How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake news | Grist
You just lived through the warmest January on record
For 421 straight months, Earth has been warmer than average.
January 2020 continued where 2019 left off, as the planet's relentless, long-term heating trend — stoked by skyrocketing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations — resulted in the warmest global January on record, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.
January 2020 squeaked past January 2016 by just fractions of a degree (0.03 Celsius), but it's really the long-term heating trend that's important, not any individual month. Overall, 2019 was the second hottest year on record, 19 of the last 20 years are now the warmest on record, and high-temperature records now absolutely dominate low-temperature records.
Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why – Bloomberg
There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.
Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5C, a nightmare scenario.
I am pretty sure it was the slogan of Bernie Sanders or maybe Ron Paul "It's Happening [now]!" Or something like that. The future is now as they say.
Arctic permafrost now melting at levels not expected until 2090 | The Independent
Permafrost hs begun thawing in the Canadian Arctic more than 70 years early because of climate change, according to new research.
A "series of anomalously warm summers” has dramatically accelerated melting rates at three sites despite average annual ground temperatures remaining low. Ponds and hillocks have formed as a result.
It had been thought that the permafrost - ground that remains frozen for at least two years - would remain until at least 2090.
Environmental Protesters Around The World Are Increasingly Being Prosecuted As Extremists
Just weeks before unprecedented wildfires broke out across Australia, killing an estimated 1 billion animals, the prime minister declared that the country faced a terrible threat: environmental protesters.
“A new breed of radical activism is on the march,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a November speech. He added that there was a “place for peaceful protests,” but he wasn’t going to stand for environmentalists obstructing and delaying mining projects or calling for boycotts of banks that finance the country’s coal industry. ADVERTISEMENT
He promised to find a way to “successfully outlaw these indulgent and selfish practices that threaten the livelihoods of fellow Australians.”