Linked: Climate Emergency
Skyrocketing ocean temperatures have scientists scratching their heads - Ars Technica…
For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world’s oceans. In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs, and have stayed that way since. … “In the tropical eastern Atlantic, it’s four months ahead of pace—it’s looking like it’s already June out there,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “It’s really getting to be strange that we’re just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long.”
‘In a word, horrific’: Trump’s extreme anti-environment blueprint…
The United States’s first major climate legislation dismantled, a crackdown on government scientists, a frenzy of oil and gas drilling, the Paris climate deal not only dead but buried.
A blueprint is emerging for a second Donald Trump term that is even more extreme for the environment than his first, according to interviews with multiple Trump allies and advisers.
Europe calls for swift reduction of fossil fuels, despite ‘greenlash’…
Despite growing backlash against** **climate regulations, the European Union called Tuesday for a 90 percent emissions cut by 2040 — a target that can only be met with a dramatic reduction in fossil fuels, as well as an overhaul of how people move around and get their food.
The aggressive timeline shows that much of Europe remains committed to ambitious climate regulations even as other major economies, including the United States, have yet to take binding action. If European nations agree to the 2040 target, it would put the E.U. on track to meet a much bigger goal, in 2050, of “net zero” carbon neutrality.
Melting ice roads cut off Indigenous communities in northern Canada
Melting ice roads cut off Indigenous communities in Canada’s far north as unseasonably warm weather on Friday also saw its largest city, Toronto, break a winter heat record.
Communities in Ontario and neighboring Manitoba provinces declared a state of emergency as the warm spell made the network of ice roads—which across Canada spans more than 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) between dispersed populations—unpassable.
As South America endures unprecedented high temperatures, after the hottest January on record globally, it is still coming to terms with the devastating wildfires that have torn across the continent.
Chile has been the most notably affected country, with at least 131 people dying in a fire that ripped through the coastal Valparaíso region in what has quickly become a national tragedy. Last year, at least 23 people died in summer wildfires in the country.
The threat of extinction is getting worse for migratory animals…
More than one in five migratory species officially deemed in need of international protection are now in danger of extinction. That’s according to the most comprehensive report of their populations yet, released as a United Nations wildlife conservation conference kicks off this week in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
Human activity is pushing these species to the brink. But that also means there are concrete steps people can take to safeguard their futures. The first-of-its-kind stocktake of the world’s migratory species isn’t all doom and gloom — there are some success stories sprinkled in there. It just goes to show that it’s not too late to act; it just has to be fast because the clock is ticking for many of the billions of animals that migrate each year.
Climate change is erasing previous gains in air quality — fires are mostly to blame…
Air quality in the US is projected to backslide in the coming decades, landing back where it was in the mid-2000s as a result of climate change, according to a new report. The report comes with an online tool for users to zoom in on individual properties to see what kind of air quality residents might experience there in the future. It paints a picture of a changing landscape for regulators, who are going to have to adapt to evolving threats.
Climate change turns an idyllic California community into a ‘perilous paradise’…
The clouds have parted after torrential downpours soaked southern California. It’s the third-wettest two-day period Los Angeles has ever seen since records began. And those totals aren’t even close to the more than 14 inches that fell on a western Los Angeles County neighborhood called Topanga.
The community of about 8,000 people had to deal with flooding, mudslides and evacuation orders. It was thanks to a dangerous combination of a slow-moving atmospheric river, a bomb cyclone and El Niño.