• Leak Suggests UN Agency Self-Censors on Climate Crisis after U.S. Pressure

    Leaked communications suggest that the UN’s migration agency is censoring itself on the climate crisis and the global compact on migration, following pressure from the U.S. government. an email sent by a U.S.-based official of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on 28 August to colleagues around the world relayed that the U.S. state department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) told the agency documents related to program activities it funds “must not be in conflict with current [U.S. government] political sensitivities.” These sensitivities include mentioning climate change and the UN sustainable development goals. 

  • Bill Gates Is Funding a Chemical Cloud That Could Put an End to Global Warming

    Whether you agree or not, global warming is happening. As reported by the minds at NASA, human activity continues to exacerbate the problem. Currently, there is more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than in all of human history. Two-thirds of extreme weather events from the past 20 years can be tied back to human activity, while both our summers and winters are getting much warmer. Bill Gates is currently backing a potential solution to global warming that centers around the technology of solar geoengineering.

  • NOAA’s Chief Scientist Will Investigate Why Agency Backed Trump over Its Experts on Dorian, Email Shows

    NOAA acting chief scientist said he was investigating whether the agency’s response to President Trump’s incorrect claims about the risk Hurricane Dorian posed to Alabama constituted a violation of NOAA policies and ethics. Forecasters in the Birmingham, Alabama office of the National Weather Service (NWS) immediately corrected Trump’s initial (1 September) false claims, but five days later (6 September), two NOAA administrators issued an unsigned press release which appeared to lend support to Trump’s claims. “The NWS Forecaster(s) corrected any public misunderstanding in an expert and timely way, as they should,” the chief scientist, Craig McLean, wrote to NOAA employees. “There followed, last Friday, an unsigned press release from ‘NOAA’ that inappropriately and incorrectly contradicted the NWS forecaster. My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political.” Scientists and experts in emergency response harshly criticized NOAA officials for bowing to political pressures and conceding to Trump’s false claims during a weather emergency, when accuracy, messaging, and trust in public safety agencies are vital to keep the public safe.

  • Britain Plans Mass Mobile Phone Alerts to Protect Public from Terrorism, Major Floods and Nuclear Attack

    Britain is planning to introduce US-style mass mobile phone alerts to protect the public against terrorism, major floods and nuclear attack. Supporters of so-called ‘cell broadcasting’ claim the message alerts could have saved lives during major incidents including the London Bridge terrorist attack and Grenfell Tower fire. Senior figures have raised concerns, however, that the messages could be hijacked by hackers or malicious foreign powers to induce mass panic.

  • Even for Non-Believers, These Are the Next Steps on Climate Change

    Research indicates that we need to go beyond observing the wreckage of major storms and pondering trillion-dollar plans to attempt to mitigate carbon. Businesses, homeowners, and local governments must focus on what can be done today to address these direct threats to people and property. There are three major tools in the “what to do next” approach: probability, selection, and migration.

  • Dorian Lashes U.S. Carolinas after Pounding Bahamas, Weakens to Category 1 Storm

    Hurricane Dorian weakened into a Category 1 hurricane Friday, after generating tornadoes and flooding roads in North and South Carolina. Dorian is moving with maximum sustained winds of 150 kilometers per hour. Dorian will remain a potent storm straight into the weekend, however, with tropical storm warnings posted as far north as Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, according to the National Hurricane Center.

  • Damage Estimates for Hurricanes Like Dorian Don’t Capture the Full Cost of Climate Change-Fueled Disasters

    Scientists say climate change is causing powerful hurricanes like Dorian to increasingly stall over coastal areas, which leads to heavy flooding. The U.S. government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment offered a range of climate change-induced losses of U.S. GDP which range from as low as 6 percent to as high as 14 percent by 2090. Aa more meaningful assessment of the costs of climate change – using basic economic principles I teach to undergrads – is a hell of a lot scarier.

