Tag: climate change

Climate change claims made by the head of the EPA can’t be backed up, new report says

At this point, most people don’t expect the Trump administration to listen to research on climate change. That doesn’t make it any less shocking when officials invent facts for themselves. Recently, the EPA failed to provide scientific evidence to back up claims that climate change damage was decades away. To environmental advocates, it’s proof that the Trump administration is playing the same old climate-denying games.

Last March, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, was interviewed by CBS News’s Major Garrett. There, Wheeler told Garrett that he believed drinking water is the “biggest environmental threat” because “most of the threats from climate change are 50 to 75 years out.”

Wheeler’s remarks quickly drew attention from climate change activists. In response, the environmental organization Sierra Club filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demanding that the EPA produce records to support Wheeler’s assertion. That simple request turned into a lawsuit in October after the EPA refused to turn over documents. Continue reading.

Climate Refugees Cannot Be Forced Home, U.N. Panel Says in Landmark Ruling

Climate refugees cannot be sent home, the U.N. Human Rights Committee ruled in a landmark judgment.

“The decision sets a global precedent,” Kate Schuetze, Amnesty International’s Pacific Researcher said Monday, in response to the news. “It says a state will be in breach of its human rights obligations if it returns someone to a country where – due to the climate crisis – their life is at risk, or in danger of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment triggered.”

While the judgment is not binding, it does emphasize that countries have a legal responsibility to protect people whose lives are threatened by the climate crisis. Here’s what to know. Continue reading.

NOAA confirms 2010s were hottest decade on record

Now that the 2010s are officially over, it’s safe to say that there were a lot of changes over the past 10 years. Notably, weather across the world took a dramatic turn and the last decade is now officially the hottest on record. With many experts saying it’s a reflection of global warming, this trend could continue into the 2020s.

If you’ve been keeping track of the weather, this news doesn’t come as a surprise. In 2019, June, August, and September broke records as the hottest of their respective months. July 2019 ended up beating out all of them as the warmest month ever recorded.

With all of those record breaking months in 2019 alone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a November report predicting 2019 to be the second-hottest-year ever recorded was to be expected. Spoiler: they were right and 2019 ended up breaking over 100,000 records in the U.S. alone. Continue reading.

Top scientists warn of an Amazon ‘tipping point’

Washington Post logoDeforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.

“The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances. “Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”

Combined with recent news that the thawing Arctic permafrost may be beginning to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, it’s the latest hint that important parts of the climate system may be moving toward irreversible changes at a pace that defies earlier predictions.

Continue reading

GOP leader: Minnesotans won’t complain if climate change causes state to get 2 degrees hotter

Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka thinks the climate emergency is panicking people.

Sen. Paul Gazelka, the Senate Majority Leader in the Minnesota Legislature, says he doesn’t think “anyone will complain” if climate change causes the state to warm by 2 degrees celsius.

The leading Republican in the Minnesota Senate made the statement on Twitter, in response to a tweet by WCCO reporting on Minneapolis’ decision to declare a “climate emergency.”

“Stop scaring Minnesotans! Clean energy yes, panic no,” he wrote. “The sky is not falling. We are taking better care of the environment. We can focus on clean energy that is reliable and affordable. If Minnesota is 2 degrees warmer in 100 years, I don’t think anyone will complain.”

Continue reading

5 ways Trump and his supporters are using the same strategies as science deniers

While watching the House impeachment hearings, I realized my two decades of research into why people ignore, reject or deny science had a political parallel.

From anti-evolutionists to anti-vaccine advocates, known as “anti-vaxxers,” climate change deniers to Flat Earthers, science deniers all follow a common pattern of faulty reasoning that allows them to reject what they don’t want to believe – and accept what they favor – based on a misunderstanding of how science deals with evidence.

As I’ve been watching the hearings, I’ve noticed that a number of characteristics of this type of reasoning are now being embraced by President Donald Trump and his congressional supporters.

View the complete November 27 article by Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University, on the Conversation website here.

In bleak report, U.N. says drastic action is only way to avoid worst effects of climate change

Washington Post logo“We need to catch up on the years in which we procrastinated,” a top official says.

The world has squandered so much time mustering the action necessary to combat climate change that rapid, unprecedented cuts in greenhouse gas emissions offer the only hope of averting an ever-intensifying cascade of consequences, according to new findings from the United Nations.

Already, the past year has brought devastating hurricanes, relentless wildfires and crippling heat waves, prompting millions of protesters to take to the streets to demand more attention to a problem that seems increasingly urgent.

Amid that growing pressure to act, Tuesday’s U.N. report offers a grim assessment of how off-track the world remains. Global temperatures are on pace to rise as much as 3.9 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, according to the United Nations’ annual “emissions gap” report, which assesses the difference between the world’s current path and the changes needed to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

View the complete November 26 article by Brady Dennis on The Washington Post website here.

Rep. Phillips Makes The Case For Carbon Pricing In Testimony Before Select Committee On Climate Crisis

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03) testified before the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis about the urgent need for climate action. In Congress, Phillips is member of the New Democrat Coalition Climate Change Task Force and is a strong advocate for H.R. 763, the bipartisan Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act.

A group of people sitting at a table Description automatically generated

Click here to watch Rep. Phillips’s testimony before the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis

Below are Rep. Phillips’s remarks as prepared:

Thank you for the invitation to offer testimony this afternoon on this urgent problem. Continue reading “Rep. Phillips Makes The Case For Carbon Pricing In Testimony Before Select Committee On Climate Crisis”

Climate change is collapsing the U.S.’s nuclear waste tomb in the Marshall Islands

Ask people to think of a nuclear disaster and they’ll probably come back with the name Chernobyl. The 1986 explosion of a Soviet Union reactor that resulted in the immediate death of at least 50 people has cemented itself in modern memory, but there’s another disaster building. In the Marshall Islands, climate change is collapsing a nuclear tomb, and the United States is the one who put it there.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, which is a collection of 29 coral atolls across 1,156 islands. Of course, the U.S. didn’t end with nuclear weapons. The Pentagon also dropped biological weapons on the islands.

When the U.S. was finished, it took all the waste from the islands, along with contaminated soil from a Nevada testing site, dumped it into the Runit Dome, a crater left from a nuclear detonation, and covered all of that with concrete.

View the complete November 12 article by Vanessa Taylor on the Mic website here.

The climate chain reaction that threatens the heart of the Pacific

Washington Post logoSHIRETOKO PENINSULA, Japan — Lined up along the side of their boat, the fishermen hauled a huge, heavy net up from swelling waves. At first, a few small jellyfish emerged, then a piece of plastic. Then net, and more net. Finally, all the way at the bottom: a small thrashing mass of silvery salmon.

It was just after dawn at the height of the autumn fishing season, but something was wrong.

“When are the fish coming?” boat captain Teruhiko Miura asked himself.

View the complete November 12 article by Simon Denyer and Chris Mooney on The Washington Post website here.