Categories
Climate Change News

Deforestation spurs wave of fires in Brazilian Amazon | Environment News [Video]

The Brazilian Amazon rainforest is suffering from more fires than at any point in nearly five years, spurred on by a surge in illegal deforestation.

According to Brazil’s national space institute, satellites have detected more than 33,000 fires as the rainforest enters the peak of fire season, which often correlates with high levels of deforestation activity.

“The deforestation rate is very high. That means there are many fallen trees ready to burn,” Ane Alencar, coordinator of the Mapbiomas Fire project, told The Associated Press. “The fire season will be even more intense in September.”

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has been criticised for his failure to combat illegal deforestation and for what critics have alleged is a sympathetic view of such activities. The fires are commonly started by groups making room for cattle to graze, and environmental land defenders and Indigenous groups have faced violence and suppression.

The Amazon experienced the worst August …

Watch/Read More
Categories
Climate Change News

Museum highlights climate change with tilted paintings [Video]

STORY: Activists from the group Last Generation smeared the screen in front of Klimt's "Death and Life" at the Leopold Museum in Vienna and glued one of their hands to it in the November protest calling for an end to drilling for oil."We found this way to be absolutely the wrong one," the museum's artistic director, Hans-Peter Wipplinger, told Reuters on the opening day of its response: a small exhibition with the full title "A Few Degrees More (Will Turn the World into an Uncomfortable Place)".It involves hanging 15 works by artists including Klimt and fellow Austrian great Egon Schiele at an angle, with texts calling attention to the effect that global warming of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels would have on the landscapes depicted in them.According to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), emissions must be halved by the mid-2030s if the world is to have any chance of limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels - a key target enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement."We wanted to initiate something productive, something communicative. That means conveying a message and not just in spectacular images (such as the protest) but by helping visitors learn about the situation and the various contexts of this global heating," Wipplinger said.The exhibition runs until June 26.

Categories
Climate Change News

Forget it, you can't keep politics out of climate change - Video

The latest U.S. climate report says we are drawing ever-closer to the 1.5-degrees-of-warming milestone. Jessica Green, professor of climate policy and politics, University of Toronto, says politics not technology is the crucial obstacle in slowing carbon pollution.