More than a year after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down economies around the world and sharply reduced worldwide travel—sparking speculation among some that emissions would plummet as a result—a coalition of scientists said in a paper published Wednesday that the planet is nonetheless reaching multiple “tipping points,” with levels of sea ice melt, deforestation, and other markers revealing that urgent action is[Read More…]

Climate modelling isn’t the only way of forecasting what our climate-changed world will look like by the century’s end and beyond. Indeed, the huge complexities and caveats involved in trying to build an accurate picture of a carbon-soaked planet from initial tenets, may not even make it the best. Instead, we can look back in time to periods in Earth’s 4.6[Read More…]

Cyprus. Cuba. Turkey. Canada. Northern Ireland. Antarctica. All recorded their hottest-ever temperatures in the last two years, and according to a new study, more such extremes are coming. A Reuters report said: In the next three decades, “record-shattering” heat waves could become two to seven times more frequent in the world than in the last 30 years, scientists report in[Read More…]

 “Cloud research is a tricky business. Clouds sometimes have a warming effect on the local climate and sometimes a cooling effect — it all depends on the type of cloud, the local climate and a variety of other conditions. “One of the most fundamental questions about climate change is also one of the thorniest: How much, exactly, will the Earth[Read More…]

Less than three months before leaving office, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has openly conceded that the industrial world has failed to adequately fight climate change and that more rapid, pain-inducing steps were urgently needed. Media reports said: Merkel, who has led Europe’s largest economy and one of the world’s leading emitters of CO2 for the last 16 years, reflected on her own bitter experience.[Read More…]

Apocalypse is complete destruction of the world as described in some detail in the biblical book of Revelation. Nothing worse can happen to humanity. Interestingly, it has been a recurring aspect of civilization for over two thousand years but every prediction of “End Times” has failed. Yet, modern day society is proving that apocalypse has multiple possible outcomes. In fact,[Read More…]

In San Francisco, we’re finally starting to put away our masks. With 74% of the city’s residents over 12 fully vaccinated, for the first time in more than a year we’re enjoying walking, shopping, and eating out, our faces naked. So I was startled when my partner reminded me that we need to buy masks again very soon — N95 masks, that is. The California[Read More…]

It is well established that global warming (GW) is driving climate change (CC). Thinkers believe that in coming years, GW-CC will adversely affect societies and nations on a global scale like nothing before. Important among the IPCC-predicted long-term effects of GW-CC, as applicable to India, are: (1) Rise in sea level due to polar ice-melt, leading to coastal erosion or[Read More…]

Our planet hasn’t seen temperatures this hot in fifteen million years, when the sea level was forty meters higher than it is today. This is just the opening salvo. As the American west is gripped by potentially the worst drought since algebra was invented 1,200 years ago and temperature records are once again shattered on a weekly basis, we are entering into unknown[Read More…]

The record-breaking heat and intensifying drought engulfing the western U.S. right now are a stark reminder of how climate change is loading the weather dice against us. It’s making heatwaves hotter and longer, and droughts stronger. Yet, what we see today is just a fraction of what’s anticipated unless serious and immediate actions are taken to reduce carbon emissions. Last week,[Read More…]

The news does not get much worse than a recent scientific report that the planet is trapping twice as much heat as it did only 14 years ago. If this one report does not turn heads and create a sense of panic to get off fossil fuels, as soon as yesterday, then nothing will ever move the needle to fix[Read More…]

Hunger, disease and drought will afflict tens of millions of more people within decades, warns a draft UN assessment that lays bare the dire human health consequences of a warming planet. “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” the report says. “Humans cannot.” The forthcoming 4,000-page draft report[Read More…]

New data released Monday showed atmospheric carbon dioxide reached a monthly average level of 419 parts per million in May, which is not only the maximum reading ever recorded since accurate measurements began 63 years ago but also the highest level the planet has experienced in over four million years. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and[Read More…]

