Tag Archives: global warming

The Washington Post reports: Ice is melting in unprecedented ways as summer approaches in the Arctic. In recent days, observations have revealed a record-challenging melt event over the Greenland ice sheet, while the extent of ice over the Arctic Ocean has never been this low in mid-June during the age of weather satellites. Greenland saw temperatures soar up to 40 …

The Washington Post reports: White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic” after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to the scientific consensus on climate change. The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the State Department’s Bureau …

NBC News reports: A sweeping report assessing the state of the natural world found that humans are having an “unprecedented” and devastating effect on global biodiversity, with about 1 million animal and plant species now threatened with extinction. A summary of the report’s findings was released Monday by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which was established …

CNN reports: Mount Everest expedition operators are finding increasing numbers of climbers’ dead bodies on the world’s highest peak as high temperatures melt glaciers and snow. More than 200 mountaineers have died on the peak since 1922, when the first climbers’ deaths on Everest were recorded. The majority of bodies are believed to have remained buried under glaciers or snow. …

The Guardian reports: In the first significant check on the Trump administration’s “energy-first” agenda, a federal judge has temporarily halted hundreds of drilling projects for failing to take climate change into account. The decision stems from an environmental lawsuit. WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Western Environmental Law Center sued the BLM in 2016 for failing to calculate …

The Guardian reports: Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, research has found. Winter temperatures at the north pole are likely to rise by at least 3C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and there could …

The Guardian reports: 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 …

Roll Call reports: Earth as we know it will look far different in a generation because of climate change and the future is bleak without bipartisan action by lawmakers to slow greenhouse gas emissions and overhaul the nation’s energy infrastructure, environmental experts told Congress on Wednesday. Wednesday marked the first time in six years the House Committee on Energy and …

A joint report from NOAA and NASA: Earth’s long-term warming trend continued in 2018 as persistent warmth across large swaths of land and ocean resulted in the globe’s fourth hottest year in NOAA’s 139-year climate record. The year ranks just behind 2016 (warmest), 2015 (second warmest) and 2017 (third warmest). In separate analyses of global temperatures, scientists from NASA, the …

The Guardian reports: At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people. Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along …

The Independent reports: Donald Trump has again appeared to fundamentally misunderstand climate change by suggesting extreme cold weather in the US is evidence global warming does not exist. It follows a number of recent tweets by the president expressing gleeful disregard for the scientific consensus that holds human carbon emissions responsible for recent global temperature increases. Earlier this month, Mr …

National Geographic reports: A new study warns that Greenland’s ice is melting faster than scientists previously thought. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that most of this ice loss is from the land-fast ice sheet itself, not Greenland’s glaciers. The new study, published January 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the largest sustained ice …

The Hill reports: A Pentagon report reveals that more than two-thirds of operationally critical military installations are threatened by the effects of climate change over the next 20 years, including repeated flooding and wildfires. The 22-page report released this week, titled the “Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense,” took a look at 79 “mission assurance priority …

Axios reports: The Environmental Protection Agency is set to announce Thursday it is weakening an Obama-era rule that had required costly technology capturing carbon dioxide emissions on new coal plants, according to multiple people familiar with the news. This is the latest regulatory rollback effort by President Trump in his attempt to revive America’s coal industry that’s declining in the …

Courthouse News reports: A new poll released Thursday shows that a majority of Americans, as well as almost two out of three Republicans, believe in the threat of climate change, a position at odds with President Donald Trump’s belief on the subject. The Monmouth University poll revealed that nearly 8 in 10 Americans more extreme weather patterns due to global …

CNN reports: Last Friday — 48 hours after Trump’s how-can-the-world’s-climate-be-changing-if-it’s-cold-in-half-the-country-on-one-day tweet — came the moved-up release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, a study involving 13 federal agencies and more than 300 leading climate scientists. If you missed the study’s release, well, that was the point. It was originally slated to be made public next month but was suddenly released …

The New York Times reports: A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American …

Axios reports: President Donald Trump touted his “natural instinct” for science, while claiming that the cause of global warming is in dispute, in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday. The transcript of this interview was released Wednesday. When asked about scientists’ views that climate change is nearing a point where it can’t be effectively reversed, as the UN …

The New York Times reports: A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.” The report, issued on Monday …

The Washington Post reports: Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century. A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with pre-industrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many …