Valerie Schloredt – Calling All Climate Activists: “Go Out and Get Yourself in Some Holy Trouble”

A handful of climate activists turned off the flow of Canadian tar sands oil through pipelines in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington on Tuesday, Oct. 11. Five who cut chains and turned pipeline valves and five more supporters were arrested. They face a range of charges, including criminal trespass, sabotage, burglary, and criminal mischief. That morning in Seattle, Jay O’Hara …

The World Bank and the IMF Are Enabling the Next Crisis

The ingredients of a fresh global economic crisis are assembling, and the IMF and the World Bank are failing to acknowledge their role in creating them. Larry Elliott, The Guardian’s economics editor, writes: According to the IMF, global debt has risen to a record level of $152tn (£1223tn) – more than double world GDP – at a time when activity …

Graham Readfearn – How climate science deniers can accept so many ‘impossible things’ all at once

Sometimes, climate science deniers will tell you that we can’t predict global temperatures in the future. Sometimes, they’ll say we’re heading for an ice age. Occasionally, contrarians will say that no single weather event can prove human-caused global warming. But then they’ll point to somewhere that’s cold, claiming this disproves climate change. Often, deniers will tell you that temperature records …

Want to Slow Climate Change? Stop Having Babies

Carbon dioxide doesn’t kill climates; people do. And the world would be better off with fewer of them. That’s a glib summary of a serious and seriously provocative book by Travis Rieder, a moral philosophy professor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University. When economists write about climate change, they’ll often bring up something called the Kaya identity—basically a multiplication problem (not an espionage novel) that helps …

Lauren McCauley – The New, New Climate Math: 17 Years to Get Off Fossil Fuels, Or Else

Though it may not have seemed possible, climate catastrophe is even closer than previously thought, with new figures released Thursday finding that—when the wells already drilled, pits dug, and pipelines built, are taken under consideration—we are well on our way to going beyond 2°C of warming. “If you’re in a hole, stop digging,” begins the study, put forth by the …

ASTRID CALDAS – No Need To Wait for the Future: Global Warming Impacts Are Happening Right Here, Right Now.

One thought hit me today, and it was not a very optimistic one. I thought that one may get so used to the fact that that month after month temperature records are being broken, that the issue of global warming would somehow become an afterthought, or a “cry wolf” phenomenon. After all, it is happening every month, right? Therefore, one would …

Chris Draper – Are mass whale deaths and locust swarms an ominous warning to the world?

Beached whale carcasses and locus infestations sound like Biblical plagues straight from the Old Testament, but they are a reality afflicting segments of the globe. Consequently, many people are wondering whether these episodes are an ominous warning to the rest of the world. Last January, the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme unveiled information that 1,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises (cetaceans) …

Lauren McCauley – The Earth Just Experienced the Hottest Month on the Books. Period.

On Monday it was confirmed that the Earth has broken an ominous climate milestone amid a wave of troubling records: July 2016 was the hottest recorded month—ever. According to new NASA data, the global mean surface temperatures last month were 0.84° Celsius (1.51° Fahrenheit) above average and was the warmest July in their data set, which dates back to 1880. …

Chris D’Angelo – The Results Of Earth’s ‘Annual Physical’ Are A Scary Dose Of Deja Vu

  A devastating dose of long-term climate change combined with a strong El Niño in 2015 seemingly left every major climate record on the books shattered, according to an annual international climate report released Tuesday. The State of the Climate report, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and described as Earth’s “annual physical,” finds that the health of the planet has, once …