(UNDP) – Material living standards can be better monitored, particularly during economic downturns, through measures of household income and consumption rather than GDP (see figure). For example, while GDP fell sharply (by 5.7 percent) in the euro area in 2008 and 2009, household disposable income stayed at precrisis levels. This can be attributed at least […]
By DIONNE SEARCEY and ROBERT GEBELOFF25 January 2015 (The New York Times) – The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century. In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in […]
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 Lyndsey Layton16 January 2015 (Washington Post) – For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation. The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of […]
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 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 Jane J. Lee13 January 2015 (National Geographic) – We’re not talking about a few dead fish littering your local beach. Mass die-offs are individual events that kill at least a billion animals, wipe out over 90 percent of a population, or destroy 700 million tons—the equivalent weight of roughly 1,900 Empire State Buildings—worth of […]
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 […]