The International Energy Agency (IEA), a Paris-based affiliate of the Organisation for Economic Co-ordination and Development (OECD), has released a special report outlining various pathways to ensure a world with a net zero carbon emissions rate by 2050. The report, which is titled Net Zero by 2050, states that in order to achieve a carbon neutral world by that year producers[Read More…]

“Net Zero by 2050” is the rallying cry of scientists and policymakers throughout the world. However, that epithet echoes past decades of climate change/global warming mitigation plans, one after another, all failures. The world’s continuing failure to come to grips with the dilemma led three notable climate scientists, deeply involved at the highest levels, to publicly ridicule past and future[Read More…]

Our Planet, Our Future is the title of the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit. As a follow up to that summit, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published Our Planet, Our Future: An Urgent Call for Action d/d April 29th 2021. The opening paragraph of the Nobel Laureate declaration implicitly calls for immediate unified worldwide action: “The first[Read More…]

The recent pledges made by governments to limit carbon emissions will not be sufficient to meet the goal of keeping global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, claims a new report. Instead, those nonbinding commitments will result in a rise in the average global temperature to a potentially catastrophic 2.4 degrees Celsius. The Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent[Read More…]

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed new standards on Tuesday, May 4, 2021 for what an average or “normal” U.S. climate looks like, showing average temperatures in the U.S. rising significantly. Shifting the baseline for normal temperatures highlights just how quickly climate crisis is affecting conditions on Earth. Updating these standards is important for helping shape government[Read More…]

It is becoming increasingly clear that the most powerful and influential forces in the world are increasingly building a consensus around an approach to checking climate change which is centered on basically retaining the existing economic systems with all their distortions and inequalities. In particular excessive consumerism( based of course on excessive energy generation) of a significant section of the[Read More…]

Covering Climate Now, CCNow, is a consortium of publications and journalists dedicated to better climate journalism; I’m a climate activist not a climate journalist but I subscribe to the CCNow newsletter as a good source of climate news as well as an insight to the world of climate journalism. In the April 21st edition I found a link to ‘what[Read More…]

 Written by Aoife Daly, Pernilla Leviner and Rebecca Thorburn Stern Even before Greta Thunberg launched her school strike for climate when she was 15-year-old, youth activists have been key players in public action on the climate crisis. Now they are breaking new ground in court. On November 30, 2020, six Portuguese children and young people brought a historic court case[Read More…]

A climate summit is going to begin. Ahead of the summit, the World Meteorological Organization released a report on April 19, 2021, which has warned: Time is fast running out. The report – State of the Global Climate 2020 – finds that concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) continued to climb in 2020, despite lockdowns imposed to slow the present pandemic.[Read More…]

Honourable Prime Minister of Bangladesh Madam Shaikh Hasina, Honourable Prime Minister of Bhutan Dr Lotay Tshering, Honourable Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi,   We, the South Asian People’s Action on Climate Crisis (SAPACC), a rainbow coalition of climate, ecology and rights groups from across South Asia, welcome the fact that you will be participating in the “Virtual Summit[Read More…]

The 21st century serves as an inflection point of acceleration of climate instability caused by human-generated greenhouse gases, as CO2 emissions increase well beyond the rate of the prior century. It’s also a defining timeline of an astonishing ice mass loss rate of 500% more than the last decade of the previous century. Throughout human history, this has never happened[Read More…]

This is an important year for climate change negotiations and climate change diplomacy is picking up fast, with an important virtual meeting called by US President of several world leaders scheduled for April 22. What is absolutely clear is that  climate change mitigation and adaptation are among the most important challenges before humanity, and all countries, all people should try[Read More…]

A new study projecting the amount of heat stress residents of the South Asia region will experience in the future finds with 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the population’s exposure to heat stress will nearly triple. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will likely reduce that impact by half, but deadly heat stress will become commonplace across South Asia, according[Read More…]

Here’s one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures there — global coronavirus cases and deaths, U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths. And I do so the way that, not so long ago, I would have opened the sports pages and checked out the latest scores of[Read More…]

“(T)he most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”   David Foster Wallace Bill Gates has both a new book and education campaign on mitigating climate change. Mr. Gates personifies successful, transforming innovation. His book is just coming out now but he has been following the evolution of our climate problem[Read More…]

