Headliners: Articles on various subjects
Climate change action: 6 trends to watch in 2022. From making green shifts fairer for workers to slashing fossil fuel subsidies, action on climate change needs to ramp up in 2022, analysts say. KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - From phasing out fossil fuel subsidies to tackling the surging costs of loss and damage caused by climate change impacts, 2022 is likely to see growing pressure for more ambitious action to fight global warming on the ground. The urgency comes as officials and climate policy analysts warn the most ambitious Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F) is growing harder to reach - despite gaining stronger political backing in 2021. "2022 is all about shifting into what the (U.N.) secretary-general has called 'emergency mode'," Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Here are some of the climate and nature issues experts predict will be top priorities this year
https://news.trust.org/item/20220105124239-61z30/?utm_campaign=Carbon%20Brief%20Daily%20Briefing&utm_content=20220106&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20Daily
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Carbon Brief’s Cropped. We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight. Snapshot Brazil’s Cerrado savannah reported a six-year deforestation high, after which government scientists have said that deforestation monitoring will cease soon, citing government budget cuts. Wood from the endangered savannah is being illegally deforested to fuel a charcoal boom, which reports say is reliant on forced labour. Massive and destructive fires have swept across parts of the US and South America in recent weeks. These fires have been unusual in their timing, speed and destructiveness. While they are fuelled in part by climate change-driven drought, forest management tactics and other human decisions have played a role as well, experts say.The UK government announced a new taxpayer-funded rewilding scheme for farmers as part of a slew of post-Brexit agricultural reforms. The scheme has been criticised by conservationists, tenant farmers and parliament’s public accounts committee for low targets, lack of detail, access and its “blind optimism” that could lead to food price hikes.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/cropped-12-january-2022-brazilian-deforestation-wildfires-rage-uk-rewilding-scheme?utm_campaign=Carbon%20Brief%20Daily%20Briefing&utm_content=20220113&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20Daily
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Nine must-read climate change stories of 2021 from around the world.....After a 2020 in which the Covid-19 pandemic squeezed out other news, climate coverage was back with a bang in 2021 with a northern summer of disaster leading up to Cop26, the most hyped climate summit since Copenhagen and the most important since Paris.At Climate Home News, we covered all the big news – the summits, the targets, the elections, the weather extremes. We also spent time digging out the lesser-known tales and the real stories behind the headlines. Here are nine examples spanning five continents( sorry Antarctica)
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/12/28/nine-must-read-climate-change-stories-2021-around-world/
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‘Everyone should be concerned’: Antarctic sea ice reaches lowest levels ever recorded.Graham Readfearn Sat 4 Mar 2023 19.00 GMT
With the continent holding enough ice to raise sea levels by many metres if it was to melt, polar scientists are scrambling for answers. For 44 years, satellites have helped scientists track how much ice is floating on the ocean around Antarctica’s 18,000km coastline. The continent’s fringing waters witness a massive shift each year, with sea ice peaking at about 18m sq km each September before dropping to just above 2m sq km by February.But across those four decades of satellite observations,
there has never been less ice around the continent than there was last week. By the end of January we could tell it was only a matter of time. It wasn’t even a close run thing,” says Dr Will Hobbs, an Antarctic sea ice expert at the University of Tasmania with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.
“We are seeing less ice everywhere. It’s a circumpolar event.” In the southern hemisphere summer of 2022, the amount of sea ice dropped to 1.92m sq km on 25 February – an all-time low based on satellite observations that started in 1979. But by 12 February this year, the 2022 record had already been broken. The ice kept melting, reaching a new record low of 1.79m sq km on 25 February and beating the previous record by 136,000 sq km – an area double the size of Tasmania. In the southern hemisphere’s spring, strong winds over western Antarctica buffeted the ice. At the same time, Hobbs says large areas in the west of the continent had barely recovered from the previous year’s losses.
The fate of Antarctica – especially the ice on land – is important because the continent holds enough ice to raise sea levels by many metres if it was to melt. While melting sea ice does not directly raise sea levels because it is already floating on water, several scientists told the Guardian of knock-on effects that can. Sea ice helps to buffer the effect of storms on ice attached to the coast. If it starts to disappear for longer, the increased wave action can weaken those floating ice shelves that themselves stabilise the massive ice sheets and glaciers behind them on the land.
That’s important because the region is home to the vulnerable Thwaites glacier – known as the “doomsday glacier” because it holds enough water to raise sea levels by half a metre. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/04/everyone-should-be-concerned-antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-lowest-levels-ever-recorded
