wildfires

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

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

With UN’s Climate summit postponed until 2021, Grassroots Activists Step in to Maintain Momentum in cutting CO2

Waging Nonviolence

By Andrea(s) Speck | – ( Waging Nonviolence) – Not just another civil society statement on climate change, the Glasgow Agreement is a ‘people’s climate commitment’ to take decisive action on greenhouse gas emissions. After more than 40 years since the first UN conference on climate change in 1979 — and after more than 25 […]

Climate Change

Amy Coney Barrett: You can’t actually be pro-life if you deny burning Fossil Fuels causes the Climate Emergency; Denialism is Mass Murder

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Amy Coney Barrett is a denialist when it comes to the human-caused climate emergency. Rachel Koning Beals at Marketwatch notes that when Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) asked her about this issue, she replied, “I’ve read about climate change. I’m certainly not a scientist. I would not say that I have […]

Climate Crisis

Stunning Doubling of Severe Natural disasters in past 20 Years, many driven by Climate Emergency

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction issued a report today concluding that natural disasters caused by the human impact on earth’s climate have doubled in the past twenty years. Human beings have put increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the past 40 […]

Climate Crisis

How ExxonMobil’s plan to Surge its CO2 output is Like Trump’s plan to Deal with the Coronavirus

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump made a mad dash to escape his hospital room at Walter Reed, browbeating his military physicians into letting him go while he was pumped full of a cocktail of potions that included euphoria- and delusion-inducing steroids. His lungs laboring with broken glass syndrome, he vaulted up the stairs to […]

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

This Is a Climate Emergency. We Need More Than Half-Measures from Democrats

Basav Sen

By Basav Sen | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – From derechos in Iowa to dueling hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, 2020 is promising to be an election year shot through with climate disasters. Even now, raging wildfires have spawned apocalyptic landscapes from Washington State on down to the Bay Area. In style and […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Emergency Overdrive: Our Age of Compound Disasters as 10% of Oregon is Evacuated, California Burns and Louisiana Sinks

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – It is astonishing to me that we still have 287 million gasoline vehicles on our roads and that 20 percent of our electricity comes from burning dirty coal. We just go on blithely pumping over 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, a powerful and dangerous heat-trapping gas, into the […]

Climate Crisis

COVID death Tolls are Horrific, but those of Global Heating are much Worse

The Third Pole

By Soumya Sarkar | – ( TheThirdPole.net) – Unless the world curbs greenhouse gas emissions significantly, extreme heat could become a major global killer by the end of this century, equalling death rates for all infectious diseases combined, including tuberculosis, HIV and malaria. In the largest international study till now on health and financial impacts […]