A recent UN Assessment, as of February 26th 2021, regarding progress or lack thereof by the 195 nations to the Paris 2015 climate agreement is starting to look like a big bust. As described in the report, nations are not meeting their voluntary commitments to decrease carbon emissions, especially based upon the Paris ‘15 goals to decelerate CO2 emissions of[Read More…]

Warnings by leading climate scientists regarding the high sensitivity of the atmosphere in response to abrupt compositional changes, such as near-doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations, are now manifest: According to Wallace Broecker, (the “father” of climate science) “The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts to even small[Read More…]

It is very sad that many reports of repression of climate activists are being received from several parts of world at such an early stage of climate activism. Even a very quick net search would reveal several recent instances from Brazil, Chile, Kenya, India , Russia and other countries. These are reports where climate activism is directly mentioned. But if[Read More…]

AN OVER-HEATED PLANET, UNCONTROLLED HUMAN POPULATION & COVID-19 A triad of intersecting world-wide pandemics simultaneously threatening humanity today are the end results of its own insatiable greedy human desire for endless, unchecked growth. Ugly, profit-based, commercial development, unimaginative high-rise towers or mega-social housing projects continue to destroy everything in their wake in an impossible attempt to try to accommodate the[Read More…]

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and comprehensive summaries of the peer-reviewed literature raise questions regarding the assumptions inherent in computer modelling of future climate changes, including the supposed linearity of future global temperature trends (Figure 1). Computer modelling does not necessarily capture the sensitivity, complexity and feedbacks of the atmosphere-ocean-land system as observed from paleoclimate studies. Underlying published[Read More…]

Last year will be remembered for many things, and let’s be honest: most of them will be bad. But amidst the hardship and suffering, there is a positive story to be told. 2020 was perhaps the first time in living memory when governments around the world took radical action to put the interests of public health and wellbeing above that[Read More…]

The world’s ice is melting so fast that sea level rise predictions cannot keep up. The ice melting is faster today than in the mid-1990s, new research suggests, as climate crisis nudges global temperatures ever higher. In the 1990s, the Earth’s ice was melting at a rate of about 760 billion tons per year. That has surged 60 percent to[Read More…]

Throughout the world, scientists are speaking out like never before. They’re talking about an emergency situation of the health of the planet threatening “complex life,” including, by default, human life. It’s scary stuff. On this subject, America’s green NGOs prefer to address the danger by sticking to a middle ground, don’t scare people, too much doom and gloom backfires, turns[Read More…]

Early this new year, the Alliance of World Scientists (13,700 strong) delivered a biting report, not mincing words: “Scientists now find that catastrophic climate change could render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable consequent to continued high emissions, self-reinforcing climate feedback loops and looming tipping points.” (Source: William J. Ripple, et al, The Climate Emergency: 2020 in Review, Scientific[Read More…]

Climate change has emerged as one of the most critical problems of our times. Its disrupting impacts on farming and related activities is already being felt by farmers, pastorals and others in the form of highly erratic weather, extremes of weather and rise in the intensity and frequency of various disasters. Hence two big questions arise—How can farmers make an[Read More…]

Climate change is a global issue but we should not forget that the impacts of climate change are highly localized. Most policies around water and irrigation issues are poorly informed by science and evidence, often leading to implementation failure. More importantly, these programs focus on getting things out, but the real challenge is in getting things to the right people[Read More…]

Global warming is the biggest challenge of all time. It impacts every living species. However, the inherent dangers are very difficult to comprehend, as such, people brush it off as one more issue in life that will somehow be handled, fixed, no worries, human ingenuity will prevail. But, what if it’s not that simple? Stuart Scott, executive producer of Facing[Read More…]

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein. As the world is trying to hopefully recover from the tragic effects of COVID-19, it is reminded there is no vaccine for the existential threat for its life support systems posed by global warming, nor for the looming threats of future wars and[Read More…]

