Climate change: Are you suffering from ‘eco-anxiety’? 

 The headlines detailing extreme weather events seem to come at you day after day. Your social feed – and just stepping outside – alerts you to record temperatures being set. And yet, still, some people in positions of power deny its full impact.

Meanwhile, an academic paper on climate change – that is so grim it apparently resulted in people going to therapy – has gone viral, with some reports suggesting it has been downloaded more than 110,000 times.

In the words of the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, who founded the school strike for climate movement in 2018: “Adults keep saying, we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic.” Read More

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Climate change is often talked about in terms of averages, like the goal set by the Paris Agreement to limit the Earth’s temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius. What such numbers fail to convey is that climate change will not only increase the world’s average temperature, it will also intensify extreme heat waves that even now are causing harm. A recent review paper describes the potential impacts of these worsening events on people and wildlife. http://bit.ly/2XUw9wa

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When deadly heat waves hit on land, we hear about them. But the oceans can have heat waves, too. They are now happening far more frequently than they did last century and are harming marine life, according to a new study.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, looked at the impact of marine heat waves on the diversity of life in the ocean. From coral reefs to kelp forests to sea grass beds, researchers found that these heat waves were destroying the framework of many ocean ecosystems.

Marine heat waves are said to occur when sea temperatures are much warmer than normal for at least five consecutive days.

Scientists estimate that the oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by excess greenhouse gases since midcentury. Humans have added these gases to the atmosphere largely by burning fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas, for energy. https://nyti.ms/2SKEmz6

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