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| Unfriendly Climate |
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| Texas Tech’s Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most respected experts on global warming in the country. She’s also an evangelical Christian who is trying to connect with the very people who most doubt her research. Too bad the temperature keeps rising. |
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| Earth Engine creates a living map of forest loss |
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| In 2005, a Google engineer named Rebecca Moore got a notice about a logging plan near her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The mailing included a grainy black-and-white map that did nothing to show what was at stake with the plan. Dissatisfied, she decided to create a new map using details of the plan overlaid on the 3-D satellite imagery in Google Earth. Moore’s visualization illuminated what was really at stake: where exactly the 1,000 acres of logging would occur, the threats to water and old-growth redwoods, even the narrow mountain roads where logging trucks would be navigating blind curves near kids walking to school. |
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| If climate change were a song, what would it sound like? |
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| Climate change is an issue that can be hard for some to prioritize. It’s abstract. We can read the charts and the statistics—but is there a way to feel it? The Bay Area’s Climate Music Project at UC Berkeley wants to make the experience visceral. |
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| Global Warming Concern Steady Despite Some Partisan Shifts |
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| Partisan gaps across global-warming measures slightly wider than in 2017.
Gallup's annual survey about the environment, conducted March 1-8, found that Americans' opinions about global warming, like many other issues, have increasingly become politically polarized.
President Donald Trump, who has called global warming a "hoax," may have contributed to this widening divide by reversing a number of government actions to address the issue. These included the announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord, the removal of climate change from the list of top U.S. national security threats and the elimination of the terms "global warming" and "climate change" from U.S. government websites and lexicons.
Democrats view global warming seriously; Republicans view it skeptically
69% of Republicans, 4% Democrats say global warming is exaggerated |
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| Easter Island Is Eroding
Nicholas Casey, a New York Times correspondent based in Colombia, and Josh Haner, a Times photographer, traveled 2,200 miles |
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| HANGA ROA, Easter Island — The human bones lay baking in the sun. It wasn’t the first time Hetereki Huke had stumbled upon an open grave like this one.
For years, the swelling waves had broken open platform after platform containing ancient remains. Inside the tombs were old obsidian spearheads, pieces of cremated bone and, sometimes, parts of the haunting statues that have made this island famous. |
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| Running out of Time | Documentary on Holistic Management |
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| This in-depth documentary explores Allan Savory and how he has used Holistic Management to completely transform his land in Zimbabwe. Holistic Management was made popular in Savory's 2013 Ted Talk, How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change. This documentary was produced by Trevor Langham and his crew at Fig Multimedia Tech in Zimbabwe. We share this video in hopes that Trevor's amazing work will reach a wider audience to honor his memory. |
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| Part of the US is experiencing a megadrought of epic proportions, one study reports |
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| Southwestern North America is in the midst of "the driest 19-year span since the late 1500s and the second driest since [the year] 800," according to a new study in Science magazine. The area includes large areas of the western United States, extending from California, Arizona and New Mexico north to Oregon and Idaho, the Washington Post notes.
The researchers used hydrological modeling and new 1,200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to produce their findings. The study argues that global warming has "pushed what would have been a moderate drought in southwestern North America into megadrought territory."
The study of the ancient trees and their tree rings enabled the researchers to reconstruct what the climate looked like in the western U.S. in the past, according to Forbes magazine. With this method, the scientists were able to deduce the average soil moisture through time in a region then plot the soil moisture and compare historical megadroughts to current conditions.
"It seems to me that this is a very important study," said AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson. "It makes sense that there is now clearly a human footprint that is already starting to have an influence on these megadroughts by making them more extreme and potentially longer-lasting. The researchers clearly did their homework on this one." |
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| Little Ice Age lessons
The world’s last climate crisis demonstrates that surviving is possible if bold economic and social change is embraced |
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| Midway through the 17th century, Dutch whalers bound for the Arctic noticed that the climate was changing. For decades, they had waited for the retreat of sea ice in late spring, then pursued bowhead whales in bays off the Arctic Ocean islands of Jan Mayen and Spitsbergen. They had set up whaling stations and even towns in those bays, with ovens to boil blubber into oil. Europe’s growing population demanded oil for lighting and cooking, and for industrial purposes that included the manufacture of soap. Now, thick sea ice kept whalers from reaching their ovens even in mid-summer. Climate change, it seemed, had doomed their trade. |
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| Hurricanes Are Moving More Slowly, Which Means More Damage |
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| Hurricanes are moving more slowly over both land and water, and that's bad news for communities in their path.
