Blended land and sea surface temperature anomalies and percentiles, February 2020. Graphic: NOAA / NCEI

February 2020 second warmest on record globally

By Bob Henson 13 March 2020 (Weather Underground) – Research groups across the world concur that this past northern winter (December-February) was the second-warmest on record globally, in records going back more than a century. The latest group to confirm this finding is NOAA, in its monthly State of the Climate report issued Friday. The winter result […]

Sunset over an offshore oil platform near Huntington Beach, California, August 2014 Photo: Pete Markham / Flickr

With the public distracted, U.S. Interior Department moves full speed ahead on oil and gas leases

By Maria Caffrey 20 March 2020 (UCS) – We are currently in a state of national emergency thanks in no small part to the Trump administration’s muzzling of public health experts and slow response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As we all do our part to limit the extent of this outbreak, the Department of the Interior (DOI) instead appears to be […]

Coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and daily testing in the U.S., Italy, and South Korea, 17 March 2020. Delays in testing in the United States set back the nation’s response to the pandemic, even though its first case was discovered around the same time that South Korea’s was. Graphic: The New York Times

U.S. lags in coronavirus testing after slow response to outbreak

By Larry Buchanan, K.K. Rebecca Lai, and Allison McCann 17 March 2020 (The New York Times) – Coronavirus testing data has been spotty and not easily available, especially in the United States. Based on official government sources, here’s how testing efforts in the United States compare with those in Italy and South Korea. Delays in […]

Modeled deaths per day and total deaths in the U.S. and Great Britain from unmitigated COVID-19 epidemic. Model published on 16 March 2020. Graphic: Ferguson, et al., 2020 / Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team

A chilling scientific paper helped upend U.S. and U.K. coronavirus strategies – “Even if all patients were able to be treated, there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in Great Britain, and 1.2 million in the U.S.”

By William Booth 17 March 2020 LONDON (The Washington Post) – Immediately after Boris Johnson completed his Monday evening news conference, which saw a somber prime minister encourage his fellow citizens to avoid “all nonessential contact with others,” his aides hustled reporters into a second, off-camera briefing. That session presented jaw-dropping numbers from some of […]

COVID-19 cases in mainland China (orange) and worldwide (yellow), 20 January 2020 - 15 March 2020. Graphic: Johns Hopkins University

Graph of the Day: Worldwide COVID-19 cases surpass China cases

15 March 2020 (Desdemona Despair) – Des follows the Johns Hopkins University dashboard for COVID-19 on a daily basis. Today, the total number of cases outside of China (81.7k) exceeded the total number of cases in mainland China (81k). The exponential rise in global cases shows no sign of abating. Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by […]

U.S household debt to 2019. Data: New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel (CCP). Graphic: Haughwout, et al., 2019 / Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Graph of the Day: U.S household debt, 1945-2018

March 2019 (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) – […] In Figure 1, we combine 1999-2018 data from the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) with the considerably longer, but less detailed, data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Accounts of the United States. What is immediately apparent in the figure is the dramatic […]

University of Rochester researchers in Greenland drill for ice cores, which contain air bubbles with small quantities of ancient air trapped inside. By measuring the carbon-14 isotope in air from more than 200 years ago, the researchers found that scientists have been vastly overestimating the amount of fossil methane emitted by natural sources, and have therefore been underestimating the amount of methane humans are emitting into the atmosphere via fossil fuels. Photo: Xavier Faïn / University of Grenoble Alpes

Methane emitted via human fossil fuel use “vastly underestimated”

By Lindsey Valich 19 February 2020 (University of Rochester) – Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and large contributor to global warming. Methane emissions to the atmosphere have increased by approximately 150 percent over the past three centuries, but it has been difficult for researchers to determine exactly where these emissions originate; heat-trapping gases like […]

Empirical relationship between system area and regime shift duration in freshwater, marine, and terrestrial systems. Graphic: Cooper, et al., 2020 / Nature Communications

Ecosystems the size of Amazon rainforest “can collapse within decades”

By Jonathan Watts 10 March 2020 (The Guardian) – Even large ecosystems the size of the Amazon rainforest can collapse in a few decades, according to a study that shows bigger biomes break up relatively faster than small ones. The research reveals that once a tipping point has been passed, breakdowns do not occur gradually […]

A man and a girl on a scooter are backdropped by a Lombardy region campaign advertising, reading in Italian, “Coronavirus: let’s stop it together”, at the Porta Nuova business district in Milan, Wednesday, 11 March 2020. Italy is mulling even tighter restrictions on daily life and has announced billions in financial relief to cushion economic shocks from the coronavirus. For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. Photo: Luca Bruno / AP Photo

WHO declares virus crisis a pandemic, urges global fight – “We are deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction”

By Maria Cheng, John Leicester, and Jamey Keaten 11 March 2020 GENEVA (AP) – Expressing alarm both about mounting infections and inadequate government responses, the World Health Organization declared Wednesday that the global coronavirus crisis is now a pandemic but added that it’s not too late for countries to act. By reversing course and using […]

Carbon emissions (CO2e) from different modes of transportation. Non-pooled ride hailing, like with Uber and lyft, emits the most carbon, by a wide margin. Graphic: UCS

Taking an Uber or Lyft pollutes more than driving, California finds – “For a one-mile trip, on average there’s another 0.7 miles of driving around to deliver that trip”

By Tony Barboza 7 March 2020 (Los Angeles Times) – Behind the tap-of-your-phone convenience of hailing an Uber or Lyft lies an inconvenient truth: Such rides generate more carbon emissions than simply driving yourself. The increased pollution comes primarily from “deadheading,” that is, drivers traveling to pick up a passenger or cruising the streets while […]

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