‘Local air pollution around the world kills about 6.5 million people annually.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Doctors have revealed that millions are already suffering the effects, in the spread of infectious diseases, uneven crop yields and longer allergy seasons

CLICK HERE - STUDY - The Lancet - Health and climate change - The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: from 25 years of inaction to a global transformation for public health

theguardian.com - by Christiana Figueres - October 31, 2017

A report just published in the Lancet from the specially created Lancet Countdown initiative, reveals just how bad climate change is for public health. The diagnosis reveals that hundreds of millions of people are already suffering the health impacts of climate change. Its insidious creep is being felt in multiple ways: rising temperatures are hastening the spread of infectious diseases; crop yields are becoming uneven and unpredictable, worsening the hunger and malnourishment for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet; allergy seasons are getting longer; and at times it is simply too hot for farmers to work in the fields.

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A livestock market in India - Omar Sobhani / Reuters

Large initiatives are underway to pinpoint the next big viral threats—but some virologists believe the task is too hard.

theatlantic.com - by Ed Yong - October 25, 2017

It’s been two years since an epidemic of Zika began in Brazil, three since the largest Ebola outbreak in history erupted in West Africa, eight since a pandemic of H1N1 flu swept the world, and almost a hundred since a different H1N1 flu pandemic killed 50 million people worldwide. Those viruses were all known, but no one knew when or where they’d trigger epidemics. Other diseases, like SARS, MERS, and HIV, emerged out of the blue.

Sick of being perpetually caught off guard, some scientists want to fully catalogue all viral threats, and predict which are likely to cause tomorrow’s outbreaks.

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The extra contribution to sea level rise from Antarctica will not kick in if warming is kept at less than 1.9C above preindustrial levels, the researchers found. Photograph: IceBridge/Nasa

University of Melbourne paper combines latest understanding on Antarctica and current emissions projection scenarios

CLICK HERE - Linking sea level rise and socioeconomic indicators under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

theguardian.com - by Michael Slezak - October 26, 2017

Coastal cities around the world could be devastated by 1.3m of sea level rise this century unless coal-generated electricity is virtually eliminated by 2050, according to a new paper that combines the latest understanding of Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise and the latest emissions projection scenarios.

CLICK HERE - BROCHURE SUMMARY - Exploring Ocean Change - BIOACID - Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification (24 page .PDF file)

CLICK HERE - BIOACID - Exploring Ocean Change

news.sky.com - by Rebecca Taylor - October 23, 2017

Increased acidity in the oceans could affect many species including molluscs and corals, an eight-year study has found.

The research from more than 250 scientists also highlighted the risk of knock-on effect up the food chain.

Increased acidity in the oceans, called by some the "evil twin of global warming", compounds the effect of rising temperatures.

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CLICK HERE - More acidic oceans 'will affect all sea life'

Flying insects caught in a malaise trap, used by entomologists to collect samples. Photograph: Entomologisher Verein Krefeld

Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years, with serious implications for all life on Earth, scientists say

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Plos One - More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

theguardian.com - by Darian Carrington - October 18, 2017

The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.

Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

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Image: Vladimir Romanovsky crouches as he collects temperature recordings beneath the forest floor (Credit: Anthony Rhoades)

bbc.com - Sara Goudarzi - October 17th 2017

Vladimir Romanovsky walks through the dense black spruce forest with ease. Not once does he stop or slow down to balance himself on the cushy moss beneath his feet insulating the permafrost.

It’s a warm day in July, and the scientist is looking for a box that he and his team have installed on the ground.

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Image: Ali Shehadeh, a plant conservationist from Syria who fled the war in his country, at work in Terbol, Lebanon. Credit Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

nytimes.com - Somini Sengupta - October 13th 2017

Ali Shehadeh, a seed hunter, opened the folders with the greatest of care. Inside each was a carefully dried and pressed seed pod: a sweet clover from Egypt, a wild wheat found only in northern Syria, an ancient variety of bread wheat. He had thousands of these folders stacked neatly in a windowless office, a precious herbarium, containing seeds foraged from across the hot, arid and increasingly inhospitable region known as the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of farming.

