Video: Is Miami Beach Drowning?

CBC News: The National

Published on Oct 16, 2014

The Union of Concerned Scientists is warning climate change is raising sea levels and the panel predicts Miami faces being swamped.

The ‘Historical Jigsaw of Climate Deception’: Private Notes Show How Big Oil Spread Climate Science Denial: DESMOG

EXXON & climate change

We’ve all heard the dodgy arguments: ‘the science is uncertain’, ‘climate change is natural, not down to humans’, ‘science has been hijacked by politics’… Now a new cache of documents sheds light on the origins of the disinformation.  

In another verse of a now familiar refrain, a fossil fuel industry group in the 1990s publicly promoted arguments to undermine confidence in climate science while internally acknowledging their products were driving up temperatures.  

• How Big Oil Tried to Capture the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Global Climate Coalition: Documents Reveal How Secretive Fossil Fuel Lobby Group Manipulated UN Climate Programs

A cache of meeting minutes, briefings, and emails uncovered by the Climate Investigations Center shows how industry group the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) used its financial clout and political connections to cast doubt on mainstream climate science until its disbandment in 2002. The GCC would for decades cast doubt on the veracity of climate science and strategically spread the message that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was a politicised body, to discourage regulatory reform that would hit coalition members’ profits. 

What will an Earth that is 4 degrees hotter be like?

Earth at 2° hotter will be horrific. Now here’s what 4° will look like. | David Wallace-Wells author of The Uninhabitable Earth.

How to erase 100 years of carbon emissions? Plant trees—lots of them.

Increasing the Earth’s forests by an area the size of the United States would cut atmospheric carbon dioxide 25 percent.

 PUBLISHED July 4, 2019

An area the size of the United States could be restored as forests with the potential of erasing nearly 100 years of carbon emissions, according to the first ever study to determine how many trees the Earth could support.

Published today in Science, "The global tree restoration potential” report found that there is enough suitable land to increase the world’s forest cover by one-third without affecting existing cities or agriculture. However, the amount of suitable land area diminishes as global temperatures rise. Even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the area available for forest restoration could be reduced by a fifth by 2050 because it would be too warm for some tropical forests.

“Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today,” said Tom Crowther, a researcher at ETH Zürich, and senior author of the study.

That does not alter the vital importance of protecting existing forests and phasing out fossil fuels since new forests would take decades to mature, Crowther said in a statement.

Read the complete National Geographic article 

Read also:

Exaggerating how much carbon dioxide can be absorbed by tree planting risks deterring crucial climate action

Related: 6 Glimmers of Climate Optimism for the End of a Dark Year: Medium

 

6 Glimmers of Climate Optimism for the End of a Dark Year: Medium

It was a year of frightening reports on the future of our planet. But sustainability experts are still feeling optimistic about some of the strides we’ve made this year.

The consensus among scientists, researchers, and sustainability experts following this years’ reports is that while stopping climate change will require an undoubtedly Herculean effort, the biggest hurdle is political, not technical. In other words, if all the innovations in sustainable technology and science were harnessed and directed at reducing emissions and environmental collapse, we might stand a chance at meeting the goals laid out in the reports.

Don’t get us wrong: It will take a heroic, global effort if we’re even going to come close to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius–the point after which, according to the reports, large swaths of the planet will become uninhabitable, and issues like mass starvation will become widespread. And the lack of leadership from the United States, under climate change denier Donald Trump, is making cohesive political action difficult.

But underneath all this, activists, scientists, and business leaders are

working to advance progressive climate action, and despite everything, have hung onto a sense of optimism as we move into 2019. Here are some reasons why:"

Read the complete article 

Related:

Restoring forests may be one of our most powerful weapons in fighting climate change: Vox

 

Fossil fuel exports make Australia one of the worst contributors to climate crisis : The Guardian

Australia looking to become an emissions superpower, the Australian Conservation Foundation says

Australia is responsible for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and could be contributing as much as 17% by 2030 if the pollution from its fossil fuel exports is factored in, research says.

Under climate accounting rules that record carbon dioxide released within a country, Australia is responsible for about 1.4% of global emissions. The analysis by science and policy institute Climate Analytics found more than twice that, another 3.6%, are a result of Australia’s coal, oil and gas exports.

Restoring forests may be one of our most powerful weapons in fighting climate change: Vox

Preserve Forests

One of the technologies for tackling climate change I’m most excited about is direct air capture: using huge electric-powered scrubbing machines to filter carbon dioxide directly out of the air and either stashing it deep underground, or using it for industrial purposes.

 

Adding 2.2 billion acres of tree cover would capture two-thirds of man-made carbon emissions, a new study found.

Allowing the earth’s forests to recover could soak up a significant amount of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research. 

The worldwide assessment of current and potential forestation using satellite imagery appeared Thursday in the journal Science. It estimates that letting saplings regrow on land where forests have been cleared would increase global forested area by one-third and remove 205 billion metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere. That’s two-thirds of the roughly 300 billion metric tons of carbon humans have put up there since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. 

“The point is that [reforestation is] so much more vastly powerful than anyone ever expected,” said Thomas Crowther, a professor of environmental systems science at ETH Zurich and a co-author of the paper. “By far, it’s the top climate change solution in terms of carbon storage potential.”

Some climate scientists who were not involved with the study disagree with its calculations and are warning against its “silver bullet” message. Still, supporting natural systems that can soak up carbon is widely accepted as a major component of any climate change mitigation strategy — in addition to deploying clean energy, switching to electric vehicles, and curbing consumption overall.

Read the complete Vox article

See also:

Three Surprising Solutions To Climate Change: Forbes