By Sara Peach2 September 2016 (Yale Climate Connections) – Sea level rise will have a significant impact on coastal communities as the world warms in the coming decades. But it happens too slowly to easily see. Now, designers Erik Jensen and Rebecca Sunter want to give people a tangible way to mark the change. They’ve […]
By Jonathan Glover31 August 2016 (The Spokesman-Review) – Police arrested three protesters calling themselves “Raging Grannies” for standing on railroad tracks Wednesday when they refused orders to stop blocking oil and coal trains in east Spokane. The women – all grandmothers – were3 the last of about 20 protestors who blocked rail lines near Trent […]
By Timothy Brown23 August 2016 (Yale) – A new Yale-led study published in the journal Nature Communications sheds light on the surprising role that haze in China plays in promoting the urban heat island effect [UHI], a process whereby city centers tend to be significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas. Scientists have always suspected that […]
25 August 2016 (350) – The seas of dead coral are a crime scene. This year, the world witnessed the most devastating mass coral bleaching event ever recorded which left behind dead reefs in at least 38 countries. Many of these reefs will never recover. The immediate cause is clear: the ongoing rise in global […]
By James Hakner22 August 2016 (University of Sussex) – A strong national commitment to nuclear energy goes hand in hand with weak performance on climate change targets, researchers at the University of Sussex and the Vienna School of International Studies have found. A new study of European countries, published in the journal Climate Policy, shows […]
By Grant Parpan24 August 2016 (Riverhead News Review) – David Gruner has been visiting the same private beach on the Long Island Sound in Jamesport for more than 50 years. On Wednesday afternoon, he witnessed something he’d never seen before. When Mr. Gruner walked down to the beach he found the shoreline covered in mussels […]
29 August 2016 (AFP) – The human impact on Earth’s chemistry and climate has cut short the 11,700-year-old geological epoch known as the Holocene and ushered in a new one, scientists said Monday. The Anthropocene, or “new age of man,” would start from the mid-20th century if their recommendation—submitted Monday to the International Geological Congress […]
By Jeremy Hance16 August 2016 (mongabay.com) – The Paris Agreement marked the biggest political milestone to combat climate change since scientists first introduced us in the late 1980s to perhaps humanity’s greatest existential crisis. Last December, 178 nations pledged to do their part to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius […]
[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 […]