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Image: A car passes among dark homes as people wait for electricity to be restored after Hurricane Maria passed through in Utuado, Puerto Rico.JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

wired.com - Adam Rogers - October 10th 2017

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria tore through the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is still mostly an island deleted from the present and pushed back a century or so—with little clean water, little electric power, and almost no telecommunications. For telecom, the biggest problem is the lack of power, because most of the island’s transmission lines were knocked out. “We have to reconstruct the power grid as if we were dropping into the middle of the desert and starting from scratch,” says Luis Romero, vice president of the Puerto Rico Telecommunications Alliance.

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Image: Villagers rest at an evacuee camp in Rendang, Bali, Indonesia, Monday, Sept. 25, 2017. More than 35,000 people have fled a menacing volcano on the Indonesia tourist island of Bali, fearing will erupt for the first time in more than half a century as increasing tremors rattle the region. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati) 

apnews.com - Firdia Lisnawati - September 26th 2017

More than 57,000 people have fled the surrounds of Mount Agung volcano on the Indonesian tourist island of Bali, fearing an imminent eruption, officials said Tuesday.

An increasing frequency of tremors from the volcano indicates magma is continuing to move toward the surface and an eruption is possible, said National Disaster Mitigation agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho. He said more than 560 volcanic earthquakes were recorded on Monday, most of them shallow.

nbcnews.com - by Yuliya Talmazan - September 20, 2017

Dominica's main hospital "took a beating" from Hurricane Maria while buildings serving as shelters had their roofs ripped off, an official said as the first images showing the devastation unleashed by the storm emerged Wednesday.

The Category 5 storm hit the tiny Caribbean island late Monday, cutting off communications and leaving the rest of the world in the dark about the storm’s aftermath.

Video footage shot by the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency shows large swaths of the island suffered heavy damage, with roofs missing and debris scattered for hundreds of yards.

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bbc.com - September 20th 2017

Hurricane Maria has knocked out power to the entire island of Puerto Rico, home to 3.5m people, emergency officials have said.

Abner Gómez, head of the disaster management agency, said the hurricane had damaged "everything in its path".

None of the customers of Puerto Rico's Electric Power Authority had any electricity, he said.

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bbc.com - September 20th 2017

A strong earthquake has struck central Mexico, killing more than 200 people and toppling dozens of buildings in the capital, Mexico City.

More than 20 children died and 30 are missing after a school collapsed, President Enrique Peña Nieto said.

The 7.1 magnitude quake also caused major damage in neighbouring states.

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Image: Satellite imagery of Hurricane Maria. NASA / AP.

theatlantic.com - Marina Koren - September 18th 2017

The Caribbean is preparing for another “dangerous” major hurricane less than two weeks after Irma struck the region, devastating entire islands, flattening homes and buildings, and killing more than 30 people.

The National Hurricane Center on Monday upgraded Hurricane Maria to a Category 3 storm packing 120-mile-per-hour winds with stronger gusts. “Additional rapid strengthening is forecast during the next 48 hours, and Maria is expected to be a dangerous major hurricane as it moves through the Leeward Islands and the northeastern Caribbean Sea,” the center said in its latest advisory.

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Image:  The 2014 El Portal fire burning near Yosemite National Park, California. Scientists have warned that rising global temperatures will lead to more wildfires in Yosemite and elsewhere. Photograph: Stuart Palley/EPA

theguardian.com - Peter Brannen - September 9th 2017

Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the centre cannot hold. Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have become fixtures of the evening news – and all this after the planet has warmed by less than 1C above preindustrial temperatures. But here’s where it gets really scary.

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Image: A street in St. Martin after Hurricane Irma. Residents spoke of a disintegration in law and order as survivors struggled in the face of severe food and water shortages. Credit Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

nytimes.com - Azam Ahmed and Kirk Semple - September 10th 2017

At dawn, people began to gather, quietly planning for survival after Hurricane Irma.

They started with the grocery stores, scavenging what they needed for sustenance: water, crackers, fruit.

But by nightfall on Thursday, what had been a search for food took a more menacing turn, as groups of people, some of them armed, swooped in and took whatever of value was left: electronics, appliances and vehicles.

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