A youth runs over what remains of the glacier that lost most of its volume during the last years, on top of the Zugspitze Mountain near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Saturday, 25 June 2022. Once the world had hope that when nations got together, they could stop climate change. Thirty years after leaders around the globe first got together to try, that hope has melted. Photo: Michael Probst / AP Photo

Climate negotiations: 30 years of melting hope and U.S. power – “Such innovative, exciting proposals were put forward in the early years, which if they had been implemented, we would be in a so much better situation”

By Seth Borenstein 4 November 2022 (AP) – Thirty years ago there was hope that a warming world could clean up its act. It didn’t. The United States helped forge two historic agreements to curb climate change then torpedoed both when new political administrations took over. Rich and poor nations squabbled about who should do what. During […]

Photo portrait of economist Nouriel Roubini. Photo: Charlie Bibby / Financial Times

Financial Times interview with economist Nouriel Roubini, aka “Dr. Doom” – “I think that really the world is on a slow-motion train wreck”

By Henry Mance 18 December 2022 (Financial Times) – Nouriel Roubini is gloomy, and it’s not just that he arrived in London on a red-eye flight and couldn’t get a table at Nobu. It’s not even conventional economic worries. It’s everything: a confluence of problems, old and new. “I think that really the world is […]

Rising sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea since 1901. The waters around Puerto Rico have warmed by heat two degrees Fahrenheit. Data: EPA Climate Change Indicators in the United States. Graphic: EPA

Big oil is behind conspiracy to deceive public, first climate racketeering lawsuit says – “What’s different about this case is that we have their enterprise in writing: the decision by rival companies, their front groups, scientists, and associations to act together to change public opinion”

By Nina Lakhani 20 December 2022 (The Guardian) – The same racketeering legislation used to bring down mob bosses, motorcycle gangs, football executives and international fraudsters is to be tested against oil and coal companies who are accused of conspiring to deceive the public over the climate crisis. In an ambitious move, an attempt will […]

Map showing GFS 2m Temperature Anomaly for 20 December 2022. Much of the Arctic in December 2022 experienced a burst of freak warming. Graphic: Climate Reanalyzer

December 2022 serving up baked Alaska and warming most of Arctic – “Record-setting weather like we’re seeing plenty of examples of in recent years does tell a real story of climate heating”

By Seth Borenstein 5 December 2022 (AP) – Much of the Arctic is in a burst of freak December warming. In Utqiagvik, Alaska’s northernmost community formerly known as Barrow, it hit 40 degrees (4.4 degrees Celsius) Monday morning. That’s not only a record by six degrees (3.3 degrees Celsius) but it’s the warmest that region has seen […]

The leadership of the U.N.-backed COP15 biodiversity conference applaud after passing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 19 December 2022. Photo: Julian Haber / UN Biodiversity / REUTERS

COP15 reaches deal to halt decline in nature by 2030 – Countries to allocate $200 billion per year for biodiversity initiatives but funds to biodiversity are miniscule – “We know the global economy and every company in it is negatively impacting biodiversity”

By Isla Binnie and Gloria Dickie 19 December 2022 MONTREAL (Reuters) – A United Nations summit approved on Monday a landmark global deal to protect nature and direct billions of dollars toward conservation but objections from key African nations, home to large tracts of tropical rainforest, held up its final passage. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity […]

Arctic annual air surface temperatures from October 2021 to September 2022 were the sixth warmest dating back to 1900. The image on the left depicts the departure from the average near-surface temperature across the Arctic during this period, with redder colors showing areas of greater than average warmth. The graphic on the right shows how the rate of Arctic air temperature warming has outpaced the rate of global warming. Data: ERA5 and NASA. Graphic: NOAA / Climate.gov

NOAA: Human-caused climate change fuels warmer, wetter, stormier Arctic

13 December 2022 (NOAA) – A typhoon, smoke from wildfires, and increasing rain are not what most imagine when thinking of the Arctic. Yet these are some of the climate-driven events included in NOAA’s 2022 Arctic Report Card, which provides a detailed picture of how warming is reshaping the once reliably frozen, snow-covered region which […]

Maternal Deaths per 100,000 Births, by State Abortion Policy, 2018-2020. Maternal death rates were 62 percent higher in 2020 in abortion-restriction states than in abortion-access states (28.8 vs. 17.8 per 100,000 births). Notably, across the three years presented in this graph, the maternal mortality rate was increasing nearly twice as fast in states with abortion restrictions. Graphic: Commonwealth Fund

The U.S. maternal health divide: The limited maternal health services and worse outcomes of states proposing new abortion restrictions

By Eugene Declercq, Ruby Barnard-Mayers, Laurie Zephyrin, and Kay Johnson 14 December 2022 (Commonwealth Fund) – In anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a number of states passed “trigger laws” that would ban all, or nearly all, abortions once national abortion protections ended. In the months since the Court’s ruling in Dobbs […]

Members of the Wampis Nation Peru listen as Indigenous representatives of Latin American countries hold a press conference during the United the Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Canada in December 2022. Photo: Andrej Ivanov / Getty Images

Business is using COP15 to show it’s serious about saving nature, but environmentalists aren’t so sure – “If you come here and your objectives actually are against the objectives of the convention, then we have a problem”

By Marisa Coulton 17 December 2022 (Financial Post) – The UN biodiversity conference in Montreal might go down in history as the moment that business engaged in the fight to preserve nature, but the presence of a thousand corporate representatives is making some the environmentalists who have been attending these meetings for years uneasy. Some […]

A person wearing a carved wooden mask takes part with other people in a march during COP15, the two-week U.N. Biodiversity summit in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 10 December 2022. Photo: Christinne Muschi / REUTERS

Activists dressed as birds and trees rally for nature at COP15 in Montreal – “We see what is happening and it is clearly not sufficient compared to our ambitions and our priorities”

By Gloria Dickie 10 December 2022 MONTREAL (Reuters) – Hundreds of people on Saturday braved sub-zero temperatures to march the streets of Montreal, the host city of this year’s U.N. biodiversity summit, demanding a strong new deal to protect nature worldwide. Wearing costumes to look like birds, trees, and caribou, activists said the COP15 summit could fail […]

Police monitor a protest opposing COP15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, in Montreal, on Wednesday, 7 December 2022. Photo: Graham Hughes / The Canadian Press

Monbiot: The US is a rogue state leading the world toward ecological collapse – “It’s a cliff edge”

By George Monbiot 9 December 2022 (The Guardian) – There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. Take a […]

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