National Geographic reports: Around the world, alarms are being sounded about groundwater depletion. Underground water is being pumped so aggressively globally that land is sinking, civil wars are being waged, and agriculture is being transformed. According to scientist Jay Famiglietti, the areas where aquifiers are under the greatest threat are also the most heavily populated….
Read More about What you need to know about the world’s water wars
Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we’re re-publishing interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best….
Read More about The Great Derangement: Conversations with Amitav Ghosh – 1Christian Schwägerl writes: According to data for 452 species, there has been a 45 percent decline in invertebrate populations over the past 40 years. So far, only the decline of honeybee populations has received attention, mostly because of their vital role in pollinating food crops. The rest of the insect world has been widely ignored….
Read More about Vanishing act: Why insects are declining and why it matters
The Guardian reports: India recorded its hottest day ever on 19 May, with the temperature in Rajasthan’s Phalodi rising to 51C. But it’s only one among many climate records broken this year. From soaring temperatures in Alaska and India to Arctic sea ice melting and CO2 concentrations rising, 2016 is smashing records around the world….
Read More about It’s only July, but 7 climate records have already been broken in 2016
In 2008, GRAIN exposed how a new wave of land grabbing was sweeping the planet in the name of addressing the global food and financial crises. Their new report shows that the global farmland grab is far from over. Rather, it’s in many ways deepening, expanding to new frontiers and intensifying conflict around the world….
Read More about The global farm land grab in 2016: How big, how bad?
Ayesha Banerjee reports: “Climate change’s not something which will happen in the future. It’s happening right now. April 2016 was one of the hottest months on record.” The warning comes from climate change researcher Mihir Mathur, at TERI in Delhi, who is picking up danger signals from planet earth and wants to mitigate the impact….
Read More about Are you too young to be worried about climate change?
Chris Mooney reports: In a new study published in Nature, scientists say they have for the first time thoroughly documented one of the most profound planetary changes yet to be caused by a warming climate: The distribution of clouds all across the Earth has shifted, in such a way as to make global warming worse….
Read More about Global warming is changing cloud distribution, with profound consequencesChris Mooney reports: In an ambitious study representing the latest merger between big data approaches and the quest to conserve the planet, scientists have found that across a majority of the Earth’s land surface, the abundance or overall number of animals and plants of different species has fallen below a “safe” level identified by biologists….
Read More about The diversity of life across much of Earth has plunged below ‘safe’ levels
Dana Nuccitelli reports in The Guardian: 2014 and 2015 each set the record for hottest calendar year since we began measuring surface temperatures over 150 years ago, and 2016 is almost certain to break the record once again. It will be without precedent: the first time that we have seen three consecutive record-breaking hot years….
Read More about We just broke the record for hottest year, nine straight times
Raghu Karnad writes: The mysterious absence of climate disaster from contemporary arts and fiction is the central issue in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, a genuinely important book. The book’s about much else: but stops at every point to ask why our pressing concern, that we are wrecking our climate and habitat, is so ignored….
Read More about Why we do not hear the waters: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
CoalSwarm’s new report details how India has a total of 243 GW of coal plants under development, threatening to derail its renewable energy ambitions, leading to either locked-out renewables or stranded coal plants. It would push the country towards more expensive and underutilized coal plants at the expense of lower cost and cleaner renewable energy….
Read More about Collision course: The incompatibility of India’s coal and renewable strategies
Charles Eisenstein in a new blog-post: The Brexit vote marks a rare moment of discontinuity, when the usual normalizing narratives falter and a society experiences a fertile and frightening moment of bewilderment. Brexit, though, is a mere foreshadowing of the vertigo that will ensue with the next economic crisis, which will dwarf that of 2008….
Read More about On Brexit: The fertile ground of bewildermentChris Martenson writes: The main issue is simple: putting in steel reinforcing bars lowers the cost and weight of installing reinforced concrete, but at the severe expense of reducing its lifespan. In other words, literally everything you see today that’s made of concrete will need to be replaced within a hundred years of its installation….
Read More about How industrial civilisation is (literally) built on a foundation with an expiry date
The introduction to Our Renewable Future, a new book on the profound, all-encompassing energy transformation that will be witnessed throughout the world over the next few decades. Two irresistible forces will drive this historic transition: the necessity of avoiding catastrophic climate change and the ongoing depletion of the world’s oil, coal, and natural gas resources….
Read More about Bookshelf: Our Renewable Future
Chris Mooney reports: A large team of researchers have reviewed individual country climate pledges made at the Paris talks to conclude that they fall short, forecasting that the full carbon “budget” that we’ve left to emit if we want to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming could be emitted by as early as 2030….
Read More about Study: Paris climate goals fall way short of what’s necessaryG.B.S.N.P. Varma writes: CO2 concentration levels in the atmosphere have risen above 400 parts per million (ppm), which scientists consider a red line for climate change, for the second year in succession, but this time they will endure for our lifetimes, according to the Mauna Loa Observatory, global record-keeper of carbon emissions since the 1950s….
Read More about CO2 levels breach climate red line, and will remain there for our lifetimeThe Centre’s recent directive to state-owned power generation firms to stop coal imports and instead buy domestic coal, saw skeptical voices warning against seeing it as a sign of new commitment to reduce coal consumption. However, there’s good reason to the hope that India may be moving away from coal, irrespective of the government’s intent….
Read More about No thanks to the govt, but coal may be on its way out in India anywayCatch News reports: In a new initiative by Speaker Ram Niwas Goel, proceedings for the day at the Delhi Assembly were kickstarted by a lecture series. The first lecture was delivered by veteran journalist P. Sainath, who spoke on ‘Water and Farm Crisis in India’, which he said were the defining crises of our times….
Read More about Video: P. Sainath at the Delhi assembly: Water and farm crisis are the defining problems of our time
IISc
Recent research by IISc reveals startling numbers on Bangalore’s reckless urbanization and its consequences: during 1973–2016 (1005% concretization or increase of paved surface) has had a telling influence on the natural resources, such as decline in green spaces (88% decline in vegetation), wetlands (79% decline), higher air pollutants and a sharp decline in groundwater table….
Read More about Red alert: India’s technology capital headed for system failure
Bharat Dogra writes: The full dimensions of the environmental crisis in the 21st century need to be understood in wider terms of several critical parameters, together disrupting the life-creating conditions on earth to such an extent as to pose nothing less than a survival crisis for many forms of life and ultimately for human beings….
Read More about Environment: It’s a question of survival now
