Author: Ranveer Kumar

This is a Conversation long read, so set aside time to take it all in. Imagine, for a moment, a different kind of Australia. One where bushfires on the catastrophic scale of Black Summer happen almost every year. One where 50℃ days in Sydney and Melbourne are common. Where storms and flooding have violently reshaped our coastlines, and unique ecosystems have been damaged beyond recognition – including the Great Barrier Reef, which no longer exists. Frighteningly, this is not an imaginary future dystopia. It’s a scientific projection of Australia under 3℃ of global warming – a future we must both…

Some 8,300 million metric tons of plastics have been manufactured since production exploded in the 1950s, with more than 75 percent ending up as waste and 15 million metric tons reaching oceans every year. Plastic waste fragments into increasingly smaller but environmentally persistent “microplastics,” with potentially harmful effects on the health of people, wildlife and ecosystems. A new collection, “Confronting Plastic Pollution to Protect Environmental and Public Health,” is publishing on March 30th, 2021 in the open access journal PLOS Biology that addresses critical scientific challenges in understanding the impacts of microplastics. The collection features three evidence-based commentaries from ecotoxicology and environmental…

MIAMI (CBSMiami/AP) — A U.S. government policy that protects rare sea turtles in four southern states, including Florida, may soon be ending after three decades. Since 1991, the Army Corps of Engineers has halted dredging during the warmer months to suck sediments from shipping channels from North Carolina to Florida. That’s when sea turtles protected by the Endangered Species Act are most abundant in those waters during spring and summer. READ MORE: The policy was put in place to protect the turtles from being mangled and killed by the machines which vacuum up the sediments. But, in the coming weeks,…

More warm weather predicted before mercury dips in time for Easter weekend The UK recorded its warmest March day in 53 years on Tuesday as temperatures rose above 24C, with the Met Office predicting they could get close to the all-time record on Wednesday. The mercury peaked at 24.5C at Kew Gardens in west London on Tuesday – slightly below the UK’s hottest March temperature of 25.6C in Cambridgeshire in 1968. Alex Burkill, a Met Office forecaster, said Tuesday’s figure was “exceptionally high for the time of year”, adding: “Temperatures could be a touch higher tomorrow than they were today. Whether it…

Many in the Sooke area are heartbroken that a wolf pack that no one was complaining about may have been wiped out. FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, naturalist and wildlife researcher Gary Schroyen followed the activities of five wolves that ranged around Metchosin and East Sooke. In many ways, images captured on Schroyen’s wildlife cameras demonstrated that the pack, which he named the Meteask wolf pack, could live harmoniously among humans. Most area residents were unaware of the proximity of the wolves, which lived on deer and small mammals, and Scott Norris of the BC Conservation Officer Service confirmed that there…

“This goal is both technically feasible and necessary—now we need action.” Over 1,000 scientists urged President Joe Biden on Tuesday to pursue a “robust target” of slashing the nation’s “emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030 and transitioning to a net-zero emissions economy no later than 2050.” “This goal is both technically feasible and necessary—now we need action,” the experts write in an open letter to the White Hoiuse. The letter was released by research and advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientists, which plans on delivering the letter next month ahead of the president’s April 22 climate…

“People who spend their careers studying our economy are in widespread agreement that climate change will be expensive, potentially devastatingly so.” While scientists and campaigners continue calling on world leaders to pursue more ambitious policies to cut planet-heating emissions based on moral arguments and physical dangers, a U.S. think tank released survey results on Tuesday that make a clear economic case for sweeping climate action. “These findings show a clear economic case for urgent climate action.” —Peter Howard, Institute for Policy Integrity The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law invited 2,169 Ph.D. economists to take a 15-question…

Small group taking most flights should face frequent flyer levy, says environmental charity An “elite minority” of frequent flyers cause most of the climate damage resulting from aviation’s emissions, according to an environmental charity. The report, which collates data from the countries with the highest aviation emissions, shows a worldwide pattern of a small group taking a large proportion of flights, while many people do not fly at all. In the US, 12% of people took 66% of all flights, while in France 2% of people took half of the flights, the report says. In China 5% of households took 40% of…

Steven Donziger has been detained at home since August 2019, the result of a Kafkaesque legal battle stemming from his crusade on behalf of Indigenous Amazonians Many of us will have felt the grip of claustrophobic isolation over the past year, but the lawyer Steven Donziger has experienced an extreme, very personal confinement as a pandemic arrived and then raged around him in New York City. On Sunday, Donziger reached his 600th day of an unprecedented house arrest that has resulted from a sprawling, Kafkaesque legal battle with the oil giant Chevron. Donziger spearheaded a lengthy crusade against the company…

A federal judge blocked new oil and gas leasing and fracking in Ohio’s Wayne National Forest, a popular destination for outdoor recreation and the only National Forest located in the vast state. The ruling rebuked the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for failing to consider threats to public health, endangered species, and watersheds before opening more than 40,000 acres of the forest to fracking last year. Pending completion of new environmental reviews, the March 9 order blocks new leases, prohibits new drilling permits and surface disturbance on existing leases, and prohibits water withdrawals from the Little…