Climate Change

A group of scientists from the Atmospheric Measurement Research (ARM) Climate Research Facility won’t be looking for gold or oil this summer as they crisscross Alaska’s North Slope in an airplane. Instead, the ARM Airborne Carbon Measurements V (ARM-ACME V) team—led by Sebastien Biraud from U.S.

As California battles its worst drought in 1,000 years — and after massive wildfires swept across the state for two consecutive summers — a number of tribe members, scientists and U.S. Forest Service officials are working to revive traditional Native American land management practices that some believe could help contain the blazes and lessen effects of the drought. ...

Where are we heading now in our quest for more "cheap energy"? North, to the Arctic! Despite the Obama Administration's jawboning about the dangers of climate change and the Administration's Climate Action Plan, it has recently given conditional approval to Shell Oil to drill for oil in the perilous waters of the Chukchi Sea. Experts who know the risks of drilling in those cold and remote waters say there is a high probability of an oil spill and that Shell has no credible means of cleaning it up. The company's record scarcely inspires confidence.

Ethiopia has made an ambitious commitment to curb its greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2030. As one of Africa’s most vulnerable nations, and the first least developed country to submit its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) to the UNFCCC, Ethiopia communicated its plans to cut emissions below 2010 levels from 150 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2e) in 2010 to 145 MtCO2e in 2030. This represents a major shift, since conventional economic growth would more than double Ethiopia’s greenhouse emissions by 2030.

It’s raining money! Or so Gov. Jerry Brown would have us believe. The new state budget assumes $2.2 billion in new revenue from California’s pioneering cap-and-trade program designed to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

During his two years leading the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis has washed the feet of inmates, proposed larger roles for women in the church, and famously shifted the institutional tone toward gay acceptance, saying, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

Linwood Pendleton was quoted in the French newspaper Le Monde on the effects of global warming on oceans. Read more (in French)

Like the tobacco industry in its past, fossil fuel giants have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns to convince us that climate science is not trustworthy. To understand why they would do so, we need to only look at two numbers. The first is $257 billion. This is the profit made in 2014 by Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, Shell and others for extracting, transporting, refining, distributing and trading fossil fuels in the United States and in Canada alone.