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Bookshelf

The Great Derangement: Conversations with Amitav Ghosh – 4

18th August 2016

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Why climate change activism is dead in the water

13th August 2016

John Michael Greer writes: I’ve had any number of well-meaning climate change activists ask me, in tones of baffled despair, why they can’t get ordinary people to take climate change seriously. My answer is not one they want to hear, because I tell them that it’s because well-meaning climate change activists don’t take climate change seriously….

Representational pic

CLIMATE CRISIS

How climate disasters can drive violent conflict around the world

10th August 2016

Chelsea Harvey reports: It’s increasingly clear that the consequences of climate change won’t stop at just heatwaves and sea level rise. A new study suggests that violence, war and other forms of human conflict may be driven or worsened by the effects of climate change — specifically in countries with high levels of ethnic divides….

Bookshelf

The Great Derangement: Conversations with Amitav Ghosh – 3

8th August 2016

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-publish interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best….

CLIMATE CRISIS

The climate crisis is already here – but no one’s telling us

7th August 2016

George Monbiot writes: If humanity fails to prevent climate breakdown, the industry that bears the greatest responsibility is not transport, farming, gas, oil or even coal. All of them can behave as they do, shunting us towards systemic collapse. The problem begins with the industry that, wittingly or otherwise, grants them this licence: the media….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Climate change is here and now, warns dire new report

5th August 2016

Common Dreams reports: Environmental records of all kinds are being shattered as climate change takes effect in real time, a new climate research report says. 2015 was the hottest year on record since at least the mid-to-late 19th century, confirming the “toppling of several symbolic milestones” in global temperature, sea level rise, and extreme weather….

Bookshelf

The Great Derangement: Conversations with Amitav Ghosh – 2

30th July 2016

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Video: A stunning prediction of climate science may now be coming true

29th July 2016

Chris Mooney reports: A recent report showed Greenland lost 1 trillion tons of ice mass between 2011 and 2014. A new NASA study shows that key areas where glaciers have been melting have actually experienced a reduction in gravitational pull, which has in turn reduced sea levels, confirming an age old prediction of climate science….

CLIMATE CRISIS

What would a global warming increase of 1.5 degrees be like?

27th July 2016

Fred Pearce writes: How hard would it be to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees? At various times in the past six months, global average temperatures have sometimes gone above 1.5 degrees. The truth is that scientists are only now getting out of the blocks to address what a 1.5-degree world would really look like….

Bookshelf

The Great Derangement: Conversations with Amitav Ghosh – 1

22nd July 2016

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

It’s only July, but 7 climate records have already been broken in 2016

19th July 2016

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Are you too young to be worried about climate change?

17th July 2016

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Global warming is changing cloud distribution, with profound consequences

16th July 2016

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

We just broke the record for hottest year, nine straight times

13th July 2016

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….

Bookshelf

Why we do not hear the waters: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Ten years on: how Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ made its mark

1st July 2016

John Cook writes: An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about the threat of climate change, starring former US vice president Al Gore, was released ten years ago. It has undoubtedly made a mark, winning two Oscar awards, and the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for Gore. But has the film achieved what it set out to do?…

CLIMATE CRISIS

CO2 levels breach climate red line, and will remain there for our lifetime

30th June 2016

G.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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

India’s heat waves spell doom for the working poor

25th June 2016

Deaths due to heat waves in India have been in the thousands–in the years 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2015 in particular. Numbers, which are how the deaths are usually reported, are class- and gender-neutral. It’s one of the grave ironies of global warming that those least responsible for it are affected the most by it….

ALTERNATIVES

Time to wake up and smell the climate change coffee

15th June 2016

Jayanta Bandopadhya writes: We no longer need meteorologists to tell us that the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere is growing steadily. Our most urgent task will be to take action towards reduction and reversal of global warming and consequent climate change, and thus, avoid a great threat to the survival of all life forms….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Revealed: first mammal species wiped out by human-induced climate change

The Guardian reports: Human-caused climate change appears to have wiped-out the Great Barrier Reef’s only endemic mammal species, the small rodent Bramble Cay melomys, into the history books, from its only known location. It’s also the first recorded extinction of a mammal anywhere in the world thought to be primarily due to human-caused climate change….