More than 50 cm of hail fall on Sydney, Australia. A booming cold system which formed over the southwest slopes and the Blue Mountains hit Sydney, Australia with destructive winds and devastating hail on April 25, 2015. Seven factories collapsed under more than 50 cm (20 inches) of hail while roads turned into rivers. Power was cut to at least 700 homes and businesses, The Daily Telegraph reports. “I couldn’t believe it, it was like we were walking through snow,” NSW Fire and Rescue’s Supt Paul Johnstone said. “I’ve never seen so much hail fall in one location. The factories just collapsed under the weight of the hail. " Australia's State Emergency Service received more than 600 calls for assistance after 16:00 local time, and were expecting many more as wild winds and rain lashed the city.
Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Francois Geffroy said a there has been some very heavy rainfalls within 10-minute windows, which led to heavy localized flooding “A large portion of the metro was hit, with most the storms were out in the west and south. Dossier : agriculture et réchauffement climatique - NPA - Comité de l'Ariège. Le NPA a des idées sur l’agriculture, l’élevage et la pêche et… le réchauffement climatique. Agriculture et réchauffement climatique L’agriculture est à la fois victime et responsable du changement climatique. Mais les principales victimes ne sont pas les coupables et inversement. Du côté des victimes, parler d’agriculture c’est parler du travail et des moyens de subsistance des paysans et paysannes, c’est parler de sécurité et de souveraineté alimentaire pour l’immense majorité de la population.
La capacité de l’agriculture de lutter contre le échauffement climatique, par sa capacité de stockage du carbone n’a pas échappé aux capitalistes, qui voudraient bien pouvoir mettre un prix à ces puits de carbone, pour pouvoir en profiter comme ils l’ont fait avec le marché du carbone…. Il faut les combattre eux et leur « agriculture intelligente face au climat ». Menaces sur la sécurité alimentaire La pêche menacée, elle aussi ! L’élevage industriel est intimement lié à ce type d’agriculture.
Come on, people. We’re going to need a lot better than this if we want a strong Paris climate treaty. Will China and India offer up ambitious climate action plans this year? The fate of the Earth might be determined by the answer. Unless those large and fast-growing economies curb their emissions, we can’t avert catastrophic climate change. Their willingness to make serious commitments will be necessary to build enough momentum for an international deal at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris this December.
The success of Paris will not just be decided during the two-week negotiating marathon. That’s why President Obama has carefully crafted executive actions such as the Clean Power Plan to make sure the U.S. is on track to just barely meet its emissions-reduction pledge made at the last big U.N. climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009. But seriousness is in the eye of the beholder, and some say China hasn’t really committed to much. To understand the climate dilemma, it’s helpful to have a sense of how countries rank in terms of emissions. India is sending mixed signals. Stench of dead fish in Rio lake won't spoil Olympic Games, officials hope. Below the open arms of the statue of Christ the Redeemer, and not far from the upmarket neighbourhood of Ipanema, the Rodrigo de Freitas lake is usually a popular spot for Rio’s cyclists, joggers and coconut sellers.
But over the last few days the air around the lake has been pervaded by the stench of rotting fish. “The smell has been really unbearable,” said Teresa Rafaela Campos, 50, a resident of Jardim Botânico, one of the neighbourhoods next to the lake. “It makes you want to vomit.” Over the past week, 42.9 tonnes of dead fish have been retrieved from the lake that is due to host the rowing events for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Comlurb, the city’s waste management company, has dispatched a team of 62 refuse collectors to remove the fish from the Rodrigo de Freitas lake. According to Rio’s environmental secretariat, the fish were killed due to thermal shock.
It is not the first time the lake has been filled with dead fish. “The Olympics is going to be a big success,” she said. Fears Grow for Indigenous People in Path of Massive Ethiopian Dam. Africa, Biodiversity, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Editors' Choice, Energy, Environment, Featured, Food & Agriculture, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Inequity, IPS UN: Inside the Glasshouse, Poverty & MDGs, TerraViva United Nations Lake Turkana, believed to be four million years old, has been called “the Cradle of Mankind”.
The Kwegu people living around it are under threat from the massive Gibe III Dam project, one of Africa’s largest hydropower projects. Credit: CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - A United Nations mission is due to take place this month to assess the impact of Ethiopia’s massive Gilgel Gibe III hydroelectric power project on the Omo River which feeds Lake Turkana, the world’s largest desert lake, lying mostly in northwest Kenya with its northern tip extending into Ethiopia. The report of the visit by a delegation from the U.N. The Ethiopian government’s claims are highly contested, however. Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris. Un blitz pour le climat à Québec. La ville de Québec a été le théâtre d’un véritable tourbillon d’activités autour de la question des changements climatiques ces derniers jours.