Although sea levels are rising due to the climate crisis and threatening near-coastal infrastructures, higher temperatures in other areas are having exactly the opposite effect. The water levels are falling and causing massive problems. The consequences are equally serious. But the declining water levels are receiving less attention according to Matthias Prange, Thomas Wilke of the Justus Liebig University in[Read More…]

“Climate change is posing one of the greatest threats to our existence on the planet Earth. It is real, and we need to panic.” It has already been five years since 196 countries signed Paris Agreement, but we are still miles away from the target of limiting global warming to well below 2 (preferably 1.5) degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial[Read More…]

Ed Yong is a very insightful science journalist. In an article published in The Atlantic in September Yong lists what he calls nine errors of intuition, conceptual errors that still hamstring the US pandemic response. Remarkably many of Yong’s errors of intuition offer valuable insight into the global failure to enact effective climate mitigation. The successful and not very successful[Read More…]

Climate change truly is a global phenomenon whose ripple effects remain invisible to even the most well-read and educated. Part of the challenge is in understanding how an activity as simple as burning coal to generate electricity in India can have ramifications for the icecaps and glaciers in the Arctic. The human mind simply cannot fathom these far-reaching implications. We[Read More…]

The United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) emissions gap report – Emissions Gap Report 2020 – released on December 9 warns: Despite a brief dip in carbon dioxide emissions caused by the pandemic, the world is still heading for a temperature rise of 3.2°C this century. The report published at the end of every year measures national commitments to reduce emissions[Read More…]

“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round…” John Lennon “Regain a sense of wonderous awe at the miracle of creation and work tirelessly to protect and restore nature’s splendor.” Dr. Glen Barry Look out the window, any window, and behold portends of the end of being. The very ecological fabric of being is unraveling. Disease, famine,[Read More…]

Climate Change: National Geographic defines climate change as “the long-term alteration of temperature and typical weather patterns”. The major cause of climate change is accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in Earth’s atmosphere. Human activity like burning of fossil fuels can be attributed to the recent increase in GHG emissions. There have been many international efforts for a coordinated response to[Read More…]

Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion/XR recently interviewed Peter Carter, M.D., who has the distinguished title – Expert IPCC Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The interview was conducted to get to the bottom of what science says about the state of affairs, specifically the health of the planet. The following is a video link to that brilliant[Read More…]

In what critics are calling a parting gift to the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration on Tuesday will ask oil and gas companies to choose which areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska—which is the sacred homeland of the Gwich’in Indigenous people—they would like to drill. The Washington Post reports the administration’s call for nominations is a key part of a rush[Read More…]

Scientists and science-informed activists say  that to save the Planet there must be rapid cessation of fossil fuel exploitation, but oil, coal and gas use continue to rise. America and its lackeys  Australia and Canada are variously committed to gas and a disastrous coal to gas transition (gas can be dirtier than coal greenhouse gas-wise). Pro-fossil fuels Trump has been[Read More…]

Mammals, birds and amphibians worldwide have lost on average 18% of their natural habitat range as a result of changes in land use and climate change, finds a new study. The scientists estimate that species have lost an average of 18% of their natural habitat range sizes thus far, and may lose up to 23% by 2100. The study (Robert[Read More…]

I would regard anyone as my leader a) whom I have met personally, b) with whom I work or interact directly face to face on a more or less daily basis c) has proved themselves friendly, kind, sympathetic, compassionate and giving. I only trust someone who demonstrates behaviour in accordance with the positive human virtues and eschews negative actions. They[Read More…]

Our Homo sapiens reality is that global warming, if it continues at the current rate, could trigger a sixth planetary extinction. Unlike past extinctions, this one will not be brought on by a random meteorite/asteroid strike or a convulsive planetary volcanic eruption. It will be self-inflicted; the result of Biosphere degradation because of our use of fossil fuels. CO2 in[Read More…]

Two time scales The central problem which the world faces in its attempts to avoid catastrophic climate change is a contrast of time scales. In order to save human civilization and the biosphere from the most catastrophic effects of climate change we need to act immediately, Fossil fuels must be left in the ground. Forests must be saved from destruction[Read More…]

