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Showing posts from May, 2015

Climate change blamed as thousands die in Indian heat

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High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our  Ts&Cs  and  Copyright Policy  for more detail. Email  ftsales.support@ft.com  to buy additional rights.  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d66381fc-05dd-11e5-b676-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz3bdBpWrng ©AFP For the wealthy of India, the annual heatwave before the monsoon is inconvenient, especially when water stored in black tanks on the roof becomes too hot to use for a shower. For the poor, however, daytime temperatures approaching 50C in the shade can be fatal. Indian officials have reported about 2,000 heat-related deaths in recent days, many of them in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with victims succumbing to heatstroke and dehydration and hospitals struggling to cope with a surge of emergency admissions. More ON THIS STORY Scientists reinforce warning on El Niño IMF — ‘True cost’ o

Global Warming Update

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Blogpost  by  Rex Weyler  - 29 May, 2015 at 9:00 Farmer Zhang Dadi in his dry corn field in Mongolia. Global warming has stricken farmers around the world. © Qiu Bo / Greenpeace. Doubt : Petroleum interests and paid denialist employ scientific doubt to rationalize non-action, but this is a trick. Scientific knowledge is built on doubt. Every process in nature involves multiple influences, no observer knows all the factors, and everything science knows is framed by a margin of doubt. Nevertheless, science has observed enough to know that global warming is real, and that the primary cause is human activity. The fundamental hypothesis : In 1896, using known observations of energy radiance and conduction, Swedish chemist Svente Arrhenius introduced the fundamental postulate: "If the quantity of carbonic acid [CO 2 ] increases … the temperature will increase." CO 2  in the atmosphere absorbs reflected light, adding heat to the Earth system. Greenhouse effect :

Longest Floating Structure In History Sets Out To Clean The Ocean In 2016!

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An ambitious new project is hoping to help clean the world's oceans with a trash collector that is reportedly the longest floating structure in recorded world history. Back in 2013 we  reported  that a 19-year-old developed a plan to clean up the world’s oceans in just 5 years, removing   7,250,000  tons of plastic. However, last week, Boyan Slat (now 21), founder and CEO of  The Ocean Cleanup , announced that this awesome project will be deployed in 2016. Slat’s invention consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Working  with  the flow of nature, his solution to the problematic shifting of trash is to have the array span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel as the ocean moves through  it.  The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from smaller forms, such as plankton, and be filtered and stored

This is climate skeptics’ latest argument about melting polar ice — and why it’s wrong

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By  Chris Mooney   May 27     This picture shows giant tabular icebergs surrounded by ice floe drift in Vincennes Bay in the Australian Antarctic Territory on Jan. 11, 2008. (Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images) We’ve had two weeks of worrying news about the melting of Antarctica. The Larsen C  and especially the remaining  Larsen B  ice shelves appear vulnerable to collapse, even as the glaciers of the  Southern Antarctic Peninsula  region have just been shown to be pouring large volumes of water into the ocean. Most people, I think, would find this pretty alarming. However, as I wrote about these Antarctic news stories over the past two weeks, I became aware that those skeptical of human-caused climate change (whether its existence, or its severity) had found a new argument to minimize concerns about polar ice melt. In particular, I came across numerous citations of a  much-read article at  Forbes  by James Taylor, titled “Updated NASA Data: Global warming not causing any