The title of this piece should instead be: how to weather the next few years of stupid politics over climate change while watching the oceans rise, acidify, and lose oxygen, and while watching extreme drought, forest fires, and weather slap us upside the head.
Representatives of Australian coastal communities have gathered this week to discuss the major challenges they face. Delegates at the conference in Rockingham, Western Australia, represent 40 councils around Australia, some falling within the 24 federal electorates held by a margin of 5% or less.
Despite the Republican US presidential candidate’s claim that climate change is a hoax, a new survey has found that more than half of his supporters believe global warming is happening.
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Worsening wildfires endanger communities. Invasive insects imperil forests. In the American West, many worry about these threats — but fewer fret about climate change, a major force behind both the burning and the bugs. Why? Apparently, because lots of people don’t see the local connection. Polling residents of eastern Oregon
By putting a temporary halt to Obama’s cornerstone climate policy, the Supreme Court puts the next president in the driver’s seat. Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to halt, at least temporarily, implementation of one of the central components of the federal effort to constrain U.S. climate emissions, the Clean Power Plan.
Volcanic eruptions that triggered climatic extremes could have heralded deadly plague and famine in Europe and undermined the Roman empire.
An environmental activist friend of mine recently shook her head and marveled at the extraordinary accomplishments of the last several months. “Still lots of work to be done,” she said. “But wow! This has been an epic period for environmentalists!”
In the lead-up to the Paris climate change summit, US President Barack Obama recently said “We only get one planet. There’s no Plan B”. Of course he’s right – there’s no other planet we can retreat to. Obama’s statement emphasized the urgent need for international agreement in Paris to minimize human-caused climate change and its impacts.
Analysts say the world’s 20 leading economies give nearly four times as much in subsidies to fossil fuel production as total global subsidies to renewable energy.
North of the 49th parallel, Canadian voters turfed the decade-old government of Stephen Harper. With close ties to the Albertan oil industry, Prime Minister Harper was an established friend of fossil fuel. As leader of the former Canadian Alliance Party, Harper in 2002 had gone as far as to describe the Kyoto Protocol as a “socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.”
More than three out of four Americans—or 76 percent—now believe that climate change is occurring. The number is up from 68 percent just one year ago, but partisan politics are still a huge factor in how people respond.
It’s a big few weeks at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA issued a regulation clarifying its authority to regulate bodies of water throughout the country. This week it issued an “endangerment finding,” a precursor to a regulation governing carbon emission from aircraft.
Converting the world’s entire energy infrastructure to run on clean, renewable energy could effectively fight ongoing climate change, eliminate air pollution deaths, create jobs, and stabilize energy prices.
This summer, Pope Francis plans to release an encyclical letter in which he will address environmental issues, and very likely climate change.
To detoxify the debate over climate change, we need to understand the social forces at work. To reach some form of social consensus on this issue, we must recognize that the public debate over climate change in the United States today is not about carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas models; it is about opposing cultural values and worldviews through which that science is viewed.
The climate debate seems to be as polarised as ever. While joint political pledges offer some hope that climate change no longer has to be a partisan issue, a look at the comments below most articles on global warming says otherwise.
If we want to use scientific thinking to solve problems, we need people to appreciate evidence and heed expert advice. But the Australian suspicion of authority extends to experts, and this public cynicism can be manipulated to shift the tone and direction of debates. We have seen this happen in arguments about climate change.
There are many complex reasons why people decide not to accept the science of climate change. Climate scientists, myself included, have strived to understand this reluctance. We wonder why so many people are unable to accept a seemingly straight-forward pollution problem. And we struggle to see why climate change debates have inspired such vitriol.
The climate science might be gloomy but at least governments seem to be doing something about it. But this is only half the story. Side by side with policy initiatives designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions have come new policies that have the opposite effect: increased emissions.
I’ve heard it many a time, and you probably have too. It’s supposedly the trump card to any argument on addressing climate change globally: “Yeah, but what’s the point? Isn’t China building a new coal plant every week?”
Naomi Klein’s third attack on capitalism, This Changes Everything, has put the urgency of climate change front and centre.
Each of the 125 leaders attending the New York climate summit this week has been given four minutes to speak to the world. They (or their aides) may well have dipped into the climate literature to add scientific ballast to their speeches.
A report published ahead of the 2014 UN Climate Summit illustrates that poor and prosperous nations, tiny islands and great cities, can achieve all their energy needs from renewables.