Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study …
If We Release a Small Fraction of Arctic Carbon, ‘We’re Fucked’: Climatologist From Vice.com Recently, scientists have made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw “vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor,” as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps …
Richard Martin, Technology Review An old man wakes on the floor of a hut in a village in southern India. He is wrapped in a thin cotton blanket. Beside him, music wails softly on a transistor radio. A small wood fire smolders on the floor, filling the space with a light haze; above it,the bamboo timbers …
Six Key Trends Shaping the Energy Future The Paris-based International Energy Agency was established after the oil crisis of the early 1970s in a move by oil-consuming nations to keep better track of trends and improve energy security. Its annual World Energy Outlook, with hundreds of pages of analysis and charts, is considered the industry …
READ ORIGINAL PAPER: By Ricarda Winkelmann, Anders Levermann, Andy Ridgwell and Ken Caldeira If We Burned All the Fossil Fuel in the World Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker What would happen if we burned through all of the fossil-fuel resources known to exist? In a paper published today in the journal Science Advances, a quartet …
Nihar Gokhale, Catch News Did you know that rivers originating in Tibet’s glaciers supply water to 1.3 billion people? That’s equivalent to the entire population of India. But these glaciers are fast disappearing due to global warming. Tibet’s sustainability is crucial for sustenance of the world, but this fact is not commonly known. The glaciers …
The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US National Parks Stephen Corry, Truthout Conservation’s achievements don’t alter the fact that it’s rooted in two serious and related mistakes. The first is that it conserves “wildernesses,” which are imagined to be shaped only by nature. The second is that it believes in a hierarchy, …
Doomsday in 10 years: India may run out of water by 2025 Nihar Gokhale, Catch News We know quite well that water is scarce. Many even imagine that a Third World War will be fought over water. Nonetheless, the thought of taps running dry doesn’t come naturally. But maybe it is time to wake up …
Peak Oil: Myth Or Coming Reality? Gaurav Agnihotri, Oilprice.com We have yet to see evidence that we are nearing a peak in oil production. On the contrary, agencies like EIA and IEA have predicted a stable increase in crude oil production for the next few years at least. But supplies may not be the only, …
Heatwave to worsen over the years: Study Times of India Hyderabad suffers a maximum of five heatwave days’ in a year. According to experts, this number will go up to as many as 40 days per year in the future. This prediction has been made in a paper titled Climate change scenarios for Hyderabad: Integrating uncertainties …