13 November 2014 (Planet Experts) – To prevent potentially catastrophic climate change, the world’s largest economies agreed to phase out their subsidies for carbon-emitting fossil fuels in 2009. That anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas emissions are influencing the global climate is now almost without dispute. The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate […]
By Reissa Su21 November 2014 (IBT) – Australia will be facing drought as soon as the Bureau of Meteorology forecasts a 70 percent chance of El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. By summer’s end, Australians will see less rainfall as temperatures rise due to warmer weather. The weather bureau has revised its El Niño forecast […]
By Brad Plumer6 November 2014 (Vox) – Back in 2011, Australia’s Labor Party enacted a national carbon tax as a way of tackling global warming. The tax took effect in 2012, and emissions promptly fell over the next two years. But the policy was also highly unpopular with voters. So, in July 2014, a newly […]
By Chris Uhlmann 5 November 2014 (ABC News) – CHRIS UHLMANN: It’s being described as a once in a 100 year drought. Parts of New South Wales and large swaths of western Queensland and Victoria have chalked up the lowest rainfall on record over the past two years. The Abbot Government is preparing to re-allocate […]
3 November 2014 (BBC News) – Australia is a drag on international efforts to tackle climate change, says leading economist and former government adviser Professor Ross Garnaut. Prof Garnaut said the country had failed to make its “fair share” of greenhouse gas cuts. Earlier, Prime Minister Tony Abbott reiterated his position that coal was the […]
By Joe Romm 31 October 2014 (Climate Progress) – An alarming satellite-based analysis from NASA finds that the world is depleting groundwater — the water stored unground in soil and aquifers — at an unprecedented rate. A new Nature Climate Change piece, “The global groundwater crisis,” by James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA […]
September 2014 (BAMS) – Seasonal and annual temperature anomalies around the globe were highly skewed toward positive (warm) extremes in 2013, as in the recent few decades. Although global warming has been described as “pausing” since 2000, global temperatures remain at anomalously high levels, and warm annual and seasonal temperature extremes continue to far outpace […]
By Paul Spong15 September 2014 (OrcaLab) – The 65th meeting of the International Whaling Commission, being held in fairytale seaside surroundings in Portoroz, Slovenia, began pretty much where the last meeting in Panama left off, with the issue of Greenland’s request to kill whales for “aboriginal” consumption. Readers who have followed the IWC story will […]
By James West10 September 2014 (Mother Jones) – With every year that passes, we’re getting further away from averting a human-caused climate disaster. That’s the key message in this year’s “Low Carbon Economy Index,” a report released by the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. The report highlights an “unmistakable trend”: The world’s major economies are increasingly failing […]
By Justin McCurry4 September 2014 Tokyo (theguardian.com) – Japan is expected to spark a fresh round of diplomatic tension after revealing plans to bypass a UN ban on the slaughter of whales in the Antarctic with a new, scaled-down “scientific” programme that limits its catch to minke whales. Japan was forced to end its hunt […]
