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UK fashion designer backs Ellen MacArthur foundation campaign to stop the global fashion industry consuming a quarter of the world’s annual carbon budget by 2050
Clothes must be designed differently, worn for longer and recycled as much as possible to stop the global fashion industry consuming a quarter of the world’s annual carbon budget by 2050.
Fashion designer Stella McCartney condemned her industry as “incredibly wasteful and harmful to the environment” as she joined forces with round-the-world sailor and environmental campaigner Dame Ellen MacArthur to call for a systemic change to the way clothing is produced and used.
Continue reading...The United States Global Change Research Program report paints a bleak picture of the consequences of climate denial
The United States Global Change Research Program recently released a report on the science of climate change and its causes. The report is available for anyone to read; it was prepared by top scientists, and it gives an overview of the most up to date science.
If you want to understand climate change and a single document that summarizes what we know, this is your chance. This report is complete, readily understandable, and accessible. It discusses what we know, how we know it, how confident we are, and how likely certain events are to happen if we continue on our business-as-usual path.
Continue reading...The company’s decline is readily apparent – but if the billionaire brothers’ other interests are a guide, their investment will be about more than money
That Charles and David Koch are putting $650m into Meredith Corp’s purchase of Time would ordinarily be cause for great soul-searching in media. But these are not ordinary times.
Meredith’s Koch-backed deal with Time – which owns, in addition to Time magazine, titles including People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated – was sealed Sunday night. Meredith said in a statement announcing the deal that they are building “a premier media company serving nearly 200 million American consumers.”
The Kochs are billionaire US brothers noted for their control of oil-and-gas giant Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned US company – and for their anti-regulatory politics. Charles and David Koch (pronounced "coke") head up the $115bn company, and are well known for their quiet financial support of conservative causes, through such groups as Americans for Prosperity, a key player in the Tea Party movement. They share the No 8 spot in Forbes' list of the world's richest people.
Related: How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous
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Related: Sinclair's vast media merger threatens democratic ideals. Congress must fight it
Continue reading...As global warming exacerbates drought and floods, farmers’ incomes plunge – and girls as young as 13 are given away to stave off poverty
It was the flood that ensured that Ntonya Sande’s first year as a teenager would also be the first year of her married life. Up to the moment the water swept away her parents’ field in Kachaso in the Nsanje district of Malawi, they had been scraping a living. Afterwards they were reduced to scavenging for bits of firewood to sell.
So when a young man came to their door and asked for the 13-year old’s hand in marriage, the couple didn’t think about it for too long, lest he look elsewhere. Ntonya begged them to change their minds. She was too young, she pleaded. She didn’t want to leave. But it was to no avail. Her parents sat her down and spelled it out for her: the weather had changed and taken everything from them. There was not enough food to go around. They couldn’t afford another mouth at the table.
Around 1.5 million girls in Malawi are at risk of getting married because of climate change. That’s a huge number
Related: South Sudan's battle for cattle is forcing schoolgirls to become teenage brides
Continue reading...Project, which could help restore damaged coral populations, has seen success in the Philippines
Scientists have stepped in as environmental matchmakers by breeding baby coral on the Great Barrier Reef in a move that could have worldwide significance.
Coral eggs and sperm were collected from Heron Island’s reef during last November’s coral spawning to produce more than a million larvae.
Related: Fears for Great Barrier Reef as deforestation surges in catchments
Related: Coral bleaching badly affected reefs of Kimberley, study finds
Continue reading...Guardian supporter Matt Bowden explains why an article by the author Robert Macfarlane helped him understand the ‘Anthropocene generation’
Matt Bowden, 34, works in the textiles industry. He is from Durham, UK and currently living in Taipei, Taiwan
I came across Robert Macfarlane’s article Generation Anthropocene: how humans have altered the planet forever, as part of my MA course last year. It was recommended reading and ignited a deep interest in humans’ impact on the planet, and an impetus to reimagine my relationship with the environment.
Continue reading...Normal methods of political action and protest are simply not working. If we don’t reduce emissions boldly and fast, that’s genocide
A little over a year ago, four friends and I shut down all five pipelines carrying tar sands crude oil into the United States by using emergency shut-off valves. As recent months have made clear, climate change is not only an imminent threat; it is an existing catastrophe. It’s going to get worse, and tar sands oil—the dirtiest oil on Earth—is one of the reasons.
We did this very, very carefully—after talking to pipeline engineers, and doing our own research. Before we touched a thing, we called the pipeline companies twice to warn them, and let them turn off the pipelines themselves if they thought that was better; all of them did so.
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Related: I released 2,000 minks from a fur farm. Now I'm a convicted terrorist | Kevin Johnson
Continue reading...Instead of imagining the kind of world we want to live in and the role Australia could play in it, the foreign policy paper paints a bleak picture for our future
There are moments in history that come to define the world changing. After years or even decades of doing things a certain way, suddenly, everything changes. We look back, often in bemusement, shame or anger, and wonder how people accepted a certain way of doing things.
Changes once fiercely resisted become archaic: corporal punishment in schools, slavery, women and Aboriginal people denied the right to vote, the death penalty, LGBTIQ people denied the right to marry, the institutionalisation of people with disabilities … the list goes on.
Related: Australia facing climate disaster on its doorstep, government's white paper warns
Related: If we act on climate change now, the economic prize will be immense | Felipe Calderón
Continue reading...Understanding what happened to the ice sheet will be key to knowing what the future holds for global sea levels
There are a lot of scientific eyes on west Antarctica right now, for some pretty obvious reasons.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) holds a lot of water – enough to push up sea levels around the world by 3m or so.
The future of the planet is tied up in that ice.
I think the timing for this is right. We now have the genetic tools more refined than ever before and we are moving into the era of interdisciplinary scientific research. There’s a lot of eyes on Antarctica right now and a lot of scientists want to know what’s going to happen.
It is worth noting that historical science, including paleoclimatic research and other research into Earth’s past and life’s evolution, does indeed generate hypotheses and do new experiments, just as in other branches of science – our ‘historical science’ really is science.
We are limited to studying the materials left behind from past times but other branches of science do face limitations as well and, like them, we work hard to find the ways to use the possible to answer key questions. We’re not even close to exhausting the possibilities, and may never be, so there is still much to learn. I hope that this new idea is similarly tested.
We could be committing the world to these higher sea levels this century, depending on our emissions. In addition to what emission and climate trajectories we will choose, the question is how quickly these multimetre sea-level rises could occur. One of the major issues in refining estimates of rates of future sea level rise is the future of the WAIS and other marine ice sheet areas in Antarctica.
Continue reading...The 2016 book by photojournalist Ashley Cooper documented the effects of climate change over 13 years and in more than 30 countries. Earlier this month, Cooper won the Green Apple award for environmental best practice at a ceremony at the UK House of Commons.
Cooper is planning to set up a website, I Commit, which aims to get citizens of the world to lower their carbon footprint and upload their own images of climate impacts. Here are his images of how extreme weather has affected the UK in recent years
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