références en Anglais

Some scientists fear the risk of a collapse to warm Atlantic currents has not been taken seriously.

Previous health impact assessments of temperature-related mortality in Europe indicated that the mortality burden attributable to cold is much larger than for heat. Questions remain as to whether climate change can result in a net decrease in temperature-related mortality. In this study, we estimated how climate change could affect future heat-related and cold-related mortality in 854 European urban areas, under several climate, demographic and adaptation scenarios. We showed that, with no adaptation to heat, the increase in heat-related deaths consistently exceeds any decrease in cold-related deaths across all considered scenarios in Europe. Under the lowest mitigation and adaptation scenario (SSP3-7.0), we estimate a net death burden due to climate change increasing by 49.9% and cumulating 2,345,410 (95% confidence interval = 327,603 to 4,775,853) climate change-related deaths between 2015 and 2099. This net effect would remain positive even under high adaptation scenarios, whereby a risk attenuation of 50%

The 29-year-old was arrested by City of London police after activists said they had cut the cables to insurance company offices in London, Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield on Monday. In a press release, the group, which calls itself Shut the System, said it had targeted insurers “due to their critical role underpinning the fossil fuel economy through underwriting contracts and investments”.

Emerging infectious diseases, biodiversity loss, and anthropogenic environmental change are interconnected crises with massive social and ecological costs. In this Review, we discuss how pathogens and parasites are responding to global change, and the implications for pandemic prevention and biodiversity conservation. Ecological and evolutionary principles help to explain why both pandemics and wildlife die-offs are becoming more common; why land-use change and biodiversity loss are often followed by an increase in zoonotic and vector-borne diseases; and why some species, such as bats, host so many emerging pathogens. To prevent the next pandemic, scientists should focus on monitoring and limiting the spread of a handful of high-risk viruses, especially at key interfaces such as farms and live-animal markets. But to address the much broader set of infectious disease risks associated with the Anthropocene, decision-makers will need to develop comprehensive strategies that include pathogen surveillance across s

Britain’s crackdown on climate protest is setting “a dangerous precedent” around the world and undermining democratic rights, the UK director of Human Rights Watch has said. In the UK “laws criminalising protests undermine democratic rights”, the NGO says in its latest annual world report, published on Thursday, adding that in the past year “the UK continued to crack down on and criminalise climate protests”.

Actuaries are calling for more realistic climate risk assessments. This includes the “risk of ruin”: the point past which global society can no longer adapt to climate change. Today’s report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the University of Exeter – “Climate Scorpion: the sting is in the tail” – puts forward the case for using financial services risk management to evaluate and communicate climate risk. It advocates for “worst-case” scenario thinking around climate change.

Campaigners receive longest ever sentences for non-violent protest after being convicted of conspiracy to cause public nuisance

Japan has doubled down on the nuclear industry’s routine practice of spreading radioactive pollutants to public air space and to common waterways. In addition to the pumping of tens of thousands of tons of radioactively contaminated cooling water to the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex, the government has announced its intention to spread around the country as much as 14 million cubic meters of radioactively contaminated soil, reportedly for road-building, construction projects, and even agricultural underlayment.

The new study, led by researchers at the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, associated with the Earth Commission, and Nanjing University, assessed what this would mean for the number of people living outside the “climate niche” in which our species has thrived. It says about 60 million people are already exposed to dangerous heat (average temperature of 29°C or higher). And two billion – 22% of the projected end-of-century population – would be exposed to this at 2.7°C of global warming.

Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security. Concurrent weather extremes driven by a strongly meandering jet stream could trigger such events, but so far this has not been quantified. Specifically, the ability of state-of-the art crop and climate models to adequately reproduce such high impact events is a crucial component for estimating risks to global food security. Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. While climate models accurately simulate atmospheric patterns, associated surface weather anomalies and negative effects on crop responses are mostly underestimated in bias-adjusted simulations. Given the identified model biases, future assessments of regional and concurrent crop losses from meandering jet states remain highly uncertain. Our results suggest that model-blind spots for such high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards have to be anticipated and acc

Winter downpours also made 20% wetter and will occur every three years without urgent carbon cuts, experts warn

Dr Sarah Benn has long been concerned about the climate crisis, diligently recycling until she was “blue in the face”. But the rise of the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion in 2019 inspired her and her husband to go further. “We thought: well, if we don’t do it then who else is going to?”

