In July of this year, during record-smashing heat waves and forest fires, a group of scientists published “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” exploring the risk that climate feedbacks could lead to runaway heating and a “Hothouse Earth.” Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, and Katherine Richardson — from the Universities of Stockholm, Australia, and Copenhagen, with colleagues from Stanford, Cambridge, Potsdam, The Netherlands, and elsewhere — published the paper in the US 

[Editor: This is surely one of the best expositions of the situation and of what has to be done right now.  A must read!]

There is Still Time for an Ecological Revolution to Prevent Hothouse Earth:

This story originally published on World Resources Institute.

If your colleague or child does well and you give her or him positive feedback, that’s good.

If climate change causes a cascade of impacts that result in additional climate change — which scientists call "positive feedback" — that’s bad, and maybe catastrophic.

This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.

The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer.

August 12, 2018

Researchers say the world may be approaching a tipping point, followed by a dangerous slide towards Hothouse Earth, an overheated planet.

LONDON, 7 August, 2018 – Human actions threaten to push the planet into a new state, called Hothouse Earth. In such a world global average temperatures could stabilise at 4°C or even 5°C higher than they have been for most of human history.