Climate Change

Throughout the world, mega droughts are hitting hard with a ferocity not seen in decades and in some cases not seen in centuries. It’s not merely coincidental that as global warming accelerates droughts turn more vicious than ever before. All of which begs the logical question of when will world… »

There is a significant body of evidence that human extinction is now imminent; that is, it will occur within the next few years and possibly this year: 2020. There is also a significant body of evidence that human extinction is now inevitable; that is, it cannot be prevented no matter… »

Economists used to admire scientists. Now they ignore them at our peril. Katherine Trebeck for openDemocracy Back in the 1800s, scholars in the field of economics cast an envious glance at their colleagues in science. They envied physics, with its laws of gravity. They looked with green-eyes… »

Heather Alberro, Nottingham Trent University; Dénes Csala, Lancaster University; Hannah Cloke, University of Reading; Marc Hudson, University of Manchester; Mark Maslin, UCL, and Richard Hodgkins, Loughborough University for The Conversation The climate breakdown continues. Over the past year,… »

The Amazon rainforest is a crucial life-support ecosystem. Without its wondrous strength and power to generate hydrologic systems across the sky (as far north as Iowa), absorb and store carbon (CO2), and its miraculous life-giving endless supply of oxygen, civilization would cease to exist beyond scattered tribes, here and there. »

Could degrowth, community, and basic income create a sane economy? An interview with one of the godfathers of the basic income movement, Phillippe Van Parijs. Philippe Van Parijs for openDemocracy-Beyond traffic and slavery. Phillippe Van Parijs is a philosopher at the University of Louvain and a founding member… »

Five years ago: Nations of the world met in Paris to draft a climate agreement that was subsequently accepted by nearly every country in the world, stating that global temperatures must not exceed +2C pre-industrial. Global emissions must be cut! Fossil fuel usage must be cut! Today: Following Paris ’15,… »

In this interview during COP25, Makoma Lekalakala (Goldman Environmental Prize 2018) and member of Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg, talks to Pressenza about the role of women in the climate change debate, the nonsense of using nuclear energy in Africa and what civil society expects of northern hemisphere multinational… »

Throughout its history, Earth has experienced five mass extinction events. See, for example, ‘Timeline Of Mass Extinction Events On Earth’. It is now experiencing the sixth. The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439 million years ago, wiped out 86% of life on Earth at the time. Most scientists believe… »

While concerns about climate change are increasing, the debate on the demographic issue has also got underway: can our planet feed 8 billion human beings? It is not easy to answer this question with a simple yes or no, depending on a great many interrelated factors and on the level… »