My Climate Change News

The Amazon River has seen its levels in Colombia reduced by as much as 90 percent, a government agency said Thursday, as South America faces a severe and widespread drought.

The river - the world's biggest by volume and which also flows through parts of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname - has been hard hit by the drought that has seen wildfires spread across the continent.

"The water level has decreased between 80 and 90 percent in the last three months due to drought caused by climate change," Colombia's National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD) said in a statement.

The lack of water was particularly impacting Indigenous communities who depend on the river for food and transport, it added.

AFP has observed boats stranded around Leticia, capital of the southern Amazonas state, in recent days, with large swathes of land exposed by low water levels.

The city, near the borders with Brazil and Peru, ...

Artificial intelligence’s hunger for energy has set off a boom in utility stocks and may lead to the reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, our columnist says.

Gently holding a blackcap warbler in his palm, ornithologist Christos Barboutis blew on its feathers to reveal the size of its belly: a good indicator of how far the bird can migrate.

Acutely vulnerable to climate change, migratory birds offer valuable clues to scientists about how our warming planet is affecting wildlife: from their shifting migration patterns to their body weight.

"Observing them warns us if something is changing or going wrong," said Barboutis, a researcher at the Hellenic Ornithological Society.

Birds "are among the first to be affected by climate change such as drought, which poses a big problem for their distant travel," he told AFP at an observation station on the small Aegean island of Antikythera.

At the crack of dawn, the researcher and his colleagues lay out nets to capture and ring the birds.

The tiny island in the eastern Mediterranean lies on a popular corridor for birds migrating from northern Europe to Africa in ...

Orbital angular momentum monopoles have been the subject of great theoretical interest as they offer major practical advantages for the emerging field of orbitronics, a potential energy-efficient alternative to traditional electronics. Now, through a combination of robust theory and experiments at the Swiss Light Source SLS at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, their existence has been demonstrated. The discovery is published in the journal Nature Physics.

Whereas electronics uses the charge of the electron to transfer information, technology of the future with less environmental impact might use a different property of electrons to process information. Until recently, the main contender for a different type of 'tronics' has been spintronics. Here, the property used to transfer information is the spin of the electron.

Now an international research team led by scientists from Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and Max Planck Institutes in Halle and Dresden in Germany have shown ...

A four-decade-old moratorium on commercial whaling will remain in force after a proposal to overturn it was withdrawn Thursday at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Peru's capital Lima.

Another proposal to declare whaling a source of global food security was also abandoned in a plenary session after failing to gain consensus among delegates from 60 countries.

"We are relieved that the dark and dangerous resolution to resume commercial whaling has been withdrawn," said Grettel Delgadillo, Latin America representative for Humane Society International (HSI).

The first proposal was submitted by Antigua and Barbuda, which is not a whaling nation but has said it would pursue the matter at the next IWC meeting in Australia in 2026.

Delgadillo said pro-whaling stances by countries that do not consume whale meat "demonstrates how Japan continues to influence the IWC despite not being a member anymore."

The food security proposal, in ...

We are extremely sad to say that our esteemed Skeptical Science colleague— and good friend to many of us— John Mason passed away on Friday September 20, 2024. Only last week, we blew a horn of appreciation for John's remarkable gift for telling stories about science. Our expectation was that of John being a constant in our lives. We are truly stunned by John's unexpected departure. With this post, we want to recount some of John's many contributions to Skeptical Science, a big part of a legacy which will live on in the minds of old and new readers of John’s work. Also included are personal memories from members of our team who had the pleasure to work and collaborate with John over the years.

John published his very first blog post, The End of the Hothouse, in December 2011 and many more have followed since then. One of his most often viewed articles, the History of Climate Science, started as a 3-part series in 2012. We then collected it into a post ...

Rising waters are slowly but surely swallowing Carnie Reimers's backyard in the Marshall Islands, pushing her toward an agonizing choice: stay in the only home she's ever known or leave and face the prospect of becoming a climate refugee.

"It's not a comfortable topic to talk about," the 22-year-old activist tells AFP, explaining the emotional toll this looming reality has on the wider community, who are grappling with similar threats.

