The Elephant
A resource for journalists, politicians, policy makers, activists and citizens interested in climate change and the environmental emergency
The ElephantA resource for journalists, politicians, policy makers, activists and citizens interested in climate change and the environmental emergency
Visit: journals.plos.org
Emotional signatures of climate policy support
2024-04-21 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceThe optimal emotional tone for climate communication has been debated by scholars and the press, but little is known about the effects of emotions on different types of policy support. In this paper we examine multiple discrete emotions people experience in reaction to climate change, and assess the strength of these emotions as predictors of support for different types of mitigation and adaptation policies. Using multi-wave, cross-sectional, nationally representative samples of American adults, we test whether guilt, anger, hope, fear, and sadness are uniquely associated with support for different types of climate policies. Gui...
Sugar industry sponsorship of germ-free rodent studies linking sucrose to hyperlipidemia and cancer: An historical analysis of internal documents
2024-04-05 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceIn 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) secretly funded a review in the New England Journal of Medicine that discounted evidence linking sucrose consumption to blood lipid levels and hence coronary heart disease (CHD). SRF subsequently funded animal research to evaluate sucrose’s CHD risks. The objective of this study was to examine the planning, funding, and internal evaluation of an SRF-funded research project titled “Project 259: Dietary Carbohydrate and Blood Lipids in Germ-Free Rats,” led by Dr. W.F.R. Pover at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom, between 1967 and 1971. A narrativ...
Carbon opportunity cost increases carbon footprint advantage of grain-finished beef
2023-12-15 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceBeef production accounts for the largest share of global livestock greenhouse gas emissions and is an important target for climate mitigation efforts. Most life-cycle assessments comparing the carbon footprint of beef production systems have been limited to production emissions. None also consider potential carbon sequestration due to grazing and alternate uses of land used for production. We assess the carbon footprint of 100 beef production systems in 16 countries, including production emissions, soil carbon sequestration from grazing, and carbon opportunity cost—the potential carbon sequestration that could occur on lan...
Tagged under: Cattle and Dairy Farming | Climate Change Mitigation | Sustainability
Income-based U.S. household carbon footprints (1990–2019) offer new insights on emissions inequality and climate finance
2023-08-30 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceCurrent policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increase adaptation and mitigation funding are insufficient to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C. It is clear that further action is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and achieve a just climate future. Here, we offer a new perspective on emissions responsibility and climate finance by conducting an environmentally extended input output analysis that links 30 years (1990–2019) of United States (U.S.) household-level income data to the emissions generated in creating that income. To do this we draw on over 2.8 billion inter-sectoral tran...
Tagged under: Climate Change | Economics | Health | Climate Change Impacts | Climate Change Mitigation | Finance
Prioritization of carceral spending in U.S. cities: Development of the Carceral Resource Index (CRI) and the role of race and income inequality
2022-12-22 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceBackground Policing, corrections, and other carceral institutions are under scrutiny for driving health harms, while receiving disproportionate resources at the expense of prevention and other services. Amidst renewed interest in structural determinants of health, roles of race and class in shaping government investment priorities are poorly understood. Methods Based on the Social Conflict Model, we assessed relationships between city racial/ economic profiles measured by the Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE) and budgetary priorities measured by the novel Carceral Resource Index (CRI), contrasting investments in car...
Tagged under: Economics | Housing | Health
A dynamic model of nonviolent resistance strategy
2022-08-08 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceWhy have some nonviolent revolutions succeeded even with modest participation numbers, while others have failed despite massive mobilization? We develop an agent-based model that predicts the outcomes of three well-known activism strategies. The first rapidly recruits a wide number of activists, which overwhelms the opponent’s support network and encourages large-scale defections. In the second, activists who have already mobilized remain committed to success and inspire other civilians to protest even when they are unable to protest themselves. In the third strategy, campaigns focus their energy and influence directly on ...
Tagged under: Activism | Predictions | Finance
Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection
2022-07-19 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceSeagrasses are in decline globally due to sustained pressure from coastal development, water quality declines and the ongoing threat from climate change. The result of this decline has been a change in coastal productivity, a reduction in critical fisheries habitat and increased erosion. Attempts to slow this decline have included legislative protection of habitat and direct restoration efforts. Monitoring the success of these approaches requires tracking changes in the abundance of seagrasses, but such monitoring is frequently conducted at either too coarse a spatial scale, or too infrequently to adequately detect changes withi...
