climate change tagged posts

Warming seas are driving many species of marine life to shift their geographic ranges out of the tropics to higher latitudes where the water is cooler. Florida’s reefs will not be able to make that northward move, however, as they will be caught between intolerably hot tropical waters and increasingly frequent water-cooling cold snaps, according to new findings from Florida Institute of Technology, the U.S. Geological Survey, and several other institutions to be published June 22 in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

Populations of the main species of reef-building corals are already in dire condition, to the extent that they are listed under the Endangered Species Act. With no where to go, the corals will decline even more drastically.

Corals are colonies of animals related to sea anemon...

We are seeing declines in coral colonies throughout the world, including reefs off Australia, Hawaii, the Florida Keys and in the Indo-Pacific region. The widespread decline is fueled in part by climate-driven heat waves that are warming the world’s oceans and leading to what’s known as coral bleaching, the breakdown of the mutually beneficial relationship between corals and resident algae. But other factors are contributing to the decline of coral reefs as well, including pollution and overfishing.

According to a new study, “Local conditions magnify coral loss after marine heat waves,” published in the journal Science, what’s key to coral reefs surviving climate-driven heat waves and subsequent bleaching is managing global climate change — and local conditions.

“We foun...

The world’s glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate, according to a comprehensive new study. A French-led team assessed the behaviour of nearly all documented ice streams on the planet. The researchers found them to have lost almost 270 billion tonnes of ice a year over the opening two decades of the 21st Century. The meltwater produced now accounts for about a fifth of global sea-level rise, the scientists tell Nature journal.

The numbers involved are quite hard to imagine, so team member Robert McNabb, from the universities of Ulster and Oslo, uses an analogy. 

“Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen that glaciers have lost about 267 gigatonnes (Gt) per year...

US President Joe Biden has told a major summit that we are in a “decisive decade” for tackling climate change.

The US has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels by the year 2030. This new target, which was unveiled at a virtual summit of 40 global leaders, essentially doubles their previous promise. But the leaders of India and China, two of the world’s biggest emitters, made no new commitments.

“Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade – this is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis,” President Biden said at the summit’s opening address.

“We must try to keep the Earth’s temperature to an increase of 1.5C. The world beyond 1...

Sharp divisions between the major global emitters have emerged at a series of meetings designed to make progress on climate change. India lambasted the richer world’s carbon cutting plans, calling long term net zero targets, “pie in the sky.” Their energy minister said poor nations want to continue using fossil fuels and the rich countries “can’t stop it”. China meanwhile declined to attend a different climate event organised by the UK.

Trying to lead 197 countries forward on the critical global issue of climate change is not a job for the faint hearted, as the UK is currently finding out. 

As president of COP26, this year’s crucial climate meeting due to take place in Glasgow in November, Britain is charged with ensuring a successful summit of world leaders and their negotiators.

Have you had a chance to watch the recent Netflix documentary Seaspiracy? Produced by Kip Anderson of Cowspiracy fame, Brit director Ali Tabrizi stars in the 89min feature about the plight of the world’s oceans. Spoiler alert: they’re basically fucked. Many of the themes explored in Seaspiracy are similar to those we discussed in June 2019, when the surf community’s – especially some of its favourite ocean advocacy groups – war on plastic was eerily all quiet on fishing front. 

It more or less still is.

In brief: Plastic is really bad, but at least half of ocean plastic comes from fishing, which also removes the fish being caught, sold and eaten from the sea, alongside some 30 million tonnes of others, in the process. 

Very few in the environmental advocacy space seem p...

More oil and gas wells are to be drilled in the North Sea, the UK government has announced. The decision has angered environmental campaigners, who say the government should refuse new licences. Ministers say permission to drill will be granted as part of a careful transition away from fossil fuels, safeguarding jobs and the economy. But environmentalists say that enough fossil fuels to ruin the climate have already been found.

In light of this, they say, the government should have refused the new licences.

They add that the decision undermines the UK position as leader of the vital UN climate conference in November, known as COP26. 

But ministers insist that their strategy will work...

Climate change is causing oceans to rise quicker than scientists’ most pessimistic forecasts, resulting in earlier flood risks to coastal economies already struggling to adapt.  The revised estimates published Tuesday in Ocean Science impact the two-fifths of the Earth’s population who live near coastlines. Insured property worth trillions of dollars could face even greater danger from floods, superstorms and tidal surges.

The research suggests that countries will have to rein in their greenhouse gas emissions even more than expected to keep sea levels in check. 

“It means our carbon budget is even more depleted,” said Aslak Grinsted, a geophysicist at the University of Copenhagen who co-authored the research...

This year, the 196 parties of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet to agree to an ambitious new plan to safeguard life on Earth by 2050. If all goes as expected, the plan will be adopted at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the CBD in Kunming, China; precisely when that meeting will happen is uncertain because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These global talks are a critical opportunity for world leaders to advance policies to halt the decline of biodiversity on our planet and ensure the long-term sustainability of Earth’s ecosystems on which human life depends. The plan would establish a “post-2020 biodiversity framework” for conserving and restoring nature that integrates many objectives included in the U.N...

A new survey of ice loss around the globe suggests the rate at which the planet’s ice sheets and glaciers are melting is rapidly accelerating. According the new analysis, detailed Monday in the journal Cryosphere, Earth lost roughly 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2017. In 1994, Earth experienced an annual loss of 0.3 trillion tons of ice. By 2017, annual losses increased to 1.3 trillion tons.

To illuminate the full scope of the problem, researchers compiled decades of satellite data on ice losses happening in different parts of the world.

The survey combined data on 215,000 mountain glaciers, as well as polar ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. Scientists also accounted for sea ice losses, as well as melting along the ice shelves extending off the coast of Antarctica.