Elsewhere, streets were flooded and basements had to be pumped dry of water in the Harz region, and two stretches of railway lines were closed.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths will be due to climate change induced air pollution
This paper highlights that climate change will increase human mortality through changes in air pollution. These health impacts add to others that climate change will also cause, including from heat stress, severe storms and the spread of infectious diseases. By impacting air quality, climate change will likely offset the benefits of other measures to improve air quality.
Climate change set to increase air pollution deaths by hundreds of thousands by 2100The Conversation, Guang Zeng,Atmospheric Scientist, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering , University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill August 1, 2017 Climate change is set to increase the amount of ground-level ozone and fine particle pollution we breathe, which leads to lung disease, heart conditions, and stroke. Less rain and more heat means this pollution will stay in the air for longer, creating more health problems.
Our research, published in Nature Climate Change, found that if climate change continues unabated, it will cause about 60,000 extra deaths globally each year by 2030, and 260,000 deaths annually by 2100, as a result of the impact of these changes on pollution.
This is the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of climate change on global air quality and health. Researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan and New Zealand between them used nine different global chemistry-climate models.
Most models showed an increase in likely deaths – the clearest signal yet of the harm climate change will do to air quality and human health, adding to the millions of people who die from air pollution every year.
Stagnant air
Climate change fundamentally alters the air currents that move pollution across continents and between the lower and higher layers of the atmosphere. This means that where air becomes more stagnant in a future climate, pollution stays near the ground in higher concentrations.
Ground-level ozone is created when chemical pollution (such as emissions from cars or manufacturing plants) reacts in the presence of sunlight. As climate change makes an area warmer and drier, it will produce more ozone.
Fine particles are a mixture of small solids and liquid droplets suspended in air. Examples include black carbon, organic carbon, soot, smoke and dust. These fine particles, which are known to cause lung diseases, are emitted from industry, transport and residential sources. Less rain means that fine particles stay in the air for longer.
While fine particles and ozone both occur naturally, human activity has increased them substantially………
Our models show that premature deaths increase in all regions due to climate change, except in Africa, and are greatest in India and East Asia.
Using multiple models makes the results more robust than using a single model. There is some spread of results amongst the nine models used here, with a few models estimating that climate change may decrease air pollution-related deaths. This highlights that results from any study using a single model should be interpreted with caution.
Australia and New Zealand are both relatively unpolluted compared with countries in the Northern Hemisphere. Therefore, both ozone and fine particle pollution currently cause relatively few deaths in both countries. However, we found that under climate change the risk will likely increase.
This paper highlights that climate change will increase human mortality through changes in air pollution. These health impacts add to others that climate change will also cause, including from heat stress, severe storms and the spread of infectious diseases. By impacting air quality, climate change will likely offset the benefits of other measures to improve air quality. https://theconversation.com/climate-change-set-to-increase-air-pollution-deaths-by-hundreds-of-thousands-by-2100-81830
An inconvenient Al Gore: new climate change film
Climate change: Al Gore gets inconvenient again Michael E. Mann, Nature, 27 July 2017
Michael Mann views the US statesman’s second film probing climate change.
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
As US vice-president under Bill Clinton, Gore became the figurehead of the movement to combat human-driven global warming. He also became the preferred punchbag for climate-change cynics in search of a straw man. Gore is such a towering, seemingly unassailable figure in this arena that critics have gone after him with all guns blazing. As Tom Toles and I noted in our book The Madhouse Effect (Columbia Univ. Press, 2016; see Nature 538, 34–35; 2016): “They have criticized his weight, his energy bills, and incidents in his personal life — indeed, pretty much anything else they can scrape up.”
There’s one problem with taking on Gore. He punches back, and above his weight. After all, he’s up against arguably the most entrenched, wealthy and powerful industry the world has ever known: fossil fuels. And this pugilist is still very much in the fight. Witness his new film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power — the follow-up to his 2006 An Inconvenient Truth.
For those fearing a preachy PowerPoint lecture on climate science, be assured: An Inconvenient Sequel isn’t that. Rather, it largely takes the scientific evidence as a given, not least because Gore has already done a whole film on that. This instalment is an attempt to show us how striking climate impacts have become in the decade since his first movie.
