Tag Archives: climate-change

The world is on a dire climate path, and the commitments of global governments to curb greenhouse-gas emissions are still woefully insufficient to blunt dangerous warming. That’s the takeaway from the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation’s climate agency, released Monday morning. The U.N. …

The first scientific judgments on the deadly, record-shattering heat wave that blasted the Pacific Northwest at the end of June are starting to roll in. One rapid attribution analysis, conducted by scientists at World Weather Attribution, found that a heatwave this severe “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” The …

If it seemed like June was a little hotter than usual, it’s because it was. In fact, it was hotter than it’s ever been in North America. The Copernicus Climate Change Service reported on Wednesday that the average surface air temperature in North America last month exceeded that of any …

One by one, the witnesses described the stench, a rancid odor that befouled the air and ruined your clothes, made you close your windows in the summer and run from your car into church on Sundays lest you bring that smell into God’s house. They talked about undrinkable tap water …

It’s hard to read the news these days, as ever-deadlier fires rage in the west and more intense hurricanes batter the Gulf Coast, and our president shrugs his shoulders and says “It’s going to get cooler, you’ll see.” Which is why it’s a small miracle that I read something about …

If you’re looking for a little distraction from the news of the pandemic — something a little gossipy, but with a point at the end about how change happens in the world — this essay may soak up a few minutes. I’ll tell the story chronologically, starting a couple of …

Climate and social justice advocates have long worked to connect the dots between flows of big money and the main players propping up the fossil fuel economy. As the climate movement pulls at the threads of old power structures, it’s found that the villains of the climate crisis are a …

Sharon Lavigne knows some 30 people who have died in and around her tiny parish of St. James, Louisiana, in just the past five years. She buried two close friends this past weekend — one died of cancer, the other heart disease. Two of her brothers have cancer, and her …

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of our federal government and its response to climate change. While most of Washington has been woefully neglectful of the crisis or outright denying its existence, what is arguably our most conservative institution — the U.S. military — has begun taking the …

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez was sitting in his living room in Boulder, Colorado, watching the environmental documentary The 11th Hour, when it hit him for the first time. “I kind of began to grasp the idea that human beings are responsible for creating a crisis that threatens not just nature but humanity …