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+20 +1
Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest point in more than 1,500 years
New research led by University College London (UCL) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) provides evidence that a key cog in the global ocean circulation system hasn't been running at peak strength since the mid-1800s and is currently at its weakest point in the past 1,600 years. If the system continues to weaken, it could disrupt weather patterns from the United States and Europe to the African Sahel, and cause more rapid increase in sea level on the U.S. East Coast.
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+27 +1
Shell predicted dangers of climate change in 1980s and knew fossil fuel industry was responsible
Oil giant Shell was aware of the consequences of climate change, and the role fossil fuels were playing in it, as far back as 1988, documents unearthed by a Dutch news organisation have revealed. They include a calculation that the oil company’s products alone were responsible for 4 per cent of total global carbon emissions in 1984. They also predict that changes to sea levels and weather would be “larger than any that have occurred over the past 12,000 years”.
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+38 +1
Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s, Internal Documents Show
Internal company documents uncovered by a Dutch news organization show that the oil giant Shell had a deep understanding, dating at least to the 1980s, of the science and risks of global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions. They show that as the company pondered its responsibility to act, Shell's scientists urged it to heed the early warnings, even if, as they said, it might take until the 2000s for the mounting evidence to prove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were causing unnatural climate change.
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+43 +1
Developing nations to study ways to dim sunshine, slow warming
Scientists in developing nations plan to step up research into dimming sunshine to curb climate change, hoping to judge if a man-made chemical sunshade would be less risky than a harmful rise in global temperatures.
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+22 +1
Paris goal too little to avoid worst effects of climate change, scientists say
There is no escape from global warming. That's the conclusion of a series of pessimistic new studies released Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, where the world's top scientists determined that the threshold for catastrophic climate change is much lower than previously believed.
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+11 +1
Climate change will destroy us, says Fiji
Fiji's prime minister has said the Pacific island nation is in "a fight for survival" as climate change brings "almost constant" deadly cyclones. Frank Bainimarama said Fiji had entered a "frightening new era" of extreme weather that needed to be confronted. His comments came after Cyclone Josie caused deaths and flooding on Fiji's main island, Viti Levu, at the weekend. In 2016, a cyclone hit Fiji leaving 44 people dead and wiping out one-third of the nation's economic production.
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+24 +1
Greenland Is Melting Faster Than Any Time in the Last 400 Years
The Greenland ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in at least 400 years, new research suggests. And the melting is only speeding up. A study published this week in Geophysical Research Letters finds that melt rates in western Greenland have been accelerating for the last few decades. Melting is now nearly double what it was at the end of the 19th century, the research suggests. And the scientists say a significant increase in summertime temperatures—to the tune of about 1.2 degrees Celsius since the 1870s—is mainly to blame.
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+10 +1
A major oil company just agreed in court that humans cause climate change. It sets a new precedent.
Last week, a federal judge at the US District Court for the Northern District of California held a five-hour tutorial to lay the scientific foundation for two lawsuits against the five biggest oil companies in the world.
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+16 +1
World lost 87 per cent wetlands in 300 years
The world has lost 87 per cent of its wetlands in the past 300 years, says a study on land degradation released at the sixth plenary session of Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in Colombia on Monday (March 26).
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+37 +1
Hotting up: how climate change could swallow Louisiana's Tabasco island
With thousands of square miles of land already lost along the coast, Avery Island, home of the famed hot sauce, faces being marooned
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+17 +1
Media Release: Worsening Worldwide Land Degradation Now ‘Critical’, Undermining Well-Being of 3.2 Billion People
Worsening land degradation caused by human activities is undermining the well-being of two fifths of humanity, driving species extinctions and intensifying climate change. It is also a major contributor to mass human migration and increased conflict, according to the world’s first comprehensive evidence-based assessment of land degradation and restoration.
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+20 +1
Arctic sea ice hits second-lowest winter peak on record
Arctic sea ice has experienced its maximum extent for the year, reaching 14.48m square kilometers on 17 March – the second smallest in the 39-year satellite record.
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+20 +1
The Paris Climate Accords Are Looking More and More Like Fantasy
Remember Paris? It was not even two years ago that the celebrated climate accords were signed — defining two degrees of global warming as a must-meet target and rallying all the world’s nations to meet it — and the returns are already dispiritingly grim.
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+13 +1
Worst species decline since dinosaurs' extinction, says UN
Climate change will become a steadily bigger threat to biodiversity by 2050, adding to damage from pollution and forest clearance to make way for agriculture, according to more than 550 experts in a set of reports approved by 129 governments. “Biodiversity, the essential variety of life-forms on earth, continues to decline in every region of the world,” the authors wrote after talks in Colombia. “This alarming trend endangers the quality of life of people everywhere.”
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+20 +1
Marine heatwave set off 'carbon bomb' in world's largest seagrass meadow
A marine heatwave in Western Australia in 2010 set off a massive “carbon bomb”, damaging the world’s largest seagrass meadow, releasing millions of tonnes of carbon that had been collected for thousands of years below the surface. Although Australia doesn’t currently count carbon released from damaged seagrass meadows in its official greenhouse gas emissions, if it did, the results mean those figures might need to be revised upwards by more than 20%.
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+19 +1
Water shortages could affect 5bn people by 2050, UN report warns
More than 5 billion people could suffer water shortages by 2050 due to climate change, increased demand and polluted supplies, according to a UN report on the state of the world’s water. The comprehensive annual study warns of conflict and civilisational threats unless actions are taken to reduce the stress on rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands and reservoirs.
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+30 +1
The Case for a Carbon Tax on Beef
It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, deforestation, species loss and human mortality. So what’s the holdup?
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+11 +1
Billion-dollar polar engineering ‘needed to slow melting glaciers’
Scientists have outlined plans to build a series of mammoth engineering projects in Greenland and Antarctica to help slow down the disintegration of the planet’s main glaciers. The controversial proposals include underwater walls, artificial islands and huge pumping stations that would channel cold water into the bases of glaciers to stop them from melting and sliding into the sea. The researchers say the work – costing tens of billions of dollars a time – is urgently needed to prevent polar glaciers melting and raising sea levels.
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+13 +1
Extreme winter weather becoming more common as Arctic warms, study finds
The sort of severe winter weather that has rattled parts of the US and UK is becoming more common as the Arctic warms, with scientists finding a strong link between high temperatures near the pole and unusually heavy snowfall and frigid weather further south. A sharp increase in temperatures across the Arctic since the early 1990s has coincided with an uptick in abnormally cold snaps in winter, particularly in the eastern US, according to new research that analyzed temperature data from 1950 onwards.
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+23 +1
FEMA Drops 'Climate Change' From Its Strategic Plan
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal government's first responder to floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters, has eliminated references to climate change from its strategic planning document for the next four years. That document, released by FEMA on Thursday, outlines plans for building preparedness and reducing the complexity of the agency.
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