Climate Crisis

By Benjamin Wehrmann and Julian Wettengel | – Germany is headed for second consecutive year of substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, as a sharp drop in coal consumption is driving a decline of the country’s overall energy use in 2019. If this trend continues, the country could get much closer to its 2020 climate […]

Climate Crisis

The Carbon Dioxide Horror Show: Sea Level threat to Coastal Cities triples in New Study

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Scott A. Kulp and Benjamin H. Strauss have published an extremely alarming set of conclusions in Nature in which they recalculated the likely impact of sea level rise in this century on coastal populations. Previous measurements by NASA satellites of how high above sea level coastal areas are, were inexact […]

Climate Crisis

Volcanoes and Climate History: What they Explain & What they Don’t

The Conversation

By Michael Petterson | – Everyone is going on about reducing our carbon footprint, zero emissions, planting sustainable crops for biodiesel etc. Is it true what the internet posts say that a volcano eruption for a few weeks will make all our efforts null and void? The pretext to this question is understandable. The forces […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Crisis Stress is already Killing Us: this Chaos Map shows Where

The Conversation

By Aled Jones, Davide Natalini,Anglia Ruskin, and Imelda Phadtare | – Over 12 days at the start of October 2019 eight people were killed, more than 1,300 injured and nearly 1,200 arrested after demonstrations became violent in Ecuador. The demonstrations focused on reversing the ending of fuel subsidies, which had been brought in as part […]

Climate Crisis

California’s Wildfire Electricity Blackouts are a Taste of Climate Apocalypse to Come

ProPublica

By Abrahm Lustgarten | ( ProPublica) | – PG&E’s rolling blackouts probably don’t eliminate fire risk, and they actually could make responding to fires harder. What they largely do is shift responsibility away from the company. At the beginning of October, my kids’ preschool informed me that it might be closed the next day because […]

Climate Crisis

The New Age of Protest

John Feffer

(Foreign Policy in Focus) – People are hitting the streets to protest government inaction, repression, and corruption. Does that mean democracy is in trouble or stronger than ever? By John Feffer, October 2, 2019. Print School strike for climate in Melbourne (Julian Meehan via Flickr) Led by young people, climate strikers blocked traffic on two […]

Authoritarianism

A Trumpian Future for our Kids: A Hot, Sweltering 1984

Tomdispatch

By Frida Berrigan | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Okay, I’ll admit it. Sometimes I can’t take the bad news. It’s too much. It’s so extra, as the kids like to say. When I hit that wall of hopelessness and anxiety so many of us have become familiar with, I take what I think of […]

Climate Crisis

Not done Destroying Earth, Germany’s Far Right to Make anti-Climate Activism Major Plank in Campaign

Clean Energy Wire

By Julian Wettengel | – (Clean Energy Wire) – Germany’s right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) has made its critique of policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect the global climate a major issue in its political strategy. “After the euro and immigration, criticism of the so-called climate action policy is the third major […]

Climate Crisis

What the Dinosaurs Teach us: Earth won’t Recover from Human-Caused Mass Extinction for 2 mn Years

The Conversation

By Paul Bown, Samantha Gibbs, and Sarah Alvarez | – Around 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid struck the Earth, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, ammonites, and many other species. The asteroid was equally devastating at a microscopic level, driving ocean plankton to near-extinction. This crippled the base of the marine food chain […]