Big investors take aim at banks over global warming risk – “Millions of people have an interest in how banks respond to the threat of climate change”

By Chris Flood 13 September 2017 (Financial Times) –  A coalition of institutional investors managing more than $1 trillion in assets is demanding that 60 of the world’s largest banks take action to protect the world from the threat of catastrophic damage due to climate change.The devastation caused by Hurricane Irma across the Caribbean and […]

Another youth climate lawsuit turns to crowdfunding in Portugal

By Bobby Magill 27 September 2017 (Climate Liability News) – After more than 60 people died in wildfires that scorched central Portugal this summer, a London nonprofit group plans to file suit against 47 European countries on behalf of six children affected by the fires. The lawsuit aims to force the countries to cut their […]

Soil’s contribution to the carbon cycle in a warming world

AMHERST, Massachusetts, 5 October 2017 (UMass Amherst) – Microbiologist Kristen DeAngelis and her graduate student Grace Pold at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with colleagues at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and in New Hampshire, report results in the Oct. 6 issue of Science from their study of warming-related soil carbon cycling changes in […]

A big-money Catholic group just said it’s yanking all of its cash out of fossil fuels – “As a Catholic Church bank, we feel strongly responsible to participate in tackling the issue of climate change”

By Anmar Frangoul 3 October 2017 (CNBC) – A coalition of 40 Catholic institutions on Tuesday announced a decision to pull their money from — or block future investment in — fossil fuels. The Global Catholic Climate Movement called it the biggest collective announcement of divestment by Catholic organizations ever. The group comes from all […]

Mathematics predicts a sixth mass extinction

By Jennifer Chu 20 September 2017 (MIT News) – In the past 540 million years, the Earth has endured five mass extinction events, each involving processes that upended the normal cycling of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans. These globally fatal perturbations in carbon each unfolded over thousands to millions of years, and are coincident […]

New climate risk classification created to account for potential “existential” threats – Researchers identify a one-in-20 chance of temperature increase causing catastrophic damage or worse by 2050

14 September 2017 (Scripps) – A new study evaluating models of future climate scenarios has led to the creation of the new risk categories “catastrophic” and “unknown” to characterize the range of threats posed by rapid global warming. Researchers propose that unknown risks imply existential threats to the survival of humanity. These categories describe two […]

Trump administration ordered to enforce methane restrictions launched under President Obama

By Evan Halper 6 October 2017 (The Los Angeles Times) – The Trump administration is not giving up on its effort to block Obama-era restrictions on the release of potent methane emissions at oil and gas drilling operations on public land, even after a federal judge ruled its suspension of the restrictions was illegal. The […]

EPA moves to repeal Obama climate rule “in its entirety” – “The Trump administration’s assault on the Clean Power Plan is about one thing and one thing only: helping corporate polluters profit”

By Timothy Cama And Devin Henry 6 October 2017 (The Hill) – The Trump administration will soon propose repealing the Obama administration’s climate change rule for power plants but won’t commit to replacing it with another regulation. A draft of the proposal obtained by The Hill on Friday asserts that under former President Barack Obama, […]

Right-wing media could not be more wrong about the 1.5°C carbon budget paper

By Dana Nuccitelli 27 September 2017 (The Guardian) – Last week, Nature Geoscience published a study suggesting that we have a bigger remaining carbon budget than previously thought to keep global warming below the 1.5°C aggressive Paris climate target. Many scientists quickly commented that the paper’s conclusion was based on some questionable assumptions, and this […]

Leaders meeting at U.N. underscore need to fast-track climate action – “It is here, now, and we need to deal with it”

19 September 2017 (United Nations) – Leaders from various levels of government, the private sector and civil society highlighted the need for climate action as they convened at United Nations Headquarters, where Secretary-General António Guterres warned that current pledges and plans are insufficient to keep global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees. “Hurricanes Harvey […]

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