Global warming is ravaging forests throughout the world. “New studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today.” (Source: We Need to Hear These Poor Trees Scream: Unchecked Global Warming Means Big Trouble for Forests, Inside Climate News, April 25, 2020) According to Bill Anderegg, a forest researcher at the University of Utah: “Global[Read More…]

In December of 2019, my best friend Kit took me and my partner to the place where she grew up, in the remote Thora Valley, in the pristine forested foothills of Eastern Australia’s Great Dividing Range. As we drove down Darkwood, the single road into the Thora, Kit told us stories of floods and mouldy houses, of Christmases spent at[Read More…]

Here are two comments regarding what we must do regarding the threat to our species’ continued existence being posed currently by global warming; here’s the first one: The primary reason for this headlong fling toward disaster is that our economic system is based on perpetual growth—on the need to consume the earth at an ever-increasing rate. Our world is dominated[Read More…]

The World Wildlife Foundation, in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London, recently issued an eye-popping description of the forces of humanity versus life in nature, the Living Planet Report 2020, but the report should really be entitled the Dying Planet Report 2020 because that’s what’s happening in the real world. Not much remains alive. The report, released September 10th, describes how[Read More…]

In my “Changing Our Species Name” I question Homo sapiens as an appropriate name for our species, and suggest an alternative that I believe to be more appropriate.  The reason that I give in that paper is not the only reason, however, for changing our species name; in this paper I suggest another reason. Let me preface my remarks here,[Read More…]

Human calamities abound. The unrelenting coronavirus pandemic has already claimed more than 900,000 lives worldwide. The images of exploding wildfires from the American Southwest—California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—look apocalyptic. Racial injustice and inequity in the United States marches on. And, the economic suffering?—painful. In this moment of so much death and suffering—do we even have the capacity to extend our[Read More…]

In my new book I examine an area of our thought process that is the primary cause of our extinction possibility today; the dark neurotic psychotic side of the human brain. XXXX That “dark side” is driven by a self-serving dynamic. We allow it to enrapture us. It can turn us against each other. We have been and continue to[Read More…]

Countries in the Asia Pacific region are in the forefront of bearing the onslaught of climate change. During the last three decades 45% of the world’s natural disasters have occurred in this region, which is vulnerable to floods, cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, storms and tsunamis. While climate change affects everyone but impacts of climate change related events are not gender neutral.[Read More…]

One of the few rays of hopeful sunshine in the UK’s currently bleak political landscape is the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. In fact, I feel like it is such a vitally important development that I want to use this article to urge you to get behind it, while also offering a rather different perspective on why I feel it matters[Read More…]

When the complaint was lodged in May 2019, there was a sense of the audacious about it.  Eight Torres Strait Islanders had taken the trouble to petition the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Committee, citing climate change and Australian violations as their main concern.  Australia, they claimed, had violated their fundamental rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.[Read More…]

The recently launched ‘Towards a Better World’ campaign by Medha Patkar, conceived by Eco-Socialism Front and in the online presence of half a dozen activists from different countries representing Fridays for Future campaign of Greta Thunberg advocates taking small steps to achieve a more equitable society. It talks about contributing to economic, political and societal change through a personal commitment,[Read More…]

“It’s time the government told the public about the impact climate change will have on our future and the economy.” Katta O’Donnell, The Guardian, Jul 24, 2020 While coronavirus ravages life, dominates policy and clouds debate, that other pressing issue of addressing climate change has moved into a more modest gear.  That has not prevented some bubbling activity from taking[Read More…]

Human-caused carbon emissions islikely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a comprehensive international study released Wednesday. Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science — how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — found that warming is extremely unlikely to be[Read More…]

Planetary heat is turning skeptics into climate change worrywarts with record temperatures galore! But wait, the worst is yet to come. It’s guaranteed, as future heat is already locked and loaded into the vast climate system. It’s the inertia bugaboo. Today, we’re living with yesteryear’s carbon emissions from the turn of the century. Meantime, the next decade and a half[Read More…]

