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"The EU and small island states have criticised the US for saying the target of keeping global warming below 2C should be removed from climate talks."
"'Flexibility' on our 2C limit would set the world on a path to irreversible, runaway climate change.
For many low-lying island states, including my own, that is not a solution - it is a death sentence,' he told BBC News.
Isaac Valero-Ladron, the EU's climate spokesman, said governments including the US had to live up to prior promises.
'Also, consolidated science continues to remind us of the dire consequences of going beyond such a temperature increase,' he said.
The core objective of the UN climate convention (UNFCCC), agreed in 1992, is to prevent 'dangerous' climate change.
Scores of governments believe that 2C is a realistic indication of where "dangerous" climate change begins, although a greater number - principally those highly vulnerable to impacts such as sea level rise - say even 2C is too high."
Scientists in the United States have identified a new strain of influenza in harbour seals that could potentially impact human and animal health.
"Strong summer thunderstorms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere pose a threat to the protective ozone layer over the United States, researchers said on Thursday, drawing one of the first links between climate change and ozone loss over populated areas.
In a study published online by the journal Science, Harvard University scientists reported that some storms send water vapor miles into the stratosphere — which is normally drier than a desert — and showed how such events could rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain in the atmosphere from CFCs, refrigerant gases that are now banned."
Shaul Mofaz
Flash 90
"Kadima chairman Shaul Mofaz hinted Tuesday, for the second time in 24 hours, that an Israeli strike on Iran is imminent. Mofaz was Deputy Prime Minister and a member of the inner security cabinet until a few days ago, and therefore was in a position to know if such a strike is indeed impending.
He did this in the context of a failed attempt by Likud to engineer a split in Kadima, and bring seven current Kadima Knesset members – as well as former MK Tzachi Hanegbi – into the coalition.
'I say this with a very heavy heart and with a very bad feeling,' Mofaz told IDF Radio. 'It is worrisome that this is happening, of all places, in a state that used to know how to maintain the difference between political moves and personal security. This is horse-trading in the Holy of Holies of Israel.'"
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was late for work in August 1945, in Hiroshima, Japan, when he saw an airplane drop a silvery speck into the air. He survived the bombing only to make his way to Nagasaki three days later...just as that city was bombed, too.
"We may look back upon 2012 as the year in which climate change began to wreak serious havoc, yet we hear almost no conversation about changing policy or behavior."
"All of this is the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is, of course, melting. As Bill McKibben points out in a piece to be published in Rolling Stone on Friday, not only was May the warmest on record for the Northern Hemisphere, not only was it "the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average," but it was also followed by a June in which some 3,200 heat records were broken in the United States.
The first page alone of the Rolling Stone article will scare the pants off you, but the chorus needs to grow bigger, louder and stronger. That's why the forthcoming book (due July 24) from Climate Central, "Global Weirdness," is so welcome. "Global Weirdness," which explains climate change in simple, easy-to-understand language and ultrashort chapters, is intentionally calm because, says Michael Lemonick, one of the authors: 'Some people respond well to 'Big trouble is coming and we must do something immediately,' but others are overwhelmed and just turn off. We believe that if you look at all the available evidence it's clear we're pushing the earth into a regime where it hasn't been before, and the effects could well be disastrous.'"
"... by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the processes killing them.
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible. And it is these two features — acceleration and inertia — that have blindsided us."
Sea level is rising around the world, but in many places on the U.S. East Coast, it's rising considerably faster than elsewhere. An oceanographer studying this phenomenon explains.
"In this documentary Ruth McDonald meets Sir Ken Robinson on a return visit to Northern Ireland, where he's supporting Derry~Londonderry's plans as the first UK City of Culture in 2013. Plagued over years by violence, unemployment and mass emigration, Derry is a complex city. The organisers of the City of Culture see the year-long event as an opportunity to 'tell a new story' but already there have been bomb attacks by dissident terrorists. Sir Ken Robinson sees 2013 as a golden opportunity for Derry to become a 'creative city'. Ruth discovers how his ideas are being received."
"Thirty writers offer their notions of a word or action or idea that can foster progress on a finite planet."
"Orion Magazine, a beautiful and lyrical nonprofit publication, is celebrating its 30th anniversary by publishing “Thirty-Year Plan,” a short book of essays by 30 writers, myself included, who were asked to describe “some thing—emotion, insight, technology, resource, practice, policy, habit, attitude—that’s going to be increasingly essential if humans are going to live comfortably, sustainably, and redeemably on Earth.” (You can sift excerpts from the 30 essays in the Orion slide show above.*)"
"Iran on Tuesday test-fired in its central desert a ballistic missile capable of striking Israel as part of war games designed to show its ability to retaliate if attacked, media said.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired the medium-range Shahab-3 missile at a mock target in the Kavir Desert on the second day of its Great Prophet 7 exercise, which is due to end on Wednesday, Iran's Al-Alam television network reported.
The Shahab-3 has a range of up to 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles), which means it is theoretically able to hit Israel, which is some 1,000 kilometres away."
"We can now admit it: global climate change is one big hoax. But let’s give credit to the special effects experts who have given us wildfires, downpour, and record heat this past month writes Bill McKibben."
"Please don’t sweat the 2,132 new high temperature marks in June—remember, climate change is a hoax. The first to figure this out was Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who in fact called it 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,' apparently topping even the staged moon landing. But others have been catching on. Speaker of the House John Boehner pointed out that the idea that carbon dioxide is 'harmful to the environment is almost comical.' The always cautious Mitt Romney scoffed at any damage too: 'Scientists will figure that out ten, twenty, fifty years from now,' he said during the primaries.
