Month: November 2018

Republican activist with ties to Project Veritas infiltrates the Sierra Club

This article discusses how climate change deniers tried infiltrating the Sierra Club. Project Veritas-linked operative allegedly tried to use Sierra Club credentials to access Democratic campaigns.

The Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest and most prominent environmental groups, was infiltrated earlier this year by a right-wing activist with alleged connections to Project Veritas, a conservative undercover video production company that has faced multiple lawsuits and criminal charges.

Southern California conservative activist Ernie White, using the alias Earl White, began volunteering in the office of the Los Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club in April in an attempt to undermine the organization’s work, according to the environmental group.

We broke down what climate change will do, region by region

This article discusses what climate change will do, region by region.

Look, at this point, even the most stubborn among us know that climate change is coming for our asses. We really don’t have much time until the climate plagues we’re already getting previews of — mega-wildfires, rising sea-levels, superstorm after superstorm — start increasing in frequency. The 4th National Climate Assessment says all that and much more is on its way.

Here’s the thing: Not all regions in the U.S. are going to experience climate change in the same way. Your backyard might suffer different climate consequences than my backyard. And, let’s be honest, we need to know what’s happening in our respective spaces so we can be prepared. I’m not saying it’s time to start prepping your bunker, but I would like to know if my family should consider moving to higher ground or stock up on maple syrup.

Luckily, that new report — which Trump tried to bury on Black Friday — breaks down climate change’s likely impacts on 10 specific regions. Unluckily, the chapters are super dense.

Unable to Bury Climate Report, Trump & Deniers Launch Assault on the Science

This article discusses how, Unable to Bury Climate Report, Trump & Deniers Launch Assault on the Science. Evidence and warnings in the National Climate Assessment are a high-stakes problem for Trump’s fossil fuel-friendly agenda, both in politics and in court.

President Donald Trump’s administration and its allies in the climate denial community have mounted a campaign to try to discredit the Fourth National Climate Assessment, an effort that has escalated in intensity since the report’s release during the Thanksgiving weekend.

Trump could not halt the peer-reviewed assessment by the U.S. government’s climate scientists. The report—the most comprehensive and authoritative report on climate change and its impacts in the United States—is mandated by a law Congress passed in 1990.

But after an attempt to minimize the attention it received, by slipping it out to the public on the afternoon of the Black Friday shopping holiday, Trump flatly rejected its central finding that global warming is causing ongoing and lasting economic damage. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

Farmers, Don’t Count on Technology to Protect Agriculture from Climate Change

This article discusses how climate change will affect food production. Farmers, Don’t Count on Technology to Protect Agriculture from Climate Change. The worsening impact of heat, drought and extreme weather will overtake tech and science advances within decades at the current pace, new U.S. climate report warns.

Of all the U.S. industries threatened by climate change, agriculture—and the broader food system it supports—is especially vulnerable to unchecked global warming, the new National Climate Assessment released by 13 federal agencies warns.

Amid the report’s grim projections for agriculture, the authors make an especially notable prediction: Advances in science and technology, like precision irrigation, drought-resistant crops and targeted fertilizer treatments, will only go so far toward helping farmers and ranchers cope with increasingly erratic weather.

The effects of climate change on American farms and ranches will likely outpace technological fixes within decades, even with the present pace of agricultural innovation, the report says.

Study: Cascading Health Risks From the Changing Climate

This article discusses a study that warns of cascading health risks from the changing climate. 

Crop yields are declining. Tropical diseases like dengue fever are showing up in unfamiliar places, including in the United States. Tens of millions of people are exposed to extreme heat.

These are the stark findings of a wide-ranging scientific report that lays out the growing risks of climate change for human health and predicts that cascading hazards could soon face millions more people in rich and poor countries around the world.

The report, published Wednesday in the public health journal The Lancet, incorporates the work of 24 academic institutions and United Nations agencies and follows a major climate assessment issued last week by the United States government. The two studies represent the most serious warnings to date that climate change is posing a series of interconnected health risks for the global population.

What causes climate change? Carbon isotopes show it’s fossil fuels.

This article discusses what causes climate change? Carbon isotopes show it’s fossil fuels. Scientists can measure how much of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is caused by us.

To identify the cause of global warming, scientists study the carbon in our atmosphere.

Powell: “Carbon has three varieties: three different isotopes, all with the same number of protons, but three different numbers of neutrons.”

James Powell of the National Physical Sciences Consortium says these isotopes are found in different proportions in different substances. For example, the carbon found in plants has a distinct ratio of the isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-13.

There’s also a difference between the carbon isotopes in living plants and those in fossil fuels, which are made from plants that died millions of years ago.

That’s because plants contain the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which decays over time.

As rainfall intensifies, cities need to prepare for more stormwater

This article discusses the impact of climate change on rainfall. As rainfall intensifies, cities need to prepare for more stormwater. The risk of catastrophic floods is rising.

High on a hill above the village of Cross Plains, Wisconsin, the rain came down in sheets against the windows of the house where I was staying. As I listened to the wind thrash tree branches, I’d never been more grateful to be on high ground. After a few hours of heavy rain, the power went out. I kept tabs on social media as flash flooding devastated the town below me.

Between the afternoon of August 20, 2018, and the next morning, 14.7 inches of rain fell on Cross Plains. Homes, businesses, bridges and parks were washed out along streets, rivers and ponds. It took six days for the main highway out of town to reopen.

The August 20 event in Cross Plains and western Dane County was deemed a 1-in-1,000-year event, which means that a rainstorm of that magnitude historically has a 0.1 percent chance of occurring in a given year.

Report: Floods, fires and rising seas: how Virginia will feel climate change

This article discusses how Virginia will feel climate change – floods, fires and rising seas.

Climate change isn’t just about extreme heat waves in distant future decades, or melting glaciers far away from the neighborhoods, forests and farms of Virginia.

Storms are dropping heavier rainfall, summer nights aren’t cooling off as much, tides are creeping higher than before — and it’s already happening in our backyards.

Those trends are likely to continue and intensify by the time a child growing up today gets to retirement age.

The scenarios and the evidence are laid out in a new report called the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which was created by hundreds of experts across 13 federal agencies.

Part one of the report, which came out in 2017, explains why the scientific community is confident that emissions from human activities are changing the planet’s weather and oceans.

Part two, released Friday, takes more than 1,600 pages to explore how those changes will affect the health, infrastructure, agriculture and economy around the United States.

Big tech companies are becoming the top buyers of green energy to meet data needs: BNEF

This article discusses how big tech companies are becoming the top buyers of green energy to meet data needs.