Latest data shows steep rises in CO2 for seventh year. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by the second highest annual rise in the past six decades, according to new data.
Atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas were 414.8 parts per million in May, which was 3.5ppm higher than the same time last year, according to readings from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, where carbon dioxide has been monitored continuously since 1958. Scientists have warned for more than a decade that concentrations of more than 450ppm risk triggering extreme weather events and temperature rises as high as 2C, beyond which the effects of global heating are likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.
Why the Guardian is putting global CO2 levels in the weather forecast. The simplest measure of how the mass burning of fossil fuels is disrupting the stable climate in which human civilisation developed is the number of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere.
Today, the CO2 level is the highest it has been for several million years. Back then, temperatures were 3-4C hotter, sea level was 15-20 metres higher and trees grew at the south pole. Worse, billions of tonnes of carbon pollution continues to pour into the air every year and at a rate 10 times faster than for 66m years. A BBC Earth Compilation That Shows the Magnificent Beauty of Different Owls at Various Stages of Life. Deep Adaptation and the Science of Climate Change. Two years ago, an influential paper suggested that we were too late to save the world.
This paper helped rewrite the direction of British universities, played a major role in reshaping the missions of climate organizations and religious institutions, had a significant impact on British activism and has been translated into at least nine languages. An Island On the Brink of Collapse Makes a Huge Comeback. In India, there's water everywhere, and nowhere. Grassland Restoration: A Win-Win-Win for Birds, Prairies, and Landowners. Since 1970, North America's grassland birds have lost about half of their population, with an astounding three out of four species declining.
Venice Flooding Reveals A Real Hoax About Climate Change - Framing It As “Either/Or” The flooding in Venice this past week was extraordinary.
According to my Forbes colleague Eric Mack, “On Tuesday, rains helped bring the seasonal high tides known as acqua alta to near record levels, just seven centimeters short of what was seen during the historic floods of 1966.” The mayor blamed climate change as did many other people around the world. That is when the hyperventilation started. Broccoli Is Dying. Corn Is Toxic. Long Live Microbiomes! Editor’s Note (9/3/2019): This post has been substantially rewritten to change or eliminate claims and sourcing that did not meet Scientific American’s editorial standards.
The revised post can be found here. As food writer Mark Bittman recently remarked, since food is defined as “a substance that provides nutrition and promotes growth” and poison is “a substance that promotes illness,” then “much of what is produced by industrial agriculture is, quite literally, not food but poison.” 'We Can't Trust the Permafrost Anymore': Doomsday Vault at Risk in Norway.
Signs we're experiencing a 6th mass extinction. WATERLICHT: An Immersive Light Installation Conveys the Power and Poetry of Water. How Humans Could Halt Climate Change By 2050 : Goats and Soda : NPR. The Italian Farmer Returning Chickens to the Wild. A Visual Guide to the Creatures That Could Disappear From Each U.S. State. Climate change increases potential for conflict and violence - News Service - Iowa State University.
AMES, Iowa – Images of extensive flooding or fire-ravaged communities help us see how climate change is accelerating the severity of natural disasters.
The devastation is obvious, but what is not as clear is the indirect effect of these disasters, or more generally of rapid climate change, on violence and aggression. That is what Craig Anderson sees. The Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of psychology and Andreas Miles-Novelo, an ISU graduate student and lead author, identified three ways climate change will increase the likelihood of violence, based on established models of aggression and violence.
Their research is published in the journal Current Climate Change Reports. Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'. The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study.
But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. Greta Thunberg: The disarming case to act right now on climate change. Greenland's ice melting rate reaching 'tipping point' Climate change is causing Greenland ice masses to melt faster, losing four times more ice since 2003, a new study says.
According to research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the ice loss in 2012 - more than 400 billion tonnes - reached nearly four times the rate in 2003. The largest sustained ice loss came from southwest Greenland, a region previously not seen as a crucial actor in rising sea levels as it is mostly devoid of large glaciers. "We knew we had one big problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet glaciers," said Michael Bevis, the study's lead author and a professor of geodynamics at Ohio State University.
"Now we recognise a second serious problem: increasingly large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea," he said. If all of Greenland's vast ice sheet was to melt, global sea levels would rise by seven metres. How Bill Gates-backed vegan Beyond Meat is winning over meat-eaters. Whatever your burger pleasure, targeting meat-eaters is a smart move — there are way more of them than there are vegans and vegetarians.
Only 5 percent of Americans identify as vegetarian and 3 percent vegan, according to a 2017 Gallup poll. Those numbers haven't changed much in the last decade or so. Brown says the company found that 93 percent of the consumers in conventional grocery stores that are buying a Beyond Meat product are also putting animal meat their basket. "So they're buying not only plant based meat, but they're buying animal meat and that's a really important breakthrough for us," Brown tells CNBC Make It.
