A new international study showing that pollutants from China are affecting air quality on the west coast of North America is partly payback for western consumers having their goods manufactured there, a University of B.C. professor said Wednesday. “Why are they having these high emissions?” asked Michael Brauer of the school of population and public health. “Part of it is the stuff they’re producing for us. Some of it is coming back to bite us ... through our consumption.”
MANILA-The Philippines is reeling from a barrage of massive natural disasters-three in as many months-that has tested the ability of government responders and aid agencies to help millions of displaced people across the country's central and southern regions. "We're stretched as thin as I've ever seen," said Ned Olney, country director for Save the Children, one of numerous nongovernmental organizations responding to an earthquake on Oct. 15, a typhoon that made landfall on Nov. 8 and then deadly floods from a tropical depression that ended Jan. 20.
Nations have so dragged their feet in battling climate change that the situation has grown critical and the risk of severe economic disruption is rising, according to a draft United Nations report. Another 15 years of failure to limit carbon emissions could make the problem virtually impossible to solve with current technologies, experts found.
NORDEN, Calif. — Cattle ranchers have had to sell portions of their herd for lack of water. Sacramento and other municipalities have imposed severe water restrictions. Wildfires broke out this week in forests that are usually too wet to ignite. Ski resorts that normally open in December are still closed; at one here in the Sierra Nevada that is actually open, a bear wandered onto a slope full of skiers last week, apparently refusing to hibernate because of the balmy weather.
My friends and I get together once a month to play Texas HoldEm poker - great conversation, a few drinks, snacks and laughs. But I don't like high-stakes poker. Gambling with high-value is not a wise choice, particularly if the pain of the loss translates beyond oneself. The fossil fuel industry is bluffing society in a multi-trillion dollar high-stakes poker game.
Cornell’s Charles H. Greene, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, and Bruce C. Monger, senior research associate in the same department, detail this phenomenon in a paper published in the June issue of the journal Oceanography. “Everyone thinks of Arctic climate change as this remote phenomenon that has little effect on our everyday lives,” Greene said. “But what goes on in the Arctic remotely forces our weather patterns here.”
Would you enjoy the cosiness and warmth of Christmas with your children or grandchildren just that little bit less if you knew that other people's children were dying because of it? More than four million children under five years old are now at risk of acute malnutrition in the Sahel, an area of the world that is one of the clearest victims of the rich world's addiction to fossil fuels.
As 2013 comes to a close, a review of the key climate events of the year reveals some interesting new research and effective myth debunking, but little net progress in terms of addressing the problem through policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A new paper published in The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society fills in the gaps in the UK Met Office HadCRUT4 surface temperature data set, and finds that the global surface warming since 1997 has happened more than twice as fast as the HadCRUT4 estimate. This short video abstract summarizes the study's approach and results.
Temperature rises resulting from unchecked climate change will be at the severe end of those projected, according to a new scientific study. The scientist leading the research said that unless emissions of greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4C by 2100, twice the level the world's governments deem dangerous.
