NOAA – “The Montreal Protocol, the international treaty adopted to restore Earth’s protective ozone layer, has significantly reduced emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals from the United States. A new study by NOAA and CIRES scientists shows the 30-year old treaty has also significantly reduced climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. That’s because the ozone-depleting substances controlled by the treaty are also potent greenhouse gases, with heat-trapping abilities up to 10,000 times greater than carbon dioxide over 100 years. The new research, the first to quantify the impact of the Montreal Protocoloffsite link on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions with atmospheric observations, shows that reducing the use of ozone-depleting substances from 2008 to 2014 eliminated the equivalent of 170 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions each year. That’s roughly 50 percent of the reductions achieved by the U.S. for CO2 and other greenhouse gases over the same period. The study was published today in Geophysical Research Letters“…
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Category Archives: Climate Change
Report – Changing climate shifts timing of European floods
Report – Changing climate shifts timing of European floods. Science 11 Aug 2017: Vol. 357, Issue 6351, pp. 588-590. DOI: 10.1126/science.aan2506 “A warming climate is expected to have an impact on the magnitude and timing of river floods; however, no consistent large-scale climate change signal in observed flood magnitudes has been identified so far. We… Continue Reading
State of the Climate 2016 report released
State of the Climate 2016 – “An international, peer-reviewed publication released each summer, the State of the Climate is the authoritative annual summary of the global climate published as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The report, compiled by NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate at the National Centers for Environmental Information… Continue Reading
Coastal Change Analysis Program Regional Land Cover and Change
NOAA: “Nationally standardized, raster-based inventories of land cover for the coastal areas of the U.S. Data are derived, through the Coastal Change Analysis Program, from the analysis of multiple dates of remotely sensed imagery. Two file types are available: individual dates that supply a wall-to-wall map, and change files that compare one date to another.… Continue Reading
Latest Congressionally mandated report again supports current and future impacts of climate change
Scientists Fear Trump Will Dismiss Blunt Climate Report – “The Times has reviewed an alarming draft report by government scientists who say climate change is happening now and severely affecting the United States, but the Trump administration must sign off on it before it can be released – The New York Times reports: “The draft… Continue Reading
Paper – Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats
Okin GS (2017) Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats. PLoS ONE 12(8): e0181301. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181301 “In the US, there are more than 163 million dogs and cats that consume, as a significant portion of their diet, animal products and therefore potentially constitute a considerable dietary footprint. Here, the energy and animal-derived product consumption… Continue Reading
By August 2, 2017 we used more from nature than our planet can renew in the whole year
“Global Footprint Network, an international research organization, is marking Earth Overshoot Day with the launch of a new mobile-friendly Footprint calculator at www.footprintcalculator.org. Earth Overshoot Day is the date when humanity’s annual demand on nature exceeds what Earth can regenerate over the entire year. This year Earth Overshoot Day falls on August 2, the earliest… Continue Reading
35 second video bursts through 117 years of data to demonstrate global warming trends in more than 100 countries
Vox: “This captivating video created by Antti Lipponen visualizes more than 100 years of temperature change in 191 countries in just 35 seconds. Lipponen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, used publicly available data from NASA to demonstrate the rising temperatures across the world. This isn’t the first time the story of global warming… Continue Reading
Studying 2,000 Years of Climate Change Data
Center for Data Innovation: “PAGES2k Consortium, an international community of climate scientists, has published the most comprehensive set of “temperature reconstructions” ever assembled in a publicly accessible database. A temperature reconstruction is an estimate of historical surface temperatures based on measurements collected from proxies such as tree rings, corals, glacier ice, and sediments. The crowd-sourced… Continue Reading
Research – Humans produce almost 20,000 plastic bottles every second
We are literally drowning the earth in plastic waste according to numerous studies and research papers that repeatedly document the perhaps insurmountable damage done by human abuse, waste and collective neglect. From a recent article in the Guardian, just one sentence that you need to genuinely understand, process and engage with: “Fewer than half of… Continue Reading
NOAA – Globe had 2nd warmest year to date and 3rd warmest June on record
Not it is not just you – it is hot, so hot in DC that we think it has been too hot for too long – and according to NOAA, we are, correct! “The average global temperature set in June 2017 was 1.48 degrees F above the 20th-century average of 59.9 degrees, according to scientists… Continue Reading
When Rising Seas Hit Home: Hard Choices Ahead for Hundreds of US Coastal Communities
Union of Concerned Scientists: When Rising Seas Hit Home: Hard Choices Ahead for Hundreds of US Coastal Communities (July 2017) “If saltwater regularly soaked your basement or first floor, kept you from getting to work, or damaged your car, how often would it have to happen before you began looking for a new place to… Continue Reading
