climate change tagged posts

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 ...

It’s a historic week for climate change in the Democratic Party.

In the same 12-hour span, Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled his plan to pass a gargantuan $16 trillion Green New Deal as president, while Governor Jay Inslee of Washington—who ran an unprecedented, bluntly climate-focused campaign—dropped out of the 2020 primary.

Then, this afternoon, the Democratic National Committee rejected a proposal to hold a climate-centered debate in the primary—even though nearly every candidate had endorsed the idea.

Germany says it plans to take a more active role in Arctic affairs, citing the far north’s growing ecological, political and economic significance as a result of climate change.

Cabinet passed a resolution Wednesday declaring its intention to send German experts to advise the Arctic Council. It also plans to campaign for an expansion of environmental protection areas in the Arctic and explore the potential that the increasingly ice-free Northwest and Northern Passages have for shipping during the summer.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday after a meeting with Nordic leaders that her country, which is an observer in the Arctic Council, will “keep an eye on the strategic role of the Arctic.”

Merkel said Germany would seek to prevent the Arctic from becoming “an obje...

When pollsters informed President Donald Trump that he faces political exposure in the 2020 election with swing voters on environment policy, he decided to respond with a White House address claiming stewardship of clean water, air and oceans.

But as some Trump aides were drafting that speech, others were casting doubt on the significance of a climate threat to a key battleground state: the degradation of coral reefs in Florida.

Weeks before, a senior intelligence analyst at the State Department had submitted a draft of planned testimony to Congress detailing the national security implications of climate change for White House review.

Among the edits that the analyst, Rod Schoonover, received back from the White House was a novel argument...

The heat wave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a week ago is now over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island’s ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic. Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a semi-autonomous Danish territory between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that has 82 per cent of its surface covered in ice. 

The area of the Greenland ice sheet that is showing indications of melt has been growing daily, and hit a record 56.5 per cent for this year on Wednesday, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute. She says that’s expected to expand and peak on Thursday before cooler temperatures slow the pace of the melt.

More than 10 billion tonnes of ice was lost to the oceans by surf...

The level of carbon now in the atmosphere hasn’t been seen in 12 million years, a Harvard scientist said in Chicago Thursday, and this pollution is rapidly pushing the climate back to its state in the Eocene Epoch, more than 33 million years ago, when there was no ice on either pole.

“We have exquisite information about what that state is, because we have a paleo record going back millions of years, when the earth had no ice at either pole. There was almost no temperature difference between the equator and the pole,” said James Anderson, a Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the Ozone Layer.

“The ocean was running almost 10ºC warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today,” Anderson said of thi...