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At a gathering of fossil fuel executives at the Vatican, Pope Francis spoke much-needed common sense about climate change
You kind of expect popes to talk about spiritual stuff, kind of the way you expect chefs to discuss spices or tree surgeons to make small talk about overhanging limbs.
Which is why it was so interesting this week to hear Pope Francis break down the climate debate in very practical and very canny terms, displaying far more mathematical insight than your average world leader and far more strategic canniness than your average journalist. In fact, with a few deft sentences, he laid bare the hypocrisy that dominates much of the climate debate.
Related: 'Extreme' fossil fuel investments have surged under Donald Trump, report reveals
It’s odd to have the pope schooling energy executives on the math of carbon
Continue reading...Experts say almost 30 species of pyralid moths have flown in or been transported via the horticultural trade
Continue reading...Rate of melt has accelerated threefold in last five years and could contribute 25cm to sea-level rises without urgent action
Ice in the Antarctic is melting at a record-breaking rate and the subsequent sea rises could have catastrophic consequences for cities around the world, according to two new studies.
A report led by scientists in the UK and US found the rate of melting from the Antarctic ice sheet has accelerated threefold in the last five years and is now vanishing faster than at any previously recorded time.
Continue reading...Coal rebound and slowing efficiency gains in 2017 suggest Paris goals may be missed, says oil firm
The renewed upward march of global carbon emissions is worrying and a big step backwards in the fight against climate change, according to BP.
Emissions rose 1.6% in 2017 after flatlining for the previous three years, which the British oil firm said was a reminder the world was not on track to hit the goals of the Paris climate deal.
Continue reading...The trees are a scientific wonder, once capable of living for thousands of years, but now becoming endangered species• Giant African baobab trees die suddenly after thousands of years
Morondava in Madagascar, the skyline in Senegal and Kruger national park all have something in common. These places are home to some of the largest trees in the world – baobabs, known to live for thousands of years. These amazing trees have trunks that can reach 30m in circumference or more. In Togo, there is a proverb: “Wisdom is like a baobab tree: no one individual can embrace it.” In many African cultures, the tree is sacred.
There are nine species of baobab in the world, and Madagascar, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, is home to six. The African mainland and the Arabian peninsula have two, and Australia has one. Africa’s most notable species is the Adansonia digitata, named after the French botanist Michel Adanson, who undertook an 18th-century exploration of Senegal. He stayed there for five years and contributed to the publication of 1757’s Natural History of Senegal.
Related: Baobab fruit takes off as a ‘superfood’ with sharp rise in UK sales
Continue reading...Alongside George Monbiot’s suggestion (Want to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy, 8 June), another way to reduce greenhouse gases is to stop keeping pets. It’s been calculated that an average dog has an ecological footprint twice as large as that of a large car.
Like meat-eating, pet ownership is nowadays encouraged by a vast industry; the pet insurance sector alone is said to generate more of Britain’s GDP than fishing does. The production of pet food, provision of veterinary services and breeding the creatures are big businesses, all with an interest in promoting the alleged benefits of owning a furry friend.
Continue reading...Are we doomed to societal collapse? Not if we break the mould of ever-greater production and consumption
Enough concrete has been produced to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a layer two millimetres thick. Enough plastic has been manufactured to clingfilm it as well. We produce 4.8bn tonnes of our top five crops, plus 4.8 billion head of livestock, annually. There are 1.2bn motor vehicles, 2bn personal computers, and more mobile phones than the 7.5 billion people on Earth.
The result of all this production and consumption is a chronic, escalating, many-sided environmental crisis. From rapid climate change to species extinctions to microplastics in every ocean, these impacts are now so large that many scientists have concluded that we have entered a new human-dominated geological period called the Anthropocene.
Continue reading...Tracking all the relevant publications on climate change has become impossible. Climate science and policy need a new approach for an age of big literature
When the lines between scientific facts, legitimate disagreements and uncertainties about climate change are being deliberately blurred – not least by world leaders like Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has never been more important. It is the IPCC’s task to make sense of the landscape of scientific findings, where they agree, and why they may differ. The authors of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report – hundreds of scientists across many disciplines – have a massive task on their hands, ahead of its publication in 2021.
When the volume of scientific information continues to grow exponentially, so does the difficulty of maintaining a clear overview. Tracking and reading all of the relevant publications on climate change has become impossible, as more emerge in a single year than was previously the case over an entire, or multiple, assessment periods. Even if there was no further growth over the next three years, the relevant literature to be reviewed for the IPCC’s sixth assessment will be somewhere between 270,000 and 330,000 publications. This is larger than the entire climate change literature before 2014. So conducting a scientific assessment is increasingly a “big literature” challenge.
Continue reading...12 June is the day to express thanks to climate scientists #hoorayforclimatescientists
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Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, according to researchers.
The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and in some cases as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated.
Related: Newcastle fells more trees than any other UK council
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