With the humans locked up inside, the past few months of Corona-pandemic have given us a world with nature reclaiming its space. The reduced levels of air-pollution have given a chance to rare-sighted mountains and peaks to reveal themselves to populations where their visibility had become folktales, only to be shared by elders as memories of yester years. AQI in[Read More…]

The Enlightenment substituted reason and the scientific method for primitive superstition. Science brought huge advances in agriculture, industry and medicine  but has had the downsides of over-population, massive biodiversity loss, deadly high-technology wars  and the existential threats to Humanity and the Biosphere from nuclear weapons and climate change. However in seriously addressing these horrendously damaging deadly downside consequences we must[Read More…]

Earth at 10°C above pre-industrial is unimaginable. It’s a deadly horrifying thought, but as shall be explained herein, it should not be dismissed out of hand. The following story might be labeled as reckless, and it might be criticized as a fearmongering piece of journalism and probably will be. Nevertheless, “10C Above Baseline” explores a dystopian world envisioned by John[Read More…]

My friend, Ashok A. in India, wrote me: “Clearly the main wealth of America lies in the vast territories it has usurped [from Native Americans – S. D.] and holds.  I agree, much of the world’s population will perish in this century.  We’ll be long gone.  Our children – those who survive – will find it in them to sustain[Read More…]

Who says President Trump doesn’t have a coherent foreign policy?  Pundits and critics across the political spectrum have chided him for failing to articulate and implement a clear international agenda. Look closely at his overseas endeavors, though, and one all-too-consistent pattern emerges: Donald Trump will do whatever it takes to prolong the reign of fossil fuels by sabotaging efforts to curb carbon[Read More…]

Last Week, David Wallace-Wells wrote a cover story for of New York Magazine, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” on some of the worst-case scenarios that the climate crisis could cause by the end of this century. It describes killer heat waves, crippling agricultural failures, devastated economies, plagues, resource wars, and more. It has been read more than two million times. The article has[Read More…]

[Paper presented for a day long discussion in the Central Party School of the CPI(ML) Red Stat held at Kolkata in June, 2016] Human beings, or rather, their dominant economic-industrial systems, have started to change the earth in major ways, leading many observers and thinkers to accept that we are into the new age of “Anthropocene” – a new chapter[Read More…]

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement follows the path of previous presidents who have undermined international climate agreements. We disagree with Trump but it is important to understand his actions in the context of the history of the United States regarding previous climate agreements. Once again, the political problems in the US are bigger than Trump. His action brings greater clarity to the inability of the US government to confront the climate crisis and clarifies the tasks of people seeking smart climate policy.

  The People’s Climate March on Saturday, April 29, 2017, flooded Washington, DC, with over 100,000 protesters. Organizers claimed 150,000, with marches in 330 other cities across the country and in three dozen solidarity events abroad. Coinciding with President Trump’s 100th day in office, the marchers also protested his anti-environmental actions. The previous Saturday (April 22, 2017), thousands of scientists[Read More…]

The situation we face First, let’s please just acknowledge there is a crisis. I’m afraid any reasonably educated, rational, and unbiased adult (or younger) can understand what the climate science has been telling us now for two decades:  the Earth is warming (so far by about 1 degree Celsius since 1800), slowly but surely, due to humans’ putting carbon dioxide[Read More…]

Human caused global warming increasingly threatens all we love and care about.  Climate change from this warming caused (mostly) by greenhouse gases (GHGs) from our use of fossil fuels is a potent growing risk to our families, our kids and their kids, our communities and country. This radical change threatens most of the species and ecosystems with which we share[Read More…]

When Countercurrents.org started 15 years ago CO2 level in the atmosphere was 372 ppm. In the last 15 years it increased only at the rate of less than 2 ppm/year. This year we are seeing a jump of 3.5 ppm over the past year. United Nations climate change secretariat tweeted “January Mauna Loa record shows atmospheric CO2 concentration accelerating, now at[Read More…]

