PLANET IN PERIL

The Climate Impact Lab A PinP photo. This summer, the world is experiencing record hot temperatures: A weather station in Death Valley, California, clocked one of the hottest temperatures ever observed on Earth. Simultaneously, the coronavirus pandemic’s devastating mortality impact and economic fallout are demanding society prioritize public health like never before. Details here.

Vice This photo shows a logging train on the CP Rail mainline in British Columbia, Canada. It depicts man's assault on Earth's forests as it was happening one hundred years ago, in 1920. Photo credit - UBC Library Digitization Centre. Deforestation and rampant resource use is likely to trigger the 'irreversible collapse' of human civilization unless we rapidly change course. Details here.

This animation shows the sheet rapidly receding, losing almost half its mass. https://twitter.com/ECCC_CIS/status/1290740808170307584?s=20 The Canadian Ice Service.

Nature Climate Change Empty streets during the Covid shutdown in Zaragoza City, Spain, Mar. 2020. A Wikimedia photo. The decline in greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollutants, as a result of policies to prevent the spread of COVID-19, will have a negligible impact on long-term warming and may lead to cooling of just 0.005–0.01 °C by 2030, suggests a paper in Nature Climate Change. However, the findings also suggest that if a ‘green recovery’ is pursued, warming could possibly be kept within the 1.5 °C limit above pre-industrial levels by 2050. The enforcement of policies to limit the spread of COVID-19 has had a significant impact on travel and work. This lack of mobility has led to substantial declines in greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollutants. Previous research has examined the immediate impacts of COVID-19 policies on emissions; however, the long-term impacts of these policies are not well understood. Piers Forster and colleagues analysed mobility data fro

Nature Research Photo "drought" by bartoszjanusz is licensed under CC0 1.0 The frequency of record-breaking two-year droughts, such as the 2018–2019 Central European drought, is expected to rise by the end of the century if projected greenhouse gas emissions aren't reduced, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

 Nature Above, healthy bull kelp. Below, bull kelp degraded by a marine heatwave. DeWikiMan Marine heatwaves can displace thermal habitats by tens to thousands of kilometres, reports a study in Nature this week. This displacement represents the distance that an organism would have to travel to escape potentially stressful temperatures. The findings open new avenues of research to understand the potential impacts of anomalously warm ocean temperatures on marine species. Marine heatwaves are distinct periods of unusually warm ocean temperatures that can cause dramatic changes to ocean ecosystems, as inhabitants find themselves in waters that are warmer than they are accustomed to. Much of the research into these events focuses on the local impact to species such as corals, but does not take into account mobile organisms (fish, for example) that can travel to find their preferred conditions. To understand how species may have to redistribute under marine heatwave conditio

Nature Cattle in the Amazon. An Adobe photo. Human-managed ecosystems harbour more hosts of zoonotic disease than undisturbed habitats, a Nature study reveals. The research highlights the need for enhanced surveillance of agricultural, pastoral and urbanizing ecosystems, and to consider the disease-related health costs associated with land use and conservation planning. Zoonotic diseases, such as Ebola, Lassa fever and Lyme disease, are caused by pathogens that spread from animals to people. It is widely accepted that land use change — for example, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural land or cities — influences the risk and emergence of zoonotic diseases in humans, but whether this is underpinned by predictable ecological changes has been unclear. Kate Jones and colleagues analysed 6,801 ecological systems and 376 host species worldwide to show that land use has global and systematic effects on local zoonotic host communities. There are more species and greater numbers o