Teenage activist takes School Strikes 4 Climate Action to Davos.
Protest by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg snowballs to last day of World Economic Forum. Thunberg is rapidly becoming the voice for a generation who are demanding urgent action to slow the rise in global temperatures. Thunberg started her protest last September by striking for three weeks outside the Swedish parliament, lobbying MPs to comply with the Paris Agreement. After the Swedish election, she continued to strike every Friday, where she is now joined by hundreds of people. Greta Thunberg will join a strike by Swiss school children in the ski resort on Friday – the final day of the World Economic Forum. The school strikes last Friday were by far the biggest to date. In Germany, an estimated 30,000 students left their schools in more than 50 cities to protest, carrying banners including: “Why learn without a future?” and “Grandpa, what is a snowman?” – The Guardian
- Using Art to Explore Indigenous Rights, Activism and Environment – The Tyee
- Majority of Americans Unwilling To Pay $10 a Month To Address Climate Change – Newsweek
- Doomsday Clock 2019: Still 2 Minutes to Midnight Amid ‘New Abnormal’ – The Weather Channel
- Forest soil needs decades or centuries to recover from fires and logging – The Conversation
- Renewables In Britain To Overtake Fossil Fuels By 2020 – Clean Technica
- Hershey wants to make sure climate change doesn’t destroy its chocolate supplies – Fast Company
Could hi-tech Netherlands-style farming feed the world? As the global population swells, so does the need for food. Could a Netherlands approach to farming that doesn’t rely on soil, sunshine, water and pesticides be the answer? The small, overcrowded, low-lying Netherlands might not sound like the answer to feeding a world whose population is predicted to rise to 9.6 billion people by 2050, but farmers and agronomists there would beg to differ. The Dutch farming uses greenhouse technology, termed ‘precision farming’, that some in the Dutch food industry claim is the most advanced in the world. Netherlands is the second largest vegetable exporter in the world. Onions, potatoes and some southern climate vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers and chiles are among its top selling products. In the greenhouses of Westland, an area that was reclaimed at great cost and effort from the sea, they grow almost 70 kilograms (154 pounds) of tomatoes per square meter. That’s at least 10 times the average yield from an open field in Spain or Morocco, but with eight times less water and practically no chemical pesticides – Made for Minds
Climate change endangers half the world’s groundwater supply.
Of the seven and a half billion people currently residing on our fair planet, two billion rely on groundwater—water that’s seeped through the layers of soil and rock to become stored in underground deposits called aquifers. Researchers for a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change say more than half of the world’s groundwater systems could take more than 100 years to completely respond to current environmental changes from global warming. Scientists from the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France found that climate-related changes to rainfall in the next century will make it harder for 44% of the world’s aquifers to recharge, particularly the shallower ones we rely on to fill up faster. That means within the next 100 years, nearly half the world’s groundwater supply will become less reliable. Since humanity’s need for water is certainly not diminishing, the newly deprived aquifers will begin to deplete—or deplete faster than they already are. Climate change may be creating a groundwater “time bomb” as the world’s underground water systems catch up to the impacts of global warming – Quartz
Sir David Attenborough Warns We’ve Entered a New Geological Age During His Lifetime. On Monday, the famous naturalist and British television broadcaster warned that the only conditions modern humans have ever known changed so rapidly and profoundly because of human-driven climate change that we risk destroying our earthly home. While accepting the Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an annual gathering of the world’s most powerful political, cultural and business leaders, Attenborough said, “I am quite literally from another age.” “I was born during the Holocene, the name given to the 12,000-year period of climatic stability that allowed humans to settle, farm and create civilizations. “Now in the space of one human lifetime, indeed in the space of my lifetime, all that has changed,” he continued. “The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more” – The Washington Post