Swiss Businessman is Contributing $1 Billion Towards Protecting 30% of the Planet. A Swiss businessman is taking it upon himself to ensure the planet’s survival by contributing $1 billion to an astonishing international conservation effort. In a recent op-ed that he published through the New York Times, Hansjörg Wyss announced that he will be using the money to launch the Wyss Campaign for Nature: an ambitious collaborative mission to protect 30% of the world’s surface by 2030. The money will be distributed through his foundation over the course of the next decade in partnership with the National Geographic Society, the Nature Conservancy, and Argentinian environmental group Fundacion Flora y Fauna.
“This money will support locally led conservation efforts around the world, push for increased global targets for land and ocean protection, seek to raise public awareness about the importance of this effort, and fund scientific studies to identify the best strategies to reach our target,” wrote Wyss. Capitalism is killing the world's wildlife populations, not 'humanity' The latest Living Planet report from the WWF makes for grim reading: a 60% decline in wild animal populations since 1970, collapsing ecosystems, and a distinct possibility that the human species will not be far behind. The report repeatedly stresses that humanity’s consumption is to blame for this mass extinction, and journalists have been quick to amplify the message.
The Guardian headline reads “Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations”, while the BBC runs with “Mass wildlife loss caused by human consumption”. No wonder: in the 148-page report, the word “humanity” appears 14 times, and “consumption” an impressive 54 times. There is one word, however, that fails to make a single appearance: capitalism. The unseen driver behind the migrant caravan: climate change. Thousands of Central American migrants trudging through Mexico towards the US have regularly been described as either fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty.
But another crucial driving factor behind the migrant caravan has been harder to grasp: climate change. Most members of the migrant caravans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – three countries devastated by violence, organised crime and systemic corruption, the roots of which can be traced back to the region’s cold war conflicts. Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems including crop failures and poverty. And they warn that in the coming decades, it is likely to push millions more people north towards the US. Earth's Water Cycle. 'We have a duty to act': hundreds ready to go to jail over climate crisis. A new group of “concerned citizens” is planning a campaign of mass civil disobedience starting next month and promises it has hundreds of people – from teenagers to pensioners – ready to get arrested in an effort to draw attention to the unfolding climate emergency.
The group, called Extinction Rebellion, is today backed by almost 100 senior academics from across the UK, including the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Tesla big battery defies skeptics, sends industry bananas over performance. It’s now been just over 18 months since those famous “billionaire tweets” – between Australian software pioneer Michael Cannon-Brookes and Tesla founder Elon Musk – set in motion a process that would see South Australia install the largest lithium-ion battery in the world. The Tesla big battery, officially known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve (it is located next to the 317MW Hornsdale wind farm) has defied skeptics, and even the experts, in almost every conceivable way. They said it couldn’t be done. The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan in New Zealand.
Black robin. Corals, blueberry bushes and polar bears: Signs of global warming are all around. Human race just 0.01% of all life but has destroyed over 80% of wild mammals – study. Nearly 200 Horses Found Dead Amid Southwest Drought In Arizona. World’s great forests could lose half of all wildlife as planet warms – report.
The world’s greatest forests could lose more than half of their plant species by the end of the century unless nations ramp up efforts to tackle climate change, according to a new report on the impacts of global warming on biodiversity hotspots. Mammals, amphibians, reptiles and birds are also likely to disappear on a catastrophic scale in the Amazon and other naturally rich ecosysterms in Africa, Asia, North America and Australia if temperatures rise by more than 1.5C, concludes the study by WWF, the University of East Anglia and the James Cook University. Climate change will displace millions. Wildfires tearing across Southern California have forced thousands of residents to evacuate from their homes.
We're climate researchers and our work was turned into fake news. Science is slow. It rests on painstaking research with accumulating evidence. This makes for an inherently uneasy relationship with the modern media age, especially once issues are politicised. The interaction between politics and media can be toxic for science, and climate change is a prominent example. Take the recent “deep freeze” along the US east coast. To scientists, it was one more piece of a larger jigsaw of climate change disrupting weather systems and circulation patterns. Call climate change what it is: violence. If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part.
You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. US is running an ecological deficit - Report. Nature Is Speaking – Julia Roberts is Mother Nature. More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas.
Guess What's Showing Up In Our Shellfish? One Word: Plastics. Sixth extinction: The era of 'biological annihilation' Complete wipeout: Just two penguin chicks survive from a colony of 40,000. Pangolin is the only known mammal covered in scales. Biodiversity loss may cause increase in allergies and asthma. 5 Animals that are at Risk of Extinction Because of Climate Change that Aren't Polar Bears. How Our Vegetables Became Less Nutritious than Our Parents' NYC subway exposes commuters to noise as loud as a jet engine. Human Population Through Time.
Eating out increases levels of phthalates in the body, study finds. Houston We Have a Problem, No Known Technology to Deal with Fukushima « Cutting the Gordian Knot. BBC NATURAL WORLD - LIGHTS on EARTH With David Attenborough. Coral Reefs 101.