April 4, 2016 A 332-page report developed and issued today under the President’s Climate Action Plan details how climate change threatens human health and well-being in the United States. Water will become more contaminated, food more tainted, and the air dirtier. Already it affects more people in more ways than … Continue reading
Category Archives: Climate Change
Carbon Emissions 10 Times Faster Than Ever
March 28, 2016 A study in Nature Geoscience compared the ongoing anthropogenic increase in carbon emissions with previous similar episodes. The only known analogous event –the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM- happened 56 million years ago during the Cenozoic era, when the Earth’s average temperature shot up by about 5 … Continue reading
2015 Hottest Year -NOAA & NASA
January 20, 2016 Reports from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and NASA found that the globally averaged temperature, over land and ocean surfaces for 2015, was the highest since record keeping began in 1880, according to scientists. During the final month, the December combined global land and ocean average … Continue reading
Anthropogenic Heat In Oceans Doubles Since 1997
January 18, 2016 This image provided by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows Pacific and Atlantic meridional sections showing upper-ocean warming for the past six decades (1955-2011). Red colors indicate a warming (positive) anomaly and blue colors indicate a cooling (negative) anomaly. … Continue reading
Global Electricity Output May Drop Due To Climate Change
January 4, 2016 Climate change impacts on rivers and streams may substantially reduce electricity production capacity around the world. Particularly vulnerable are the United States, southern South America, southern Africa, central and southern Europe, Southeast Asia and southern Australia. A new study by the International Institute For Applied Systems Analysis in … Continue reading
COP21 And Nuclear War
January 3, 2016 The Doomsday Clock Last year, on January 22, 2015 to be precise, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the Doomsday Clock to 3 minutes before midnight, a metaphor to indicate how close our species is to extinction. Among other things, the scientists are (correctly) concerned with … Continue reading
COP21 And The Distribution Of Wealth
January 1, 2016 Background COP21 is a pragmatic face-saving agreement for politicians, nothing more. Essentially, signatory nations have agreed only to commit individually and severally to maximum annual carbon emissions. Reporting the results is mandatory, but unlike global lending institutions that routinely force helpless quasi-bankrupt governments into painful austerity programs … Continue reading
Making COP21 Work
December 15, 2015 President Obama and Secretary Kerry have made the case that developing nations account for 65% of carbon emissions, and that consequently even if industrialized countries were to stop using fossil fuels instantly, now, that would not bring global warming under control. Statistically they are correct, but that’s … Continue reading
Paris FCCC 2015 Final Agreement
December 12, 2015 The Paris conference is over, and member nations have unanimously adopted a resolution to keep global mean temperature within 1.5°C of that which existed before the industrial era and to help needy nations cope with the effects of global warming. Pundits are already criticizing it due to … Continue reading
Making Paris 2015 Successful
December 11, 2015 As at Copenhagen, the sticking point in Paris is money –who is going to pay how much so the entire world won’t look like Beijing during a red-alert smog storm. The real issue is not money per se but that the world’s powers are reluctant to simply … Continue reading