Early in An Inconvenient Sequel, there’s a scene on the Greenland ice sheet, where glaciologists Eric Rignot and Konrad Steffen point to the dramatic retreat of ice in recent years. We witness rivers of surface melt water gushing away from the ice sheet to the open water of the North Atlantic Ocean. Gore poses the question: “Where is all of that water going?” He then answers it. We’re transported to Miami Beach, Florida, where we witness the flooding of streets that now comes simply with seasonal high tides. If melting Greenland ice seems distant and abstract, the perennial flooding of Miami and other coastal cities, and low-lying, highly populated countries from Bangladesh to Belgium is anything but.
The drought that has afflicted Syria for more than a decade is the most pronounced and prolonged for at least 900 years (as far back as we have reliable palaeodata). Climate change has undoubtedly had a role. Gore shows us how the impact of the drought on rural farmers led to increased conflict, a civil war, mass exodus, global conflict over immigration and, as a consequence, the emergence of Islamist terrorist group ISIS. If drought in Syria seems distant or even mundane, the threat of terrorism and global political instability is immediate and visceral. Gore has a genius for joining the dots in the global mapping of climate impacts.
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore showed a version of the famous ‘hockey-stick’ curve that my co-authors and I published in the late 1990s ( et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 26, 759–762; 1999), revealing a dramatic spike in temperature over the past century. There is a ‘hockey stick’ in the new film, but it charts instead the remarkable global growth in renewable energy over the past decade. Climate change is accelerating; so too is our ability to tackle it. There are reasons for cautious optimism……
Finally, the film casts an inconvenient light on humanity. It is astonishing that we’re still mired in a political debate about whether climate change even exists when, with each passing year of insufficient action, the challenge of averting a catastrophe becomes ever greater. Knowing that Al Gore is still optimistic is a shot in the arm at a time of uncertainty. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7664/full/547400a.html?foxtrotcallback=true
Investors turning away from fossil fuels
Climate News Network 30th July 2017, Shares in major oil and gas companies are expected to plunge in value in
the next three to five years because of climate change-related financial
risks, meaning more investors will spurn fossil fuels.
the next three to five years because of climate change-related financial
risks, meaning more investors will spurn fossil fuels.
This is the verdict of British asset managers who control billions of pounds of investments in
stock markets.
stock markets.
It could have serious consequences for many thousands of
people whose pension funds have invested in these companies, as well as
many institutions and charities which rely on dividends for their income,
according to a report by the Climate Change Collaboration (CCC), a group of
four UK charitable trusts.
http://climatenewsnetwork.net/more-investors-will-spurn-fossil-fuels/
people whose pension funds have invested in these companies, as well as
many institutions and charities which rely on dividends for their income,
according to a report by the Climate Change Collaboration (CCC), a group of
four UK charitable trusts.
http://climatenewsnetwork.net/more-investors-will-spurn-fossil-fuels/
Poll shows Scotland’s people increasingly want action on climate change
Scotsman 31st July 2017, A growing number of people in Scotland want to see stronger action on
climate change, according to a poll. Results from a survey by WWF Scotland
show an increase in the percentage of those calling for more investment,
renewable energy sources and a reduction in emissions.
The data comes as a new Climate Change Bill is out for public consultation, and around 1,000
Scots were surveyed in May and June for the WWF study. More than
three-quarters, 76 per cent, of respondents said the Scottish Government
should reduce climate change emissions by “investing more in improving the
energy efficiency of homes across Scotland”, up from 67 per cent in 2016.
Atotal of 68 per cent said they want the Government to invest in projects
that reduce emissions, up from 59 per cent in 2016. There were 72 per cent
who believe more should be d one to help people heat their homes from
renewable sources. Only 59 per cent thought so in the previous year.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/poll-finds-more-scots-want-stronger-action-on-climate-change-1-4517962
Expert opinion is that climate change will increase wildfire incidence and severity
Climate change will feed wildfires – experts http://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1458660/climate-change-feed-wildfires-experts By AFP28th July 2017 Long periods of heat cause vegetation to become dry and inflammable, easily set alight by lightning, spontaneous combustion, or fires lit by humans. More than 10,000 people had to flee raging fires in southern France this week, and several villages were evacuated in Portugal just weeks after another blaze killed more than 60 people there.In South Africa in June, nine people died and some 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes as fires raged through the drought-stricken Western Cape region, while this month some 40,000 people have had to flee wildfires in western Canada, where officials declared a state of emergency.In California, some 8,000 people were evacuated last week ahead of fires that razed vast swathes of forest.
What causes wildfires? Long periods of heat cause vegetation to become dry and inflammable, easily set alight by lightning, spontaneous combustion, or fires lit by humans. The more the mercury climbs, the higher the risk for more, and more intense, wildfires.
