Nasa says it has detected the first signs of significant melting in a swathe of glaciers in East Antarctica. The region has long been considered stable and unaffected by some of the more dramatic changes occurring elsewhere on the continent. But satellites have now shown that ice streams running into the ocean along one-eighth of the eastern coastline have thinned and sped up.
BBC 11th Dec 2018 read more »
The Extinction Rebellion climate protest group has expanded to 35 countries and is building towards a week of international civil disobedience in April, according to organisers, who are using UN climate talks in Poland this week to widen its network. The rapid spread of the movement, which consisted of 10 people in the UK six months ago, comes amid rising frustration with policymakers who are failing to slow perilous levels of global warming and biodiversity loss. The distinctive banner of the group was evident at a rally on Saturday attended by several thousand climate campaigners in Katowice, the city hosting the conference. Campaigners also held Skype workshops for activists in Berlin, after training sessions in the US, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Ghana and Poland. “In the two months since our first action, we have expanded more than we imagined,” Liam Geary Baulch, an environmental activist, said. “We are now planning to change our structure so it can accommodate up to 2 million people.”
Guardian 10th Dec 2018 read more »
COP24 video: How can the Paris Agreement stay on track in a world with Bolsonaro and Trump? The technical side of the talks have been dominated by negotiations aimed at finalising the Paris “rulebook”, the detailed guidelines needed to bring the Paris Agreement to life. But a fight led by the US and Saudi Arabia over how to acknowledge the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on 1.5C, a US side-event promoting coal and Brazil’s decision to pull out of hosting the COP25 talks next year have provided a unsettled backdrop. Carbon Brief asked a range of delegates at COP24 how they think the Paris Agreement can stay on track in a world with the likes of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and the US’s Donald Trump in office.
Carbon Brief 10th Dec 2018 read more »