Free Republic

Xcel Energy wants to stop buying electricity from the world’s largest high-concentration solar energy plant, located in the San Luis Valley, and it will pay $41 million to the federal government to do it. The utility company has been purchasing power from the 30-megawatt solar plant in southern Colorado since 2012, when the federally backed project was one of the first of its kind and the largest using the technology anywhere. But parts on the solar farm have been starting to fail and there are no ready replacements — and the project’s owner, Kepco Solar of Alamosa LLC, tells Xcel...

...just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world...Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists... While the problems are too numerous to cover in full here, they include:a halving of vegetation biomass since the agricultural revolution around 11,000 years ago...about 1,300 documented species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more unrecorded... Read more: What is a 'mass extinction' and are we in one...

LONDON - France’s Total on Friday became the first major energy company to quit the largest U.S. oil and gas lobby because of differences over climate policies. Total said in a statement it would not renew its 2021 membership with the American Petroleum Institute (API) following a review of the lobby’s climate positions, describing them as being only “partially aligned” with Total’s. The points of difference include API’s support for the rollback of U.S. regulation on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and how to assign a price to carbon, vital to any carbon trading system seen as critical...

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden must place environmental justice at the heart of his plans to tackle climate change by tailoring policies to address the global inequalities at the root of the crisis, guests in a Reuters Next panel said on Thursday. The United States now had an opportunity to heed calls from climate justice movements around the world to push for a fundamental transformation of the global economy, said Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and executive director of the California-based Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network International. “The climate crisis really emerged from interlocking systems of capitalism, resource extraction, racism, patriarchy...

World leaders and businesses are not putting enough money into adapting to dangerous changes in the climate and must “urgently step up action,” according to a report published Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Last year was the joint-hottest year on record and disasters struck every continent. Smoke-belching wildfires burned through communities from Australia to the Arctic. Extreme storms battered coastal cities from the Philippines to Nicaragua, while floods put a third of Bangladesh underwater and covered entire villages in Nigeria. Extreme weather and climate-related disasters have killed more than 410,000 people in the past 10 years, almost...

Jay Gamel, 76, still talks about his Northern California home in the present tense, as if nothing had happened. “The place is a paradise by any measure,” says Gamel, who is semiretired. “The mountains are beautiful, the surroundings are gorgeous. It’s a postcard.” “That place is everything to me,” he says. “It has been my life. It’s the center of my being.” Or it was, until last October, when hot, dry easterly winds known as Diablos drove a fierce wildfire across the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. Known as the Glass Fire, the flames tore through more than 67,000 acres of...

Rising temperatures caused by climate change are contributing to low diet quality and malnutrition among young children in many parts of the world, researchers say. Warmer temperatures now equal or exceed the impact of traditional causes of child malnutrition and low quality diets, such as poverty, poor sanitation and low levels of education, according to investigators from the University of Vermont. "Certainly, future climate changes have been predicted to affect malnutrition, but it surprised us that higher temperatures are already showing an impact," study co-author Meredith Niles said. The researchers assessed diet diversity among 107,000 children, 5 years and younger,...

Baby sharks are being born small, exhausted and undernourished as a result of rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change, according to a new study. Researchers looked at the effects of warming waters on juvenile epaulette sharks (Hemiscyllium ocellatum) — a small, egg-laying species of shark found in the Great Barrier Reef, that spends most of its time on the seafloor. Studying their egg sacs in a laboratory at the New England Aquarium in Boston, the researchers discovered that warmer waters led to premature births of the baby sharks inside. "The hotter the conditions, the faster everything happened, which could...

LONDON - Half of the world's climate change financing should go to helping poorer nations adapt to the effects of global warming, such as droughts, rising seas and floods, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Thursday. Extreme weather last year such as torrential rains in Africa, record heat waves and warmer temperatures on tropical oceans is consistent with climate change, scientists say. Last year was one of the warmest on record and as impacts intensify, governments around the world must adapt better or face serious costs, damages and losses, the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2020 said. The 2015 Paris...

Paris (AFP) - A Paris court will begin hearing a complaint brought by NGOs backed by two million citizens on Thursday accusing the French state of failing to act to halt climate change. The NGOs want to the court to hold the state responsible for ecological damage and say victory would mark a symbolic step in the fight to persuade governments to do more. An international accord signed in Paris five years ago aims to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and preferably to 1.5 degrees. The French case is part of a mounting...