Le tout a commencé samedi avec la « Marche Action Climat », l’une des plus importantes du genre au Canada, qui a regroupé plus de 25 000 personnes qui ont défilé pacifiquement et dans la joie pour terminer cette marche avec la formation d’un thermomètre géant illustrant l’augmentation des températures. Le message des marcheurs était simple : nous avons des attentes envers nos leaders dans la lutte aux changements climatiques et cela doit se faire par un virage important vers une économie sobre en carbone, et non par leur appui à des projets polluants comme celui du pipeline Énergie Est de TransCanada. Lundi, c’était le tour de la « Table ronde canadienne sur l’économie verte » organisée par SWITCH, l’Alliance pour une économie verte au Québec. Food, Farming and Climate Change: It’s Bigger than Everything Else. Record-breaking heat waves, long-term drought, “100-year floods” in consecutive years, and increasingly extreme superstorms are becoming the new normal.
The planet is now facing an unprecedented era of accelerating and intensifying global climate change, with negative impacts already being widely felt. While global climate change will impact nearly everyone and everything, the greatest impact is already being felt by farmers and anyone who eats food. When we think of climate change and global warming, visions of coal-fired power plants and solar panels come to mind. Policy discussions and personal action usually revolve around hybrid cars, energy-efficient homes and debates about the latest technological solutions. However, the global agriculture system is at the heart of both the problem and the solution. Industrial agriculture is a key driver in the generation of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Farms and farmers are in the crosshairs of climate change. For a Better World.
Permafrost may not be the ticking “carbon bomb” scientists once thought. This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The ‘carbon bomb’ stored in the thawing Arctic permafrost may be released in a slow leak as global warming takes hold, rather than an eruption, according to new research. Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found previous predictions of a catastrophic release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as permafrost thaws may have been overstated.
But the impact on the climate of future permafrost emissions remained significant. “The data from our team’s syntheses don’t support the permafrost carbon bomb view,” said A. “What our syntheses do show is that permafrost carbon is likely to be released in a gradual and prolonged manner, and that the rate of release through 2100 is likely to be of the same order as the current rate of tropical deforestation in terms of its effects on the carbon cycle.” “We are talking about a fraction, but not a tiny fraction. Beneath the tar sands is even dirtier oil, and industry is salivating over it. The price of crude oil has slumped to its lowest point in six years, and that has sent some major oil companies scrambling to get out of expensive tar-sands projects in Alberta, Canada. Shell has pulled out of one of its largest lease applications, and Petrochina is attempting to get rid of its tar-sands assets.
Environmentalists have watched the slowdown with great hope. Yet at the same time, some of those very same companies are positioning themselves to tap into an even more dirty and expensive kind of oil in Alberta: bitumen carbonates. The little-known bitumen carbonates are a far more difficult-to-mine, more unconventional form of the molasses-like bitumen that’s already being extracted from the tar sands.
Shell, Husky, tar-sands giant Suncor, and the dreaded Koch brothers have all snapped up leases in Alberta’s bitumen carbonates. Despite decades of attempts, though, no one has yet found a way to profitably mine them. In Wyoming, climate change is all too real. The scientists used satellite data to measure snow extent over time and found that snow is melting 16 ± 10 days earlier in the 2000s compared with 1972 to 1999.
This plot shows the amount of snow cover (vertical axis) over the day of year (horizontal). The red line is the average from 1972 to 1999, and the purple from 2000 to 2013. The purple line is lower, meaning that at the same time of year, there was less snow in the more recent measurements than there used to be. Snow is melting earlier. That has profound consequences; state agriculture depends on that melt water. Less snowpack on mountains west of the Continental Divide means less water for the western states, where there is a monumental drought. Some good news: Happily, the state legislature in Wyoming managed to reach a compromise that should allow teaching good climate science in their public schools (hopefully).
