Will EPA Heed the Pope's Call to Save Our Oceans?
When it comes to saving our oceans, I'm wondering: What would Pope Francis do? With his sprawling encyclical on the fate of our planet this month, the pope became an unexpected revolutionary. I never thought I'd see bold environmental leadership arise from this powerful, historically conservative institution. By now, everyone knows about his call to fight climate change, ocean acidification, pollution and loss of the planet's biodiversity.
climate loop
For decades, scientists have warned that climate change would make extreme events like droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires more frequent, more devastating, or both. In 2017, we got an up-close look at the raw ferocity of such an altered world as high-category hurricanes battered the East and Gulf coasts, and wind-whipped fires scorched the West (see “Did Climate Change Fuel California’s Devastating Fires? Probably”). We’re also seeing with greater clarity how these dangers are interlinked, building upon one another toward perilous climate tipping points.
Scientists are starting to clear up one of the biggest controversies in climate science
This color-coded map displays a progression of changing global surface temperature anomalies from 1880 through 2015. Higher than normal temperatures are shown in red and lower then normal temperatures are shown in blue. (NASA) How much Earth will warm in response to future greenhouse gas emissions may be one of the most fundamental questions in climate science — but it’s also one of the most difficult to answer. And it’s growing more controversial: In recent years, some scientists have suggested that our climate models may actually be predicting too much future warming, and that climate change will be less severe than the projections suggest.
We Need to Literally Declare War on Climate Change
This is, simply put, as wrong as Chamberlain’s “peace in our time.” Even if every nation in the world complies with the Paris Agreement, the world will heat up by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100—not the 1.5 to 2 degrees promised in the pact’s preamble. And it may be too late already to meet that stated target: We actually flirted with that 1.5 degree line at the height of the El Niño warming in February, a mere 60 days after the world’s governments solemnly pledged their best efforts to slow global warming. Our leaders have been anticipating what French strategists in World War II called the guerre du longue durée, even as each new edition of Science or Nature makes clear that climate change is mounting an all-out blitzkrieg, setting new record highs for global temperatures in each of the past 14 months. The Antarctic research did contain, as the Times reported, one morsel of good news. What would that “far more stringent effort” require?
How will ocean acidification impact marine life?
Many marine organisms—such as coral, clams, mussels, sea urchins, barnacles, and certain microscopic plankton—rely on equilibrated chemical conditions and pH levels in the ocean to build their calcium-based shells and other structures. A new analysis published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology provides a holistic analysis of how species will be affected worldwide under different climate scenarios. "Calcifying species are indispensable for ecosystems worldwide: they provide nursery habitats for fish, food for marine predators, and natural defenses for storms and erosion. These species are also particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification triggered by increased fossil fuel emissions," says IIASA researcher Ligia Azevedo, who led the study.
narrower range of outcome
Earth’s surface will almost certainly not warm up four or five degrees Celsius by 2100, according to a study which, if correct, voids worst-case UN climate change predictions. A revised calculation of how greenhouse gases drive up the planet’s temperature reduces the range of possible end-of-century outcomes by more than half, researchers said in the report, published in the journal Nature. “Our study all but rules out very low and very high climate sensitivities,” said lead author Peter Cox, a professor at the University of Exeter.
Satellite Snafu Masked True Sea Level Rise for Decades
Joe Raedle/Getty As the Greenland ice sheet thaws, it is helping to raise the world's sea levels. The numbers didn’t add up. Even as Earth grew warmer and glaciers and ice sheets thawed, decades of satellite data seemed to show that the rate of sea-level rise was holding steady — or even declining.
World War Mentality Needed to Beat Climate Change
America’s next president must declare war on climate change in the same way President Franklin Roosevelt fought the Axis powers during World War II, climate activist Bill McKibben said in an article published today in The New Republic. McKibben argued that the next president should harness the nation’s industrial might in exactly the same way Roosevelt did in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and in the years following the U.S. entrance into the war. “It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing,” wrote McKibben, an author and activist who co-founded 350.org to fight the Keystone XL pipeline project. “Defeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers,” he wrote.
Get ready for endlessly gross shrimp, thanks to climate change
Hard out here for a shrimp You may not think you care much about the mental well-being of imperiled sea spawn, but did ya know that a stressed-out shrimp does not a delicious cocktail make? According to a study published in November by Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, shrimp grown in acidic waters simply aren’t as tasty as those reared in healthy seas.
tribute to Saw O Moo
Indigenous activists in Myanmar’s Karen state are mourning the killing of a community leader who campaigned for a peace park to protect a local forest and its residents’ land rights. Saw O Moo was ambushed by government troops on 5 April as he was riding a motorbike with a soldier from the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), a rebel group that is fighting for autonomy. The military has claimed both men were pain-clothes rebels “suspected of sabotage” who were armed with grenades at the time of the shooting, according to the Irrawaddy newspaper.
Osef, je vais à puget chez mon Grand père, suis un peu en auteur. Et si la plage peut se rapprocher de la maison... by nicolas Sep 23