The unsettling story of how global warming helped fuel two record-breaking multi-billion dollar weather disasters thousands of kilometers apart this winter highlights just how unpredictable and dangerous our CO2 turbo-charged climate system is becoming. On the west coast, California is suffering its worst winter drought ever recorded. The failure of the rainy season left critical snowpack levels at just 30% of normal.
The number of species at risk has doubled over the past decade in the Salish Sea, generating calls for a special international body to co-ordinate research and conservation issues in the 17,000-square-kilometre area that includes the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound.
For the first time, scientists have documented that souring seas caused by carbon-dioxide emissions are dissolving pteropods in the wild right now along the U. S. West Coast. That is damaging a potentially important link in the marine food web far sooner than expected.
My God. There’s more darkness in this quote than the New York Times intended. I winced when I read these words of Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chairman of the committee that wrote the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC report, which the Times quoted in a recent editorial headlined “Running Out of Time.” Suddenly, ten years felt vital, alive with possibility.
... In fact, the parallel I want to highlight is between the opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels. Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the country would have to give up their wealth. That liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding: that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground.
One of the most disturbing ways that climate change is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or “mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.
'Oil, tar sands, coal, natural gas: What's behind the expansion drive of Canada's and North America's fossil fuel industries?' talk by Roger Annis of Vancouver Ecosocialist Group, at University of California Santa Barbara, April 11, 2014
This is a story about bad timing. One of the most disturbing ways that climate change is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or “mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.
As humanity reaches for more energy, fossil fuels are being selected for five out of every six new units of energy. The energy gap between fossil fuels and renewable energy continues to grow dramatically wider despite decades of efforts to prevent a full-blown climate crisis. Even more troubling, the gap is accelerating. Take a look. My chart below shows global energy use by year, divided into fossil fuels vs everything else. You can see how fossil fuels have been relentlessly widening their lead, decade after decade. And the biggest leap has been in the last decade.
Archbishop of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu is saying their is no longer any excuse for not doing everything humanly possible to fight climate change and called on Thursday for an international "anti-apartheid-style boycott" against the fossil fuel industry.
