Greenwash and Greenwashing: A look at the claims of government and big business showing how they manipulate the truth and mislead us with false and unverifiable claims.

Deadly with extreme weather now, climate change is about to get so much worse. It is likely going to make the world sicker, hungrier, poorer, gloomier and way more dangerous in the next 18 years with an "unavoidable" increase in risks, a new United Nations science report says. And after that watch out. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said Monday if human-caused global warming isn't limited to just another couple tenths of a degree, an Earth now struck regularly by deadly heat, fires, floods and drought in future decades will degrade in 127 ways with some being "potentially irreversible."

"Today's IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership," United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. "With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change."

During a recent impact-focused hackathon at work, I found myself working on an interesting sustainability project. Our team’s idea was simple: because almost all employees work remotely using a Mac laptop, could we measure the energy consumption of every employee’s Mac laptop to better understand how much energy it takes to power employee devices, as well as the amount of carbon work devices produce?

The last eight years have been the eight hottest years on record, NASA and the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA) confirmed today. 2021 ranks as the sixth hottest year on record, the agencies said, as global average temperatures trend upward. Rankings aside, there were plenty of red flags throughout 2021 to show us how remarkable the year was for temperature extremes. "The fact is that we've now kind of moved into a new regime ... this is likely the warmest decade in many, many hundreds, maybe 1000s of years," says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "There's enough change that it's having impacts locally."

Companies large and small, some with longtime roots in their neighborhoods, are on the hunt for new real estate that is less prone to weather and climate extremes. Within the past three years, tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a major hospital in South Carolina, and the nation's eighth-largest airline by passengers carried have all decided to move their infrastructure to higher ground.

With COP26 taking place this week, governments, companies, and individuals are discussing how we can all reduce our carbon emissions. The task is monumental, and technology has an important role to play – both in reducing its own carbon footprint and in helping the wider world track and reduce their emissions. This blog post gives a few examples from MyData Global’s supporting companies and organisations that are helping people improve their sustainability.

It may still be fuel for hot debate on social media, but 99.9% of scientist actually agree on the fact that humans are altering the climate. "It is really case closed. There is nobody of significance in the scientific community who doubts human-cased climate change," said the lead author, Mark Lynas, a visiting fellow at Cornell University, based on a survey of nearly 90,000 climate-related studies.

That's according to the International Energy Agency, which said in its global energy outlook published Wednesday that more aggressive climate action is needed as world leaders prepare for the crucial COP26 summit in Glasgow in November. "The world's hugely encouraging clean energy momentum is running up against the stubborn incumbency of fossil fuels in our energy systems," Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. "Governments need to resolve this at COP26 by giving a clear and unmistakeable signal that they are committed to rapidly scaling up the clean and resilient technologies of the future."

The Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half of the Nobel Prize in physics jointly to Syukuro Manabe of the United States and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany for modeling Earth's climate and predicting global warming.

Production of meat worldwide causes twice the pollution of production of plant-based foods, a major new study has found: The entire system of food production, such as the use of farming machinery, spraying of fertilizer and transportation of products, causes 17.3bn metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, according to the research. This enormous release of gases that fuel the climate crisis is more than double the entire emissions of the US and represents 35% of all global emissions, researchers said.

Greenland just experienced another massive melt event this year. But this time, something unusual happened. It also rained at the highest point of its ice sheet for the first time since scientists have been making observations there, the latest signal of how climate change is affecting every part of the planet.

Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years, coal and gas-fired power plants must close in the next decade and lifestyle and behavioral changes will be needed to avoid climate breakdown, according to the leaked draft of a report from the world's leading authority on climate science. The leak is from the forthcoming third part of the landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the first part of which was published on Monday, warning of unprecedented changes to the climate, some of them irreversible. The document, called the sixth assessment report, is divided into three parts: the physical science of climate change; the impacts and ways of reducing human influence on the climate.

The devastating heatwave that struck the Northwest US and southwest Canada in June was "the most extreme summer heatwave" ever recorded in North America, according to a new analysis from nonprofit research group Berkeley Earth.

Thousands of scientists have repeated calls for urgent action to tackle the climate emergency, warning that several tipping points are now imminent. From a report:

The researchers, part of a group of more than 14,000 scientists who have signed on to an initiative declaring a worldwide climate emergency, said in an article published in the journal BioScience on Wednesday that governments had consistently failed to address "the overexploitation of the Earth," which they described as the root cause of the crisis. Since a similar assessment in 2019, they noted an "unprecedented surge" in climate-related disasters, including flooding in South America and Southeast Asia, record-shattering heatwaves and wildfires in Australia and the US, and devastating cyclones in Africa and South Asia.