"We're deeply rooted in our country, and we don't want to be displaced or forced to live somewhere else - it would be hard to preserve our culture."

Climate change is dramatically reshaping life in Pacific Island nations, leaving them ever more vulnerable to storm surges, saltwater contamination, ruined crops, and relentless coastal erosion.

"Every day it's a constant battle," says Grace Malie, a 25-year-old from Tuvalu, the tiny archipelago facing the grim prospect of becoming the first nation to be rendered unlivable by ...

Metro Denver and the northern Front Range just experienced one of the worst ozone pollution seasons in 10 years, with 40 days when air quality measurements exceeded federal standards.

A summary released by the Regional Air Quality Council, a quasi-governmental agency that makes recommendations for reducing air pollution, said the region recorded more days above federal pollution standards than it did in eight of the last 10 years. The ozone season runs from late May to early September.

The council called for "more immediate action" by the state to bring the region into federal compliance since the Environmental Protection Agency has set a 2027 deadline for the region to show improvement.

"It is clear we are moving in the wrong direction with ozone pollution," said Kate Merlin, a staff attorney with WildEarth Guardians, an advocacy group.

The council's summary blamed the Front Range's continued struggles with ozone pollution on a growing population, ...

A team of astrophysicists from several institutions in Italy, working with a colleague in the U.S., has found that aliphatic hydrocarbons observed on Ceres' surface have short lifetimes, suggesting they likely appeared there within the last 10 million years.

In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how they conducted experiments in their lab designed to mimic conditions on Ceres.

Ceres is the largest body in the middle of the main asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. It was initially classified as an asteroid but more recently has been upgraded to dwarf planet.

Prior study of Ceres, much of which came from NASA's Dawn space mission, has shown there is organic material on its surface. In this new effort, the researchers investigated the history of aliphatic organics (AOs) on the surface.

AOs are a hydrocarbon class that includes alkenes, alkanes and alkynes - some of them have been observed ...

Imperial County consistently ranks among the most economically distressed places in California. The Salton Sea, the state's biggest and most toxic lake, is an environmental disaster. And the region's politics have been dominated by a conservative white elite, despite its supermajority Latino population.

The county also happens to be sitting on enough lithium to produce nearly 400 million batteries, sufficient to completely revamp the American auto fleet to electric propulsion. Even better, that lithium could be extracted in a way consistent with broader goals to reduce pollution.

The traditional ways to extract lithium involve either hard rock mining, which generates lots of waste, or large evaporation ponds, which waste a lot of water. In Imperial Valley, companies are pioneering a third method. They are extracting the mineral from the underground briny water brought up during geothermal energy production and then injecting that briny water back into the ground in ...

A small team of biologists and animal movement specialists in the Netherlands and the U.K. has found that birds such as the emu have a grounded running style at medium speeds, allowing them to conserve energy compared to the ungrounded running style of other animals such as humans.

In their study published in the journal Science Advances, the group simulated the running style of emus to better understand it.

When a bird such as an emu runs at medium speed, it never becomes airborne - it always has one foot firmly planted on the ground. This grounded running style, the researchers found, uses less energy than one in which a runner leaps into the air with each stride - again, at medium speed.

In this new study, the researchers investigated why birds have adopted such a running style when most other bipedal animals have an ungrounded style regardless of speed.

To simulate the running style of an emu, the research team created what they describe as a ...

With about 90% of New Zealand's natural wetlands drained or severely damaged during the past decades, we need to understand the role of native plants in the restoration of these important habitats.

Our new research details the history of raupo (bulrush) from the time before people arrived in Aotearoa. It shows this resilient, opportunistic plant - and taonga species - can play an important role in restoring wetlands and freshwater quality.

An unexpected finding was that the decline of freshwater quality in many lakes did not really kick in until the mid-20th century with the intensification of agriculture. Until then, lake water quality indicators generally showed these ecosystems remained healthy. The prolific expansion of raupo after Aotearoa was first settled may have helped.

