Aerial view of steam and smoke rising from the Syncrude Mildred Lake mining facility in 2014. Photo: Alex MacLean / climatestate.com

Trudeau will fuel the fires of our climate crisis if he approves Canada’s mega mine

By Tzeporah Berman 10 December 2019 (The Guardian) – This week, the Canadian government is in Madrid telling the world that climate action is its Number 1 priority. When they get home, Justin Trudeau’s newly re-elected government will decide whether to throw more fuel on the fires of climate change by giving the go-ahead to […]

Repparfjord is near the northernmost point of Norway. On 30 November 2019, Norway greenlit a copper mine that will dump two million tons of tailings in Arctic fjord each year. Photo: Thomas Nilsen / The Barents Observer

Norway greenlights copper mine that will dump two million tons of tailings in Arctic fjord each year – “Dumping of mining waste will kill every living thing on the ocean floor in the immediate area and disturb spawning grounds over a much greater distance”

ByThomas Nilsen 30 November 2019 (The Barents Observer) – “Allowing this to happen with a protected national salmon fjord doesn’t make sense at all,” said Silje Lundberg, head of Naturvernforbundet. The organisation is the Norwegian branch of Friends of the Earth. Lundberg said the planned dumping of tailings from the copper mine to the fjord […]

Carbon dioxide emissions from natural gas, petroleum, coal, and land use changes, 1998-2017, in gigatons of CO2 per year. Graphic: GCP

Global carbon emissions growth slows, but still hits record high in 2019 – “Emissions cuts in wealthier nations must outpace increases in poorer countries where access to energy is still needed”

By Rob Jordan 3 December 2019 (Stanford News Service) – The runaway train that is climate change is about to blow past another milestone: global fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions will reach yet another record high. Driven by rising natural gas and oil consumption, levels of CO2 are expected to hit 37 billion metric tons this […]

RFS volunteers and NSW Fire and Rescue officers fight a bushfire encroaching on properties near Termeil, New South Wales, Australia, on Tuesday, 3 December 2019. Photo: Reuters

“Mega fire” near Sydney may burn for weeks as people struggle to breathe – “We cannot stop these fires, they will just keep burning until conditions ease”

By Lidia Kelly 6 December 2019 MELBOURNE (Reuters) – A giant bushfire on the edge of Sydney, which has blanketed the city in smoke causing a spike in respiratory illnesses and the cancellation of outdoor sports, will take weeks to control but will not be extinguished without heavy rains, firefighters said. Thousands of weary firefighters, […]

Globally averaged CO2 mole fraction (a) and its growth rate (b) from 1984 to 2018. Increases in successive annual means are shown as shaded columns in (b). The red line in (a) is the monthly mean with the seasonal variation removed; the blue dots and line depict the monthly averages. Observations from 129 stations have been used for this analysis. Graphic: WMO

Greenhouse gas concentrations in atmosphere reached yet another high in 2018

GENEVA, 25 November 2019 (WMO) – Levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached another new record high, according to the World Meteorological Organization. This continuing long-term trend means that future generations will be confronted with increasingly severe impacts of climate change, including rising temperatures, more extreme weather, water stress, sea level rise […]

This animation depicts the abundance and direction of black carbon blowing through the atmosphere from 1 November 2019 to 18 November 2019. The data for the animation come from the GEOS forward processing (GEOS-FP) model, which assimilates information from satellite, aircraft, and ground-based observing systems. Video: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

Smoke plumes from Australia bushfires crossing oceans

By Michael Carlowicz and Adam Voiland 21 November 2019 (NASA) – Three weeks into November 2019, springtime bush fires continued to blaze across southern and eastern Australian states. As of November 20, government agencies counted 45 fires in South Australia and 49 in New South Wales, and dangerously dry and windy weather was fanning flames […]

Likelihood of observing various butterfly species in California, 1980-2015. Graphic: Shaffer Grubb / Los Angeles Times

Scientist has been counting California butterflies for 47 years and now sees them disappearing

By Deborah Netburn 12 November 2019 DONNER PASS, California (Los Angeles Times) – Art Shapiro stands on the edge of a Chevron gas station in the north-central Sierra, sipping a large Pepsi and scanning the landscape for butterflies. So far he’s spotted six species — a loping Western tiger swallowtail, two fluttering California tortoiseshells, a […]

Aerial view of severely flooded areas of Fond du Lac, Minnesota, shown on 24 June 2012. Photo: Matthew Schofield / U.S. Coast Guard / Reuters

What the climate’s “new normal” is doing to Lake Superior

By Ron Meador 1 November 2019 Minnesota has shoreline on only one Great Lake, but it happens to be the greatest: largest, clearest, coldest and, until recently, seemingly least vulnerable to various environmental afflictions elsewhere in the five-lake basin. The world’s biggest lake by surface area, Superior happens to hold one-tenth of the fresh water […]

Aerial view of Runit Dome, in Enewetak Atoll, the Marshall Islands, where more than 3.1 million cubic feet of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium, are buried. The so-called “Tomb” now bobs with the tide, sucking in and flushing out radioactive water into nearby coral reefs, contaminating marine life. Video: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster – “More than any other place, the Marshall Islands is a victim of the two greatest threats facing humanity: nuclear weapons and climate change”

By Susanne Rust 10 November 2019 MAJURO, Marshall Islands (Los Angeles Times) – Five thousand miles west of Los Angeles and 500 miles north of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide. Here in […]

Graphs showing change in global human activities from 1979 to the present. Graphic: Ripple, et al., 2019 / BioScience

More than 11,000 scientists issue warning of climate emergency – “An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis”

5 November 2019 (BioScience) – Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth […]

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