Tag: ecology

Human-Driven Climate Crisis: East Antarctica Ice Shelf collapses for First Time in Human History

The Associated Press reports that the Conger/Glenzer ice shelf in East Antarctica has collapsed. The event was caught on satellite video, and it is the first such collapse known to have occurred on the east coast of Antarctica, which had been thought to be more stable and less affected by human-caused global heating than the west.… Read More Human-Driven Climate Crisis: East Antarctica Ice Shelf collapses for First Time in Human History

Dilip

Douglas McCauley: As the ocean industrial revolution gains pace the need for protection is urgent /Jeff Sparrow: Is battling back-to-back disasters distracting us from fighting the climate crisis?

The ocean is often seen as the last wild frontier: a vast and empty blue wilderness where waves, whales and albatrosses rule. This is no longer true. Unnoticed by many, a new industrial revolution is unfolding in our seas. The last several decades have seen exponential growth in new marine industries. This includes expansion of offshore oil… Read More Douglas McCauley: As the ocean industrial revolution gains pace the need for protection is urgent /Jeff Sparrow: Is battling back-to-back disasters distracting us from fighting the climate crisis?

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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