Quadrennial Global Trends Report of the National Intelligence Council.
It's hard to think of a headline more stark than the one in the Washington Post: "Intelligence forecast sees a post-coronavirus world upended by climate change and splintering societies."
Washington Post story.
President Macron of France had wanted to add to his country's constitution an amendment spelling out a commitment to protect the environment and fight climate change, but political infighting led to abandonment of the measure. From the New York Times.
The National Intelligence Council released a report predicting that the pandemic, along with climate change leading to mass migration, will be highly destabilizing over the coming two decades.
Washington Post story here.
Interesting Wall Street Journal article discussing pressure on companies to disclose climate-related risks to their investors.
“The big blind spot is the physical risk of climate change,” said David Victor, professor at the University of California, San Diego and co-author of the Brookings paper. He added that very few companies disclose specific risks, or what they are doing to mitigate their vulnerabilities.
Interesting New York Times story about Dr. Linda Zall, a CIA employee who used data from spy satellites to identify planetary change and to consider how it was likely to affect global security.
New York Times story with graphics.
Hint: It has to do with climate change.
Washington Post article detailing the animals killed in Australia's current fires.
A clear-eyed opinion piece that appeared in the NY Times.
Washington Post story about unprecedented oceanic changes.
“We’re really playing catch-up,” said marine scientist Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Canada. “Everything we base our civilization on is based on the accumulated experience from the last 7,000 years, about how the world works, and how we can survive in this world that had an exceptionally stable climate.
“And we’re shifting away from that equilibrium at breakneck speed now. We’re living in a no-analog world that none of us has any experience with.”
Around the world, over 1000 people were arrested. Washington Post story.
As experts gather at the U.N. climate talks in Poland, they are considering measures that had been previously dismissed. Carbon capture and storage is one of them.
From the Washington Post.
And the New York Times.
Scientists from around the world are meeting to try to work out details for the fossil fuel emissions goals agreed to in 2015 Paris climate agreement.
A couple of days ago, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, representing 91 top climate change researchers from 40 countries, released their long-awaited report on global climate change and the possibilities for topping rising temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. This was a report that some vulnerable nations had requested after a larger UN meeeting in Paris in 2015 had resulted in the 2016 Paris Agreement committing participating nations to put best efforts to hold global temperature rise in this century to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Those nations were concerned about the consequences of even a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase.
Here's a good summary of and response to the Panel's findings, which indicate that the consequences of a 1.5 degree increase are still quite severe, and that they may come as soon as 2040. Click the following link for the Panel's headline findings: Download UN panel headline findings.
One of the Panel's key suggestions for staving off such a global temperature increase turns on a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. This is a policy recommendations developed by climate economist William Nordhaus. Probably not coincidentally, the day after the climate report was released, Nordhaus was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Economics.