Climate change may spark next financial crisis, former Bank of England regulator says. Pathways to zero emissions : Nature Geoscience. To keep global warming below 2 °C, countries need long-term strategies for low-emission development. Without these, immediate emissions reductions may lock-in high-emitting infrastructure, hamper collaboration and make climate goals unachievable. Figures left right Read the full article Total GHG Emissions Excluding Land-Use Change and Forestry — 2012 (World Resources Institute, 2016); IPCC Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change (eds Edenhofer, O. et al.) Download references Affiliations Jeffrey Sachs, Guido Schmidt-Traub and Jim Williams are at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 1040, New York 10115, USA Jeffrey D.
Editors' pick. Humanity Just Ate Through Planet's Annual Resource Budget Faster Than Ever. The end of coal-fired growth in China | Brookings Institution. When will China reach its coal peak? Most analysts have predicted that China’s coal consumption will peak somewhere between 2020 and 2040. In an article recently published in Nature Geoscience, however, we argue that China’s economic growth has already decoupled from its coal consumption growth. China’s coal consumption grew from 1.36 billion tons per year in 2000 to 4.24 billion tons per year in 2013, an annual growth rate of 12 percent. As of 2015, the country accounts for approximately 50 percent of global demand for coal. In other words, China’s economic miracle was fueled primarily by coal. This tremendous coal combustion creates air pollution and carbon emissions that threaten China, its neighbors, and the rest of the world. However, China’s coal consumption decreased by 2.9 percent in 2014 and 3.6 percent in 2015, and the economy has maintained a moderate speed of growth.
Over the past 35 years, coal powered the engine of China’s rapidly developing economy. This GIF Shows How Close We Are To Blowing The World's Carbon Budget. A few years ago Massoud Hassani hit the design blogs with his tumbleweed mine detector, the Mine Kafon. A rolling ball of plastic and bamboo, the Kafon was intended partly as a template and partly as a provocation. Hassani, who grew up in Afghanistan near plenty of land mines, wanted to draw attention to the fact that 100 million mines are still in the ground, killing kids every day. And draw attention he did. The tumbleweed was a hit across the Internet and now resides in the New York MoMa. While that project was (mostly) artistic, Hassani sees more practical potential in his new mine-destroying drone project, which is now funding on Kickstarter.
The Mine Kafon Drone is meant to map mine sites, detect mines, and then blow them up, and Hassani hopes it could help clear up mines more efficiently. The drone works in three stages. Hassani hopes to cut the cost of de-mining and speed up the process. Have something to say about this article? Anthrax outbreak triggered by climate change sickens dozens in Arctic Circle | World news. A 12-year-old boy in the far north of Russia has died in an outbreak of anthrax that experts believe was triggered when unusually warm weather caused the release of the bacteria. The boy was one of 72 nomadic herders, including 41 children, hospitalised in the town of Salekhard in the Arctic Circle, after reindeer began dying en masse from anthrax. Five adults and two other children have been diagnosed with the disease, which is known as “Siberian plague” in Russian and was last seen in the region in 1941.
More than 2,300 reindeer have died, and at least 63 people have been evacuated from a quarantine area around the site of the outbreak. “We literally fought for the life of each person, but the infection showed its cunning,”the Yamal governor, Dmitry Kobylkin, told the Interfax news agency. “It returned after 75 years and took the life of a child.” The tabloid LifeNews reported that the boy’s grandmother died of anthrax at a nomad camp last week. Understanding Uncertainty: How to Improve Communication around Climate Change Evidence – Behavioral Science & Policy Association.