Still, you have to admit: for a hoax, it’s got excellent production values."
A federal appeals court is upholding the first federal regulations to reduce the gases blamed for global warming.
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The plan of attack for a theoretical future military action has angered the Chinese military and has been pilloried by some Army and Marine Corps officers as excessively expensive.
The average land temperature on earth has risen 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years — essentially all of it caused by human emission of greenhouses gases.
For several days this month, Greenland's surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations.
"The mental habits that help us navigate the practical demands of day-to-day life make it difficult to engage with the more remote dangers posed by climate change."
"Climate Change is staring us in the face. The science is clear, and the need to reduce planet-warming emissions has grown urgent. So why, collectively, are we doing so little about it?
Yes, there are political and economic barriers, as well as some strong ideological opposition, to going green. But researchers in the burgeoning field of climate psychology have identified another obstacle, one rooted in the very ways our brains work. The mental habits that help us navigate the local, practical demands of day-to-day life, they say, make it difficult to engage with the more abstract, global dangers posed by climate change.
Robert Gifford, a psychologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who studies the behavioral barriers to combating climate change, calls these habits of mind “dragons of inaction.” We have trouble imagining a future drastically different from the present. We block out complex problems that lack simple solutions. We dislike delayed benefits and so are reluctant to sacrifice today for future gains. And we find it harder to confront problems that creep up on us than emergencies that hit quickly."
"If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the 'largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.' The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was 'a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,' the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in."
An ice island twice the size of Manhattan has broken off from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, according to researchers. This marks the second massive break in two years.
"Researchers around the world studied six extreme weather events from 2011 and published the results in six months."
"Some of the weather extremes bedeviling people around the world have become far more likely because of human-induced global warming, researchers reported on Tuesday. Yet they ruled it out as a cause of last year’s devastating floods in Thailand, one of the most striking weather events of recent years.
A new study found that global warming made the severe heat wave that afflicted Texas last year 20 times as likely as it would have been in the 1960s. The extremely warm temperatures in Britain last November were 62 times as likely because of global warming, it said.
The findings, especially the specific numbers attached to some extreme events, represent an increased effort by scientists to respond to a public clamor for information about what is happening to the earth’s climate. Studies seeking to discern any human influence on weather extremes have usually taken years, but in this case, researchers around the world managed to study six events from 2011 and publish the results in six months.
Some of the researchers acknowledged that given the haste of the work, the conclusions must be regarded as tentative."
"... flash mobs, in their earliest incarnations, were a strange mixture of meaning and nihilism. As manic and effervescent as they could be as performances, their comntent itself -- the flash of the mob -- was almost beside the point. It was the mechanism that mattered, the crowds that came together at one random place, at one random time. What the congregants did once congregated was secondary, merely the proof of the concept.
Which is why I love [this] video ...: a flash mob that is beautiful and high-minded and entirely, entirely earnest. The performance -- an iterative take on Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy,' convened in Sabadell, Spain -- takes the original purpose of the flash mob and reverses it: Instead of assembly > content, here's it's the content that matters much more than the congregation. The gathering's subject has a predicate, which is to create -- and to share -- art."
At least 42 people die over several days, as a heatwave brings record-breaking temperatures to swathes of the central and eastern US.
"The United States has quietly moved significant military reinforcements into the Persian Gulf to deter the Iranian military from any possible attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz and to increase the number of fighter jets capable of striking deep into Iran if the standoff over its nuclear program escalates.
The deployments are part of a long-planned effort to bolster the American military presence in the gulf region, in part to reassure Israel that in dealing with Iran, as one senior administration official put it last week, 'When the president says there are other options on the table beyond negotiations, he means it.'
But at a moment that the United States and its allies are beginning to enforce a much broader embargo on Iran’s oil exports, meant to force the country to take seriously the negotiations over sharply limiting its nuclear program, the buildup carries significant risks, including that Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps could decide to lash out against the increased presence."
"In the first comprehensive satellite study of its kind, a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team used NASA data to calculate how much Earth's melting land ice is adding to global sea level rise.
Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), the researchers measured ice loss in all of Earth's land ice between 2003 and 2010, with particular emphasis on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.
The total global ice mass lost from Greenland, Antarctica and Earth's glaciers and ice caps during the study period was about 4.3 trillion tons (1,000 cubic miles), adding about 0.5 inches (12 millimeters) to global sea level. That's enough ice to cover the United States 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) deep.
'Earth is losing a huge amount of ice to the ocean annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet's cold regions are responding to global change,' said University of Colorado Boulder physics professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study. 'The strength of GRACE is it sees all the mass in the system, even though its resolution is not high enough to allow us to determine separate contributions from each individual glacier.'"
"The same view, photographed 88 years apart, affords a striking contrast -- and a much diminished glacier."
"Before the famed English mountaineer George Mallory died on Mount Everest, he was asked why he wanted to climb it, and his response, perhaps apocryphal, would become the three most famous words in mountaineering: 'Because it's there.' Something like that impulse had gripped Mallory years prior, when he joined the British Mount Everest Reconnaissance Team in its mission to explore the Himalayas and map a route to the summit now widely known as The Top of the World. Standing in Tibet in 1921, Mallory photographed the north face of the mountain that would claim his life three years later, no doubt marveling at its grandeur. He could scarcely imagine how another mountaineer would use his photograph almost nine decades hence. "
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