By Monte Morin28 November 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – A fog of suffocating smoke settles over the Indonesian countryside, sickening hundreds of thousands of people and triggering an environmental crisis. In Peru, officials abandon plans to host the lucrative Dakar Rally and prepare instead for torrential rains and devastating floods. And in Ethiopia, crops perish […]
By Matt McGrath 27 November 2015 (BBC News) – Public support for a strong global deal on climate change has declined, according to a poll carried out in 20 countries. Only four now have majorities in favour of their governments setting ambitious targets at a global conference in Paris. In a similar poll before the […]
26 November 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Because 2015 is certain to be the hottest year on record globally, it’s reasonable to expect that it will also be the worst year for wildfires. In the U.S., this has turned out to be the case: wildfires in 2015 have exceeded the record of 9.8 million acres (3.9 […]
23 November 2015 – A new report issued today by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) shows that over the last 20 years, 90 per cent of major disasters have been caused by 6,457 recorded floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts and other weather-related events. The report, titled The Human Cost of Weather Related […]
By Emma Howard23 November 2015 (The Guardian) – More than 2,000 academics from over 80 countries – including linguist Noam Chomsky, climate scientist Michael E Mann, philosopher Peter Singer, and historian Naomi Oreskes – have called on world leaders to do more to limit global warming to a 1.5C rise. In an open letter, they […]
By Seth Borenstein23 November 2015 WASHINGTON (Associated Press) – When it comes to climate science, two of the three Democratic presidential candidates are ‘A’ students, while most of the Republican contenders are flunking, according to a panel of scientists who reviewed candidates’ comments. At the request of The Associated Press, eight climate and biological scientists […]
By Damian Carrington20 November 2015 (The Guardian) – More than half the myriad tree species in the Amazon could be heading for extinction, according to a study that makes the first comprehensive estimate of threatened species in the world’s largest rainforest. Among the species expected to suffer significant falls in numbers are the Brazil nut, […]
20 November 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – During the opening session of the 2015 Global Security Forum, sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), CIA director John Brennan made some interesting comments: When CIA analysts look for deeper causes of this rising instability, they find nationalistic, sectarian, and technological factors that are eroding […]
By Rong-Gong Lin II and Rosanna Xia17 November 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – Temperatures in a key location of the Pacific Ocean are now hotter than they ever were in the record 1997 El Niño. Some scientists say the readings show that this year’s El Niño could be among the most powerful on record — […]
12 November 2015 (NASA) – It’s big. It’s cold. And it’s melting into the world’s ocean. It’s Zachariae Isstrom, the latest in a string of Greenland glaciers to undergo rapid change in our warming world. A new NASA-funded study published today in the journal Science finds that Zachariae Isstrom broke loose from a glaciologically stable […]
