Australia carbon emissions rise in off-season for first time in a decade

By Michael Slezak and Nick Evershed 7 June 2017 (The Guardian) – Australia’s carbon emissions jumped at the start of 2017, the first time they have risen in the first few months of a year for more than a decade, according to projections produced exclusively for the Guardian.Emissions in the first three months of the […]

Carbon dioxide levels could reach their highest point in 50 million years by the end of the century

By Chelsea Harvey 5 April 2017 WASHINGTON (The Washington Post) – Continuing to burn fossil fuels at the current rate could bring atmospheric carbon dioxide to its highest concentration in 50 million years, jumping from about 400 parts per million now to more than 900 parts per million by the end of this century, a […]

New research shows how rapid growth in resource use, land use, emissions, and pollution makes humans the dominant driver of changes in Earth’s natural systems

COLLEGE PARK, Maryland, 9 February 2017 (University of Maryland) – A new scientific paper by a University of Maryland-led international team of distinguished scientists, including five members of the National Academies, argues that there are critical two-way feedbacks missing from current climate models that are used to inform environmental, climate, and economic policies. The most […]

Global hydropower boom will add to global warming – “Reservoirs are major emitters of methane, a particularly aggressive greenhouse gas”

By Claire Salisbury14 February 2017 (Mongabay) – From the Amazon Basin to boreal forests, and from the Mekong to the Himalayan foothills, rivers worldwide are being targeted for major new dams in a global hydropower boom that also aims to supply drinking water to exploding human populations and to facilitate navigation on the planet’s rivers; […]

Industrialised societies driving climate change 170 times faster than the natural rate – New paper formalises mathematically the change rate of Earth’s life support system

10 February 2017 (Stockholm Resilience Centre) – A paper recently published in the journal The Anthropocene Review puts the current rate of change of Earth’s life support system in the context of the last 4-billion-year evolution of the biosphere. The paper, which is written by the centre’s Owen Gaffney and senior research fellow Will Steffen, […]

Reservoirs are underappreciated source of greenhouse gases

By Eric Sorensen28 September 2016 VANCOUVER, Washington (WSU News) – Washington State University researchers say the world’s reservoirs are an underappreciated source of greenhouse gases, producing the equivalent of roughly 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide a year, or 1.3 percent of all greenhouse gases produced by humans. That’s more greenhouse gas production than all of […]

Study finds climate sensitivity to carbon forcing has been underestimated – ‘Significantly larger values are attained during warm phases’

By Ian Johnston11 November 2016 (Independent) – It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine. But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a […]

NASA study analyzes Four Corners methane leaks – Some sources emit up to 5,000 kilograms per hour

15 August 2016 (NASA) – In an extensive airborne survey, a NASA-led team has analyzed a previously identified “hot spot” of methane emissions in the Four Corners region of the United States, quantifying both its overall magnitude and the magnitudes of its sources. The study finds that just 10 percent of the individual methane sources […]

Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can

By Jason Hickel15 July 2016 (Guardian) – Earlier this year, media outlets around the world announced that February had broken global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the records too. In June, our screens were covered with surreal images of flooding in Paris, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the […]

Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate – ‘Methane emissions are substantially higher than we’ve understood’

 [cf. Report: Cheap natural gas leads to more plants and pollution] By Bill McKibben23 March 2016 (The Nation) – Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps […]

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