January 11, 2020 ======================================================== Meteorologists declared it the largest snowfall in the region since 1971. Between January 7–9, 2021, a moist, low-pressure weather system over the ocean collided with a cold air mass sitting over western Europe. The result was the heaviest snowfall over Spain in fifty years. After barely seeing significant snowfall for a decade, the capital city of Madrid was blanketed with widespread accumulations of 20 to 30 centimeters (8 to 12 inches). Some suburban and rural areas in central, northern, and eastern Spain were coated with up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) of snow. The country’s State...

US greenhouse gas emissions tumbled below their 1990 level for the first-time last year as a result of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. A preliminary assessment from research group Rhodium says that overall emissions were down over 10%, the largest fall since World War II. Transport suffered the biggest decline, with emissions down almost 15% over 2019. Energy emissions also fell sharply, due to a decline in the use of coal. With stay-at-home orders in place, economic activity ground to a halt in March and April and this had significant implications for greenhouse gas emissions. In transport, the restrictions...

LONDON - Companies must listen to scientists and align their plans to reach net zero targets with a global pact to fight climate change, executives told a Reuters Next conference on Monday. But time is running out and scientists have delivered stark warnings that society as a whole needs rapid and unprecedented change to curb global warming and avoid catastrophic climate change. “Governments and companies need to be thinking about what the scientists are telling us. COVID-19 teaches us that,” said Sean Kidney, Chief Executive Officer, Climate Bonds Initiative. “Look at the mess made in Britain and the United States...

From unprecedented wildfires across the US to the extraordinary heat of Siberia, the impacts of climate change were felt in every corner of the world in 2020. We have come to a "moment of truth", United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in his State of the Planet speech in December. "Covid and climate have brought us to a threshold." BBC Future brings you our round-up of where we are on climate change at the start of 2021, according to five crucial measures of climate health. 1. CO2 levels The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached record levels in...

A severe winter storm, the worst to hit Spain in decades, has overwhelmed its capital, Madrid, where around a foot of snow has fallen since Friday. The blockbuster storm has wreaked havoc across a region not used to seeing any snow, let alone up to a foot or more. A significant amount of snow had not fallen in Madrid in a decade. As the snow started to pile up Friday night, transportation became impossible, with airports shut down, train services canceled and over 1,000 motorists trapped in their cars on major roadways around Madrid, according to the Associated Press.

Bill Gates has been accused of hypocrisy after entering a bid to buy the world's largest private jet operator, just one month before he releases a book preaching about climate change. The Microsoft boss's company Cascade Investment entered the bidding war for Signature Aviation Friday, teaming up with Blackstone Group to make a $4.3 billion play for the British private jet servicing company. Cascade and Blackstone are now going head-to-head with private equity firm Carlyle, which had already made an initial takeover approach.

In the span of a week, from late December to early January, temperatures high in the atmosphere above the Arctic jumped by 100 degrees Fahrenheit. While this may sound alarming, it's a natural phenomenon that happens every couple of years, but experts say human-caused climate change may be making these events more likely. The remarkable event is called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW), and it involves the temperatures 50,000 to 100,000 feet above the ground. It disrupts the typical winter climate pattern in the Arctic stratosphere famously known as the polar vortex, and typically leads to more extreme winter weather...

LONDON - Last year tied with 2016 as the world's warmest year on record, rounding off the hottest decade globally, as the impact of climate change intensified, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Friday. Scientists said the latest data underscored the need for countries and corporations to slash greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough to bring within reach the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement and avoid catastrophic climate change. "The extraordinary climate events of 2020 show us that we have no time to lose," said Matthias Petschke, Director for Space in the European Commission, the E.U.'s executive...

KINGMAN, Alberta - Larry Asp grew up playing shinny outside in this tiny rural town he calls home again after 40 years away. Since returning, he also holds the keys to the outdoor “Rink of Dreams” that gives the 90 local residents the chance to skate outside during the keen Canadian winters. Out here on the prairie an hour’s drive southeast of Edmonton, the ice in the former “Lutefisk Capital of Alberta” doesn’t seem to freeze as long as it used to, not like when Asp was a kid. Pond hockey has been a tradition for generations in places like...

Paris (AFP) - More than half the world's nations failed to submit upgraded commitments by year's end to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, straggling behind the schedule of accelerated climate ambitions set out in the Paris Agreement. Almost every country on the planet signed up to the 2015 Paris deal, which calls for capping global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, and 1.5C if possible. As the December 31, 2020, deadline approached, several large emitters said they would achieve net-zero output this century, but many nations allowed the year end to pass without publishing details...