BRASILIA, Brazil, 24 January 2015 (Australian News.Net) – Brazil’s Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira has told the media following a crisis meeting at the presidential palace in Brasilia that the country is experiencing its worst drought since 1930. The states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais are the worst affected, she said after […]
By Damian Carrington7 January 2015 (The Guardian) – Vast amounts of oil in the Middle East, coal in the US, Australia, and China and many other fossil fuel reserves will have to be left in the ground to prevent dangerous climate change, according to the first analysis to identify which existing reserves cannot be burned. […]
By Ali Mirchi, Kaveh Madani, and Amir AghaKouchak for Tehran Bureau23 January 2015 (The Guardian) – In the late 1990s, Lake Urmia, in north-western Iran, was twice as large as Luxembourg and the largest salt-water lake in the Middle East. Since then it has shrunk substantially, and was sliced in half in 2008, with consequences […]
By Patrik Stollarz22 January 2015 (AFP) – Climate change and the danger of nuclear war pose an ever-growing threat to civilization and are bringing the world closer to doomsday, a group of prominent scientists and Nobel laureates said Thursday. “It is now three minutes to midnight,” said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of […]
By Stefan Rahmstorf14 January 2015 (RealClimate) – The “zoo” of global sea level curves calculated from tide gauge data has grown – tomorrow a new reconstruction of our US colleagues around Carling Hay from Harvard University will appear in Nature (Hay, et al., 2015). That is a good opportunity for an overview over the available […]
16 January 2015 (Associated Press) – Federal science officials say that for the third time in a decade, the globe sizzled to the hottest year on record. Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA calculated that 2014 was the hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping. Earlier, the Japanese weather agency and an […]
By Joel Achenbach 15 January 2015 (Washington Post) – At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points […]
By Michael E. MannJanuary/February 2015 (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) – Much as lions on the Serengeti seek out vulnerable zebras at the edge of a herd, special interests faced with adverse scientific evidence often target individual scientists rather than take on an entire scientific field at once. Part of the reasoning behind this approach […]
By Stephen Messenger 6 January 2015 (The Dodo) – In a touching show of solidarity amidst so much devastation, a wild koala stranded by wildfires in South Australia was captured on film accepting help from a passerby — offering proof that a wellspring of hope can emerge from even the simplest of gestures, and a […]
By Brian Kahn5 January 2015 (Climate Central) – It’s official: 2014 has taken the title of hottest year on record. That ranking comes courtesy of data released Monday by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the first of four major global temperature recordkeepers to release their data for last year. The upward march of the world’s […]