  • Boosting Energy Security: Lessons from Post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico

    It took nearly a year for the government-run Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), which is the only power company in Puerto Rico, to restore electricity throughout the island. This was the biggest and longest power outage in U.S. history.As scientists suggest that weather will probably become more extreme and weather-related natural disasters are likely to intensify in the coming decades,we can learn some valuable lessons from what Puerto Rico has gone through in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

  • “100-year” Floods Will Happen Every 1 to 30 Years: Study

    A 100-year flood is supposed to be just that: a flood that occurs once every 100 years, or a flood that has a one-percent chance of happening every year. But researchers have developed new maps that predict coastal flooding for every county on the Eastern and Gulf Coasts and find 100-year floods could become annual occurrences in New England; and happen every one to 30 years along the southeast Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico shorelines.

  • Want to Avoid Climate-Related Disasters? Try Moving

    The response to catastrophes — Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Michael — tended to be a defiant vow to rebuild, turn loss into lesson by making protective seawalls higher and stronger to hold back floods, or raising homes onto stilts to stay clear of the encroaching waves. To this, experts say, “Enough.” The time has come to consider a different path: retreat. Abandon areas prone to repeated disaster in favor of those that are safer and do so in a deliberate, thoughtful way.

  • Retreating from Rising Seas Isn’t a Win or a Defeat — It’s Reality

    “Managed retreat” is a controversial response to climate change. It’s the idea that communities and governments should be strategic about moving people away from areas that have become too waterlogged to live in safely. Retreating from coastlines and riversides might have once been considered unthinkable. But across the world, it’s already happening — in Australia, Colombia, Vietnam, and here in the United States. And Indonesia just found itself a new capital. The country’s president, Joko Widodo, announced on Monday that the new seat of government will be on the island of Borneo, hundreds of miles to the northeast of the current capital, Jakarta. The Java Sea threatens to swallow 95 percent of the city over the next 30 years.

  • Building Public Awareness of Global Earthquake Risk

    The U.S. Geological Survey and the Global Earthquake Model Foundation signed an agreement that will pave the way for both parties to work collaboratively to enhance global earthquake loss modeling efforts and to incorporate these new developments into the USGS Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquake for Response, or PAGER, system – a system that provides fatality and economic loss impact estimates following significant earthquakes worldwide.

  • The Amazon Fires Are More Dangerous Than WMDs

    When Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election last year, having run on a platform of deforestation, David Wallace-Wells, writing in New York Magazine, asked, “How much damage can one person do to the planet?” Bolsonaro didn’t pour lighter fluid to ignite the flames now ravaging the Amazon, but with his policies and rhetoric, he might as well have. The destruction he inspired—and allowed to rage with his days of stubborn unwillingness to douse the flames—has placed the planet at a hinge moment in its ecological history. “It is commonplace to describe the Amazon as the ‘world’s lungs’,” Franklin Foer writes. “Embedded in the metaphor is the sense that inherited ideas about the sovereignty of states no longer hold in the face of climate change. If the smoke clouds drifted only so far as the skies of São Paulo, other nations might be able to shrug off the problem as belonging to someone else. But one person shouldn’t have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity’s shot at mitigating rising temperatures.”

  • Increasing Wildfires Threaten to Turn Northern Hemisphere’s Boreal Forests from Vital Carbon Stores into Climate Heaters

    Thanks in part to the carbon-hungry soils and peatlands they contain, boreal forests punch well above their weight as carbon sinks, covering 10 percent of the world’s land, but storing one-third of the land’s carbon. That stored carbon is under threat. Wildfires are becoming so frequent and intense that they are already turning some boreal forest areas from carbon sinks into net emitters.

  • Study: Climate Change Could Pose Danger for Muslim Pilgrimage

    For the world’s estimated 1.8 billion Muslims — roughly one-quarter of the world population — making a pilgrimage to Mecca is considered a religious duty that must be performed at least once in a lifetime, if health and finances permit. The ritual, known as the Hajj, includes about five days of activities, of which 20 to 30 hours involve being outside in the open air. , because of climate change there is an increasing risk that in coming years, conditions of heat and humidity in the areas of Saudi Arabia where the Hajj takes place could worsen, to the point that people face “extreme danger” from harmful health effects.