These are some of the stories in this roundup:
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New DNA Research Shows Humans Did Not Cause Woolly Mammoths To Go Extinct – Climate Change Did
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Tories received £1.3m from fossil fuel interests and climate sceptics since 2019
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Democrats likely to ditch U.S. methane fee amid opposition, sources say
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Climate change: Sir David Attenborough in 'act now' warning
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UN: Greenhouse gas levels hit a new record, cuts fall short
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Plagued by Daily Blackouts, Puerto Ricans Are Calling for an Energy Revolution. Will the Biden Administration Listen?
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'One of the greatest injustices': Pacific islands on the frontline of the climate crisis – video
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Wind farms don’t work in the dark, says Nationals MP
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Activists arrested to silence criticism of Total's R52bn Ugandan project - watchdogs
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Climate crisis: greenhouse gas levels hit new record despite lockdowns, UN reports
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Catholic Bishops in the US Largely Ignore the Pope’s Concern About Climate Change, a New Study Finds
This Is An open Thread
New DNA Research Shows Humans Did Not Cause Woolly Mammoths To Go Extinct – Climate Change Did
For five million years, woolly mammoths roamed the earth until they vanished for good nearly 4,000 years ago – and scientists have finally proved why.
Modern Arctic landscape. Credit: Inger Greve Alsos
The hairy cousins of today’s elephants lived alongside early humans and were a regular staple of their diet – their skeletons were used to build shelters, harpoons were carved from their giant tusks, artwork featuring them is daubed on cave walls, and 30,000 years ago, the oldest known musical instrument, a flute, was made out of a mammoth bone.
Now the hotly debated question about why mammoths went extinct has been answered – geneticists analyzed ancient environmental DNA and proved it was because when the icebergs melted, it became far too wet for the giant animals to survive because their food source – vegetation – was practically wiped out.
Tories received £1.3m from fossil fuel interests and climate sceptics since 2019
The Conservative party and its MPs have registered £1.3m in gifts and donations from climate sceptics and fossil fuel interests since the 2019 general election, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.
Oil companies, petrostates, airports and businesses linked with Russian energy tycoons are among this set of donors, who have either made money from fossil fuels or stand to lose economically or politically from cutting emissions.
Their donations, all legally given and declared to the Electoral Commission or in the House of Commons register of interests, are overwhelmingly to the ruling party.
Democrats likely to ditch U.S. methane fee amid opposition, sources say
Oct 25 (Reuters) - A Democratic proposal to impose a methane fee on U.S. oil and gas producers is not likely to be included in the party's massive spending bill in Congress amid opposition within its own ranks, two sources familiar with the negotiations said on Monday.
The proposal to tax oil and gas producers for methane emissions above a certain threshold faces opposition from U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, who represents natural gas-producing West Virginia, along with Democrats from oil-producer Texas, the sources said.
The fee, supported by the White House, is part of a broader effort by Democratic President Joe Biden to curb the greenhouse gas methane, considered the biggest cause of climate change after carbon dioxide.
Climate change: Sir David Attenborough in 'act now' warning
"If we don't act now, it'll be too late." That's the warning from Sir David Attenborough ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
The broadcaster says the richest nations have "a moral responsibility" to help the world's poorest.
And it would be "really catastrophic" if we ignored their problems, he told me in a BBC News interview.
"Every day that goes by in which we don't do something about it is a day wasted," he said.
Sir David and I were speaking at Kew Gardens in London during filming for a new landmark series, The Green Planet, to be aired on BBC1 next year.
UN: Greenhouse gas levels hit a new record, cuts fall short
Greenhouse gas concentrations hit a new record high last year and increased at a faster rate than the annual average for the last decade despite a temporary reduction during pandemic lockdowns, the World Meteorological Organization said in a report published Monday.
The news came as the United Nations climate office warned that the world remains off target for meeting its goal of cutting emissions as part of international efforts to curb global warming.