Scientists say the average global temperature has risen by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the Industrial Revolution, when mankind started emitting heat-trapping greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
Most of the world’s nations agreed in Paris in 2015 to limit overall warming to 2 C. But experts say this will not be enough, and severe heatwaves and drought will grow worse regardless.
And it is not just heat to blame for fires. A recent study showed that extreme thunderstorms formed due to higher temperatures, and were the main driver for massive fires in Alaska and Canada in recent years. More storms mean more lighting to ignite fires.
Are there more fires today? According to Thomas Curt, a researcher at France’s Irstea climate and agriculture research institute, big fires of over 100 hectares, and “megafires” over 1,000 hectares, have been “a growing problem worldwide and notably in Mediterranean Europe”.And NASA research shows that fires have increased in Canada and the American west, as well as in regions of China, India, Brazil and southern Africa.
Why? According to NASA, “a warming and drying climate,” was to blame. “Climate change has increased fire risk in many regions,” according to the space agency.
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said last month that parts of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the southwestern United States experienced extremely high May and June temperatures.
Globally, surface temperatures over land and sea were the second highest on record for January to May.
Italy, Portugal and most of France had winter rainfall 20-30 percent under the seasonal norm, according to French climatologist Michele Blanchard. Almost three-quarters of Portugal, where 75,000 hectares of forest have burnt since January, has been battling a severe drought since June. According to the WMO, more than a third of Portuguese weather stations measured temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius over a weekend in June when the fires began.
In France, several towns in the south broke June temperature records.
Large parts of South Africa, meanwhile, experienced an historic drought and crippling water shortages.
Scientists are loath to ascribe any particular drought, heatwave, or other weather event to climate change — a phenomenon that can only be measured over decades, but note that these events took place within a What about the future?
Climate change will unlock “more heatwaves… with more evaporation and more intense drought,” said Blanchard.
A 2016 study of the European Commission showed that the fire-prone surface area of southern Europe could double in the 21st century.
A study published in Nature Climate Change in June said three-quarters of the global population will be exposed to potentially deadly heatwaves by 2100 unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed. Even with aggressive cuts, it said, nearly half of the population will be exposed.
According to the authors of another study published by the same journal in May, fire is the most significant risk to forests, which cover about a third of global land surface. And it was clear that “risks caused by fires… will increase in the context of climate change,” they said — citing devastating forest blazes in Canada and Russia in recent years.
What to do?
Apart from long-term efforts to rein in global warming, some forest will have to be cut back, undergrowth cleared, and residential areas moved further from scrubland and forest borders, to reduce the risk to life and property.
“The focus… should shift from combating forest fires as they arise to preventing them from existing, through responsible long-term forest management,” says green group WWF.
Thousands homeless, hundreds die in East India floods
Monsoon 2017: Floods Across Gujarat, Rajasthan, East India Kill Hundreds; Thousands Homeless, Sky Weather, 28 July 2017 Floods across many parts of the country have wreaked havoc resulting in chaos in several areas. The flood toll has reached a whopping 200 now and a few thousands have become homeless.
Rescue and relief operations were in full swing which is why thousands were sent to safer places. Not only this, PM Modi announced that the injured are entitled to compensation of Rs 50,000, while the family of deceased will get Rs 2 lakh.
The two weather systems which developed over either side of the country, one being over South Rajasthan and Gujarat and another over Gangetic West Bengal as well as Jharkhand were responsible for bringing torrential rains. Heavy rains were witnessed over many parts of the country.
Parts of Odisha, Gangetic West Bengal and Jharkhand witnessed extremely heavy rains between July 21 and 25. These weather conditions were attributed to the low over Gangetic West Bengal and adjoining Jharkhand intensified into a low pressure area and now the system is lying over Southeast Uttar Pradesh as a depression…..
many parts of Gujarat and South Rajasthan have been reeling under flood conditions which escalated to being severe due to non stop rains.
Since the second week of July, back to back weather systems have been affecting Gujarat and South Rajasthan. Initially, the low which formed over Southeast Uttar Pradesh travelled over Gujarat and gave heavy rains over the region.
