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 […]
2 December 2016 (Columbia University) – The Arctic’s frozen ground contains large stores of organic carbon that have been locked in the permafrost for thousands of years. As global temperatures rise, that permafrost is starting to melt, raising concerns about the impact on the climate as organic carbon becomes exposed. A new study is shedding […]
By David Archer17 November 2016 (RealClimate) – The recent US election has prompted cries that the decision on Earth’s climate has now been irrevocably made, that the US has unilaterally decided to scrap the peak warming target from the Paris agreement of 1.5oC. What do the numbers say? Is Earth’s climate now irrevocably fracked? The […]
By David Spratt9 September 2016 (Climate Code Red) – The 2015 Paris climate talks put the 1.5°C temperature target firmly on the policy-making table, whilst also signing off on actions consistent with 3°C or more of warming. This has prompted more discussion in the climate movement about the emissions reduction task consistent with 1.5°C, and […]
[cf. Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate – ‘Methane emissions are substantially higher than we’ve understood’] By Zeke Hausfather23 August 2016 (Yale Climate Connections) – For the past century, coal has been king, providing the majority of U.S. energy for electricity generation. But a combination of new federal and state environmental policies and […]
By Andrew H. MacDougall22 August 2016 (Nature Geoscience) – Between 17,500 and 14,500 years ago, a period sometimes referred to as the Mystery Interval1, atmospheric CO2 concentrations began their post-glacial rise from about 190 ppm in glacial times to approximately 270 ppm by the beginning of the Holocene. The rise in CO2 during the Mystery […]
By Christopher Ingraham 4 August 2015 (Washington Post) – A recent essay by an Ohio woman who refuses to mow her lawn has struck a nerve. Thirteen hundred people have weighed in with a comment on Sarah Baker’s tale of flouting a neighborhood mowing ordinance in the face of a $1,000 fine. As Baker notes […]
6 July 2016 (University of Exeter) – A recent drought completely shut down the Amazon Basin’s carbon sink, by killing trees and slowing their growth, a ground-breaking study led by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds has found. Previous research has suggested that the Amazon – the most extensive tropical forest on Earth […]
By Michael Slezak11 May 2016 (The Guardian) – The world is hurtling towards an era when global concentrations of carbon dioxide never again dip below the 400 parts per million (ppm) milestone, as two important measuring stations sit on the point of no return. The news comes as one important atmospheric measuring station at Cape […]
By Chris Mooney 21 March 2016 (Washington Post) – If you dig deep enough into the Earth’s climate change archives, you hear about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. And then you get scared. This is a time period, about 56 million years ago, when something mysterious happened — there are many ideas as to […]
