Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction issued a report today concluding that natural disasters caused by the human impact on earth’s climate have doubled in the past twenty years. Human beings have put increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the past 40 […]
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Drought
This Is a Climate Emergency. We Need More Than Half-Measures from Democrats
By Basav Sen | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – From derechos in Iowa to dueling hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, 2020 is promising to be an election year shot through with climate disasters. Even now, raging wildfires have spawned apocalyptic landscapes from Washington State on down to the Bay Area. In style and […]
Climate Emergency Overdrive: Our Age of Compound Disasters as 10% of Oregon is Evacuated, California Burns and Louisiana Sinks
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – It is astonishing to me that we still have 287 million gasoline vehicles on our roads and that 20 percent of our electricity comes from burning dirty coal. We just go on blithely pumping over 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, a powerful and dangerous heat-trapping gas, into the […]
COVID death Tolls are Horrific, but those of Global Heating are much Worse
By Soumya Sarkar | – ( TheThirdPole.net) – Unless the world curbs greenhouse gas emissions significantly, extreme heat could become a major global killer by the end of this century, equalling death rates for all infectious diseases combined, including tuberculosis, HIV and malaria. In the largest international study till now on health and financial impacts […]
As Party of Climate Denial Meets, Wildfires Rage and Hurricanes Target Gulf Coast
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 […]
Heat the Earth more than 3.6° F. and Rain Forests will Release Hundreds of Billions of Tons of CO2
By Aida Cuní Sanchez and Martin Sullivan | – As they photosynthesise and grow, tropical forests remove enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, reducing global warming. However, forests are also themselves affected by this warming. If it gets too hot or too dry, trees will grow less and may start to die faster, decomposing […]
Anti-Immigrant Trump promotes Burning Fossil Fuels that will displace Millions toward US
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents findings that shocked the authors themselves. If the world (by which I mean you and me, dear reader) does not swing into prompt action to deal with the climate emergency, some 3.5 billion people are going to […]
Why Burning Fossil Fuels is to Today’s Pandemics as Fleas were to the Black Death
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sheri Fink at the NYT reports that Center for Disease Control scientific modeler Matthew Biggerstaff estimated in a conference call that the coronavirus pandemic could last for many months or as long as a year and could infect half to two-thirds of the population of the United States. Between 200,000 […]
Climate Change is already Diminishing the Colorado River, U.S. Researchers Find
By Luke Runyon /KUNC | ( Cronkite News) – GREELEY, Colo. – A warming climate already is reducing stream flows in the Southwest’s largest watershed, according to a new study from scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey. And as the planet continues to heat up, it said, the shortages are likely to get worse. Using […]