This past May was the warmest May month in a 137-year period, breaking global temperature records, according to a report published Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In How to Let Go of the World and Love All The Things Climate Can’t Change, Oscar Nominated director Josh Fox (GASLAND) continues in his deeply personal style, investigating climate change – the greatest threat our world has ever known. Traveling to 12 countries on 6 continents, the film acknowledges that it may be too late to stop some of the worst consequences and asks, what is it that climate change can’t destroy? What is so deep within us that no calamity can take it away?
Physicist Stephen Hawking says pollution coupled with human greed and stupidity are still the biggest threats to humankind. During an interview on Larry King Now, the science superstar told King that in the six years since he’s spoken with the talk show host people haven’t cleaned up their act.
The water receded and the fish died. They surfaced by the tens of thousands, belly-up, and the stench drifted in the air for weeks. The birds that had fed on the fish had little choice but to abandon Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second-largest but now just a dry, salty expanse. Many of the Uru-Murato people, who had lived off its waters for generations, left as well, joining a new global march of refugees fleeing not war or persecution, but climate change.
This is part of a series on the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, in collaboration with the Stockholm Resilience Centre. This article focuses on goal 13 – Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
Carla Lopez remembers the first time she heard a suggestion that climate change was a factor leading to the rape of young girls.
‘I was in Santa Maria Xalapan of Guatemala when a group of women said young girls were being kidnapped and raped because there was a water crisis. It was a revelation,’ said the executive director of the Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres, a women’s fund based in Central America.
Carbon dioxide has been steadily rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, setting a new high year after year. There’s a notable new entry to the record books. The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.
Schools in Portland, Oregon, have voted to abandon textbooks that ‘express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities.’
Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo and Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch, whose South Florida districts are already enduring increased flooding, salt water intrusion and other effects of rising sea levels, are leading the first truly bipartisan congressional effort to tackle climate change.
We have a pretty good idea of what climate change will do to the landscape: melt it, flood it, tear it up in freak superstorms, turn it into desert. But what will climate change do to us—to our bodies and minds?