Another Weather system which formed over West Central Bay off Odisha coast also travelled up to South Rajasthan and Gujarat around July 20. Since then, the system has been persisting over the region and giving heavy to extremely heavy rains over that area…..https://www.skymetweather.com/content/weather-news-and-analysis/monsoon-2017-floods-across-gujarat-rajasthan-east-india-kill-hundreds-thousands-homeless/
Northern Germany hit by floods
Floods hit northern Germany, force some evacuations,
BERLIN — Heavy rains led to flooding Wednesday in some parts of northern Germany, forcing some evacuations and prompting residents to pile sandbags in front of their homes to protect themselves from a swollen river.
Climate change exacerbates the formation of toxic algal blooms in waterways
Climate change is wreaking havoc on our water, Grist, on Jul 28, 2017 Cross-posted from Climate Central, For two days in early August 2014, the 400,000 residents in and around Toledo, Ohio, were told not to drink, wash dishes with, or bathe in the city’s water supply. A noxious, pea-green algae bloom had formed over the city’s intake pipe in Lake Erie and levels of a toxin that could cause diarrhea and vomiting had reached unsafe levels.
No signs of the drought ending in Italy
No drought relief in sight as Rome faces water rationing, Vatican shuts off fountains, By Kristina Pydynowski, AccuWeather senior meteorologist July 27, 2017, There are no signs of the drought ending in Italy in the foreseeable future.
Significant rain is needed to quell the wildfire risk, ease fears of water rationing and allow the Vatican to turn back on its water fountains.
The Vatican turned off its famous fountains for the first time in living memory in efforts to conserve water, CNN reported.
Around 100 decorative and drinking fountains surround the Vatican. Two of these fountains date back 500 years…….
There are no signs of the drought ending in Italy in the foreseeable future. https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/no-drought-relief-in-sight-as-rome-faces-water-rationing-vatican-shuts-off-fountains/70002303
USA drought continues
Drought Still Growing Across the U.S. https://www.hoosieragtoday.com/drought-still-growing-across-the-u-s/By Hoosier Ag Today -Jul 27, 2017 The latest Drought Monitor shows soils continuing to dry out and crops suffering as drought and abnormal drynessexpand and intensify across the Plains, Midwest, northern Rockies, and Virginia. Montana saw the most severe level of drought, called exceptional drought, grow by 10 points in a week. Twelve percent of the state is in exceptional drought and 24 percent is under extreme conditions. In neighboring North Dakota, 8 percent of the state is in exceptional drought. Another 30 percent of the state is in extreme drought. In the Corn Belt, drought conditions have shown up in Iowa. The state’s moderate drought grew to 34 percent. All states east of the Mississippi River are drought-free for now, but patches of abnormal dryness mean it could change as early as next week.
USDA meteorologist Brad Rippey says drought conditions are intensifying across the central United States. The Corn Belt has seen double-digit percentage increases. Drought coverage is growing around the nation, with the current drought monitor showing over 32 percent of the country in some form of drought.
Wildfire season made worse by climate change
How Climate Change Is Making Wildfire Season Worse, Here and Now, July 27, 2017 This summer there have been dozens of fires burning in the West, which has been experiencing record-high temperatures.
NASA monitors Arctic sea ice loss
Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres (3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.
even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of anxiety from the data hunters. “At the same time that we’re getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate its importance to the public,” one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers
Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care? By Avi Steinberg, Guardian, 27 July 17
From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, looking down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, it’s easy to see why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres (1,500ft) – high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass – is nearly impossible to fathom when you aren’t sitting at that particular vantage point.
But it’s different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasa’s monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real time – dramatising, in a sense – the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions…..
The crew of Nasa’s Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable angle. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade – the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document, among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is disappearing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.
Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12-hour daily flights, as often as weather permits…….
On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding plane, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to see what they were seeing, to see the facts. What they told me revealed something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 – and what they didn’t, or couldn’t, tell me revealed even more……
Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A team of polar scientists from across the US sets the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland……
Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres (3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.
Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we don’t know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen archive of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it……
polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep earth’s climate cool; the loss of all this white material means more heat is absorbed and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating weather patterns, the ice helps makes life on earth more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling fear in 19th-century readers, actually make the world more habitable……
even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of anxiety from the data hunters. “At the same time that we’re getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate its importance to the public,” one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers…….https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/27/watching-ice-melt-inside-nasas-mission-to-the-north-pole
Greenland ice sheet might start to melt “faster and faster”
Independent 25th July 2017, Scientists are “very worried” that the Greenland ice sheet might start to
melt “faster and faster”, a leading scientist has said. The problem is that
the warmer weather is allowing more dark algae to grow on the ice. Because
ice is white, it reflects much of the sun’s energy, but dark algae absorb
the heat, increasing the rate of melting. The Greenland ice sheet is up to
3km thick and would raise sea levels by seven metres if it all melted into
the sea. The current rate of melting is adding about 1mm a year to the
global average sea level. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-scientists-greenland-ice-sheet-melt-faster-worried-algae-a7858876.html
Plans for technology to remove CO2 from air
Scientists dim sunlight, suck up carbon dioxide to cool planet, Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle , JULY 26, 2017OSLO (Reuters) – Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun’s rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet.Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels.
