Environment

There is a reason why deep water oil drilling is thought of as a frontier industry.  Drilling through 2.5 miles of rock located beneath just short of a mile (5,100 feet) of water really is at the frontier of our current technology.  At those depths, necessarily working with remote robot …

The biggest obstacle to tackling runaway climate change is that while prevention involves the richest people in the richest countries giving up their unsustainable lifestyles, the impacts of climate change have been falling largely on the shoulders of the poorest people in the poorest countries. Delegates at a two day …

A new report by the Committee on Climate Change – an independent scientific body that advises the UK government – has warned that hydraulically fractured shale gas is incompatible with the UK government’s self-imposed target of reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. According to Tereza Pultarova in Engineering …

Following the election of a Tory government in 2015, the UK has quietly dropped any pretence that it will meet 2020 EU climate targets.  However, the government still maintains the fiction that it can achieve its Climate Change Act target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. …

Energy ministers at last week’s G20 meeting in China failed to agree to set a date to end fossil fuel subsidies.  Previously, the G7 had agreed to end subsidies by 2025.  However, this was something of a fudge as it failed to define what was meant by a subsidy. The …

The Paris climate agreement has been widely hailed as a success.  This is largely because for the first time the world’s biggest polluter – the USA – is actually a signatory to the agreement.  This said, the reason it is an “agreement” rather than a treaty is precisely because the …

One of the few pieces of apparently good climate news in recent years was that the growth of new vegetation in the Arctic has helped remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the crucial Polar Regions.  However, a new NASA-led study has cast doubt on the effect that new plant …

The human population is expected to climb toward 10bn by mid-century; far outstripping already strained global food supplies.  One proposed means of accommodating these extra people without causing huge famines and mass migrations is to turn to the one lifeform that we have so far been too grossed out to …

The greenhouse effect is not the only thing causing our planet to warm.  Larry O’Hanlon at the American Geophysical Union also points to our own energy use as a cause of excess heating in developed regions: “There is also the waste heat released when we generate and use energy – …

Ninety-four million years ago, Earth experienced warming similar – but much slower – than today.  So changes that occurred then hold clues to the fate that awaits humanity in the (relatively) near future. In a new study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Assistant Professor of Geology Jeremy Owens …