22 million trees planted in Scotland to help meet ‘global climate emergency’. In fact, more than 22 million trees were planted in Scotland last year in what has been described as a “critical contribution to the global climate emergency”. Dr. Sam Gardner, deputy director at WWF Scotland added: “Woodlands will play an increasingly important role in capturing carbon and reducing Scotland’s contribution to climate change. The planting has comfortably outstripped the 10,000-hectare target set by the Scottish Government for new trees in the ground.“In Scotland alone, around 9.5 million tonnes of CO2 each year are removed from the atmosphere by our forests – this is a clear example of why an increase in tree planting is so important in the fight against climate change”, rural economy secretary Fergus Ewing said. The overwhelming majority of new trees were planted by private enterprise with the Scottish Government setting aside £46m last year to subsidize new forestry schemes. The Scottish Government, as part of their climate change commitments, has already upped the planting targets for the future, rising to 15,000 ha a year from 2024/25. At present, Scotland’s forests cover just under 19 percent of the total land mass area with this due to increase to 21 % by 2032 – The Scotsman
- Development banks’ climate funding at all-time high in 2018 – Reuters
- The Most Delicious Foods Will Fall Victim to Climate Change – WIRED
- Scientists Create A New Guide For Saving Corals In A Warming World – HuffPost
- As Canadian cities prepare for more deadly heat waves, limiting increase of climate change could save lives – The Telegram
- Pressure mounts on aviation industry over climate change – Phys.org
- World leaders ‘are lying about climate change – Irish Examiner
- Is Climate Change Fueling Tornadoes? – Inside Climate News
Will climate change kill everyone — or just lots and lots of people? The story went up on Vice with an orange-tinged, haunting illustration of the Statue of Liberty submerged to the neck by rising seas. The post was shared more than 70,000 times on Facebook and left readers terrified, despairing, and sharing doubts about whether it’s ethical to have children. The fact is that even the most pessimistic reports, evaluated responsibly, don’t suggest climate change will end human civilization, much less within our lifetimes. In a detailed response, six researchers argued that the report overstates the risks from climate change. Sea levels will rise, but not up to the Statue of Liberty’s neck (if all the ice in the world melted, sea levels would rise to approximately the statue’s waist). However, lots of climate policy analysts agree that the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is too optimistic. In particular, the IPCC has kept insisting that it’s still possible to keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius when at this point, that’s really unrealistic. Beneath the disagreement over climate risks is a disagreement over worldviews. From one perspective, quibbling over whether climate change will kill millions or billions is a silly waste of time when, in either case, we urgently need to act. Another broad disagreement is whether alarmism makes our prospects of tackling climate change better or worse. As some people see it, we’re not doing nearly enough to fight climate change, so we’d better focus in on the worst-case scenarios in case that will be what it takes to finally spur people to action. Others, though, worry that alarmism, far from motivating people, leads to paralysis — too much despair about the future to even bother working on it – Vox
Michael E. Mann took climate change deniers to court. In 2011, the renowned scientist sued a Canadian think tank that published an interview suggesting his work on climate change was fraud. Mann is best known as the lead researcher on a landmark 1998 paper on climate change. He and three colleagues reconstructed global temperatures going back about 500 years, producing a now-infamous sideways-hockey-stick-like graph of global temperatures that showed a sharp upswing beginning in the 1900s. Eight years later, the Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy — which often promotes climate change denial — apologized Friday and wiped the inflammatory interview from its website. Mann has spent the two decades since the paper’s publication defending it and his reputation against climate change deniers — sometimes in court. He settled with the Frontier Centre on Friday, but a related case in British Columbia and a similar one in the United States are ongoing.”Making false and malicious allegations about a scientist is illegal,” Mann said by email, “The law is the appropriate recourse, and often an effective one, as this latest episode demonstrates – Canada’s National Observer