New global study reveals rising soil temperatures in permafrost regions around the world – “The permafrost isn’t simply warming on a local and regional scale, but worldwide and at virtually the same pace as climate warming”

16 January 2019 (AWI) – Global warming is leaving more and more apparent scars in the world’s permafrost regions. As the new global comparative study conducted by the international permafrost network GTN-P shows, in all regions with permafrost soils the temperature of the frozen ground at a depth of more than 10 metres rose by […]

Australia extreme heatwave continues – “code red” issued as Port Augusta hits 48.9C – Sydney is hottest place on Earth

By Lisa Cox15 January 2019 (The Guardian) – Port Augusta in South Australia has reached 48.9C on Tuesday, as a heatwave sets in across much of Australia threatening more record hot days. All-time highest minimum temperatures have also been broken in three places. Meekatharra in Western Australia and Fowlers Gap and White Cliffs in New […]

Antarctica losing six times more ice mass annually now than 40 years ago – “We expect multi-meter sea level rise from Antarctica in the coming centuries”

IRVINE, California, 14 January 2019 (UCI) – Antarctica experienced a sixfold increase in yearly ice mass loss between 1979 and 2017, according to a study published today in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Glaciologists from the University of California, Irvine, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Netherlands’ Utrecht University additionally found that the […]

The climate papers most featured in the media in 2018

By Robert McSweeney8 January 2019 (Carbon Brief) – In a year dominated by events such as Brexit, royal weddings, the Salisbury poisonings, US Supreme Court nominations and the World Cup, there was still space in the news media in 2018 for reporting on new climate research. These new journal papers were reported around the world […]

Global warming of oceans equivalent to an atomic bomb per second – Total heat taken up by oceans over the past 150 years was 1,000 times the annual energy use of the entire global population

By Damian Carrington7 January 2019 (The Guardian) – Global warming has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years, according to analysis of new research.More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a […]

U.S. had world’s three costliest natural disasters in 2018, and California’s Camp Fire was the worst – “Such massive wildfires appear to be occurring more frequently as a result of climate change”

By Doyle Rice8 January 2019 (USA TODAY) – Racking up an overall damage cost of $16.5 billion, the devastating and deadly Camp Fire that ravaged California in November was the world’s costliest natural disaster in 2018. The data come from a report issued Tuesday by Munich Re, a reinsurance firm. In second and third place […]

Policymakers are not adequately factoring land use and human diets into climate mitigation strategies – “The fundamental problem is that policymakers and researchers have not truly confronted the fact that global land area is limited”

4 January 2019 (Mongabay) – A recent study finds that governments and researchers routinely underestimate the potential for changes to land use and human diets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impacts of global warming. Published in Nature last month, the research suggests that policymakers are not adequately accounting for the amount of […]

U.S. carbon emissions surged in 2018 even as coal plants closed – “We haven’t yet successfully decoupled U.S. emissions growth from economic growth”

By Brad Plumer8 January 2019 WASHINGTON (The New York Times) – America’s carbon dioxide emissions rose by 3.4 percent in 2018, the biggest increase in eight years, according to a preliminary estimate published Tuesday. Strikingly, the sharp uptick in emissions occurred even as a near-record number of coal plants around the United States retired last […]

Data mining adds evidence that war is baked into the structure of society – “There is little evidence that humankind is progressing toward a more peaceful world”

4 January 2019 (Emerging Technology) – War is the subject of detailed study among historians, reflecting a general hope that by learning from the past, we can avoid similar mistakes in future. Many historians study war in terms of the actors involved and the decisions they make. It is often possible to describe how wars […]

Journalists reporting on the environment faced increased dangers in 2018

By Kaamil Ahmed4 January 2019 (Mongabay) – A pair of “French spies” had infiltrated India by sea to commit a “treasonous conspiracy,” an Indian minister claimed in late November. In reality, they were two visiting journalists, and their mission was an investigation into allegations of illegal sand mining in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. […]

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