By Rod McGuirk 31 January 2019 CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – Australia sweltered through its hottest month on record in January and the summer of extremes continued with wildfires razing the drought-parched south and flooding in expanses of the tropical north. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology confirmed the January record on Friday as parts of the northern […]
By Jonathan Amos 31 January 2019 (BBC News) – Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate. That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK. The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural […]
By Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade24 January 2019 SÃO PAULO (SciDev.Net) – Brazil’s new government, led by President Jair Bolsonaro, has quickly taken steps to loosen environmental law enforcement. Now a review paper shows that the deforestation that could result may have terrible consequences for the Amazon rainforest, including dramatic biodiversity loss, intensified dry seasons, droughts, […]
23 January 2019 (CBS News) – A public health emergency has been declared in Clark County, Washington, as a result of an ongoing measles outbreak. According to the latest update from the county’s Department of Health, 23 cases of measles have been confirmed and health officials are investigating two more suspected cases. The majority of […]
By Naaman Zhou24 January 2019 (The Guardian) – Temperature records have tumbled across South Australia, with the city of Adelaide experiencing its hottest day on record, as the second heatwave in as many weeks hit southern parts of Australia Adelaide hit 46.6C on Thursday afternoon, the hottest temperature recording in any Australian state capital city […]
17 January 2019 (Radboud University) – Currently approximately 600 species might be inaccurately assessed as non-threatened on the Red List of Threatened Species. More than a hundred others that couldn’t be assessed before, also appear to be threatened. A new more efficient, systematic and comprehensive approach to assess the extinction risk of animals has shown […]
By Ivana Kottasová18 January 2019 LONDON (CNN Business) – America’s push for oil and gas supremacy could lead to a “climate catastrophe,” a new report has warned. The report by Oil Change International said that the United States is set to “unleash the world’s largest burst” of carbon emissions from new oil and gas development […]
By Tamino19 January 2019 (Open Mind) – We’ve spoken before (as have many before us) of the fact that climate isn’t just about the average, it’s about the whole distribution (the probability distribution if you want to get technical). We also emphasized that the tails of the distribution — the probabilities for extreme values (very […]
20 January 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – At the beginning of each year, the World Economic Forum publishes its Global Risks Report, which “presents the results of our latest Global Risks Perception Survey, in which nearly 1,000 decision-makers from the public sector, private sector, academia and civil society assess the risks facing the world.” In 2019, […]
By Bob Henson 16 January 2019 (Weather Underground) – Just two years after shrinking to its lowest extent ever measured, Antarctic sea ice may challenge that record a few weeks from now. This depletion comes just as scientists reported a harrowing sixfold increase in the loss of Antarctic land ice over the last 40 years. […]