In the past 70 years, tropical cyclones around the world have slowed down 10 percent, and in some regions of the world, the change has been even more significant, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. |
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| Can We Actually Stop Using Fossil Fuels? |
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| In July 2017, as Dawn Lippert surfed the swells at her home beach in Honolulu, a rogue board sprang up and slammed her between the eyes. It could have been a knockout blow. But Lippert, a former high school soccer champ who had taken up surfing when she arrived here a decade ago—fresh from Yale and working as an energy consultant to the state as it began to wean itself from fossil fuels—possesses a resilient athleticism. She managed to steady herself as the remorseful owner of the wayward board paddled her ashore. Once at the hospital, she received 12 stitches that snaked between her eyes and a parade of concerned nurses. Her fiancé, Brody, had explained that their wedding was a few weeks away. “Oh, honey,†one nurse clucked, “this is not going to be pretty.†As is her habit in the face of rough odds and bruising encounters, Lippert shrugged it off. “I was just grateful that it wasn’t my eye,†she recalls. It’s easy to draw conclusions about a person based on one anecdote. But Lippert is a true optimist. Which is a good thing, because as the world warms and humanity hurtles toward a catastrophe of its own making, she is part of an army of innovators who believe they can help the rest of us engineer our way out of global warming. Lippert is in Hawaii because the action is here. In 2015, the archipelago state became the first to Âlegally require that its utilities generate 100 percent of their electricity from Ârenewable sources. Deadline: 2045. Lippert is now backing dozens of companies to help the state achieve its radical goal. A Seattle native, Lippert is CEO of Elemental Excelerator. It is Âa nonprofit accelerator that finds, funds, and nurtures the inchoate technologies that, she hopes, can extinguish our fossil-fuel habit. She looks for innovators who have had a “Eureka!†moment, who have seen something the rest of us have overlooked. “If these technologies are successful,†she says, “they will affect a billion people. They will change the world.†|
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| How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades |
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| Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year, Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,†Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!â€
With new legislation, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020, Udall is attempting to marshal Washington into a confrontation with the plastics industry, and to force companies that profit from plastics to take accountability for the waste they create. Unveiled in February, the bill would ban many single-use plastics and force corporations to finance “end of life†programs to keep plastic out of the environment. “We’re going back to that principle,†the senator tells Rolling Stone. “The polluter pays.†|
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| Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis |
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| Research shows a trillion trees could be planted to capture huge amount of carbon dioxide.
Planting billions of trees across the world is one of the biggest and cheapest ways of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.
As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions from human activities that remain in the atmosphere today, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowingâ€. |
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| Your Call: Through the lens, climate change and conservation photography |
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| From declining sea ice in the Arctic to coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, photographers give us a visual sense of the human toll on the environment.
We are seeing major changes in the world’s landscapes. What do photographs reveal about the urgency of addressing climate change? And how are they motivating people to take action? |
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| Watching the Giant Sequoias Die |
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| Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Each week this summer I snapped pictures of giant sequoias. Each week I documented their sparse, browning needles. They were dying. I was trying to track it.
Giant sequoias are special; they are both incomprehensibly massive and ancient. Reaching upward of 250 feet tall and over 100 feet in circumference, sequoias are among the largest living things on Earth. They can live to be 3,000 years old, which means that some giant sequoias alive today were here when King Solomon ruled Israel, Zoroaster prophesied, and the Mayan civilization arose. Of course they weren’t actually there in ancient Israel, Persia, or Central America—because sequoias are also rare, found only in about 75 isolated groves on the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada. But statistics like those don’t even begin to convey what makes giant sequoias special. You have to be there, to feel just how small you are, to see the Sierra sunshine illuminate a sequoia’s cinnamon-red trunk, to really understand. In the summertime, I get to work among these trees. For the past 12 years, I’ve worked as a seasonal ranger in Yosemite National Park, leading visitors through the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, in the park’s south end, pointing out all the ways these trees are extraordinary. |
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| The global impacts of climate change & the consequences of inaction |
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| Your call radio - another great radio show by ROSE AGUILAR.
In 2006, Al Gore’s award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth started a national conversation about climate change. What’s been accomplished since then?
Seen around the world by millions of people it put Al Gore in the center of the movement for climate justice and won him a Nobel Prize.
Eleven years later, he’s out with An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. The sequel revisits the ongoing impacts of climate change, Donald Trump’s departure from the historic Paris agreement, and the growing renewables revolution. |
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| HURRICANES AND CLIMATE |
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| Although a theory of the climatology of tropical cyclone formation remains elusive,
high-resolution climate models can now simulate many aspects of tropical cyclone climate |
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| Atmosphere/vegetation feedbacks: A mechanism for abrupt climate
change over northern Africa |
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| Modeling studies and paleoclimate data of the mid-Holocene provide strong
evidence of abrupt climate change over northern Africa. Regional climate model
simulations are used to isolate and diagnose the role of interactions between vegetation
and the dynamics of the West African summer monsoon in generating abrupt climate
change. Simulations with both fixed and interactive vegetation distributions are included.
