By Sue Branford and Thais Borges 10 June 2019 (Mongabay) – The Brazilian government’s environmental agency, IBAMA, has so far this year imposed the lowest number of fines for illegal deforestation in at least 11 years, while the country’s other leading environmental agency and its federal parks’ protector, ICMBio (the Chico Mendes Institute), did not […]
By Spencer Dale 11 June 2019 (BP) – The Statistical Review of World Energy has been providing timely and objective energy data for the past 68 years. In addition to the raw data, the Statistical Review also provides a record of key energy developments and events through time. My guess is that when our successors […]
By Brian K Sullivan , Shruti Singh, and Mario Parker 8 June 2019 (Bloomberg) – Hundreds of barges are stalled on the Mississippi River, clogging the main circulatory system for a farm-belt economy battered by a relentless, record-setting string of snow, rainstorms and flooding. Railways and highways have been closed as well, keeping needed supplies […]
By Peter Rüegg 9 April 2019 (ETH) – Without the climate change caused by human activity, simultaneous heatwaves would not have hit such a large area as they did last summer. This is the conclusion of researchers at ETH Zurich based on observational and model data. Many people will remember last summer – not only […]
By Karen Savage 4 June 2019 (Climate Liability News) – A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday appeared skeptical of the court’s role in dealing with climate change in the landmark constitutional climate case brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. But the kids’ attorneys argued in a […]
By Christine Adams-Hosking 9 May 2019 (The Conversation) – Today the Australian Koala Foundation announced they believe “there are no more than 80,000 koalas in Australia”, making the species “functionally extinct”. While this number is dramatically lower than the most recent academic estimates, there’s no doubt koala numbers in many places are in steep decline. […]
By Dr. Jeff Masters 6 June 2019 (Weather Underground) – In early 2018, a three-year drought pushed Cape Town, South Africa, within weeks of experiencing “Day Zero”—the day when the city would run out of water and the taps be shut off. Fortunately, extreme water conservation efforts and the arrival of timely rains pushed “Day […]
5 June 2019 (AFP) – India’s tallest rubbish mountain in New Delhi is on course to rise higher than the Taj Mahal in the next year, becoming a fetid symbol for what the UN considers the world’s most polluted capital. Hawks and other birds of prey hover around the towering Ghazipur landfill on the eastern […]
5 June 2019 (NHM) – A letter authored by Natural History Museum Head of Earth Sciences Prof Richard Herrington and fellow expert members of SoS MinErals (an interdisciplinary programme of NERC-EPSRC-Newton-FAPESP funded research) has today been delivered to the Committee on Climate Change. The letter explains that to meet UK electric car targets for 2050 […]
9 June 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – It’s time to update one of Desdemona’s favorite graphs: human carbon emissions per capita. In the last update, four years ago, we had carbon emissions data through the year 2013, and it was clear that per-person emissions growth followed a nearly perfect exponential curve. The curve passed through one ton […]