The United Nations says the targets are way off track and will not be met simply by reducing emissions for example from factories or cars – particularly after U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 pact.
They are pushing for other ways to keep temperatures down.
In the countryside near Zurich, Swiss company Climeworks began to suck greenhouse gases from thin air in May with giant fans and filters in a $23 million project that it calls the world’s first “commercial carbon dioxide capture plant”.
Worldwide, “direct air capture” research by a handful of companies such as Climeworks has gained tens of millions of dollars in recent years from sources including governments, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the European Space Agency.
If buried underground, vast amounts of greenhouse gases extracted from the air would help reduce global temperatures, a radical step beyond cuts in emissions that are the main focus of the Paris Agreement.
Climeworks reckons it now costs about $600 to extract a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air and the plant’s full capacity due by the end of 2017 is only 900 tonnes a year. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of only 45 Americans.
And Climeworks sells the gas, at a loss, to nearby greenhouses as a fertilizer to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and has a partnership with carmaker Audi, which hopes to use carbon in greener fuels.
Jan Wurzbacher, director and founder of Climeworks, says the company has planet-altering ambitions by cutting costs to about $100 a tonne and capturing one percent of global man-made carbon emissions a year by 2025.
“Since the Paris Agreement, the business substantially changed,” he said, with a shift in investor and shareholder interest away from industrial uses of carbon to curbing climate change.
But penalties for factories, power plants and cars to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are low or non-existent. It costs 5 euros ($5.82) a tonne in the European Union.
And isolating carbon dioxide is complex because the gas makes up just 0.04 percent of the air. Pure carbon dioxide delivered by trucks, for use in greenhouses or to make drinks fizzy, costs up to about $300 a tonne in Switzerland.
Other companies involved in direct air capture include Carbon Engineering in Canada, Global Thermostat in the United States and Skytree in the Netherlands, a spinoff of the European Space Agency originally set up to find ways to filter out carbon dioxide breathed out by astronauts in spacecrafts……..
Faced with hard choices, many experts say that extracting carbon from the atmosphere is among the less risky options. Leaders of major economies, except Trump, said at a summit in Germany this month that the Paris accord was “irreversible.”
“Barking Mad
Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at Oxford University, said solar geo-engineering projects seemed “barking mad”.
By contrast, he said “carbon dioxide removal is challenging technologically, but deserves investment and trial.”
The most natural way to extract carbon from the air is to plant forests that absorb the gas as they grow, but that would divert vast tracts of land from farming. Another option is to build power plants that burn wood and bury the carbon dioxide released……http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-demand-shell-idUSKBN1AC1MG
World watching Australian government – ready to sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef for Adani coal interests?
Australia’s Greatest (Dying) Global Asset, JULY 26, 2017 “……..on a local level, it’s a magnet for tourism that generates around $6 billion ($4.8 billion USD) a year. This is what the Australian government seemed intent on protecting when it removed all references to the reef and the way it was being ruined by warming waters, among other things, from a United Nations report on climate change last year.
But it’s also more than that.
“Corals are foundational,” Dr. Cantin told me, comparing the reef to giant forests, like the Amazon. “It’s not just people from tropical countries who care about them.”
And, he said, those who do care are increasingly concerned. The effects of climate change are accelerating beyond what the ecosystem can handle. Rib Reef, where Dr. Cantin was diving, was teeming with color and life just a year ago; now most of it is just coral skeleton covered in algae that looks like soot.
There is still time to adjust. “It’s a big system,” Dr. Cantin says, with areas that can recover if given a decade or so of prime conditions.
But the world is watching to see what will happen next.
Will tour operators and the Australian government speak with more force about the damage from climate change? Will the giant Adani coal mine, which would bring more coal ships close to the reef, gain final approval? Will more of the reef die — or recover — in the coming year?….https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/world/australia/letter20-great-barrier-reef-climate-change-coral.html
1 This Month
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- May 2026 (102)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 