climate change tagged posts

The UK government must tell the public small, easy changes will not be enough to tackle climate change, warn experts.

Researchers from Imperial College London say we must eat less meat and dairy, swap cars for bikes, take fewer flights, and ditch gas boilers at home.

The report, seen by BBC Panorama, has been prepared for the Committee on Climate Change, which advises ministers how to cut the UK’s carbon footprint.

It says an upheaval in our lifestyles is the only way to meet targets.

The government has passed a law obliging the country to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

It is “going further and faster than any other developed nation to protect the planet for future generations”, a government spokesperson told BBC Panorama. “If we can go faster, we will.”

But the new report warns...

Google has made “substantial” contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington despite its insistence that it supports political action on the climate crisis. Among hundreds of groups the company has listed on its website as beneficiaries of its political giving are more than a dozen organisations that have campaigned against climate legislation, questioned the need for action, or actively sought to roll back Obama-era environmental protections.

The list includes the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative policy group that was instrumental in convincing the Trump administration to abandon the Paris agreement and has criticised the White House for not dismantling more environmental rules.

Read full story here

Haribon Foundation stood in solidarity with millions of people across the planet at the recent Global Climate Strike to demand immediate and concrete actions from every individual, especially the decision-makers, to provide solutions to the worsening climate emergency. As the words of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg resoundingly urges, all sectors should “act as if our house is on fire.”

Climate change is not an issue separate from biodiversity loss, as one inevitably affects the other.

For instance, the destruction, degradation and loss of forests over the past decades have dramatically increased the amount carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thereby amplifying the greenhouse gas effect.

This phenomenon has led to increased global temperature and heat waves...

German Research Vessel Polarstern has found a location to begin its year-long drift in Arctic sea-ice. The ship, which will head the North Pole’s biggest scientific expedition, will settle next to a thick ice floe on the Siberian side of the ocean basin. The precise location is 85 degrees north and 137 degrees east.

Hundreds of investigators will use it as a base from which to probe the impacts of climate change at the top of the world.

“After a brief but intensive search, we’ve found our home for the months to come,” said expedition leader Prof Markus Rex, from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI).

“It may not be the perfect floe but it’s the best one in this part of the Arctic and offers better working conditions than we could have expected after a warm Arctic summer.”

RV Polarstern set ...

Climate change is devastating our seas and frozen regions as never before, a major new United Nations report warns. According to a UN panel of scientists, waters are rising, the ice is melting, and species are moving habitat due to human activities. And the loss of permanently frozen lands threatens to unleash even more carbon, hastening the decline.

There is some guarded hope that the worst impacts can be avoided, with deep and immediate cuts to carbon emissions.

This is the third in a series of special reports that have been produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over the past 12 months.

The scientists previously looked at how the world would cope if temperatures rose by 1.5C by the end of this century...

When it comes to saving the planet, one whale is worth thousands of trees. Scientific research now indicates more clearly than ever that our carbon footprint – the release of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming through the so-called greenhouse effect – now threatens our ecosystems and our way of life.  But efforts to mitigate climate change face two significant challenges.  The first is to find effective ways to reduce the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere or its impact on average global temperature.  The second is to raise sufficient funds to put these technologies into practice.

Many proposed solutions to global warming, such as capturing carbon directly from the air and burying it deep in the earth, are complex, untested, and expensive...

It will be the clearest declaration yet on how an overheating world is hammering our oceans and frozen regions. Scientists have been meeting in Monaco to finalise a report on the seas and the cryosphere. Released on Wednesday, it will show how the oceans have been a friend, helping us cope with rising temperatures.

But it will warn that warming is turning the seas into a huge potential threat to humanity.

Researchers from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were encouraged by Prince Albert II and the Monaco government in 2015 to produce a special report on the oceans and cryosphere – the Earth’s surface where water is frozen solid.

For the past three years, the scientists have been reviewing hundreds of published papers on how climate change affects the seas, the poles a...

The world’s leading climate science organizations have joined forces to produce a landmark new report for the United Nations Climate Action Summit, underlining the glaring – and growing gaps – between agreed targets to tackle global warming and the actual reality.

The report, United in Science, includes details on the state of the climate and presents trends in the emissions and atmospheric concentrations of main greenhouse gases. It highlights the urgency of fundamental socio-economic transformation in key sectors such as land use and energy in order to avert dangerous global temperature increase with potentially irreversible impacts. It also examines tools to support both mitigation and adaptation.

“The Report provides a unified assessment of the state of our Earth system under the...

Extreme events linked to climate change, such as the heatwave in Europe this year, are occurring sooner than expected, an ex-chief scientist says. Prof Sir David King says he’s been scared by the number of extreme events, and he called for the UK to advance its climate targets by 10 years.

But the UN’s weather chief said using words like “scared” could make young people depressed and anxious.

Campaigners argue that people won’t act unless they feel fearful.

Speaking to the BBC, Prof King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, said: “It’s appropriate to be scared. We predicted temperatures would rise, but we didn’t foresee these sorts of extreme events we’re getting so soon.”

He said the world had changed faster than generally predicted in the fifth assessment ...

Investing $1.8 trillion over the next decade – in measures to adapt to climate change – could produce net benefits worth more than $7 trillion. This is according to a global cost-benefit analysis setting out five adaptation strategies.

The analysis was carried out by the Global Commission on Adaptation – a group of 34 leaders in politics, business and science.

They say the world urgently needs to be made more “climate change resilient”.

• 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months
• Big lifestyle changes needed to cut emissions
• Climate change is ‘shrinking winter’

The commission, led by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Bank chief executive Kristalina Georgieva and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, argues that it is an urgent moral obligation of richer countries to invest ...