SAVING THE PLANET

N. CUNNINGHAM—From devastating wildfires to rising methane emissions, Earth’s vital signs are continuing to deteriorate, scientists warn. An urgent global phaseout of fossil fuels is needed, they say, reiterating calls for “transformative change,” which is “needed now more than ever to protect life on Earth and remain within as many planetary boundaries as possible.”

The warning comes roughly a year and a half after a global coalition of 11,000 climate scientists declared a climate emergency, warning that global action was needed to avoid “untold suffering due to the climate crisis.” The new paper examining Earth’s vital signs, published in the journal BioScience, is authored by some of the same scientists who helped spearhead the climate emergency declaration.

GAVAN McCORMACK—In such an ecological hotspot, teeming with life at the juncture of forest and sea, Japan’s government, in consultation with the US government, insists that a huge new military facility must be constructed for the US Marine Corps. So strategically attractive is this site, overlooking the East China Sea, that the Pentagon planned, and would have carried out, such a scheme in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War except that it would have had to pay for it itself.

Sergei Zimov could be a visionary capable of reversing much of the damage done by humans over thousands of years, and now threatening the future of life on this planet

MoA—Guess who said this: “Many of us read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry when we were children and remember what the main character said: “It’s a question of discipline. When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. … It’s very tedious work, but very easy.”

I am sure that we must keep doing this “tedious work” if we want to preserve our common home for future generations. We must tend our planet.

TIM RADFORD—An international team of scientists brings bad news about Arctic heating: the polar ocean is warming not only faster than anybody predicted, it is getting hotter at a rate faster than even the worst case climate scenario predictions have so far foreseen.

Such dramatic rises in Arctic temperatures have been recorded before, but only during the last Ice Age. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that temperatures rose by 10°C or even 12°C, over a period of between 40 years and a century, between 120,000 years and 11,000 years ago.