Slow-motion wrecks: how thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities | Cities At first, Yury Scherbakov thought the cracks appearing in a wall he had installed in his two-room flat were caused by shoddy workmanship. But then other walls started cracking, and then the floor started to incline. “We sat on the couch and could feel it tilt,” says his wife, Nadezhda, as they carry furniture out of the flat. Yury wasn’t a poor craftsman, and Nadezhda wasn’t crazy: one corner of their five-storey building at 59 Talnakhskaya Street in the northern Russian city of Norilsk was sinking as the permafrost underneath it thawed and the foundation slowly disintegrated. Cracking and collapsing structures are a growing problem in cities like Norilsk – a nickel-producing centre of 177,000 people located 180 miles above the Arctic Circle – as climate change thaws the perennially frozen soil and increases precipitation. In most cases, these are slow-motion wrecks that can be patched up or prevented by engineering solutions. But sometimes changes come too suddenly.
Carte. En 2040, une planète dangereusement aride L’auteur. Cette carte a été réalisée par notre cartographe, Thierry Gauthé, en collaboration avec notre journaliste Carole Lembezat. D’ici à vingt-cinq ans, la question de l’eau risque de devenir un problème majeur pour la planète. » Cliquer ici pour afficher la carte en plus grand Dans un monde plus peuplé, plus urbain, la question des ressources, combinée au réchauffement climatique, va se poser avec de plus en plus d’acuité. What is climate change? Media playback is unsupported on your device BBC News looks at what we know and don't know about the Earth's changing climate. What is climate change? The planet's climate has constantly been changing over geological time. The global average temperature today is about 15C, though geological evidence suggests it has been much higher and lower in the past. However, the current period of warming is occurring more rapidly than many past events. What is the "greenhouse effect"? The greenhouse effect refers to the way the Earth's atmosphere traps some of the energy from the Sun. The energy that radiates back down to the planet heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface. Scientists believe we are adding to the natural greenhouse effect with gases released from industry and agriculture (known as emissions), trapping more energy and increasing the temperature. Most man-made emissions of CO2 are through the burning of fossil fuels, as well as through cutting down carbon-absorbing forests.
Hurricane Sandy-level flooding is rising so sharply that it could become normal | Environment The frequency of floods of the magnitude of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated parts of New York City in 2012, is rising so sharply that they could become relatively normal, with a raft of new research laying bare the enormous upheavals already under way in the US due to climate change. These findings and two other fresh pieces of research have highlighted how the US is already in the grip of significant environmental changes driven by warming temperatures, albeit in different ways to the processes that are fueling hurricanes. An analysis of past storms and models of future events as the planet warms has shown that Sandy-like floods have become three times more common in the New York area since 1800. This frequency is set to climb further, from once every 400 years to once every 90 years by 2100, due to the effects of sea level rise alone. “Sandy was a wake-up call, and New York has been starting to do things, such as coastal defences and some mitigation.
Réchauffement climatique : La carte montrant l’influence de la hausse des témpératures sur l’économie "Un changement climatique non jugulé va probablement réduire le revenu du terrien moyen de près de 23 % en 2100, selon des estimations contenues dans une recherche publiée par la revue scientifique Nature et co-réalisée par deux professeurs de l'Université de Berkeley, en Californie", écrit le Berkeley News. Le magazine, qui publie cette carte interactive, ajoute que les recherches indiquent que le changement climatique va accroître les inégalités au niveau global, peut-être de manière dramatique, car le réchauffement est bon pour les pays froids, qui tendent à être plus riches, et plus dommageable pour les pays chauds, qui tendent à être plus pauvres.
COP21: Beginner's guide to the UN Paris climate summit Image copyright Getty Images What is the climate conference for? In short, the world's governments have already committed to curbing human activities such as burning fossil fuels that release the gases that interfere with the climate. But that isn't problem solved. The difficulty comes when you try to get 195 countries to agree on how to deal with the issue of climate change. Every year since 1992 the Conference of the Parties has taken place with negotiators trying to put together a practical plan of action. This year's COP21 in Paris is the last chance for this process. Critics would say the problem of climate change mustn't be that urgent if it takes 20 years to agree on a solution. But defenders argue that it's taking such a long time because decisions are taken by consensus, meaning nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. What is climate change? Six graphics that explain climate change Why does it have an odd name? Who will be attending? What are they hoping to achieve? Simple?
