Living in China’s expanding deserts – ‘We dread the sandstorms’

By Josh Haner, Edward Wong, Derek Watkins, and Jeremy White24 October 2014 In the Tengger Desert, China (The New York Times) – This desert, called the Tengger, lies on the southern edge of the massive Gobi Desert, not far from major cities like Beijing. The Tengger is growing. For years, China’s deserts spread at an […]

At ground zero of Alabama’s drought: ‘It’s an agricultural disaster’

31 October 2016 (AP) – Six months into a deepening drought, the weather is killing crops, threatening cattle and sinking lakes to their lowest levels in years across much of the South. The very worst conditions — what forecasters call “exceptional drought” — are in the mountains of northeast Alabama and northwest Georgia, a region […]

How fast will we need to adapt to global warming? ‘Societies will be faced with the decision of whether to defend or abandon cities threatened by sea-level rise’

STANFORD, California, 4 October 2016 (Carnegie Science) – What would we do differently if sea level were to rise one foot per century versus one foot per decade? Until now, most policy and research has focused on adapting to specific amounts of climate change and not on how fast that climate change might happen. Using […]

The ocean is swallowing West Africa – ‘My third house is about to crumble into the sea. I would like to cry, but a chief cannot cry.’

By Matteo Fagotto21 October 2016 (Foreign Policy) – Buabasah begins nervously checking the waters creeping up the coastline toward his partially destroyed home. As the high tide mounts the steep shore of this small Ghanaian fishing village perched on a shrinking peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and the Volta River estuary, he and other inhabitants […]

Meteorologists: Arctic warming demands action – ‘The Arctic is undergoing an unprecedented rate of change with consequences far beyond its boundaries’

28 September 2016 (WMO) – Dramatic and unprecedented warming in the Arctic is driving sea level rise, affecting weather patterns around the world, and may trigger even more changes in the climate system. The rate of change is challenging the current scientific capacity to monitor and predict what is becoming a journey into uncharted territory. […]

UN refugee agency: Mediterranean death toll soars, 2016 is deadliest year yet – ‘This is the worst we have ever seen’

25 October 2016 (UN) – With just two months left in 2016, and despite a substantial drop in the number of migrants and refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean, the number of people losing their lives has witnessed a three-fold overall increase this year, and in one particular route by more than five-fold, the United […]

One billion trees felled in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest now 10 million hectares of abandoned pasture

  [Translation by Google.] By Alexandre Mansur5 October 2016 (Época) – One of the strongest arguments to end deforestation in Brazil is the existence of abundant land already cleared and abandoned. The area already deforested and abandoned in Brazil is equivalent to the states of Parana, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina added. That […]

Climate scientist to Norway prime minister: ‘Your government’s actions are utterly at odds with the scientific consensus that underpins the Paris Agreement’

The Earth Institute, 475 Riverside Drive, 520, New York, New York 10115www.earth.columbia.edu18 October 2016 Dear Prime Minister Solberg, A year ago I wrote an open letter urging you to carry out an act of transformational climate leadership. I held the faint hope that your government might yet waken to the realities of climate change, heed […]

Grassland tuned to present environmental conditions suffers in a hotter future – Study finds no CO2 fertilization effect

STANFORD, California, 5 September 2016 (Carnegie Science) – One of the world’s longest-running, most comprehensive climate change experiments produced some surprising results. The extensive experiment subjected grassland ecosystems to sixteen possible future climates and measured many aspects of ecosystem performance and sustainability. This study, appearing in the September 5, 2016, Early Online Edition of the […]

Global warming has doubled Western U.S. forest fire area – ‘No matter how hard we try, the fires are going to keep getting bigger’

10 October 2016 (University of Idaho) – Human-caused climate change has nearly doubled the amount of land burned in western U.S. forest fires over the past three decades, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Idaho and Columbia University. The researchers estimate that human-caused climate change caused an additional 16,000 square […]

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