of the neighborhood to parking lots elsewhere in the city. The city handed out 400 temporary bikes and electric scooters to neighbors, and set up a bike school to teach the many residents who didn’t know how to ride. Mail was delivered by electric vehicles. Shuttle buses ran every 15 minutes to take people to their cars.
The neighborhood transformed. Cafes and restaurants added new sidewalk seating, and the streets filled with people. It often looked a lot like car-free streets look during "Sunday Streets" events in other places, but the length of the experiment helped show how people could actually live without cars in everyday life…
Jennifer Oladipo on the Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
Jennifer Oladipo, Orion Magazine
Orion editor Scott Gast speaks with Jennifer Oladipo, a one-time Red Cross volunteer, about how, amid one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, people in the Gulf Coast found ways to live with dignity and grace. Oladipo’s “Flood City” appears in the Lay of the Land section of the July/August 2015 issue…
Subsidies for small scale solar face steep cuts
Matt McGrath, BBC
The UK government says it plans to significantly reduce subsidies paid to small-scale green power installations.
Under the proposals, the amount of money paid to home owners and businesses producing electricity from roof-top solar and small wind turbines will be limited from January 2016.
Subsidy schemes could be closed to new entrants from the start of next year…
