By Simon Denyer29 May 2016 LANZHOU NEW AREA, China (Washington Post) – This city is supposed to be the “diamond” on China’s Silk Road Economic Belt — a new metropolis carved out of the mountains in the country’s arid northwest. But it is shaping up to be fool’s gold, a ghost city in the making. […]
By Olga Gertcyk29 May 2016 (Siberian Times) – A quarter of all Russian forests, 89% of stocks in Sakha Republic, could be left to burn, even though they are essential to fight global warming. These vast tracts of forest have been labelled ‘distant and hard-to-reach territories’, and as such it is officially permitted not to […]
By Andrea Thompson18 May 2016 (Climate Central) – Odds are increasing that 2016 will be the hottest year on the books, as April continued a remarkable streak of record-warm months. Last month was rated as the warmest April on record by both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which released their data this […]
Mr February4 May 2016 (Hot Topic) – The decision to keep the Huntly coal thermal power station open for another four years is not only contrary to all New Zealand’s commitments and climate targets, it also sends the Ministry for the Environment’s projections of stabilising energy emissions to 2020 up in a cloud of coal […]
By Daniel Cusick12 May 2016 (ClimateWire) – Rapid economic growth in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and other emerging countries will drive global energy consumption to nearly double by 2040, according to new projections released yesterday by the Department of Energy. But the associated rise in carbon emissions will not keep pace with overall energy consumption, […]
By Emily Williams11 May 2016 (CU Denver) – A researcher at the University of Colorado Denver has found that Neanderthals in Europe showed signs of nutritional stress during periods of extreme cold, suggesting climate change may have contributed to their demise around 40,000 years ago. Jamie Hodgkins, a zooarchaeologist and assistant professor in the Department […]
26 May 2016 (UN) – At a meeting today in the United Nations Security Council on the situation in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa, senior UN officials stressed that climate change plays a direct role in the region’s security, development and stability by increasing drought and fuelling conflict. Speaking via videoconference from Niger, the […]
[cf. Leave fossil fuels buried to prevent climate change, study urges – ‘We’ve binged to the edge of our own destruction’] By Megan Darby24 May 2016 (Climate Change News) – Total is slashing expensive oil ventures in line with international efforts to hold global warming below 2C. The French oil major is reducing its exposure […]
By Vera Salnitskaya5 May 2015 (Siberian Times) – A leading Siberian scientist has delivered another stark warning about climate change and said melting peat bogs could speed up the process. Professor Sergey Kirpotin, director of the BioClimLand Centre of Excellence for Climate Change Research in Tomsk, said he has concerns over the ‘awful’ consequences in […]
By Anthony LeRoy Westerling23 May 2016 (The Conversation) – Dramatic images of out-of-control wildfires in western North American forests have appeared on our television and computer screens with increasing regularity in recent decades, while costs of fire suppression have soared. In 2015, federal spending on suppression exceeded US$2 billion, just 15 years after first exceeding […]