Evidence shows a continuing increase in the frequency and severity of global heatwaves1,2, raising concerns about the future impacts of climate change and the associated socioeconomic costs3,4. Here we develop a disaster footprint analytical framework by integrating climate, epidemiological and hybrid input–output and computable general equilibrium global trade models to estimate the midcentury socioeconomic impacts of heat stress. We consider health costs related to heat exposure, the value of heat-induced labour productivity loss and indirect losses due to economic disruptions cascading through supply chains. Here we show that the global annual incremental gross domestic product loss increases exponentially from 0.03 ± 0.01 (SSP 245)–0.05 ± 0.03 (SSP 585) percentage points during 2030–2040 to 0.05 ± 0.01–0.15 ± 0.04 percentage points during 2050–2060. By 2060, the expected global economic losses reach a total of 0.6–4.6% with losses attributed to health loss (37–45%), labour productivity loss (18–37%) and i

European and US oil and gas majors have made profits of more than a quarter of a trillion dollars since Russia invaded Ukraine, according to a new analysis by Global Witness marking two years since the conflict began. After posting record gains in 2022 off the back of soaring energy prices, the big five fossil fuel companies paid shareholders an unprecedented $111 billion in 2023. In the hottest year ever recorded, this figure is some 158 times what was pledged to vulnerable nations at last year’s COP28 climate summit.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford has used the fossil record to better understand what factors make animals more vulnerable to extinction from climate change. The results, published today in the journal Science, could help to identify species most at risk today from human-driven climate change.

In Munich I heard both Ukrainians and Alexei Navalny’s widow tell us why Putin must be defeated, says Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash

A new paper published in the journal Science has warned that melting areas in the Arctic have become 'frontlines for resource extraction', describing it as a 'modern day gold rush'.

The celebrated science broadcaster and environmental activist says we have to stop elevating the economy and politics over the state of our world

There has been a strong push to promote increased investments in new nuclear power as a strategy to decarbonize economies, especially in the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). The evidence base for these initiatives is poor. Investments in new nuclear power plants are bad for the climate due to high costs and long construction times. Given the urgency of climate change mitigation, which requires reducing emissions from the EU electricity grid to almost zero in the 2030s (Pietzcker et al.1), preference should be given to the cheapest technology that can be deployed fastest. On both costs and speed, renewable energy sources beat nuclear. Every euro invested in new nuclear plants thus delays decarbonization compared to investments in renewable power. In a decarbonizing world, delays increase CO2 emissions. Our thoughts focus on new nuclear power plants (not phasing out existing plants) in the US and Europe. In Europe, new nuclear power plants are planned or seriously discussed in France, Czechia, Hu

Permafrost and glaciers in the high Arctic form an impermeable ‘cryospheric cap’ that traps a large reservoir of subsurface methane, preventing it from reaching the atmosphere. Cryospheric vulnerability to climate warming is making releases of this methane possible. On Svalbard, where air temperatures are rising more than two times faster than the average for the Arctic, glaciers are retreating and leaving behind exposed forefields that enable rapid methane escape. Here we document how methane-rich groundwater springs have formed in recently revealed forefields of 78 land-terminating glaciers across central Svalbard, bringing deep-seated methane gas to the surface. Waters collected from these springs during February–May of 2021 and 2022 are supersaturated with methane up to 600,000 times greater than atmospheric equilibration. Spatial sampling reveals a geological dependency on the extent of methane supersaturation, with isotopic evidence of a thermogenic source. We estimate annual methane emissions from prog