Australia’s carbon emissions jump in 2015 – ‘There can be no new coal mines anywhere in the world’

By Latika Bourke28 December 2015 (Stock & Land) – Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by nearly 1 per cent in 2015, a federal government report quietly released in the lead-up to Christmas showed. The Climate Council said the increase showed Australia urgently needed to transition to renewables and justified calls for a worldwide moratorium on […]

Graph of the Day: Australia carbon dioxide emissions, projected to 2020

22 December 2015 (Department of the Environment) – Figure 5 shows domestic emissions by sector. The key changes expected in emissions by sector to 2019–20 are: expected growth in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) production will result in emissions from this subsector increasing by over 27 Mt CO2-e. This represents around three quarters of the expected […]

Graph of the Day: Total U.S. debt balance and debt composition, 2003-2015

19 November 2015 (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) – Aggregate household debt balances increased in the third quarter of 2015. As of 30 September 2015, total household indebtedness was $12.07 trillion, a $212 billion increase from the second quarter of 2015. Overall household debt remains 5% below its 2008Q3 peak of $12.68 trillion. Mortgage […]

Graph of the Day: World oil production, 2002-2015

By Ron Patterson21 December 2015 (Peak Oil Barrel) – I follow the JODI World Oil Database primarily because it is now four months ahead of the EIA international data base. I make some adjustments however. I use the OPEC MOMR “secondary sources” for all OPEC data where JODI also uses the MOMR but uses their […]

Scientists say climate change could cause a ‘massive’ tree die-off in the U.S. Southwest

By Chris Mooney21 December 2015 (Washington Post) – In a troubling new study just out in Nature Climate Change, a group of researchers says that a warming climate could trigger a “massive” dieoff of coniferous trees, such as junipers and piñon pines, in the U.S. southwest sometime this century. The study is based on both […]

Wildlife decline threatens UK biodiversity and agriculture, study finds

By Emma Howard8 December 2015 (The Guardian) – A decline in wildlife is threatening core functions of the ecosystem that are vital for human wellbeing, researchers behind an unprecedented study of biodiversity in the UK have warned. Climate change and habitat loss are leading to a reduction in biodiversity, with species that act as pollinators […]

Graph of the Day: Simulated catastrophic decline of plankton in warming oceans

By Yadigar Sekerci and Sergei Petrovskii12 November 2015 (Bulletin of Mathematical Biology) – We have studied the oxygen–plankton dynamics using a mathematical model that takes into account oxygen production in photosynthesis, plankton respiration, and the effect of zooplankton predation on phytoplankton. The model is described by a system of three coupled ODEs in the nonspatial […]

Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say – ‘We are reducing soils to their bare mineral components. We are creating soils that aren’t fit for anything except for holding a plant up.’

  By Oliver Milman2 December 2015 (The Guardian) – The world has lost a third of its arable land due to erosion or pollution in the past 40 years, with potentially disastrous consequences as global demand for food soars, scientists have warned. New research has calculated that nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality […]

Graph of the Day: Thyroid cancer incidence in children and adolescents from Belarus after the Chernobyl accident, 1986-2002

21-23 February 2014 (IAEA) – The objective of this workshop was to develop a state-of-the-art scientific understanding of radiation-induced thyroid cancer, and to share knowledge and experience in this area in order to support the efforts of the Japanese government and the Fukushima Prefecture to enhance public health. Experience in holding effective social dialogues, in […]

New NASA study shows Brazil’s drought deeper than thought – Southeast losing 56 trillion liters of water in each of the past three years

By Chris Arsenault 30 October 2015 TORONTO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – New satellite data shows Brazil’s drought is worse than previously thought, with the southeast losing 56 trillion liters of water in each of the past three years – more than enough to fill Lake Tahoe, a NASA scientist said on Friday. The country’s most […]

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