Environment

Writing in the Guardian, Michael Slezak lists nine ways in which climate records were broken in 2015: 2015 was the warmest year on record, “0.76C above the 1961-90 average” (note that commentators no longer use the start of the industrial revolution – 1750 – as this would provide a more …

China is now responsible for 10 percent of global warming according to a new report in the Journal Nature. The most obvious manifestation of the amount of pollution generated in China is in the poor air quality in its major cities.  In Beijing, smog is so bad that people routinely …

Seventy-one percent of the surface of the Earth is water… ninety-seven percent of which is saline.  Of the remaining three percent, two are locked up in ice caps and glaciers.  So, 7.5 billion humans depend upon just one percent of the water.  This is not just the water we drink.  …

Temperatures in the northern hemisphere passed the limit of 2 degrees of warming for the first time last month.  The amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide is higher than at any time in the last 8,000.  The trend toward runaway global warming (well beyond 2 degrees) is accelerating.  And the action …

Climate scientists have been warning of the threat to global food supplies for decades.  Drought, flooding and sea level rise threaten to dramatically reduce the productivity of the world’s key agricultural regions.  However, even these dire warnings may have underestimated the threat according to a new study published in the …

A combination of the El Nino in the pacific and the general upward trend in global temperature pushed last month’s temperatures higher than any month since records began in 1880 according to new data from NASA. While some of the rise can be attributed to the El Nino event, Andrew …

Most of our focus on tackling climate change has been on the carbon dioxide emissions generated when we burn carbon dioxide in our electricity and transport industries.  Given this concern, it is unsurprising that scientists and campaigners have also turned their attention to the carbon dioxide emissions generated by agriculture. …

One of humanity’s greatest failings is our constant search for “miracles” as a substitute for rolling up our sleeves and getting on with the hard work of problem solving.  In the face of a looming energy crunch, for example, we have invested heavily in nuclear fusion – a technology that …

Updated modelling by researchers at University of Queensland and Griffith University show that the world will reach the widely feared 2 degrees of warming (above the 19th century temperature) by 2030; about twenty years earlier than had been previously thought. Despite some governments regarding two degrees of warming as a …

A new study has uncovered a rise in US methane levels of more than 30 percent over the last decade.  And while the authors stop short of blaming the increase on the US shale gas (fracking) industry, which grew by 900 percent in the same period, it is difficult to …