Both announcements came days before the start of a U.N. climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Many environmental activists, policymakers and scientists say the Oct. 31-Nov. 12 event, known as COP26 for short, marks an important and even crucial opportunity for concrete commitments to the targets set out in the 2015
Plagued by Daily Blackouts, Puerto Ricans Are Calling for an Energy Revolution. Will the Biden Administration Listen?
Eddie Ramirez has never understood why his government doesn’t more aggressively pursue renewable energy.
When Hurricane Maria swept across Puerto Rico in September 2017, shredding the energy grid and knocking out power for nearly all the island’s 3.4 million residents for months on end, Casa Sol—Ramirez’s five-bedroom bed and breakfast—was one of the only buildings in San Juan with working electricity, with 30 solar panels bolted to its roof.
When a large fire this June at an electrical substation in San Juan plunged more than 800,000 Puerto Rican homes into darkness and knocked out power to another 330,000 the following week, Casa Sol’s lights stayed on, even as its neighbors lost power.
And when a series of equipment failures and poor maintenance led to cascading power outages across the island in August, September and October, leaving hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans without electricity for days at a time and prompting calls for Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi to resign, Ramirez and his solar-powered hotel carried on, business as usual.
'One of the greatest injustices': Pacific islands on the frontline of the climate crisis – video the video is 5:04 minutes, worth your time IMO. Beautiful islands.
Wind farms don’t work in the dark, says Nationals MP
The Nationals were pretty pleased with themselves last week when Resources Minister and newly promoted Cabinet member Keith Pitt declared that solar doesn’t generate in the dark.
Now, a Nationals MP has extended the analogy, this time to wind. “What Keith Pitt says is perfectly true,” the Nationals MP for Mallee Anne Webster said. “They don’t work in the dark, and neither do our wind farms.”
Actually, that’s not true. Wind farms do work in the dark. But this is the government that told us that wind farms are an “appalling” blight on the landscape, that batteries are as useful as the Big Banana, and that electric vehicles will “end the weekend.”
No wonder they are scared of net zero.
Activists arrested to silence criticism of Total's R52bn Ugandan project - watchdogs
Environmental watchdogs have condemned the arrest of six Ugandan rights campaigners as a coordinated effort to silence critics of a contested energy project involving French oil giant Total.
The activists from AFIEGO, the country's highest-profile environmental defenders group, were detained without charge at a police station outside Kampala on Friday, the organisation said in a statement.
Its French partners, Amis de la Terre France (Friends of the Earth) and Survie (Survival), called for their immediate release and said the arrests fit a pattern of harassment against critics of the multi-billion dollar oil venture.
"For several months, AFIEGO has been the target of continuous and increasing pressure and intimidation from the Ugandan authorities, who want to prevent it from continuing its activities against Total's mega-oil project," the French NGOs said in a statement.
Climate crisis: greenhouse gas levels hit new record despite lockdowns, UN reports
Levels of climate-heating gases in the atmosphere hit record levels in 2020, despite coronavirus-related lockdowns, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization has announced.
The concentration of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, is now 50% higher than before the Industrial Revolution sparked the mass burning of fossil fuels. Methane levels have more than doubled since 1750. All key greenhouse gases (GHG) rose faster in 2020 than the average for the previous decade and this trend has continued in 2021, the WMO report found.
The data shows the climate crisis continues to worsen and send a “stark” message to the nations meeting at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in a week’s time, according to WMO chief Prof Petteri Taalas: “We are way off track.”
Catholic Bishops in the US Largely Ignore the Pope’s Concern About Climate Change, a New Study Finds
In the six years since Pope Francis published his landmark teaching document on the environment, or “care for our common home,” the leader of the global Catholic Church has only strengthened his call for action to curb climate change.
However, a new study out of Creighton University in Nebraska finds that bishops in the United States have been nearly silent and sometimes even misleading around Laudato Si’, the pope’s 2015 climate change encyclical, which best-selling author Bill McKibben has called “perhaps the most important document yet of this millennium.”
Published in Environmental Research Letters on Oct. 19, the authors’ conclusions were based on an analysis of more than 12,000 official, written pastoral communications to parishioners by U.S. bishops from Florida to Alaska over five years—a year before Laudato Si’ was published, and for four years afterwards.