Desertification

The Southwest once had 4000-year-long Droughts; Could Human-Caused Climate Emergency bring them Back?

By Judy Fahys ( InsideClimate News/ Cronkite News Creative Commons. —— Bonus Video added by Informed Comment: The Enigmatic Montezuma Castle and Well in Arizona, USA | Ancient Architects

Climate Crisis

The Caspian Sea, central to Iran & Russia, is set to fall by 9 Yards or more this century – an ecocide is imminent

The Conversation

By Frank Wesselingh and Matteo Lattuada | – Imagine you are on the coast, looking out to sea. In front of you lies 100 metres of barren sand that looks like a beach at low tide with gentle waves beyond. And yet there are no tides. This is what we found when we visited the […]

Desertification

Demand for meat is driving deforestation in Brazil – changing the soy industry could stop it

The Conversation

By Angela Guerrero and Malika Virah-Sawmy | – Soy may have a pretty innocuous reputation thanks to its association with vegan food and meat alternatives. But don’t be fooled – crops of this pale legume are behind much of Brazil’s epidemic of deforestation. Since 2000, Brazil has doubled its total area of soy plantation to […]

Climate Crisis

The Lancet: Climate Crisis Menaces every Country with spike in Heat Strokes, Flood, Drought, and more Pandemics

The Conversation

By Celia McMichael, Ilan Kelman and Shouro Dasgupta, and Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson | – Climate change is resulting in profound, immediate and worsening health impacts, and no country is immune, a major new report from more than 120 researchers has declared. This year’s annual report of The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, released today, […]

Climate Crisis

UN Report: Human Environmental, Climate Destruction could unleash 800k Animal Viruses on Us

The Conversation

By Katie Woolaston and Judith Lorraine Fisher | – Human damage to biodiversity is leading us into a pandemic era. The virus that causes COVID-19, for example, is linked to similar viruses in bats, which may have been passed to humans via pangolins or another species. Environmental destruction such as land clearing, deforestation, climate change, […]

Acidification of Oceans

The Black Hole of Depressions: Doing nothing about Climate Emergency could cost more than all the Wealth in the World

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A study in Nature Communications has found that if you add in variability to calculations of the impact of climate change, the upper range of the damage it could do to property is $563 trillion.* That is in the worst case scenario where the world does virtually nothing to stop […]

Desertification

Pandemic Karma: Destroying Forests to Raise certain Foods Put us Closer to Viruses

The Conversation

By Terry Sunderland | – As the global population has doubled to 7.8 billion in about 50 years, industrial agriculture has increased the output from fields and farms to feed humanity. One of the negative outcomes of this transformation has been the extreme simplification of ecological systems, with complex multi-functional landscapes converted to vast swaths […]

Climate Crisis

As Party of Climate Denial Meets, Wildfires Rage and Hurricanes Target Gulf Coast

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – One of the speakers at the Republican National Convention on Monday evening was Nikki Haley, formerly Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, who helped usher the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords and who slammed Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal. Haley when pressed will admit that the climate is […]

Desertification

Experts: Trump Border wall construction may imperil sacred stream, biodiversity in Desert

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Alisa Reznick/Arizona Public Media ( Cronkite News) – Wedged between a sprawl of saguaros and a busy highway in Mexico, Quitobaquito is a tiny oasis. Wildlife and Indigenous communities have long relied on this rare spring system for fresh water in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. The spring flows into a pond just […]