China air pollution crisis shows no sign of ending as nation fails to lower coal use – “The reality is China has big plans for coal”

By Matthew Carney7 January 2017 (ABC News) – For weeks northern China has been covered in a thick toxic smog. It is one of the worst episodes of air pollution the country has seen, affecting 460 million people. Coal is the major cause, and will continue to be the country’s biggest source of energy and […]

World heat shatters record in 2016 in new sign of global warming – Record breaking temperature was close to 1.5°C Paris agreement target

Reading, 5 January 2017 (Copernicus Climate Change Service) – The first global analysis of the whole of 2016 has confirmed last year as the warmest on record and saw the planet near a 1.5°C warming, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). The latest figures from C3S, part of the EU’s Copernicus earth observation […]

Gas flaring grows as oil industry saves money

By Kieran Cooke29 December 2016 LONDON (Climate News Network) – Gas flaring figures are an indictment of the global oil and gas industry. In 2015, 147 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas was flared at oil production sites around the world – up from 145bcm in 2014 and 141bcm in 2013. That’s a waste […]

The underestimated danger of a breakdown of the Gulf Stream System

By Stefan Rahmstorf4 January 2017 (RealClimate) – A new model simulation of the Gulf Stream System shows a breakdown of the gigantic overturning circulating in the Atlantic after a CO2 doubling. A new study in Science Advances by Wei Liu and colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and the University of […]

Canadian and U.S. car sales hit record levels in 2016

By Greg Keenan4 January 2017 (The Globe and Mail) – Canadians and Americans wore out the showroom floors of car dealerships in 2016, driving auto makers to record sales years in both markets. Auto makers sold 1.95 million vehicles in Canada, the fourth consecutive year that sales have hit a record. The 2016 level was […]

Forest die-offs alter global climate “like El Niño’

By Christopher Intagliata22 November 2016 (Scientific American) – Climate change may be partly to blame for the massive die-off of pine trees in the western U.S. But it works the other way, too: forest die-offs can alter the global climate. “I like thinking of this as a parallel to something like El Nino.” Abigail Swann, […]

Will we miss our last chance to save the world from global warming?

By Jeff Goodell22 December 2016 (Rolling Stone) – In the late 1980s, James Hansen became the first scientist to offer unassailable evidence that burning fossil fuels is heating up the planet. In the decades since, as the world has warmed, the ice has melted and the wildfires have spread, he has published papers on everything […]

Global warming hiatus disproved again – “Our results mean that NOAA got it right, that they were not cooking the books”

By Robert Sanders4 January 2017 (Berkeley News) – A controversial paper published two years ago that concluded there was no detectable slowdown in ocean warming over the previous 15 years — widely known as the “global warming hiatus” — has now been confirmed using independent data in research led by researchers from UC Berkeley and […]

Record drought in Bolivia drains lakes, threatens capital, and kills livestock by the thousands – “The situation in our area is critical”

4 January 2017 (The Associated Press) – Last year, the flowering quinoa plants painted Florencio Tola’s farmlands in vibrant sepia and ochre tones. But this season, all that could be seen was the straw colour of dried-out stalks that never germinated amid Bolivia’s worst drought in 30 years. Nearby a collection of scrawny cows, with […]

Tenfold jump in green technologies needed to meet global emissions targets – “We must scale them up and spread them globally at unprecedented speeds”

3 January 2017 (Duke University) – The global spread of green technologies must quicken significantly to avoid future rebounds in greenhouse gas emissions, a new Duke University study shows. “Based on our calculations, we won’t meet the climate warming goals set by the Paris Agreement unless we speed up the spread of clean technology by […]

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