The modeled climate is largely insensitive to the latitude of the desert border when the
border is located south of 17.9
°
N. But when the desert border is located only 180 km north of
17.9
°
N, the climate is quite sensitive, with summer precipitation rates a factor of 5 greater
over the Sahara desert and an African easterly jet that is 50% weaker. Prescribing
vegetation north of the threshold latitude places moist soil beneath the thermal low,
increasing the low-level moist static energy and convective instability. The atmospheric
model is asynchronously coupled with a simple vegetation model that allows the
vegetation to respond to and influence climate. When the model is initialized with the
desert border at 10.0
°
N, the resulting equilibrium vegetation distribution is similar to
that of the present day. In contrast, when the model is initialized with the desert border
at 20.9
°
N, a new equilibrium vegetation distribution results in which the central Sahara
is vegetated. The existence of these two stable climate and vegetation states and the
threshold latitude indicates that interactions between vegetation (specifically through soil
moisture) and the atmosphere (through the African easterly jet) can produce abrupt
climate change |
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| New federal climate assessment for U.S. released |
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| A new federal report finds that climate change is affecting the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, and human health and welfare across the U.S. and its territories. |
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| New extreme heat wave hits Australia causing temperatures to soar |
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| (CNN) - Australians are sweltering in temperatures as much as 12 degrees Celsius (53 Fahrenheit) above average after another extreme heatwave swept across the country Monday, the second in under a month.
Temperatures rose above 40 C (104 F) at the weekend and the extreme weather is expected to last the week. Forecasts show all of Australia's eight states and territories are expected to be affected by the extended heatwave. |
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| Climate change news is a “ratings killer†|
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| This is hilarious, but true, especially when you look at the most recent Gallup Poll that shows many Americans just don’t treat climate change as an issue of interest anymore. Google trends confirms this too: |
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| Mortgage industry isn't ready for this kind of foreclosure crisis |
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| The threat to real estate from increasingly extreme weather brought on by climate change is clear, but the threat to the nation’s mortgage market is only beginning to come into focus.
In Hurricane Harvey’s federally declared disaster areas, 80 percent of the homes had no flood insurance, because they weren’t normally prone to flooding.
Serious mortgage delinquencies on damaged homes jumped more than 200 percent, according to CoreLogic. |
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| Climate change and redwoods |
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| Many studies suggest that redwoods and sequoias may also play an important part in mitigating climate change, according to Zierten. The trees have the ability to pull in and store dangerous carbon, keeping it from wreaking havoc on the climate. "Ancient redwood forests store at least three times more carbon above ground than any other forests on Earth," according to a Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative study. |
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| Taking on the climate change denial industry
By ROSE AGUILAR & MALIHE RAZAZAN |
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| On the October 24th edition of Your Call, we’ll have a conversation with Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann about his new book The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.
In the debate over climate change, he says pseudoscience or anti science is too often allowed to masquerade as science and denialism is allowed to pose as skepticism. Why aren’t the media doing more to report on the truth? |
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| California Requires New City Buses to Be Electric by 2029 |
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| California on Friday became the first state to mandate a full shift to electric buses on public transit routes, flexing its muscle as the nation’s leading environmental regulator and bringing battery-powered, heavy-duty vehicles a step closer to the mainstream. |
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| A new way to fix the planet |
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| Preparation is everything
Before any trees go in the ground, the Land Life Technology and Ecology team assesses the land and the ecological situation extensively.
By talking to local land owners, analyzing satellite and drone images and compiling climatic and soil sample data we can understand how this area has become degraded and plan the optimum approach to restore the ecosystem. Reforesting at scale
Land Life’s mission is to reforest the world’s degraded land at scale, bringing back nature where it cannot come back unaided. We have developed technologies that allow us to reforest hundreds of hectares in a single planting session, with GPS-led drills and automated planting systems to drive speed and efficiency in the field. Although automation plays an increasingly important role in our large-scale operations, local crews are indispensable to a project’s success. That’s why we train local crews in the high-tech planting process and always have Land Life Project Managers on site to ensure high impact outcomes. |
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| Redwoods and Climate Change |
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| QUEST follows a group of UC Berkeley scientists to the top of a 320-foot redwood in Mendocino County. Only 5 percent of these ancient redwoods survived our voracious desire for their hardy and plentiful wood. Now scientists are trying to predict how the remaining ones and their descendants might fare in the face of climate change in the decades to come. |
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| Want To Understand Carbon Credits? Read This |
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| You know from my first article in this series that forestry and land-use innovations represent a uniquely efficient way to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide. After reading through my second article in this series, you know about compliance and voluntary carbon offset markets and the basic mechanics of cap-and-trade.
By the time you finish this article, you will understand how carbon offset credits (a/k/a “carbon offsetsâ€, “carbon creditsâ€) work and see examples of how credits are generated in both the compliance and voluntary markets. Along the way, you’ll learn about some of the innovative business opportunities in this emerging field — a field that has the mother of all tailwinds supporting future demand. |
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