The world is wildly off track meeting the Paris Agreement goal of holding temperature rises to 1.5ۜ°C, despite a recent series of more ambitious new national climate plans Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2269432-we-are-nowhere-near-keeping-warming-below-1-5c-despite-climate-plans/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Tag: paris
Our interview with 5-time NBA All-Star Chris Webber about his Sports Activism online course, new on Coursera
By Shantelle Williams-Valadié, BOLD ERG Chair and Associate Director, University Partnerships, Coursera In the 1968 Olympics, medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos punched defiant fists into the summer air, decrying oppression of Black communities in the country whose colors they wore on their tracksuits. The act seized the world of sports and was widely condemned […]
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Bill Gates took private jet to Paris climate summit, his book reveals
Bill Gates has admitted to flying on a private jet to the Paris climate change summit in 2015. Green campaigners say the revelation, made in his new book on reducing carbon emissions, undermines the billionaire philanthropist’s message Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2267538-bill-gates-took-private-jet-to-paris-climate-summit-his-book-reveals/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Solar and Wind Are Reaching for the Last 90% of the US Power Market
An anonymous reader shares a report: Three decades ago, the U.S. passed an infinitesimal milestone: solar and wind power generated one-tenth of one percent of the country’s electricity. It took 18 years, until 2008, for solar and wind to reach 1% of U.S. electricity. It took 12 years for solar and wind to increase by another factor of 10. In 2020,…
France Found Guilty of Failing To Meet Its Paris Climate Accord Commitments
“Four environmental groups are crying victory after France was found guilty of failing to meet climate change goals it committed to in a historic accord signed in and named after its own capital city,” reports CBS News: The Administrative Tribunal in Paris ruled Wednesday that France had fallen short of its promise to reduce greenhouse gases under commitments made in the…
What’s the weather like on Titan?
Most of the planets in our solar system have some sort of atmosphere and many have dynamic weather systems. But only one moon in the solar system, Saturn’s large moon Titan, can say the same. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/titan-saturns-moon-weather-seasons-methane-rain-storms…
Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Twitter accounts run by machines are a major source of climate change disinformation that might drain support from policies to address rising temperatures. In the weeks surrounding former President Trump’s announcement about withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, accounts suspected of being bots accounted for roughly a quarter of all tweets about climate…
Biden Rejoins Paris Climate Accord, Works To Overturn Trump’s Climate Policies
During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Biden returned the United States to the Paris climate accord and directed federal agencies to begin unraveling Donald Trump’s environmental policies. The Washington Post reports: Biden’s executive order recommitting the United States to the international struggle to slow global warming fulfilled a campaign promise and represented a stark repudiation of…
Saturn’s tilt caused by its moons
Two scientists from CNRS and Sorbonne University working at the Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeris Calculation (Paris Observatory—PSL/CNRS) have just shown that the influence of Saturn’s satellites can explain the tilt of the rotation axis of the gas giant. Their work, published on 18 January 2021 in the journal Nature Astronomy, also predicts that the tilt will increase even further…
The obliquity of Mars: Periodic bedding in Tithonium Chasma
Earth’s seasons are caused by the tilt of our planet’s rotational axis to the orbital plane or obliquity. Mars’ obliquity is currently about 25 degrees, which is not much different from Earth’s 23 degrees. However, numerical calculations by scientists at the Paris Observatory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest that this near-agreement is a coincidence. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-obliquity-mars-periodic-bedding-tithonium.html…