By Merrit Kennedy 17 July 2019 (NPR) – Two vital research agencies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are hemorrhaging staff as less than two-thirds of the researchers asked to relocate from Washington to the Kansas City area have agreed to do so. When U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced the planned new location […]
27 June 2019 (Chalmers University of Technology) – The Powering Past Coal Alliance, or PPCA, is a coalition of 30 countries and 22 cities and states that aims to phase out unabated coal power. But analysis led by Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, published in Nature Climate Change, shows that members mainly pledge to close […]
17 July 2019 (AFP) – The concept of a carbon budget is dead simple: figure out how much CO2 humanity can pump into the atmosphere without pushing Earth’s surface temperature beyond a dangerous threshold. [cf. What Counts for Our Climate: Carbon Budgets Untangled and Budgeting for our future climate. –Des] The 2015 Paris climate treaty […]
By Dom Phillips 19 July 2019 BRASÍLIA (The Guardian) – The Amazon belongs to Brazil and European countries can mind their own business because they have already destroyed their own environment, said Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who also described his own government’s satellite data showing an alarming rise in deforestation as “lies”. “You have to understand […]
By Dr. Jeff Masters 18 July 2019 (Weather Underground) – June 2019 was the planet’s warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, said NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) on Tuesday. NASA also rated June 2019 as the warmest June on record, well of ahead of the previous record set in 2015. The global heat in June […]
IRVINE, California, 1 July 2019 (UCI News) – The nations that have signed agreements to stabilize the global mean temperature by 2050 will fail to meet their goals unless existing fossil fuel-burning infrastructure around the world is retired early, according to a study [pdf] – published today in Nature – by researchers at the University […]
4 July 2019 (Science Media Centre) – A new study, published in Science, reports on the capacity for trees to reduce atmospheric carbon levels. Dr James Borrell, Researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said: “Global forest restoration clearly has remarkable potential to address climate change, but restoring forest on this scale is a significant […]
NEW YORK/GENEVA, 15 July 2019 (UNICEF) – 20 million children worldwide – more than 1 in 10 – missed out on lifesaving vaccines such as measles, diphtheria and tetanus in 2018, according to new data from WHO and UNICEF. Globally, since 2010, vaccination coverage with three doses of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP3) and one […]
15 July 2019 (UN News) – After nearly a decade of progress, the number of people who suffer from hunger has slowly increased over the past three years, with about one in every nine people globally suffering from hunger today, the United Nations said in a new report released on Monday. This fact underscores “the […]
By Cristina Rojas 12 July 2019 (PSU) – Efforts to shift away from fossil fuels and replace oil and coal with renewable energy sources can help reduce carbon emissions but do so at the expense of increased inequality, according to a new Portland State University study. [Data available here: Renewable energy injustice McGee and Greiner […]