FEATURE

  By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams (2/7/20) The rising frequency of extremely hot temperatures tied to human-caused global heating is creating “climate chaos” that drives widespread declines of bumblebees, some of the planet’s most important pollinators, according to a new study published in the journal Science. Researchers at the University of Ottawa in Canada and University College London in the United Kingdom developed a new measurement of temperature based on species’ heat tolerance. “We have created a new way to predict local extinctions that tells us, for each species individually, whether climate change is creating temperatures that exceed what the bumblebees can handle,” explained study…

“We got some really strange results.” By Eric Roston Bloomberg (2/3/20) There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations. Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections…

  Extinction Rebellion graphic. Even the bodies that claim to be addressing our predicament remain locked within destructive frameworks.  By George Monbiot The Guardian (11/14/19) It was a moment of the kind that changes lives. At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims? A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion,…