More trees are the answer to cool down our cities

Urban life can be an insulated existence, consisting of circling between one temperature-controlled space after another. But cities are not invulnerable to climatic changes. Indeed, when it comes to heat, they can fare worse. They are also far from homogenous. Counter to the images of “domed cities” that Buckminster Fuller proposed for Manhattan in the 1960s and that Dubai is touted to be pursuing, cities do not have equally distributed temperatures. Even if they do, the risk those temperatures represent are far from equally perceived or experienced.

 ‘At present, development for new housing tends to
occur on greenfield sites where one of the first steps
is to remove existing trees to enable the movement
 of building equipment and later cars’ 

Australians typically pride themselves on being pretty sanguine about the nation’s extreme weather, at least when it comes to spectacular events like Dorothea Mackellar-esque “flooding rains” or disasters playing out elsewhere on our vast continent. But this week even our assumed role as the world’s most variable climate took a turn for the worse, as Australia hosted the planet’s 15 hottest sites. Many of these extreme temperatures were recorded inland in small settlements. Port Augusta, for example, with 15,000 residents, was number two on the list at 49C. Nonetheless, the heat wave rolled across the continent affecting major urban settlements such as Canberra and Western Sydney.

Read the story from The Guardian by Marco Amati and Lauren Rickards -  “More trees are the answer to cool down our cities.”

It’s 50 years since climate change was first seen. Now time is running out

Fifty years ago, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) delivered a report titled Sources, Abundance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmospheric Polluters to the American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade association for the fossil fuel industry.

 ‘Scientists attribute 15-40% of the epic rain
 of Hurricane Harvey to climate change.’

The report, unearthed by researchers at the Center for International Environmental Law, is one of the earliest attempts by the industry to grapple with the impacts of rising CO2 levels, which Stanford’s researchers warned if left unabated “could bring about climatic changes” like temperature increases, melting of ice caps and sea level rise.

The year was 1968, and the term “global warming” would not appear in a peer-reviewed academic journal until 1975. Famed Nasa scientist James Hansen would not testify before Congress that “global warming has begun” for another 20 years. And the US would not enter into – only to later pull out of – the Paris climate accord for nearly half a century.

Read the climate change opinion piece on The Guardian by Richard Wiles - “It’s 50 years since climate change was first seen. Now time is running out.”