This was a big week for the suit brought by San Francisco and Oakland against the five largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies for the costs associated with adapting to climate change. First, the five companies in question—Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell—filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss the case, arguing that the U.S. […]
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly put a stop to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt‘s plan to hold nationally-publicized debates on the science of climate change, The New York Times reported Friday. According to the Times, Pruitt had been developing the idea since before June 2017, when he told the board […]
According to a study released March 7, half of San Francisco International Airport’s runways could sink underwater by 2100, The New York Times reported. The study, published in Science Advances by Manoochehr Shirzaei of Arizona State University and Roland Bürgmann of the University of California, Berkeley, reveals that sea level rise poses more of a […]
If you turn on the news, you might think that climate science has been on trial for decades. But now a San Francisco judge will give it an official day in court. U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, who is hearing a suit brought by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco against five big […]
The Seychelles has created two vast new marine protected areas in the Indian Ocean after a groundbreaking finance deal brokered by the Nature Conservancy and other stakeholders, including environmentalist and Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio. In exchange for writing off a portion of its debt, the island nation agreed to protect a total of 81,000-square-miles of […]
By Andrea Germanos A group of 13 youths have filed a lawsuit against the State of Washington for breaching its constitutional and Public Trust obligations. Why? Failure to act on climate change. In their suit (pdf), filed Friday in King County Superior Court, the plaintiffs, aged seven to 17, say the state, Gov. Jay Inslee, […]
Global sea levels are rising at a rapid rate and could be another two feet higher by the end of the century compared to 2005 levels, a study based on 25 years of satellite data shows. The research, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, shows that global sea levels have […]
Scott Pruitt, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), suggested in an interview Tuesday that humans “flourished” during warm periods and climate change might not be so bad. “We know that humans have most flourished during times of what? Warming trends,” Pruitt told Nevada news station News 3. “So I think there’s assumptions […]
By Cameron Wake The year 2017 painted a grim picture of coastal storms in the eastern U.S. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria were deadly and destructive harbingers of how climate change contributes to bigger storms with stronger winds, greater extreme precipitation, and higher storm surge due to rising seas. Unfortunately, there’s a long-standing cultural divide […]