By Ian Johnston2 March 2017 (The Independent) – The US Secretary of State, former oil industry mogul Rex Tillerson, has not responded to a request from the United Nations’ most senior climate change official for a face-to-face meeting amid concern about the Trump administration’s stance on global warming. Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN […]
BY Bob Berwyn28 February 2017 (InsideClimate News) – Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles […]
By John von Radowitz27 February 2017 (Irish Independent) – Microbes are generating a vast pool of marine methane that is contributing to global warming, scientists have confirmed. Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London, traced the source of methane in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Sediment collected from the ocean floor, where there is very little […]
By Chelsea Harvey 28 February 2017 (The Washington Post) – A hearing held Tuesday by several House subcommittees was meant to be an examination of the methods used to calculate an oft-contested metric known as the social cost of carbon, a way of quantifying the costs — environmental, health-related or otherwise — of emitting on […]
By Vince Beiser27 February 2017 (The Guardian) – Times are good for Fey Wei Dong. A genial, middle-aged businessman based near Shanghai, China, Fey says he is raking in the equivalent of £180,000 a year from trading in the humblest of commodities: sand. Fey often works in a fishing village on Poyang Lake, China’s biggest […]
By Lorraine Chow1 March 2017 CHICAGO (EcoWatch) – a city well known for its windy and snowy winters—is experiencing some unusually warm weather. For the first time in 146 years, there was no documented snow on the ground in January and February, according to the local National Weather Service. January and February are usually the […]
By Steven Mufson, Jason Samenow, and Brady Dennis 3 March 2017 (The Washington Post) – The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington […]
23 February 2017 (Heriot-Watt University) – New research from Heriot-Watt, published on open-access journal Elementa today, shows that food supply to some areas of the Earth’s deep oceans will decline by up to half by 2100. Dr Andrew Sweetman, associate professor at the Lyell Centre for Earth and Marine Science, and colleagues from 20 of […]
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, 5 March 2017 (Associated Press) – The sound of howling dogs filled downtown Anchorage on Saturday as mushers from around the world gathered for the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. About 2,000 dogs belonging to 72 mushers waited their turn — some more patiently and less vocally than others […]
By Benji Jones2 March 2017 (Mongabay) – You don’t have to travel far to discover a new species – just head to the natural history museum. At least that’s how Chris Barratt, a doctoral student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, discovered Hyperolius ruvuensis, the newest species to be named in the clad of […]