Estimated disruptions to Earth’s great elemental cycles

23 March 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – Back in 2011, Desdemona was asked by a local church to give a presentation on the condition of the world’s oceans (State of the Oceans 2011 video; pdf slide deck; PowerPoint). As part of the talk, Des wanted estimates for human disturbances to the great cycles of elements on […]

Australia emissions rising and vastly underestimated, says report – ‘It defies logic. This is a major discrepancy that can’t be brushed off with the same inadequate explanations used so far.’

By Michael Slezak18 March 2016 (The Guardian) – The latest federal government carbon emissions inventory shows Australia has increased its emissions and has come under fire for allegedly vastly underestimating the amount of land clearing that has occurred, and its associated emissions. The Quarterly Update of the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report, which counts emissions […]

Carbon emissions make up 60 percent of world’s ecological footprint

8 March 2016 (Global Footprint Network) – Global Footprint Network launches its 2016 edition of the National Footprint Accounts today, featuring a refined carbon Footprint calculation. The updated calculation has revealed that the global carbon Footprint is 16 percent higher than previously calculated, with a consequent 8 percent increase in the global Ecological Footprint. The […]

World temperature could rise rapidly by 2020 – ‘Our model shows we may have less time left than expected to prevent world temperature from rising above these thresholds’

10 March 2016 (University of Queensland) – Global warming could occur more quickly than expected, according to a new model by University of Queensland and Griffith University researchers. The model is the first to include ‘energy use per person’ as a predictive factor rather than focusing solely on economies or populations. It forecasts that population […]

Unprecedented spike in CO2 levels in 2015 – ‘Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years’

By Bobby Magill10 March 2016 (Climate Central) – The annual growth rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose more in 2015 than scientists have ever seen in a single year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday. It was the fourth year in a row that carbon dioxide concentrations grew by more than […]

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscars speech was about climate change, which could be worse than we thought

By Chris Mooney 29 February 2016 (Washington Post) – On Sunday night while accepting a long-anticipated Oscar for best actor, for his role in “The Revenant,” Leonardo DiCaprio seized the moment to highlight the plight of the planet. “Making “The Revenant” was about man’s relationship to the natural world,” DiCaprio said. “A world that we […]

Global climate in context as the world approaches 1°C above pre-industrial for the first time

11 November 2015 (Met Office) – Global annual average surface temperature in 2015 is looking set to reach 1°C above the pre-industrial average (as represented by the 1850-1900 reference period) for the first time, according to the HadCRUT4 dataset produced by the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. […]

China burns much more coal than reported, complicating climate talks

[cf. Peak Coal in China? Not so fast –Des] By Tom Phillips, with additional reporting by Luna Lin 4 November 2015 (Beijing) – China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, has been dramatically underreporting the amount of coal it consumes each year, it has been claimed ahead of key climate talks in Paris. Official Chinese data, […]

Photo gallery: Satellite views of smoke and fires in Indonesia, October 2015

By Adam Voiland19 October 2015 (NASA) – Heavy smoke continued to pour from peat fires in Borneo, Indonesia, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on 19 October 2015. Red outlines indicate hot spots where the sensor detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Gray smoke hovers […]

Exxon’s early knowledge of climate risks, their long campaign of climate deception, and why it matters

By Peter Frumhoff10 October 2015 (UCS) – Internal Exxon memos recently brought to light through meticulous investigative reporting by Inside Climate News (ICN) show that senior company executives knew by 1978 that emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels posed significant risks of disrupting the climate. Over the decade before NASA scientist James Hansen’s 1988 […]

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