Environmental Glance
A new report from Citibank found that acting on climate change by investing in low-carbon energy would save the world $1.8 trillion through 2040, as compared to a business-as-usual scenario. In addition, not acting will cost an additional $44 trillion by 2060 from the “negative effects” of climate change.
The report, titled Energy Darwinism, looked at the predicted cost of energy over the coming decades, the costs of developing low carbon energy sources, and the implications of global energy choices.
Big Bank Says It’s Going To Cost A Lot To Do Nothing On Global Warming
General Mills Warns Climate Change Will Lead To Global Food Shortages
n a rebuff to climate deniers, the CEO of American food giant General Mills has asserted that global warming is being created by human activity and is threatening to disrupt global food supplies.
Announcing that the company has set a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent over the next decade across its value chain, from farm to fork to landfill, Ken Powell told The Associated Press: “We think that human-caused greenhouse gas causes climate change and climate volatility and that's going to stress the agricultural supply chain, which is very important to us. Obviously we depend on that for our business, and we all depend on that for the food we eat."
NASA: Sea Level Rise Likely To Get Much Worse
Sea levels worldwide rose an average of nearly 3 inches (8 cm) since 1992, the result of warming waters and melting ice, a panel of NASA scientists said on Wednesday.
In 2013, a United Nations panel predicted sea levels would rise from 1 to 3 feet (0.3 to 0.9 meters) by the end of the century. The new research shows that sea level rise most likely will be at the high end of that range, said University of Colorado geophysicist Steve Nerem.
Activists threaten lawsuit against EPA over fracking-induced earthquakes
Environmental groups have threatened to sue the Obama administration for failing to prevent swarms of earthquakes that came in the wake of America’s fracking boom.
In a first step to a lawsuit, the groups on Wednesday challenged the Environmental Protection Agency to improve what they said were weak laws governing the disposal of fracking waste – or go to court.
The groups, led by the Environmental Integrity Project, said the EPA had stalled for years in regulating waste from the oil and gas industry.
Trash-mapping expedition sheds light on 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch'
Scientists and volunteers who have spent the last month gathering data on how much plastic garbage is floating in the Pacific Ocean returned to San Francisco on Sunday and said most of the trash they found is in medium to large-sized pieces, as opposed to tiny ones.
Volunteer crews on 30 boats have been measuring the size and mapping the location of tons of plastic waste floating between the west coast and Hawaii that according to some estimates covers an area twice the size of Texas.
Feeling the heat: Earth in July was hottest month on record
Federal officials say July was Earth’s hottest month on record, smashing old marks.
July’s average temperature was 61.86 degrees Fahrenheit, beating the previous global mark set in 1998 and 2010 by about one-seventh of a degree. That’s a large margin for weather records.
Records go back to 1880, but nine of the 10 hottest months on record have happened since 2005. The first seven months of 2015 are the hottest January-to-July span on record.
A decade after Katrina, are America's flood estimates dangerously wrong?
In the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, time apparently flies.
In 2013, Hannibal had a 50-year flood, a high-water event only expected once every 50 years. In 2014, it had another 50-year flood. Somehow, the river has reached its 10-year flood stage in Hannibal—which should happen about once a decade—in seven of the last eight years. And if the years seem to be passing with unusual speed, so do the centuries. Hannibal had a 200-year flood in 2008, considerably less than 200 years after an even larger deluge in 1993.
Evidence is mounting that Hannibal’s statistical anomalies have been caused not by glitches in the space-time continuum, but by a combination of floods getting worse and government estimates of flood risks being wrong.
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