Climate Change

A Volkswagen e-Golf electric car being charged in Dresden, Germany, in March. Volkswagen and Tesla each have plans to produce more than 1 million electric vehicles per year by 2025. Credit Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

CLICK HERE - Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) - Electric Vehicle Outlook 2017

nytimes.com - by Brad Plumer - July 8, 2017

As the world’s automakers place larger bets on electric vehicle technology, many industry analysts are debating a key question: How quickly can plug-in cars become mainstream?

The conventional view holds that electric cars will remain a niche product for many years, plagued by high sticker prices and heavily dependent on government subsidies.

But a growing number of analysts now argue that this pessimism is becoming outdated. A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research group, suggests that the price of plug-in cars is falling much faster than expected, spurred by cheaper batteries and aggressive policies promoting zero-emission vehicles in China and Europe.

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A man trying to keep cool sat in the fountain at Washington Square Park last August in New York. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Even with aggressive reductions in carbon emissions, extreme heat is going to get worse, a new study has found.

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Nature - Global risk of deadly heat

huffingtonpost.com - by Chris D'Angelo - June 22, 2017

If humans fail to drastically cut carbon emissions, 3 in 4 people on the planet could be exposed to deadly heat waves by the end of the century, a new study has found. 

And even if countries take action to reverse climate change with aggressive emissions reductions, up to 48 percent of the global population will be plagued by at least 20 days of lethal heat per year by 2100. 

Camilo Mora, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of geography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told HuffPost that our “assault on the planet has been so massive” that we’ve left ourselves without a good option.

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CLICK HERE - STUDY - Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States

nola.com - by Mark Schleifstein - June 29, 2017

New research concludes that the poorest one third of U.S. counties -- including many Louisiana parishes -- could sustain economic damages representing as much as 20 percent of their annual income by the end of this century if nothing is done to minimize climate change. The findings are explained by the lead author of the study in a video released with its publication Thursday (June 29) in Science magazine.

"Unmitigated climate change will be very expensive for huge regions of the United States," said Solomon Hsiang, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

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ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Study: Climate change damages US economy, increases inequality

Flooding in North Miami, Florida. A 2013 World Bank study found that Miami is one of the 10 cities most at risk of damage from sea-level rise. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Amplification of flood frequencies with local sea level rise and emerging flood regimes

thebulletin.org - by Dan Drollette Jr. - June 9, 2017

According to a new study published on Wednesday by researchers from Princeton and Rutgers universities, rare floods will soon become the norm for cities like New York, San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle, as well as entire states such as Florida and Hawaii. On average, this means a 40-fold increase in the occurence of flood, unless humanity soon cuts back on the amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere.

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ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Rare US floods to become the norm if emissions aren't cut, study warns