For the third year in a row, the world experienced its warmest year on the books, global scientists have determined. The new assessments come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the UK’s Met Office, as well as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which relies in part on data from those[Read More…]

Global sea ice levels are at their lowest in recorded history, according to new statistics from the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center. In the Arctic, the loss is due to climate change and extreme weather events that are likely influenced by global warming, while the changes in the Antarctic may be attributed to natural variability, the center said.[Read More…]

  The catastrophic climate change is no longer a subject for argument, at least on a mainstream level within the science community. Yet, as temperatures continue to rise, American efforts to combat global warming, sadly seem to decline. President Elect, Donald Trump is more concerned by the economic cost of combating global warming, and has repeatedly rejected United States’ role[Read More…]

The loss of Arctic sea ice has already been shown to be part of a positive feedback loopdriving climate change, and a recent study published in the journal Nature puts the spotlight on what appears to be another of these feedback loops. It has to do with soil, currently one of Earth’s carbon sinks. But warming may lead to soils[Read More…]

  Global domination by  neoliberal One Percenter climate criminals has meant that a catastrophic plus 2C temperature rise is now unavoidable  and that the Paris ideal of no more than plus 1.5C will be exceeded in 4-10 years. The most effective collective action now for decent Humanity to mitigate inescapable climate catastrophe is to promise that all climate criminals will[Read More…]

Why are we failing at communicating the danger of climate change? Maybe people don’t have enough information? (This is the “information deficit” model). Or maybe they have too much information? (This is called the “cultural cognition” model). Or maybe they are not getting the right information? Or there is something else that’s wrong? Without going into the details of the[Read More…]

Global warming is on track to top 3° Celsius, the United Nations warned this week, because today’s climate pledges are “not nearly enough” to prevent dangerous levels of warming. That’s according the latest annual “Emissions GapReport” (pdf) from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which concluded that pledges to cut emissions will result in a global temperature rise of 3.4ºC[Read More…]

Last month was the hottest September on record, which means 2016 is all but locked into being the hottest year on record, according to new NASA statistics released Tuesday. “With data now available through September, 2016 annual record (~1.25ºC above late 19th [century]) seems locked in,” tweeted Dr. Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. With data[Read More…]

September’s carbon dioxide output failed to drop below 400 parts per million (ppm) despite historically being the year’s low point for CO2 emissions, which means the Earth has very likely passed that symbolic climate threshold forever. The Earth has hit 400ppm before, but seasonal cycles have always reduced carbon dioxide output back below that level. Now, climate scientists say it[Read More…]

Time is about to run out on holding global warming to two degrees. The next President needs to be prepared to act promptly and decisively to assure that the world changes direction.  The world’s seeming inability to make progress on climate change appears to be more a refusal to jeopardize growth of the GDP, even though economic growth (a) has arguably[Read More…]

The planet could pass the critical 1.5°C global temperature threshold in a decade—and is already two-thirds of the way to hit that warming limit, climate scientists warned on Thursday. Speaking at a University of Oxford conference this week, led by leading U.K. climate researcher Richard Betts, scientists said global greenhouse gas emissions are not likely to slow down quickly enough[Read More…]

Illustration from the paper “The Sower’s Way.” by Sgouridis, Csala and Bardi  recently published in the IOP Environmental Research Letters journal. The main points of the paper are summarized in a previous post. Note how fast the production of energy must fall in order to prevent temperatures from rising above the 2°C limit. It is a true “Seneca collapse“, necessary[Read More…]

One of the silliest arguments of climate deniers goes like this: the atmosphere with its greenhouse gases cannot warm the Earth’s surface, because it is colder than the surface. But heat always flows from warm to cold and never vice versa, as stated in the second law of thermodynamics. The freshly baked Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts has recently phrased it[Read More…]

In a year of record-setting heat on a blistered globe, with fast-warmingoceans, fast-melting ice caps, and fast-rising sea levels, ratification of the December 2015 Paris climate summit agreement — already endorsed by most nations — should be a complete no-brainer.  That it isn’t tells you a great deal about our world.  Global geopolitics and the possible rightward lurch of many countries (including a potential deal-breaking election in[Read More…]