Another Life: Sea-level debate heats up as Greenland’s ice melts. Whenever I feel the need to know where the wind is coming from, it helps that our hillside house straddles the compass exactly, so that one corner of my workroom is definitely pointing west. This doesn’t, for some reason, help persuade me that looking out to sea past my computer takes me straight to Newfoundland, home to grandsons of emigrant Irish cod fishermen and the weather we would rather not share with there and Labrador. I must attend, nonetheless, to the news of a big patch of the North Atlantic, on the direct line between Ireland and Newfoundland, that is perversely cooling down while the rest of the world is warming up. The cold of its water has been even more abnormal than the recent icy winter of the US northeast. It seems, moreover, to offer disturbing confirmation that the flow of freshwater from melting Greenland ice is indeed slowing down what scientists call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or Amoc.
There are denialists. La plus grande extinction d'espèces de l'histoire causée par l'acidité - rts.ch - Sciences-Tech. En absorbant le dioxyde de carbone (CO2) de l'atmosphère, la composition des océans s'est modifiée pour devenir plus acide, ce qui a eu des conséquences catastrophiques sur la faune et la flore.
Plus de 90% des espèces animales marines et plus des deux-tiers des espèces terrestres ont alors disparu, ont expliqué ces scientifiques, dont l'étude est publiée jeudi dans la revue Science. Résultat "préoccupant" Ces résultats vont être utiles pour aider les scientifiques à comprendre la menace que représente pour la vie marine l'acidification actuelle des océans. Les résultats "sont préoccupants étant donné que nous pouvons déjà voir aujourd'hui une augmentation de l'acidité dans les océans résultant des émissions carboniques des activités humaines", a souligné un scientifique.
Les quantités de CO2 rejetées dans l'atmosphère il y a 252 millions d'années étaient probablement plus importantes que les réserves d'énergie fossiles d'aujourd'hui, ont noté les scientifiques. ats/fisf. Voici à quoi ressemblerait la Terre si toutes les glaces du globe fondaient. Plusieurs études le confirment : les banquises perdent du terrain d'année en année. Mais à quoi ressemblerait notre planète si toute la glace avait fondu ? Comme on peut s'en douter, les conséquences seraient pour certains désastreuses. La surface de la banquise n'a jamais été aussi réduite. C'est l'annonce inquiétante que vient de faire le National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Selon ses mesures, la superficie aurait en effet atteint en février 14,54 millions de kilomètres carrés, soit une donnée bien inférieure à la moyenne observée entre 1981 et 2010, estimée à 15,64 millions de km2.
Jusqu'ici, le précédent minimum remontait à 2011, lorsque la surface avait atteint 14,67 millions de km2. "Cela devrait être une nouvelle sonnette d'alarme", a commenté le WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) à l'annonce de ces résultats, pointant du doigt le changement climatique "qui ne s'arrêtera pas au cercle arctique".
Vous nous aimez déjà ? Another state bans agency from discussing climate change. This story is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The climate change language police just struck again. Last month, it was in Florida, where former staffers with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection alleged that senior officials, under the direction of Gov. Rick Scott (R), had instituted an unwritten ban on using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming.” Scott denied the claim. This week’s incident is much less ambiguous. In proposing and voting on the ban, the commission “spent 19 minutes and 29 seconds talking about talking about climate change,” according to Bloomberg: The move to ban an issue leaves staff at the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands in the unusual position of not being able to speak about how climate change might affect lands it oversees …The Midwest warmed about 1.5 F on average from 1895 to 2012.
Adamczyk was joined in voting for the ban by State Attorney General Brad Schimel (R), also newly elected. California’s snowpack is at a record low. April 1 is supposed to mark the high point of California’s snowpack. It’s when officials estimate how much water they’re going to see flowing into reservoirs as winter’s snow melts during the spring and summer. But after this hot, dry winter, there wasn’t much to measure, and the snowpack came in at a shocking 6 percent of normal — an all-time record low. The previous record for low snowpack was the 25 percent of normal recorded this time last year, as well as in another period of record drought, from 1976-1977.
California has been in the throes of a drought that is now in its fourth year, and that has been linked to climate change. “So we’re not only setting a new low, we’re completely obliterating the previous record,” David Rizzardo, the chief of snow surveys for California’s Department of Water Resources, said during a teleconference held by the water-focused nonprofit Circle of Blue. “So that’s one thing that’s kind of saving us a little bit,” Rizzardo said.
Thawing permafrost could be the worst climate threat you haven’t heard of. Tell Shell to take real action against climate change and not go to COP Paris! Want to fix the climate? First, we have to change everything. Amériques - À sec, la Californie impose des mesures d'économie d'eau. At least nine dead as fatal storms hit Germany and Austria - BBC News. Record breaking Maysak becomes a Super Typhoon, heading toward Philippines.