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More than 100 U.S. cities have pledged to switch to renewable energy

This Yale Climate Connections audio discusses how more than 100 U.S. cities have pledged to switch to renewable energy. People across the country – from coast to coast, and from small towns to big cities – are urging their communities to switch to one hundred percent renewable energy.

Kassie Rohrbach: “Citizens are speaking up and asking for it, and there is widespread public demand.” She is deputy director of “Ready for 100,” a Sierra Club campaign helping mobilize people to demand community-wide clean energy.

Rising global temperatures are creating bubbling, methane lakes you can light on fire

This article and video discusses just how bad climate change is affecting permafrost.

  • Thousands of flammable lakes are popping up all over Alaska and Siberia.
  • Rising global temperatures are thawing and melting permafrost in the Arctic, which creates these thermokarst lakes that bubble with methane.
  • The methane is flammable, but also getting into the atmosphere where it can contribute to further climate change.

Thousands of flammable lakes are popping up all over Alaska and Siberia. That’s because rising global temperatures are creating these thermokarst lakes as well as the perfect storm for our changing climate.

Video: The Role of Shale Gas Development in the Methane Cycle

This Youtube video by Dr. Robert Howath should be seen by all. In a talk titled, “The Role of Shale Gas Development in the Methane Cycle: New Insights from 13C and 14C Data,” Robert Howarth, PhD, concludes that the global increase in methane over the last 10 years is largely driven by the oil/gas industry. His updated estimate for average, full-cycle methane leakage rate from natural gas operations is 4.1%. Dr. Howarth is the David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He is a biogeochemist and ecosystem scientist whose work includes the environmental consequences of energy systems, particularly from oil and gas development and from biofuels, emphasizing water quality and greenhouse emissions. Follow Dr, Howarth on Twitter: @howarth_cornell Video by: Colleen Boland”.

 

16-year-old Greta Thunberg makes compelling plea for climate action

This article discusses the efforts of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg to plea for climate action. It contains a video of her speech.

This is one of those climate videos you’re likely to remember, have a hard time putting out of your thoughts.

That applies in particular to 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg, who virtually stole the show and left some in the audience at a recent World Economic Forum meeting deeply moved, some verging on tears.

Responding to adults’ always wanting to give youths reasons to be hopeful, Thunberg told the January meeting in Davos, Switzerland, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.

“And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would act in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.”

Gone in a Generation – Across America, climate change is already disrupting lives

This article/video discusses how climate change is disrupting lives across America.

The continental United States is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was a century ago. Seas at the coasts are nine inches higher. The damage is mounting from these fundamental changes, and Americans are living it. These are their stories.

Connecting Latino communities to climate change action: One woman’s story

This article/video discusses connecting Latino communities to climate change action: One woman’s story. Linda Escalante is linking lawmakers to people on the front lines of environmental problems.

As a child, Linda Escalante moved from Bogota, Colombia to Burbank, California. There, she and her mom lived in a neighborhood stuck between a freeway, an airport, and a toxic waste cleanup site.

Escalante: “This is kind of the story about a lot of folks in my community. You have to live close to the sources of pollution in order to afford housing, and of course nowadays it’s just gotten worse and worse.”

Video: Pumped storage could help put more wind and solar on the grid

This article discusses how pumped storage could help put more wind and solar on the grid. The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. These energy-storage technologies could help get around those limitations.

Managing climate change in part involves rapidly scaling-up wind and solar energy.

But as independent videographer Peter Sinclair’s “This is Not Cool” video explains, significant obstacles remain in executing that strategy. One of the biggest challenges?

“The wind doesn’t always blow, and the Sun doesn’t always shine,” says Mark Jacobson of Stanford University. That’s why renewables like wind and solar are referred to as intermittent sources of energy.

Reliable methods of storing energy could help solve the intermittency problem, enabling wind and solar energy to be deployed at larger scales in coming decades.

A conversation with Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, environmental policy expert Adil Najam, and social and political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary

This video, called Hothouse Earth, is a conversation with Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, environmental policy expert Adil Najam, and social and political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary.

We’re closer than we knew to falling off the cliff into climate hell – not just in the Florida Panhandle and our Deep South this week. The UN scientists’ brutal assessment is so simple you can’t forget it: if the world doesn’t get its carbon fumes largely out of the sky by 2030, Space-ship Earth will be toast by 2040. It’s in the toaster now. Twenty-two years left for this beautiful blue planet, unless we master the tech of carbon capture, fast. You are supposed to hear that warning like a howling smoke alarm in your kitchen. Oddly enough, Donald Trump doesn’t hear it at all, though the government measure of carbon in the atmosphere is higher, scarier than the UN figures. Question: can we de-carbonize the sky before we de-carbonize our oil, gas and coal economy?

Sea Level Rise – It could be 15-20 feet

This article discusses a the leading climate scientist of our time is warning of the horrifying possibility of 15-to-20 feet of sea-level rise.

Hurricane Michael, the third most intense storm on record to make landfall in the U.S., has caused widespread destruction, turning places like Mexico Beach, Florida, into a hellscape of broken homes and overturned cars. It will be a while before we learn the full extent of the damage — and the human suffering and death — caused by the storm’s 155 mph winds and the 14-foot storm surge that swamped the coastline.

Bad as the hurricane was, imagine the damage and destruction if that storm surge had been 15 feet or so higher. And if instead of receding, that wall of water never went away. That is what we could be facing in the not-so-distant future if we don’t dramatically cut fossil-fuel pollution.

If that sounds alarmist, watch this short video. In it, you’ll see a scientist named Richard Alley in a Skype discussion with students at Bard College, as well as with Eban Goodstein, director of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard. It would be just another nerdy Skype chat except Alley is talking frankly about something that few scientists have the courage to say in public: As bad as you think climate change might be in the coming decades, reality could be far worse. Within the lifetime of the students he’s talking with, Alley says, there’s some risk — small but not as small as you might hope — that the seas could rise as much as 15-to-20 feet.