Another month, another temperature record shattered. NASA data released Monday shows not only that last month was the hottest August since record-keeping started in 1880, but that it tied with July for the warmest month in the last 136 years. According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, August 2016’s temperature was 0.16 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous warmest August[Read More…]

The highly influential but neoliberal Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has published a detailed analysis entitled The Economics of Climate Change. However this report ignores a veritable Herd of Elephants in the Room apparent to science-informed climate change analysts, ignores the acute, existential  seriousness of the worsening climate emergency, and absurdly argues for effective Business As Usual (BAU)[Read More…]

The head of the United Nation’s climate body has called for a thorough assessment of the feasibility of the international goal to limit warming to 1.5C. Dr Hoesung Lee, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told delegates at a meeting in Geneva, which is designed to flesh out the contents of a special report on 1.5C, that[Read More…]

On Monday it was confirmed that the Earth has broken an ominous climate milestone amid a wave of troubling records: July 2016 was the hottest recorded month—ever. According to new NASA data, the global mean surface temperatures last month were 0.84° Celsius (1.51° Fahrenheit) above average and was the warmest July in their data set, which dates back to 1880.[Read More…]

John Michael Greer has written a provocative essay: Climate Change Activism: a Postmortem. His list of activist mistakes should be interesting to many of you but Greer makes the same tactical error as the activists he derides in his ‘postmortem’. Greer is still concerned about winning political and economic battles instead of getting to necessary emergency government as quickly as[Read More…]

Environmental records of all kinds are being shattered as climate change takes effect in real time, scientists warned on Tuesday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) released its annual State of the Climate report with the dire warning that 2015 was the hottest year on record since at least the mid-to-late 19th century, confirming the “toppling of several symbolic[Read More…]

Record global heat in the first half of 2016 has caught climate scientists off-guard, reportsThompson Reuters Foundation. “What concerns me most is that we didn’t anticipate these temperature jumps,” David Carlson, director of the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) climate research program, told Thompson Reuters Foundation late Monday. “We predicted moderate warmth for 2016, but nothing like the temperature rises we’ve[Read More…]

As the party of climate science denial convenes in Cleveland this week—minus the few Republicans who care about global warming—new data further confirms that the world is on fire. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) announced Tuesday that June 2016 was 1.62° F above the 20th century average, breaking last year’s record for the warmest June on record by[Read More…]

The June temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 71.8°F, or 3.3°F above the 20th century average, surpassing the previous record of 71.6°F set in 1933. The year-to-date (January-June) temperaturewas 50.8°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, making it the third warmest on record. The June precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 2.46 inches, 0.47 inch below the 20th century[Read More…]

“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act” –George Orwell March 2016 set a new record temperature for that time of year, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The global temperature was 2.30 °F (1.28 °C) warmer than the average for March from 1951 to 1980, which is used as a baseline. http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2432/[Read More…]

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will stay permanently above 400 parts per million (ppm) this year due to El Nino—and will likely not drop below that number again “within our lifetimes,” according to a study published this week in the journal Nature. The milestone represents a symbolic threshold that scientists and environmentalists had long sought to avoid. Greenhouse gases have jumped 48[Read More…]

Children suffer the most from fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel combustion and associated air pollution and carbon dioxide (CO2) is the root cause of much of children’s ill health children today as well as their uncertain future. There are strong scientific arguments, as well persuasive economic ones, for reducing the world’s dependence on energy generated by the burning of fossil[Read More…]

Record carbon dioxide levels are set to surpass the symbolic threshold of 400 parts per million (PPM) this year and will likely never fall below that line again in our lifetimes, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Scientists at the UK Met Office used emissions data, sea surface temperature figures, and a climate[Read More…]

On the surface, things appear normal. The status quo of life in America circa 2016 isn’t to everyone’s liking, but at least the system is still working after a fashion. The price of oil is going up a bit: that means the cost of driving is also creeping higher, but steeper prices provide a little welcome relief for an oil[Read More…]