Environmental News For The Week Ending 23May 2019
This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics published last week. This is usually a Tuesday evening regular post at
GEI (but can be posted at other times).
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Note: Because of the high volume of news regarding the coronavirus outbreak, that news has been published separately:
Covid totals continue to fall, both in the US and worldwide. New US cases during the week ending May 22nd were down 22.0% from those testing positive during the week ending May 15th, and down 64.2% from our mid-April surge high; this week s new cases were also the lowest for a 7 day period since that ending June 19th of last year. US deaths attributed to Covid this week were down 7.1% from the prior week, and less than a sixth of the death rate during the peak weeks of January. US Covid deaths were also the lowest since t
Green energy technology is often more expensive than more established fossil fuel equivalents. But government support for scaling up green energy could push its price down fast and result in a cheaper energy system in the long run, a new study suggests. The findings are in contrast with the output of many Integrated Assessment Models […]
Dive Brief:
The U.S. EPA recently issued a final rule on emissions thresholds for municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills, which stakeholders see as a significant step in the Biden administration’s climate change plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
The final rule brings clarity to a drawn-out legal battle over the timeline for implementing state or federal emission rules, industry groups say,
helping landfill operators make plans to update emissions systems if necessary. Environmental groups see the rule as an important way to more quickly take a bite out of air pollution, as MSW landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States.
An important study has just been published
1 examining the level of consensus among scientists about climate change.
The issue at hand is this: What is the level of agreement in the scientific community about the reality of climate change and about the human role in climate change? The new paper,
Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, address this question and the answer is very clear. The number of climate scientists who question the reality of global warming or the human role in global warming is vanishingly small.
This is not the first study to look at this question, but it is the most thorough effort. This should, however, be the last paper to report this kind of research because, really, we’re there; climate scientists are in very strong agreement about this issue and with this landmark study further demonstration of this fact is superfluous. (John Keegan discusses the merits of this paper relative to other similar effort