Tagged under: Climate Change | Fish | Sea Level | Climate Change Impacts
The clean energy claims of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell: A mismatch between discourse, actions and investments
2022-05-02 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceThe energy products of oil and gas majors have contributed significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and planetary warming over the past century. Decarbonizing the global economy by mid-century to avoid dangerous climate change thus cannot occur without a profound transformation of their fossil fuel-based business models. Recently, several majors are increasingly discussing clean energy and climate change, pledging decarbonization strategies, and investing in alternative energies. Some even claim to be transforming into clean energy companies. Given a history of obstructive climate actions and “greenwashing&rd...
Tagged under: BP | Shell | Exxon | Greenhouse Gases | Climate Change | Chevron | Fossil Fuels | Finance
Global expansion and redistribution of Aedes-borne virus transmission risk with climate change
2022-02-28 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceAuthor summary The established scientific consensus indicates that climate change will severely exacerbate the risk and burden of Aedes-transmitted viruses, including dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and other significant threats to global health security. Here, we show more subtle impacts of climate change on transmission, caused primarily by differences between the more heat-tolerant Aedes aegypti and the more heat-limited Ae. albopictus. Within the next century, nearly a billion people could face their first exposure to viral transmission from either mosquito in the worst-case scenario, mainly in Europe and high-elevation tropical ...
Tagged under: Africa | Climate Change | Health | Climate Change Mitigation | Climate Change Impacts
The recent normalization of historical marine heat extremes
2022-02-01 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceClimate change exposes marine ecosystems to extreme conditions with increasing frequency. Capitalizing on the global reconstruction of sea surface temperature (SST) records from 1870-present, we present a centennial-scale index of extreme marine heat within a coherent and comparable statistical framework. A spatially (1° × 1°) and temporally (monthly) resolved index of the normalized historical extreme marine heat events was expressed as a fraction of a year that exceeds a locally determined, monthly varying 98th percentile of SST gradients derived from the first 50 years of climatological records (1870–1919)...
Tagged under: Oceans | Extreme Weather | Climate Change
Happy without money: Minimally monetized societies can exhibit high subjective well-being
2021-12-16 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceEconomic growth is often assumed to improve happiness for people in low income countries, although the association between monetary income and subjective well-being has been a subject of debate. We test this assumption by comparing three different measures of subjective well-being in very low-income communities with different levels of monetization. Contrary to expectations, all three measures of subjective well-being were very high in the least-monetized sites and comparable to those found among citizens of wealthy nations. The reported drivers of happiness shifted with increasing monetization: from enjoying experiential activi...
Tagged under: Economic Growth
Past world economic production constrains current energy demands: Persistent scaling with implications for economic growth and climate change mitigation
2021-08-08 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceClimate change has become intertwined with the global economy. Here, we describe the contribution of inertia to future trends. Drawing from thermodynamic principles, and using 38 years of available statistics between 1980 to 2017, we find a constant scaling between current rates of world primary energy consumption E ( t ) and the historical time integral W of past world inflation-adjusted economic production Y, or W ( t ) = ∫ 0 t Y ( t ′ ) d t ′. In each year, over a period during which both E and W more than doubled, the ratio of the two remained nearly unchanged, that is λ = E ( t ) ( t ) / W ( t ) = 5 ....
Tagged under: Renewable Energy | Nuclear Power | Predictions | Climate Change | Economics | Fossil Fuels | Economic Growth | Climate Change Mitigation
Approximate calculations of the net economic impact of global warming mitigation targets under heightened damage estimates
2020-10-09 (or before) in PLOS - Open ScienceEfforts to mitigate global warming are often justified through calculations of the economic damages that may occur absent mitigation. The earliest such damage estimates were speculative mathematical representations, but some more recent studies provide empirical estimates of damages on economic growth that accumulate over time and result in larger damages than those estimated previously. These heightened damage estimates have been used to suggest that limiting global warming this century to 1.5 °C avoids tens of trillions of 2010 US$ in damage to gross world product relative to limiting global warming to 2.0 °C. However,...
Tagged under: Greenhouse Gases | Climate Change | Economics | Economic Growth | Climate Change Mitigation
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