23 May 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Recently, Canada announced that it will reduce carbon emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. But the province of Alberta is home to the Athabasca bitumen mines, aka the “Alberta tar sands” mines. The disastrous environmental effects of Alberta’s open pit mines have been […]
By John Upton 29 April 2015 (Climate Central) – California introduced a world-leading carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program to drive down pollution rates after lawmakers approved an ambitious climate protection law in 2006. It also changed rules affecting utilities, spurring investments in some of the biggest solar power plants the world has yet seen. But an […]
By Chelsea Harvey4 May 2015 (Washington Post) – When it comes to combating climate change, many scientists and policy makers focus on one major goal: cut carbon emissions enough to keep the planet’s average surface temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above its pre-industrial level. But a new analysis [pdf], published on Monday […]
20 April 2015 (NBC News) – Apple is more energy efficient than it ever has been, according to a new report, with 100 percent of U.S. operations running completely on renewable energy. Still, the company was responsible for 34.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in fiscal 2014 — the vast majority from manufacturing […]
By Chris Clarke 18 March 2015 (KCET) – In a typical year, California gets almost a fifth of its energy from dams on its rivers and streams. But the last several years have been anything but typical: the ongoing drought has shrunk the state’s reservoirs and cut the amount of hydro power the state can […]
By Gerard Wynn5 March 2015 (RTCC) – Severe drought five years ago caused an observed doubling in the rate of tree mortality in the Amazon rainforest, according to a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, 4 March 2015. In addition, the drought caused the forest to take up about 1.4 billion tonnes less […]
By Raymond T. Pierrehumbert10 February 2015 (Slate) – Some years ago, in the question-and-answer session after a lecture at the American Geophysical Union, I described certain geoengineering proposals as “barking mad.” The remark went rather viral in the geoengineering community. The climate-hacking proposals I was referring to were schemes that attempt to cancel out some […]
By Stephanie Anderson 7 February 2015 (ABC) – A new report by the Climate Council of Australia says it would have been “virtually impossible” for 2013 to be the hottest year in the country’s record without man-made emissions in the atmosphere. The independently-funded group used new modelling to look at the odds of extreme heat […]
By Apoorva Joshi27 January 2015 (mongabay.com) – Since the 1950s, plantations and second-growth forests in China have been locally managed by village communities as collective forests, which today account for 58 percent of China’s forestland. Many of these collective forests lie within mountainous rural areas, some of which are also home to the 1,600 or […]
By Jonathan Amos18 December 2014 (BBC News) – NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) has returned its first global maps of the greenhouse gas CO2. The satellite was sent up in July to help pinpoint the key locations on the Earth’s surface where carbon dioxide is being emitted and absorbed. This should help scientists better understand […]
