Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

How the Arts Might Help us Grapple with Climate Change

What on Earth – CBC Radio 1 | When Omar El Akkad wrote his 2017 dystopian novel American War, about a second U.S. civil war after land loss due to climate change, he considered it a “deliberately grotesque” view of a possible future on a degraded planet. But just three years later, the Egyptian-Canadian author says his climate…

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How Humans Have Changed the Earth’s Geology

Brut Media Humans are a relatively new addition to the earth, but we have changed geology more than any natural force. This epoch is called anthropocene — and it might be the last one. These changes to nature, caused by human alteration and are supported by overwhelming evidence, are referred to as the Anthropocene. “The…

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29 Cameras and 203 Hours of Footage Later, This Haunting Movie Exists

Emily Buder | No Film School Anthropocene: The Human Epoch directors and cinematographers unpack the ambitious scale of the visually-stunning and perennially haunting project. It’s fitting that Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a film that attempts to convey the massive impact of humanity on the earth’s landscapes, would require such a large-scale production. The film’s three directors —…

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The Wonders and Terrors of Humanity’s Impact on Earth

Phosphor Tailings Pond #4, Near Lakeland, Florida, USA 2012. A photograph by Edward Burtynsky from The Anthropocene Project

By Laura Leavitt | Hyperallergic Featuring stunning landscape photography, the documentary Anthropocene surveys a new era of human-driven geology. The cult film Koyaanisqatsi, named after the Hopi idea of “life lived out of balance,” contains no dialogue, but rather scenes all over the world — of cities, nature, the tiniest industrially produced products, and the vastness of canyons.…

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Meet the Editor: Prof. Ian Townend, Anthropocene Coasts

The CSP Blog The Canadian Science Publishing family of journals grew this year with the introduction of Anthropocene Coasts, a new international, interdisciplinary open access journal.  Founding co-editor Prof. Ian Townend (University of Southampton) shared with us how global perspectives of how humans are impacting coastal ecosystems are needed to inform social, economic, and legal processes. …

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Alaska’s Permafrost is Melting

By Henry Fountain | The New York Times YUKON DELTA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska — The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages. But…

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Climate change researchers cancel expedition because of climate change

By  Laura Glowacki | CBC News A team of scientists had to abandon an expedition through Hudson Bay because of hazardous ice conditions off the coast of Newfoundland caused by climate change. About 40 scientists from five Canadian universities were scheduled to use the icebreaker CCGS Amundsen for the first leg of a 133-day expedition across the Arctic. It’s part…

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Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts

By Damian Carrington | The Guardian It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter,…

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Climate change causes glacial river in Yukon to change direction

By Brandie Weikle | CBC News Climate change has caused the massive Kaskawulsh Glacier in the Yukon to retreat so much that its meltwater abruptly switched direction, in the first documented case of “river piracy” in modern times. Instead of flowing into the Slims River and then north to the Bering Sea, the water has changed course and now flows…

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Great Barrier Reef at ‘terminal stage’: scientists despair at latest coral bleaching data

By Christopher Knaus and Nick Evershed | The Guardian Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found. The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover.…

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Record-breaking climate change pushes world into ‘uncharted territory’

By Damian Carrington | The Guardian The record-breaking heat that made 2016 the hottest year ever recorded has continued into 2017, pushing the world into “truly uncharted territory”, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. The WMO’s assessment of the climate in 2016, published on Tuesday, reports unprecedented heat across the globe, exceptionally low ice at both…

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World temperatures hit new high for the third year in a row

By Alister Doyle | The Globe and Mail World temperatures hit a record high for the third year in a row in 2016, creeping closer to a ceiling set by the Paris climate change deal, with extremes including unprecedented heat in India and ice melt in the Arctic, scientists said on Wednesday. The findings, providing new…

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Can Humans Go From Unintended Global Warming to Climate By Design?

  By Andrew C. Revkin | Dot Earth, The New York Times Geoengineering is in the wind more and more these days, particularly the use of sun-blocking aerosols as a cheap, temporary counterweight to greenhouse-gas-driven global warming. In pondering the plausibility or desirability of such a tool, it might be useful to start with a thought experiment: 1) Suppose…

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