By Philip Pullella; Editing by Jane Merriman 1 September 2019 VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis challenged governments on Sunday to take “drastic measures” to combat global warming and reduce the use of fossil fuels, saying the world was experiencing a climate emergency. Francis issued his appeal, a written message for Sunday’s World Day of […]
By Robbie Andrew 23 April 2019 (Robbie Andrew) – The road to 2°C is steep; the road to 1.5°C is a cliff. While it is theoretically possible that we can keep global warming under 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, that task is monumental. In fact, models struggle to generate future scenarios that keep warming below 1.5°C, but can […]
28 August 2019 (BBC News) – Teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg has arrived in New York after a 15-day, 3,000-mile (4,800km) voyage across the Atlantic. She will be participating in UN climate summits in New York City and Chile. The 16-year-old Swede sailed from Plymouth in the UK on a zero-emissions yacht in order to […]
By Peter Hannam 30 August 2019 (The Sydney Morning Herald) – Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have risen to the highest annual rate since the 2012-13 financial year, driven higher by surging gas production that has made the country the world’s biggest exporter of the fossil fuel. Greenhouse gas figures [pdf] for the March quarter of 2019, […]
By Jenny Gonzales 18 August 2019 (Mongabay) – The combined impact of ongoing deforestation and escalating climate change on the Amazon rainforest could radically transform its configuration by 2050, with the biome divided into two distinct blocks — one occupied by still significant but very seriously diminished rainforest, the other dominated by agribusiness and scattered […]
By Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado 28 August 2019 RIO DE JANEIRO (The New York Times) – Hundreds of government workers on the front lines of enforcing Brazil’s environmental laws signed an open letter warning that their work has been hampered by President Jair Bolsonaro, contributing to a rise in deforestation and the fires sweeping […]
By Ellen Knickmeyer 29 August 2019 WASHINGTON (AP) – Oil and gas companies could face far looser oversight of emissions of potent climate-changing methane gas under a proposal expected from the Trump administration as soon as Thursday, oil industry and environmental groups said. The government’s plan would ease requirements on oil and gas sites to monitor for […]
By Jonathan Watts 26 August 2019 (The Guardian) – Indonesia has announced plans to move its capital from the climate-threatened megalopolis of Jakarta to the sparsely populated island of Borneo, which is home to some of the world’s greatest tropical rainforests. President Joko Widodo said the move was necessary because the burden on Jakarta was […]
14 August 2019 (University of Exeter) – Too much inequality in society can result in a damaging lack of support for public goods and services, which could disadvantage the rich as well as the poor, according to new research from the University of Exeter Business School, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) […]
By Guy Davies 27 August 2019 LONDON (ABC News) – A senior government official said Brazil would reject the $22 million G-7 countries promised to help fight the wildfires raging in the Amazon. Brazilian President Bolsonaro’s chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni told Globo News, a Brazilian publication, that Brazil would reject the $22 million aid package, suggesting that the money […]