By Jan Wesner Childs 14 June 2019 (The Weather Channel) – Scientists studying climate change expected layers of permafrost in the Canadian Arctic to melt by the year 2090. Instead, it’s happening now. A new study published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters revealed that unusually warm summers in the Canadian High Arctic between 2003 […]
By Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis 7 June 2019 (The New York Times) – President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses. [cf. Trump regulation rollbacks will […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Kevin Krajick 29 April 2019 (Columbia University) – The world’s oceans soak up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the air each year — a powerful brake on the greenhouse effect. In addition to purely physical and chemical processes, a large part of this is taken up by photosynthetic plankton as they incorporate carbon into their […]
4 June 2019 (NOAA) – Atmospheric carbon dioxide continued its rapid rise in 2019, with the average for May peaking at 414.7 parts per million (ppm) at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory. The measurement is the highest seasonal peak recorded in 61 years of observations on top of Hawaii’s largest volcano and the seventh consecutive […]
30 May 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – Last week, the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory posted its annual update to the NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), which measures the climate-warming influence of long-lived trace gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. To nobody’s surprise, the AGGI continued its inexorable rise in 2018 because, for another year, […]
By Jonathan Hair 26 May 2019 (ABC News) – There are fears national parks in NSW are being damaged by a revenue-making tree-planting scheme, after revegetation works were carried about in the Capertee National Park. About three hours’ drive west of Sydney, Capertee National Park was a working cattle property until 2010, when it was […]
By Brian Kahn 14 May 2019 (Gizmodo) – Atmospheric carbon dioxide sets a new record every year. This year’s cracked the ominous milestone of 415 parts per million (ppm) thanks to ever rising emissions from human activities. The sharp rise might seem like something nobody could’ve predicted but there’s at least one group of scientists that were […]
By Joseph Albanese 8 May 2019 (Princeton Environmental Institute) – As the planet continues to warm, multi-day heat waves are projected to increase in frequency, length and intensity. The additive effects of these extreme heat events overwhelm emergency service providers and hospital staff with heat-related maladies, disrupt the electrical grid and can even cause delays […]
