The council chamber in Ferro Fini Palace in Venice, which is located on Venice’s Grand Canal, was flooded for the first time in its history on Tuesday night, 12 November 2019 – just after the Veneto regional council rejected measures to combat climate change. Photo: Andrea Zanoni

Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change

By Gianluca Mezzofiore 15 November 2019 (CNN) – Veneto regional council, which is located on Venice’s Grand Canal, was flooded for the first time in its history on Tuesday night — just after it rejected measures to combat climate change. The historic Italian city has been brought to its knees this week by the worst […]

Country-specific total CO2 emission shares GtC per year of the biggest 5 emitters. Graphic: Nauels, et al., 2019 / PNAS

Just 15 years of post-Paris emissions to lock in 20 cm of sea level rise in the year 2300 – “Emissions today will inevitably cause seas to rise a long way into the future. This process cannot be reversed. It is our legacy for humankind.”

5 November 2019 (PIK) – Unless governments significantly scale up their emission reduction efforts, the 15 years’ worth of emissions released under their current Paris Agreement pledges alone would cause 20 cm of sea-level rise over the longer term, according to new research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). […]

Permanent inundation surfaces predicted by CoastalDEM and SRTM given the median K17/RCP 8.5/2100 sea-level projection. Locations include (a) the Pearl River Delta, China; (b) Bangladesh; (c) Jakarta, Indonesia; and (d) Bangkok, Thailand. Low-lying areas isolated from the ocean are removed from the inundation surface using connected components analysis. Current water bodies are derived from the SRTM Water Body Dataset. Gray areas represent dry land. Axis labels denote latitude and longitude. Graphic: Kulp and Strauss, 2019 / Nature Communications

Flooded Future: New elevation maps triple estimates of global risk from sea-level rise and coastal flooding – “By 2100, land now home to 200 million people could sit permanently below the high tide line”

29 October 2019 (Climate Central) – Sea level rise is one of the best known of climate change’s many dangers. As humanity pollutes the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the planet warms. And as it does so, ice sheets and glaciers melt and warming sea water expands, increasing the volume of the world’s oceans. The consequences […]

The pattern of normalized relative sea-level (RSL) from Glacial Isostatic Adjustement (GIA) simulations of a 20-m rise in eustatic sea level (ESL). Graphic: Grant, et al., 2019 / Nature

If warming exceeds 2°C, Antarctica’s melting ice sheets could raise seas 20 meters in coming centuries

By Georgia Rose Grant and Timothy Naish 2 October 2019 (The Conversation) – We know that our planet has experienced warmer periods in the past, during the Pliocene geological epoch around three million years ago. Our research, published today, shows that up to one third of Antarctica’s ice sheet melted during this period, causing sea levels to rise […]

Aerial view of damaged mangroves from a 2019 monitoring trip in the Gulf of Carpentaria. A cascade of impacts including rising sea levels, heatwaves and back-to-back tropical cyclones has created 400km of dead and badly damaged mangroves in the Gulf of Carpentaria. A cascade of impacts including rising sea levels, heatwaves and back-to-back tropical cyclones has created 400km of dead and badly damaged mangroves in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Photo: Norman Duke

Shocked scientists find 400 km of dead and damaged mangroves in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria – “We are getting these compounding effects that we just didn’t expect”

By Graham Readfearn 3 October 2019 (The Guardian) – A cascade of impacts including rising sea levels, heatwaves and back-to-back tropical cyclones has created 400 kilometers [249 miles] of dead and badly damaged mangroves in the Gulf of Carpentaria, a scientific monitoring trip has discovered. Prof Norman Duke, of James Cook University, spent 10 days […]

A montage of photos that were submitted to the Environmental Photographer of the Year 2019 award. “Journey by Launch” by Azim Khan Ronnie; “Polluted New Year” by Eliud Gil Samaniego, “Remains of the Forest” by J Henry Fair, “Tuvalu Beneath the Rising Tide” by Sean Gallagher, “My Climate Future” by Souray Karmakar, “Looking Beyond What is There” by Graham Earnshaw, “Where the City Ends and the Ships Begin” by Azim Khan Ronnie, and “Tuvalu Beneath the Rising Tide” by Sean Gallagher (second entry). Photo: CIWEM

Photo gallery: Striking images from the 2019 Environmental Photographer of the Year competition – “Climate change is the defining issue of our time and now is the time to act”

23 September 2019 (CIWEM) – The CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year exposes the terrible impacts being wrought on our planet by humans, but also celebrates humanity’s innate ability to survive and innovate, lending hope to us all that we can overcome challenges to live sustainably. [See all of the submissions: Environmental Photographer of the […]

Map showing 2015–2019 five-year average temperature anomalies relative to the 1981-2010 average. Data: NASA GISTEMP v4. through June 2019. Graphic: WMO

Landmark “United in Science” report brings together world’s leading climate science organizations

NEW YORK, 22 September 2019 (WMO) – The world’s leading climate science organizations have joined forces to produce a landmark new report  [pdf] for the United Nations Climate Action Summit, underlining the glaring – and growing – gap between agreed targets to tackle global warming and the actual reality. The report, United in Science, includes details on the […]

Satellite view of Hurricane Dorian passing over the Bahamas, 27 August 2019 to 5 September 2019. Photo: NASA Worldview

“What death smells like”: Dorian’s toll expected to soar in Bahamas – Official warns people to prepare for the “unimaginable” – “Literally hundreds, up to thousands, of people are still missing”

By Nick Brown 6 September 2019 MARSH HARBOUR, Bahamas (Reuters) – The smell of death hangs over parts of Great Abaco Island in the northern Bahamas, where relief workers on Friday sifted through the debris of shattered homes and buildings in a search expected to dramatically drive up the death toll from Hurricane Dorian. Dorian, […]

Grand Bahama island before and after Hurricane Dorian made landfall on 2 September 2019. In the after photo, the yellow lines mark where the land was before the storm flooded the area. Photo: Google Earth / ICEYE / CNN

Hurricane Dorian leaves neighborhoods flattened and homes shredded in the Bahamas – “We are in the midst of one of the greatest national crises in our country’s history”

4 September 2019 (CBS News) – As Hurricane Dorian accelerates up the Florida coast, the magnitude of the storm’s destruction in the Bahamas is coming into view. Parts of the island nation are in ruins. Much of Grand Bahama Island is underwater. Two more deaths were confirmed overnight, bringing the official total now to seven. The country’s prime minister […]

Satellite views of land subsidence in Jakarta Indonesia in 1984-1991 and 2010-2015. Data: Subsidence data courtesy of Irwan Gumilar of Geodesy Research Group of ITB; satellite images via Landsat 5 and Landsat 8. Graphic: The New York Times

Indonesia announces site of capital city to replace sinking Jakarta – Choice of Borneo for £27 billion project raises fears of forest destruction and pollution

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 […]

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial