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The Guardian: ““Car nation” Germany has surprised neighbours with a radical proposal to reduce road traffic by making public transport free, as Berlin scrambles to meet EU air pollution targets and avoid big fines. The move comes just over two years after Volkswagen’s devastating “dieselgate” emissions cheating scandal unleashed a wave of anger at the …
ThinkProgress: “Americans’ dissatisfaction with the quality of the environment is at an all-time high, Gallup reported Monday. In a poll of 1,024 Americans conducted last month, 45 percent said they were satisfied with “the quality of the environment in the nation,” while 52 percent said they were dissatisfied. This is the lowest level of satisfaction and …
CRS report via EveryCRSReport.com – Evolving Assessments of Human and Natural Contributions to Climate Change, February 1, 2018. “As Congress continues to deliberate whether and how to address climate change, a key question has been the degree to which humans have influenced observed global climate change. Members of Congress sometimes stress that policies or actions …
Yale Environment 360: “The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is speeding up the pace of sea level rise a little bit every year, according to a new analysis of satellite data published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If the current pace continues, the study estimates, seas could rise …
Eu Joint Research Center: “The JRC has launched a new tool with data on all 10,000 urban centres scattered across the globe. It is the largest and most comprehensive database on cities ever published. With data derived from the JRC’s Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), researchers have discovered that the world has become even more …
Quartz: “On January 5, 2018, a paper published in the journal Science delivered a sobering message: The oxygenation of open oceans and coastal seas has been steadily declining during the past half century. The volume of ocean with no oxygen at all has quadrupled, and the volume where oxygen levels are falling dangerously low has …
Washington Post – As threats to California’s giant redwoods grow, the key to their salvation might be in their complex genetic code. “As California’s climate changes to one of extremes and humans continue to harvest, the only coast redwoods on the planet are in peril. The challenge to preserving them is here, in forests like …
“Researchers estimate the amount of natural mercury stored in perennially frozen soils (permafrost) in the Northern Hemisphere. Permafrost regions contain twice as much mercury as the rest of all soils, the atmosphere, and ocean combined.” [full text link to the study] Washington Post: “We already knew that thawing Arctic permafrost would release powerful greenhouse gases. On …
HuffPo: “More than 60 researchers and technologists are running for federal office in 2018 as part of a historic wave of candidates with science backgrounds launching campaigns. At least 200 candidates with previous careers in science, technology, engineering and math announced bids for some of the nation’s roughly 7,000 state legislature seats as of Jan. …
The Atlantic – Urban Bird Feeders Are Changing the Course of Evolution – More than 50 million Americans are conducting an unwitting experiment on a vast scale. I joined them from my Manhattan high-rise. “According to experts, feeding birds is probably the most common way in which people interact with wild animals today [this statement …
“All fossil-fuel vehicles will vanish in 8 years in twin ‘death spiral’ for big oil and big autos, says study that’s shocking the industries. This speedy revolution, a Stanford economist says, will be driven by technology, not climate policies — and while his timing may be off a few years, there is little doubt about …
The Nature Conservancy: “Approximately 41 million trees are cut down every day—far faster than we are currently replanting them. The consequences of deforestation and other types of land degradation are severe, exacerbating climate change, biodiversity loss, and declines in ecosystem services that hundreds of millions of people depend on. In response, governments around the world …
