Amy Westervelt and Kyle Pope have covered climate disinformation for a combined 20-plus years – here’s their guide on how to decode it
Increasingly sophisticated and better-funded disinformation is making climate coverage trickier both for journalists to produce and for the public to fully understand and trust.
But telling the story, and understanding it, has never been more urgent with half of Earth’s population eligible to vote in elections that could decisively impact the world’s ability to act in time to stave off the worst of the climate crisis.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
04/14/2024 - 05:00
04/14/2024 - 04:00
The tree all but vanished in the 1970s. Now, thanks to two amateur nature lovers, it may soon grace our landscapes again
Constable painted them. Shakespeare wrote of them. And Francis Drake sailed the world in a ship made from them. English elms were a mainstay of England’s landscape and culture – until they all but disappeared to Dutch elm disease in the 1970s.
Since that devastation, when 25m elms were felled, enthusiasts and academics have searched for varieties resistant to the fungus spread by Scolytus beetles that kills the trees.
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04/14/2024 - 00:13
Treasurer offers more detail on forthcoming Future Made in Australia plan after concerns raised by productivity commissioner
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Tax breaks and subsidies may be offered to industry as part of the government’s yet-to-be-detailed Future Made in Australia plan – but Jim Chalmers says there will be “strict tests” on public funding for the green energy strategy.
The treasurer says there must be “generational change” in Australia to match similar major green economy programs being undertaken by other nations including the US.
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04/13/2024 - 08:42
The marine mammals are increasingly endangered as warmer waters push them into ship traffic and fishing gear
A North Atlantic right whale has been spotted entangled in rope off New England, worsening an already devastating year for the vanishing animals, federal authorities said.
Right whales number less than 360 and are vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships. The entangled whale was seen on Wednesday about 50 miles (80km) south of Rhode Island’s Block Island, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.
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04/13/2024 - 01:00
Bulldozed tracks and informal byways in tropical forests and palm-oil plantations ‘almost always’ an indicator of future deforestation, say researchers
A vast network of undocumented “ghost roads” is pushing into the world’s untouched rainforests and driving their destruction in the Asia-Pacific region, a new study has found.
By using Google Earth to map tropical forests on Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea islands, researchers from James Cook University in Australia documented 1.37 m kilometres (850,000 miles) of roads across 1.4m sq kilometres of rainforest on the islands – between three and seven times what is officially recorded on road databases.
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04/12/2024 - 23:00
Decision by European court of human rights around vulnerability of older women to heatwaves marks significant shift
A landmark legal ruling at the European court of human rights could open the floodgates for a slew of new court cases around the world, experts have said.
The Strasbourg-based court said earlier this week that Switzerland’s failure to do enough to cut its national greenhouse gas emissions was a clear violation of the human rights of a group of more than 2,000 older Swiss women. The women argued successfully that their rights to privacy and family life were being breached because they were particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of heatwaves.
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04/12/2024 - 19:00
Alliance says there’s not enough ambition in proposed laws to prevent extinctions, as promised by the environment minister
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The Albanese government is backing away from a promise to substantially transform how nature is protected in Australia and is planning some changes that would make things worse, according to eight of the country’s top environment groups.
The conservation organisations said they were concerned the government planned to break up promised legislation for new environmental laws and defer some difficult reforms until after the next election, if it wins a second term.
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Include a “call-in” power that allowed the minister to take over a decision from a proposed environment protection agency (EPA) “at any time and for any reason”.
Allow developers to make payments to a new “restoration contributions” fund to compensate for damage their projects caused to the environment. This would remove a requirement that environmental offsets provide a “like-for-like” replacement for ecosystems or species affected by a development.
Fail to give the new EPA the “teeth” it needed to be an independent and effective environmental regulator.
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04/12/2024 - 15:42
Company is fighting Dutch court ruling that says it must emit 45% less CO2 by 2030 than in 2019
Shell has argued that it “lobbies for, not against, the energy transition” on the final day of its appeal against an important climate ruling.
The fossil fuel company is fighting the decision of a Dutch court in 2021 that forces it to pump 45% less planet-heating CO2 into the atmosphere by 2030 than it did in 2019. In court on Friday, Shell argued the ruling is ineffective, onerous and does not fit into the existing legal system.
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04/12/2024 - 06:00
Chamonixia caespitosa found during rewilding project in west Highlands while removing non-native Sitka spruce
Naturalists have found a very rare type of truffle living in a Scottish forestry plantation which is being cut down so a natural Atlantic rainforest can grow in its place.
The discovery of the globally rare fungus near Creagan in the west Highlands has thrown up a paradox: the work to remove the non-native Sitka spruce, to allow rewilding by native trees, means the truffle will be lost.
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04/12/2024 - 06:00
El Niño weather phenomenon has contributed to warm, dry conditions in US, leading to more fires much earlier in the year
The US midwest typically spends the start of spring emerging from snow. But this year, after a warm winter left landscapes parched, the region instead was primed to burn. Hundreds of blazes ignited in recent months in states more accustomed to dealing with just dozens for this time of year, as extreme fire behavior defied seasonal norms.
Experts say the unusually early and active fire season was a symptom of El Niño, a climate pattern characterized by warmer surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that was predicted to supercharge global heating and extreme weather. But the climate crisis turned up the dial, and helped create conditions in the midwest where winter temperature records were not only broken – they were smashed.
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