NASA yesterday released brand new images showing the pace of
ice loss from Earth’s two vast ice sheets, Greenland and
Antarctica. The amount of ice lost from the frozen expanses is
accelerating and together have helped raise global sea level by
more than 7cm since 1992.

The government yesterday announced

Thousands of walrus have been forced to come ashore on a
remote island off Alaska, scientists report, because of extreme
loss of Arctic sea ice. Just as President Obama embarks on a tour
to highlight the consequences of climate change in the Arctic,
villagers reported seeing animals come ashore in the Chukchi Sea to
rest and find food in the absence of sea ice, their preferred
habitat. Since 2000, the forced migration of walruses – known as a
“haul out” – has become an increasingly regular occurrence,
according to US government scientists.

About one-fifth of all countries will experience chronic
waterscarcityby 2040, with the Middle East the worst
affected, according to a new report from the World Resources
Institute. Palestine, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates scored
five out of five for water stress, based on ratings developed by
the US thinktank, with many others moving from “medium” to “high”
stress as climate change disrupts temperature and rainfall
patterns. A separate

Visiting New Orleans on Thursday, President Obama heralded
the progress the city had made since Hurricane Katrina swept
through 10 years ago, but said more needed to be done to tackle
poverty and inequality. The city saw devastating flooding after the
government was slow to respond to the disaster. “What started out
as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster, a failure of
government to look out for its own citizens,” Obama told
reporters.

The US government has urged the international community to
devote more resources to slowing the impacts of climate change on
the oceans, with corals, shellfish and other marine life a
particular concern. “We are asking the [Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change] in their next series of reports to focus more on
ocean and cryosphere…We need to keep pushing up until the Paris
conference and beyond,” said David Balton, deputy assistant
secretary for oceans and fisheries at the US State
Department.

The latest attack on the renewables sector in a bid to cut
energy bills is a problem for a government that is supposedly fully
committed to the decarbonisation of the British economy, says
BusinessGreen’s James Murray. If you kill off the feed-in tariff
for solar generation and risk taking the distributed energy market
down with it, what do you replace it with? The government urgently
needs to provide a credible answer to these questions, says
Murray.

Remembering the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina when
she raged through New Orleans ten years ago, the media is once
again asking whether climate change played a role in making the
storm worse. While these questions don’t always have easy answers,
the expectation is that climate change will mean we see the
strongest storms happening more often in future, says Andrea
Thompson.

As the £24.5bn nuclear power development at Hinkley Point in
Somerset is poised to get the green light, The Independent’s Tom
Bawden says environmentalists are far from alone in opposing the
controversial project. With the government agreeing a deal that
would guarantee EDF a price of £92.50 per megawatt hour of the
electricity it generates up to 2061, some analysts, politicians and
rival power companies are “dismissing the project as a colossal
waste of money.”

A new study simulates the climate impact of implementing
geoengineering measures to reflect more of the Sun’s energy away
from the Earth’s surface. The results show the measures could
reduce global average temperature rise by around 60% under a
moderate climate change scenario. The simulations also show extreme
temperatures changes that are similar to average changes. Changes
to rainfall extremes depend on the type of geoengineering measure,
the researchers say, with simulations showing both increases and
decreases in the length of dry spells globally.

Use of electronic appliances in households accounts for
almost 9% of greenhouse gas emissions in China, a new study finds.
Use of electronic products has increased with income, and average
household emissions in China are now higher than they are in
Norway, for example. Potential measures to reduce the emissions of
these products would be the development of energy-saving models and
a reduction in coal power for generating electricity, the
researchers say.