Open access notables Early knowledge but delays in climate actions: An ecocide case against both transnational oil corporations and national governments, Hauser et al., Environmental Science & Policy: Cast within the wide context of investigating the collusion at play between powerful political-economic actors and decision-makers as monopolists and debates about ‘the modern corporation and private property’ (Berle and Means, 1932/2017), ‘the new industrial state’ (Galbraith, 1967), and ‘the economic theory of regulation’ (Stigler, 1971), the paper reviews the contentious re ..read more

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Karin Kirk The Inflation Reduction Act is the Biden administration’s signature climate law and the largest U.S. government investment in reducing climate pollution to date. Among climate advocates, the policy is well-known and celebrated, but beyond that, only a minority of Americans have heard much about it.  Once voters learn a bit about this landmark law, however, a large majority support it. These findings are from a survey of U.S. registered voters, conducted jointly by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication ..read more

This is a re-post from This is Not Cool Here’s an example of some of the best kind of climate reporting, especially in that it relates to impacts that will directly affect the audience. WFLA in Tampa conducted a study in collaboration with the Department of Energy, analyzing trends in hurricane strength, and projecting hurricane activity in to the future. The results are sobering. One of the predictions is for hurricanes with 20 percent stronger maximum winds. As Jeff Berardelli explains below, that 20 percent is actually much, much worse than it sounds ..read more

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections In February 2021, several severe storms swept across the United States, culminating with one that the Weather Channel unofficially named Winter Storm Uri. In Texas, Uri knocked out power to over 4.5 million homes and 10 million people. Hundreds of Texans died as a result, and the storm is estimated to have cost the state $130 billion. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, quickly sought to blame the crisis on renewable energy. While the storm and blackouts were still ongoing, Abbott told Sean Hannity of Fox News, “T ..read more

A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, September 1, 2024 thru Sat, September 7, 2024. Story of the week Our Story of the Week is about how peopele are not born stupid but can be fooled into appearing exactly so. This week we posted a critique of Australian Queensland state senator Gerard Rennick  by journalist and author Peter Hadfield, sailing under his Potholer54 YouTube flag. The title "Could this be the stupidest politician in Australia?" is certainly not a flattering introduction to Renn ..read more

Open access notables Diurnal Temperature Range Trends Differ Below and Above the Melting Point, Pithan & Schatt, Geophysical Research Letters: The globally averaged diurnal temperature range (DTR) has shrunk since the mid-20th century, and climate models project further shrinking. Observations indicate a slowdown or reversal of this trend in recent decades. Here, we show that DTR has a minimum for average temperatures close to 0°C. Observed DTR shrinks strongly at colder temperature, where warming shifts the average temperature toward the DTR minimum, and expands at warmer tempe ..read more

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler I love thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is like your mom: it may not tell you what you can do, but it damn well tells you what you can’t do. I’ve written a few previous posts that include thermodynamics, like one on air capture of carbon dioxide and one on air conditioning. For whatever reason, they tend to get a lot of traffic. Well, here’s another one. I was charging my electric vehicle (EV) at a DC fast charger the other day and was pumping electrons into my car at around 200 kilowatts (kW). Man, that’s a ..read more

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Daisy Simmons Every summer brings a new spate of headlines about record-breaking heat – for good reason: 2023 was the hottest year on record, in keeping with the upward trend scientists have been clocking for decades. With climate forecasts suggesting that heat waves will only become more frequent and severe in the future, it’s increasingly clear that the world needs new ways to adapt to heat – in addition to eliminating climate-warming pollution. Heat waves pose a serious (and costly) public health risk, given that ex ..read more

Together with Cristian Rojas, Frank Algra-Maschio, Mark Andrejevic, Travis Coan, and Yuan-Fang Li, I just published a paper in Nature Communications Earth & Environment where we use the Computer Assisted Recognition of Denial and Skepticism (CARDS) machine learning model to detect climate misinformation in 5 million climate tweets. We find over half of climate misinformation tweets involve personal attacks or conspiracy theories. This new paper builds on work published in 2021 which I wrote about in the article How machine learning holds a key to combating misinformation. Here is ..read more

A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, August 25, 2024 thru Sat, August 31, 2024. Story of the week After another crammed week of climate news including updates on climate tipping points, increasing threats from rising seas, burgeoning disease threats and tropical storms juiced by too much warmth, Our Story of the Week is about root cause and excacerbator for all of the above. Writing for Jacobin, former Rhode Island state representative Aaron Regenburg delivers a critique and rebuttal of a previous essay i ..read more