Flooding

By Katie Woolaston and Judith Lorraine Fisher | – Human damage to biodiversity is leading us into a pandemic era. The virus that causes COVID-19, for example, is linked to similar viruses in bats, which may have been passed to humans via pangolins or another species. Environmental destruction such as land clearing, deforestation, climate change, […]

Acidification of Oceans

The Black Hole of Depressions: Doing nothing about Climate Emergency could cost more than all the Wealth in the World

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A study in Nature Communications has found that if you add in variability to calculations of the impact of climate change, the upper range of the damage it could do to property is $563 trillion.* That is in the worst case scenario where the world does virtually nothing to stop […]

Climate Crisis

The Republican Party is Sick: Top 4 Ways it is Making You and Yours Sick, too

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Republican Party is sick. That isn’t a putdown, it is just the truth. The chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, is down with Covid-19, which she caught from hanging around with top Republican leaders. The head of the party, Donald Trump, is so ill he is in […]

Climate Crisis

Burning Fossil Fuels is causing Extreme Rainfall and Acceleration of Earth’s Water Cycle

The Conversation

By Francis Zwiers and Ronald Stewart | – Extreme weather and climate events causing extensive damage are a fact of the Canadian climate, and this year is no exception. On June 13, a mammoth hailstorm pounded Calgary with damage in excess of $1 billion dollars, the most expensive hailstorm in Canadian history. In early July, […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Emergency making you Poor: Coastal Flooding may cost up to 20% of Global Economy in coming Decades

The Conversation

By Ebru Kirezci | – Over the past two weeks, storms pummelling the New South Wales coast have left beachfront homes at Wamberal on the verge of collapse. It’s stark proof of the risks climate change and sea level rise pose to coastal areas. Our new research published today puts a potential price on the […]

Climate Crisis

Why Burning Fossil Fuels is to Today’s Pandemics as Fleas were to the Black Death

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sheri Fink at the NYT reports that Center for Disease Control scientific modeler Matthew Biggerstaff estimated in a conference call that the coronavirus pandemic could last for many months or as long as a year and could infect half to two-thirds of the population of the United States. Between 200,000 […]

Bangladesh

Rich v. Poor: New York faces Climate Crisis, But Bangladesh Faces Climate Apocalypse

The Conversation

By Saleh Ahmed | – Unpredictable weather and climate patterns recently prompted New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to proclaim in January 2020 that “Apocalypse will become the new normal.” Extreme storms, tides and other awful surprises the world has experienced in recent years suggest that Krugman could be right. July 2019 registered the hottest […]

Climate Crisis

We Can’t Stop what We Can’t Visualize: How We can Get our Minds around the Climate Crisis

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – The climate crisis suffers from an odd contradiction. The seriousness of the issue is not matched by comparable efforts to articulate and address the crisis. Though activism among the young has picked up dramatically, older citizens, even those who completely accept climate science, generally remain politically quiescent. […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Crisis: It isn’t just Sea Level Rise, it is the Coastal Floods it Brings

The Conversation

By James Renwick | – I saw an article claiming that “king tides” will increase in frequency as sea level rises. I am sceptical. What is the physics behind such a claim and how is it related to climate change? My understanding is that a king tide is a purely tidal effect, related to Moon, […]