By Muyu Xu and Melanie Burton 22 October 2019 BEIJING/MELBOURNE (Reuters) – China, the world’s top coal buyer, is on track to boost imports of the fuel by more than 10 percent this year, traders and analysts said on Tuesday, countering earlier expectations that shipments would be capped by Beijing at the same level as […]
By Nadja Popovich 24 October 2019 (The New York Times) – New data reveals that damaging air pollution has increased nationally since 2016, reversing a decades-long trend toward cleaner air. An analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data published this week by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that fine particulate pollution increased 5.5 percent on average across the […]
By Alois Vinga 18 October 2019 (New Zimbabwe) – Extreme poverty in Zimbabwe has risen to 34 percent, with 1 million more citizens now added to the existing 4.7 million, World Bank (WB) said in a recent Poverty and Equity brief. The global lender said there has been a significant growth in the country’s poverty […]
3 October 2019 (NSIDC) – Arctic sea ice began its autumn regrowth in the last 12 days of September, with the ice edge expanding along a broad front in the western Arctic Ocean. Overall, the summer of 2019 was exceptionally warm, with repeated pulses of very warm air from northern Siberia and the Bering Strait. […]
By Steven Mufson 16 October 2019 DOHA, Qatar (The Washington Post) – It was 116 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade outside the new Al Janoub soccer stadium, and the air felt to air-conditioning expert Saud Ghani as if God had pointed “a giant hair dryer” at Qatar. Yet inside the open-air stadium, a cool breeze was blowing. […]
By Patrick Greenfield 13 October 2019 (The Guardian) – The world’s largest investment banks have provided more than $700 billion of financing for the fossil fuel companies most aggressively expanding in new coal, oil and gas projects since the Paris climate change agreement, figures show. The financing has been led by the Wall Street giant […]
5 October 2019 (Copernicus Climate Change Service) – In Europe, temperatures were above average over most of the continent, especially in the south and south-east. Below-average temperatures occurred over much of Norway and Sweden, and over the far east of the continent. Globally September 2019 was 0.57°C warmer than the average September from 1981-2010, making […]
By Georgia Rose Grant and Timothy Naish 2 October 2019 (The Conversation) – We know that our planet has experienced warmer periods in the past, during the Pliocene geological epoch around three million years ago. Our research, published today, shows that up to one third of Antarctica’s ice sheet melted during this period, causing sea levels to rise […]
By Stephen Leahy 10 October 2019 (National Geographic) – As many as five billion people, particularly in Africa and South Asia, are likely to face shortages of food and clean water in the coming decades as nature declines. Hundreds of millions more could be vulnerable to increased risks of severe coastal storms, according to the first-ever model […]
By Christopher Ingraham 8 October 2019 (The Washington Post) – A new book-length study on the tax burden of the ultrarich begins with a startling finding: In 2018, for the first time in history, America’s richest billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than the working class. The Triumph of Injustice, by economists Emmanuel Saez […]
