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 […]
By Bob Henson 27 August 2019 (Weather Underground) – Nudged on all sides by a grab bag of influences, Tropical Storm Dorian has held its own, working its way into the eastern Caribbean after passing near Barbados and over St. Lucia. Dorian is likely to move across Puerto Rico as a tropical storm on Wednesday […]
27 August 2019 (The Siberian Times) – Lena River fleet cannot sail after abnormal heat causes 2.5 metre water level drop. The current water level means critical delays in the summer ritual delivering vital supplies to Arctic settlements in Yakutia, Russia’s biggest region. Most of its remote corners are only accessible via water, with the […]
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 […]
By Nick Paton Walsh and Natalie Gallón 26 August 2019 Porto Velho, Brazil (CNN) – The smoke is so thick, at times the Cessna airplane had to climb to stay out of it. At times your eyes burn and you close the air vents to keep the cabin habitable. Sometimes it is so bad, it […]
By Angelique Chrisafis 26 August 2019 BIARRITZ, France (The Guardian) – Donald Trump did not attend Monday’s crucial discussion on climate and biodiversity at the G7 meeting of international leaders in Biarritz, missing talks on how to deal with the Amazon rainforest fires as well as new ways to cut carbon emissions. Reporters noticed at […]
By Douglas I. Kelley, Ioannis Bistinas, Rhys Whitley, Chantelle Burton, Toby R. Marthews, and Ning Dong 19 August 2019 (Nature Climate Change) – Anthropogenically driven declines in tropical savannah burnt area1,2 have recently received attention due to their effect on trends in global burnt area3,4. Large-scale trends in ecosystems where vegetation has adapted to infrequent fire, […]
20 August 2019 (Global Witness) – A staggering 61 percent of the world’s new oil and gas production over the next decade is set to come from one country alone: the United States. The sheer scale of this new production dwarfs that of every other country in the world and would spell disaster for the […]
By Bill Spindle and Gareth Phillips 19 August 2019 LEH, India (The Wall Street Journal) – The Ladakh region of northern India is one of the world’s highest, driest inhabited places. For centuries, meltwater from winter snows in the Himalayan mountains sustained the tiny villages dotting this remote land. Now, like many other places in […]
By Patrick Barkham 22 August 2019 (The Guardian) – An exotic plant has produced male and female cones outdoors in Britain for what is believed to be the first time in 60 million years. Botanists say the event is a sign of global heating. Two cycads (Cycas revoluta), a type of primitive tree that dominated […]