Tree Teachings: How Forests and Wildfires Are Critically Linked
In British Columbia alone, wildfires released between 150 and 200 megatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2017. That’s more than twice the volume created by human activities in the province.
climate change
World Acknowledges Unprecedented Climate Challenge, so What Should a Labor Federal Government Do?
Quite suddenly, in the wake of the recent IPCC report, it’s become commonplace to talk about a global climate emergency. Al Gore told PBS on 12 October: “We have a global emergency. You use a phrase like that and some people immediately say, ‘okay calm down, it can’t be that bad.’ But it it is.”
When it comes to sustainability, we’re a society of distracted drivers
Rather than sharing the distractions now capturing the attention of other drivers, we must each retrain ourselves to pay attention to the instrument panel and the road ahead of us. Abandoning old habits and making new ones requires effort. But some habits are so unwise that changing them is a life-or-death affair.
Climate catastrophe: The median is NOT the message
The latest report from the IPCC is the first to abandon the measured tone of its previous ones and foretell what it considers a climate catastrophe for human civilization unless the world makes an abrupt U-turn and begins dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions almost immediately.
And yet, even this forecast is probably too conservative in its pronouncements.
The Trump Administration Knows the Planet is Going to Boil. It Doesn’t Care
The World Bank predicts we may see 140 million climate migrants before long, and given the chaos that even a million people fleeing the (partially drought-fueled) crisis in Syria created, we better come to grips.
Nuclear Plant Declares Emergency, Second Breach Reported at Coal Ash Site amid Florence’s Rains
At least 23 people have died in North and South Carolina so far during the historic storm. Around half a million people in the region are without power, with more damage expected as Florence continues to rage.
Times Square Drowns in a Climate Art Exhibit
“I think the most important motivation as an artist is to use what James Baldwin has described as extracting the question that is buried within the answer,” Chin has said. “If the answer is ‘The world will be inundated and destroyed by our own doings,’ then what is the question that we have to ask now? This project is about now.”
Seawalls for oil refineries and other ironies of climate change adaptation
Several climate change deniers in the Texas political establishment aren’t deniers after all. They just don’t want the industry which got them elected (and could get them defeated just as easily) to pay anything to protect itself from the very dangers to which the use of the industry’s products exposes the entire globe.
‘Peak Coal’ is Getting Closer, Latest Figures Show
Total global coal capacity continues to inch up, but a peak is on the horizon. In the first half of 2018, retired capacity has nearly matched newly operating plants and the global pipeline for proposed coal is quickly eroding.
Take Unprecedented Action or Bear the Consequences
Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.
Climate Change in the Anthropocene: An Unstoppable Drive to Hothouse Earth?
Can the global climate be stabilized before runaway change creates conditions that are too hot for human civilization and deadly for most species?
Earth’s Carbon Concentrations Have Soared to Levels Not Seen in 800,000 Years
As temperatures bust heat records across the globe and wildfires rage from California to the Arctic, a new report produced annually by more than 500 scientists worldwide found that last year, the carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere reached the highest levels “in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years.”