Please invest in Our Daily Planet today, by making a one time or monthly contribution.
We do not charge our readers a subscription fee for our content. We want to continue to grow our readership, particularly among millennials and public servants. Voluntary contributions from readers will help us employ interns and freelance journalists, expand our content, and reach a larger audience.
If you make a contribution of $150 or more, you will become an official “Friend of the Planet” and receive a Friend of the Planet T-shirt or water bottle.
A new study found that the ocean is showing signs of intensifying stratification, a phenomenon in which the layers of water in the ocean become more distinct and mix less.
Why This Matters: The mixing of ocean layers is crucial to sea life and human life.
Continue Reading 555 words
Due to closures of coal-fired power plants, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell in 2019, according to an analysis of preliminary figures published Tuesday by the Rhodium Group, CNN reported. However, as Axios reported, the 2010s was a decade of record-high global temperatures, with 2016 coming in as the hottest year on record just beating 2019 by 0.04 degrees Celsius, according to an analysis by Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service using U.S. government climate data.
Why This Matters: These trends need to both be heading down — even if our greenhouse gas emissions fell slightly, we need to make deeper emissions cuts to stop the global temperatures from spiral even higher in the 20s.
Continue Reading 401 words
Scientists who have studied global weather data say that beginning in 2012 “on the basis of a single day of globally observed temperature and moisture, we detect the fingerprint of externally driven climate change, and conclude that Earth as a whole is warming.”
Why This Matters: When we talk about climate change, we can now explain it as something that is immediately apparent — not something that takes years to comprehend. This should help in rebutting climate deniers insofar as they were resting on arguments about weather variability.
Continue Reading 427 words
This summer the number of cases of people who are made ill by a flesh-eating bacteria called vibrio vulnificus that stops blood circulation, causing muscle tissue to die and skin to decay is increasing around the country — and the cause is believed to be climate change.
Continue Reading 475 words
A study just published in the Journal Earth’s Future found that as a result of California’s increasingly long and dry summers caused by climate change, the state overall has experienced in the last 50 years a 500% increase in the amount of land burned in fires. While non-forest areas have not experienced a huge increase in fires in those areas, forested areas have seen an 800% increase in areas that have burned.
Continue Reading 572 words
A new study published on Tuesday by the National Academies of Science found that all the marine life in the ocean will decline by one-sixth by the year 2100 under the high emissions global warming scenario but on by 5% if we can stay within the low emissions scenario — with an average 5% decline for every 1 °C of warming. These losses are driven by temperature increases rather than fishing and were more significant in the tropics.
Continue Reading 387 wordsSubscribe to the email that top lawmakers, renowned scientists, and thousands of concerned citizens turn to each morning for the latest environmental news and analysis.