UK must focus on carbon removal to meet Paris goals, climate advisers urge | Environment The UK government needs to kickstart technologies to suck carbon dioxide from the air if it is to play its part in meeting the goals of the Paris climate change agreement, according to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the government’s official advisers. The global climate deal, which the prime minister, Theresa May, says the UK will ratify by the end of 2016, pledges net zero emissions by the second half of the century, in order to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. Given that some emissions, such as those from aviation and agriculture, will be very difficult to reduce to zero, that means removing some carbon from the atmosphere. Planting trees is the simplest solution but is limited by the land available, meaning more radical technologies need to be developed, such as chemically scrubbing CO2 from the air and burying it. Hydrogen has the advantage of using the existing gas network, but is as yet untested.
Climate change emissions footprint calculator Since February, countries have been publishing their plans for cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, ahead of a December UN meeting in Paris that aims to deliver a new accord on climate change... If every country keeps pumping GHGs into the environment at its current rate until 2100, the planet’s surface will warm by an average of up to 6°C, bringing about a dramatically different climate... Countries’ pledges for emissions cuts mostly cover the period between 2020 and 2030. Let's see what would happen if all these commitments are met...... Most countries have now announced plans, but some of the biggest emitters are proposing to do the least, and globally, current pledges won’t be enough to limit the temperature increase to the agreed limit of 2°C by 2100. The Paris accord due to be struck in December is supposed to ensure countries ratchet up their pledges. Even if every country met the pledges it has made to date, we would still be looking at a rise in emissions and temperatures.
Will coal be on the dole after COP21? Image copyright PA For coal, COP21 is meant to be the start of the long goodbye. This is the conference that's supposed to consign the black stuff to the ash heap of history. The world will finally tilt definitively towards windmills and a future filled with sunbeams and smiles. Perhaps not. Coal has certainly been on the back foot. A recent report from the International Energy Agency showed that in 2014 renewables accounted for half of the world's new power generation capacity and they have already become the second-largest source of electricity after coal. The UK, the home of the coal-fired industrial revolution, recently announced that power generation from unabated coal would end within 10 years. "Let me be clear: this is not the future," said Energy Secretary Amber Rudd. Well, it's not the future, unless you live in India or a host of other emerging economies around the world. Look at India - the world's third largest economy but only accounts for 6% of global energy use. No easy task
Climate change: global deal reached to limit use of hydrofluorocarbons | Environment A global deal to limit the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in the battle to combat climate change is a “monumental step forward”, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, has said. The agreement, announced on Saturday morning after all-night negotiations in Kigali, Rwanda, caps and reduces the use of HFCs – a key contributor to greenhouse gases – in a gradual process beginning in 2019, with action by developed countries including the US, the world’s second worst polluter. More than 100 developing countries, including China, the world’s top carbon dioxide emitter, will start taking action in 2024, sparking concern from some groups that the action would be implemented too slowly to make a difference. A small group of countries, including India, Pakistan and some Gulf states, also pushed for and secured a later start in 2028, saying their economies need more time to grow. That is three years earlier than India, the world’s third worst polluter, had first proposed.
Global Temperature Anomalies - Views of the World Recent figures released by the NASA as well as the British Met Office and NOAA confirm that 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded. In addition, the period of the past five years was also the warmest in recent times. The following map animation visualises a data series by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) that depicts “how much various regions of the world have warmed or cooled when compared with a base period of 1951-1980. They show temperature anomalies, or changes, not absolute temperature. (click for larger version) Single snapshots of our global climate do of course not provide evidence for climate change. Global Temperature Anomaly 2015 (click for larger version) Global Temperature Anomaly 2014 (click for larger version) Global Temperature Anomaly 2013 (click for larger version) Global Temperature Anomaly 2012 (click for larger version) Global Temperature Anomaly 2011 (click for larger version) Global Temperature Anomaly 2010 (click for larger version)