By Michael Shellenberger 6 May 2019 (Forbes) – Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world. “Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build […]
6 May 2019 (IPBES) – Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was […]
29 April 2019 (The Weather Channel) – Hurricane Michael ripped through the Southeast U.S. six months ago. The damage at the coast was unreal, but inland, another astounding loss: pecan, timber and row crops. While row crops can be planted again this year, it’ll be a decade before farmers can grow pecans and earn an […]
By Shirin Jaafari 29 April 2019 (PRI) – Since March, Iran has been ravaged by record rainfall and unprecedented flash flooding. At least 26 of 31 provinces have been impacted by the deadly floods. One city received 70% of its annual rainfall in a single day. Dozens of people have died. “This is the largest disaster to hit Iran in more than 15 years,” […]
By Bianca Padró Ocasio29 March 2019 (Orlando Sentinel) – Luis Angel Santos Baez was rummaging in his apartment complex’s dumpster in the early days of January 2018 when he found what seemed like a gift from God: a plastic storage cart that held several bags filled with unused notebooks and other arts-and-crafts supplies. Santos Baez, […]
By James Temple1 May 2019 (Technology Review) – Climate change is clearly making some regions wetter and others drier. But it’s been difficult for scientists to detect a clear, consistent human role in increasing the frequency and severity of global droughts given natural climate variability, regional differences, and limited data. A new report in Nature adds evidence […]
By Zoya Teirstein24 April 2019 (Grist) – In the 1980s, NASA scientist James Hansen brought climate change to the attention of Congress, and shortly thereafter the public. Humans, he testified in 1988, were responsible for rising global temperatures. But the man who put his reputation on the line to alert the world to the dangers of […]
NEW DELHI, 2 May 2019 (AP) – Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated along India’s eastern coast on Thursday as authorities braced for a cyclone moving through the Bay of Bengal that was forecast to bring extremely severe wind and rain. The India Meteorological Department in New Delhi said Cyclone Fani was expected to […]
By Bob Henson1 May 2019 (Weather Underground) – Still a Category 3 storm as of Wednesday, Tropical Cyclone Fani is hurtling toward landfall in northeast India on a track that could spread a significant amount of storm surge as far as Bangladesh, well east of Fani’s center. As of 12Z (8 am EDT) Wednesday, Fani […]
30 April 2019 (University of Guelph) – A “sleeping giant” hidden in permafrost soils in Canada and other northern regions worldwide will have important consequences for global warming, says a new report led by University of Guelph scientist Merritt Turetsky. Scientists have long studied how gradual permafrost thaw occurring over decades in centimetres of surface […]
