Tag: ecology

IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown

Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said. Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes… Read More IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown

Dilip

ALFRED MCCOY: China Is Digging Its Own Grave (and Ours as Well)

Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages. And I’m not talking about… Read More ALFRED MCCOY: China Is Digging Its Own Grave (and Ours as Well)

Dilip

Péter Krekó: Learning to live with the madness

Decades of political campaigning against climate science and medicine have made public health a battleground of beliefs. Vaccine hesitancy, as seen in eastern Europe, based on distrust in authority, can’t be solved with rationality alone. So what might the antidote be?    Rejecting science is not so much a grass-roots movement, says Péter Krekó, in… Read More Péter Krekó: Learning to live with the madness

Dilip

Adele Dipasquale: Careless mothers, sterile goddesses and ungrateful offspring

Nature is a tricky term. It can refer to the quality of things, to what moves things into existence or to the world as a whole. Read and heard, from political debate to food labelling, it is in constant use: back to nature, 100% natural, natural order, unnatural acts, natural ways of living, wisdom of… Read More Adele Dipasquale: Careless mothers, sterile goddesses and ungrateful offspring

Dilip

The great Amazon land grab: how Brazil’s government is turning public land private

Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction. Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No. It happens routinely and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon. The most… Read More The great Amazon land grab: how Brazil’s government is turning public land private

Dilip

George Monbiot: Carbon offsetting is not warding off environmental collapse – it’s accelerating it / Oliver Milman: Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisis

There is nothing that cannot be corrupted, nothing good that cannot be transformed into something bad. And there is no clearer example than the great climate land grab. We now know that it’s not enough to leave fossil fuels in the ground and decarbonise our economies. We’ve left it too late. To prevent no more… Read More George Monbiot: Carbon offsetting is not warding off environmental collapse – it’s accelerating it / Oliver Milman: Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisis

Dilip

Chemical pollution exceeds safe planetary limit

The production and release of plastics, pesticides, industrial compounds, antibiotics and other pollutants is now happening so fast and on such a large scale that it has exceeded the planetary boundary for chemical pollution, the safe limit for humanity, a new study claims. We asked Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate at Stockholm University and one… Read More Chemical pollution exceeds safe planetary limit

Dilip

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Is midnight upon us? Doomsday Clock panel to set risk of global catastrophe

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinctionOn 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. “I am writing on… Read More Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Is midnight upon us? Doomsday Clock panel to set risk of global catastrophe

Dilip

Malaysia: Buddhist monks fight to protect mountain home

A cool breeze sweeps through the Dhamma Sakyamuni Monastery. Sitting cross-legged on the polished stone floor, monks meditate silently under the gaze of a Buddha painted gold. Above them, stalactites hang from the rough limestone ceiling. This is one of the last remaining limestone cave temples in Malaysia. It sits nestled into the foot of Mount Kanthan, one of… Read More Malaysia: Buddhist monks fight to protect mountain home

Dilip

Oliver Milman: How the speed of climate change is unbalancing the insect world

The climate crisis is set to profoundly alter the world around us. Humans will not be the only species to suffer from the calamity. Huge waves of die-offs will be triggered across the animal kingdom as coral reefs turn ghostly white and tropical rainforests collapse. For a period, some researchers suspected that insects may be… Read More Oliver Milman: How the speed of climate change is unbalancing the insect world

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