"Solar energy could be the top source of electricity by 2050, aided by plummeting costs of the equipment to generate it, a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the West's energy watchdog, said on Monday."
"It actually takes quite a lot of fossil fuel power to reach the tiny Spanish island of El Hierro. You have to catch a commercial jet flight, a propeller plane and then a ferry to reach what was once the end of the known world, before Columbus set sail."
"The record-setting heat wave in Australia last year was "largely attributable" to human-caused climate change, according to a synthesis report released Monday. Heat waves in Japan, Korea, China and Europe were also "substantially influenced" by global warming, the report found."
"The worst decline was among populations of freshwater species, which fell by 76 percent over the four decades to 2010, while marine and terrestrial numbers both fell by 39 percent."
"The woman cowers inside a phone booth as a fury of birds tears through town. Demented seabirds hurl themselves at the windows, cracking the glass. Outside, beaks and claws swirl over bloody bodies in the streets."
"An excruciating mosquito-borne illness that arrived less than a year ago in the Americas is raging across the region, leaping from the Caribbean to the Central and South American mainland, and infecting more than 1 million people. Some cases have already emerged in the United States."
"Brazil has refused to sign up to a pact setting a deadline for ending deforestation entirely by 2030."
"Ellesmere Island, Nunavut — It’s August, and there’s snow on the ground. The six-week summer has already passed; our 24-hour daylight will drop to 16 in just a month’s time. Small, brittle leaves crunch underfoot as I walk across tundra that’s already beginning to freeze for the long winter ahead. The top of the world is a cold place. I’ve been at a field camp here in the Canadian high Arctic gathering climate change data from one of the most remote and isolated regions of the planet. It is barren, wild and beautiful. Yet this place is not beyond the reach of our carbon emissions."
"Moving to halt a powerful contributor to climate change, the United States has joined more than 110 corporations, civil society groups and governments to launch a global initiative to reduce deforestation sharply over the next 15 years, with the goal of eliminating the practice by 2030."
"Climate change poses risks to human health just as pollution and lack of sanitation did a century ago, says a medical journal editorial that details the potential harmful health effects and the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
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