Thriving on material washed from disturbed catchments, raupo acted as an ecological buffer, intercepting nutrients and sediments, and reducing potentially harmful effects on ...

Most Americans can expect wetter winters in the future due to global warming, according to a new study led by a University of Illinois Chicago scientist.

Using climate models to investigate how winter precipitation in the United States will change by the end of the 21st century, a team led by Akintomide Akinsanola found overall winter precipitation and extreme weather events will increase across most of the country.

The study in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science also reported an increased frequency in "very wet" winters - those which would rank in the top 5% of U.S. historical total winter precipitation. By the end of the 21st century, these previously rare winters would happen as often as once every four years in some parts of the country.

Combined with a shift from snow to rain in many parts of the country, the changes will have dramatic implications for agriculture, water resources, flooding and other climate-sensitive areas, said Akinsanola, assistant ...

Scientists have found that different populations of a plant species, which is closely related to many crops of worldwide importance, use very different strategies to adapt to environmental changes, which gives experts new options to engineer crops to better survive climate change and tackle future food security.

A common assumption is that populations of the same species use the same processes to adapt to common stressors, but experts at the University of Nottingham have discovered that this is not always the case. Instead, they reveal a surprising degree of "evolutionary flexibility."

In a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Levi Yant from the School of Life Sciences discovered that neighboring "sister" populations of a previously unstudied Brassica species adapt to a coastal habitat in very different ways. In this case, very high salinity levels, which are an increasing threat due to climate change.

The ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) models like ChatGPT run on algorithms and have great appetites for data, which they process through machine learning, but what about the limits of their data-processing abilities? Researchers led by Professor Sun Zhong from Peking University's School of Integrated Circuits and Institute for Artificial Intelligence set out to solve the von Neumann bottleneck that limits data-processing.

In their paper published in the journal Device on September 12, 2024, the team developed the dual-IMC (in-memory computing) scheme, which not only accelerates the machine learning process, but also improves the energy efficiency of traditional data operations.

When curating algorithms, software engineers and computer scientists rely on data operations known as matrix-vector multiplication (MVM), which supports neural networks. A neural network is a computing architecture often found in AI models that mimics the function and structure of a human ...

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Yale Climate Connections

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Yale Climate Connections readers in Puerto Rico are taking action to protect themselves from the island’s frequent blackouts.

“Puerto Rico, although it doesn’t seem like it, is prepared to withstand blackouts; it’s the daily life that Puerto Ricans have become accustomed to because of the promises of politicians who come to power,” one resident told us in response to our questionnaire about how readers take care of themselves during blackouts.

“Before coming to power, they [politicians] oppose the current administration and make Puerto Ricans believe they are on their side when, in reality, they just take advantage of the situation. But most Puerto Ricans are already so prepared with solar panel systems that they exceed 120,000 residences, plus hospitals, shopping centers, and pharmaceutical companies are also ...

The structural complexity of coral reefs creates a vibrant underwater city populated by a diverse assortment of characters. Ironically, this same complexity can impede coral recovery after disturbances.

Coral reefs are busy ecosystems undergoing constant change. Every now and again, a larger disturbance will rock the reef, like a storm, an influx of coral predators, or a bleaching event. While all of these can deal a blow to the ecosystem, small nuances can drastically affect the reef's recovery.

Historically, tropical storms and cyclones have been the biggest disruptors to Moorea's reefs. "They tend to scrape all the coral off the reef and leave behind a flat surface," said lead author Kai Kopecky, a former doctoral student in UCSB's Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology. But bleaching and predation are on the rise, and these events kill coral, but leave the reef's structure intact.

Bleaching occurs when stress - usually heat - causes corals ...

Firefighters battled five blazes on the outskirts of Ecuador's capital Quito on Wednesday, as wildfires continue to rip through South American nations turned into tinderboxes by droughts linked to climate change.

Some 2,000 firefighters, military personnel and rescue workers have been deployed in Quito to try to contain the blazes and bring residents in affected areas to safety.

So far at least six people have been injured including two children and two firefighters, and around 100 families evacuated from their homes.

From Ecuador to Brazil, many Latin American nations are gripped by their worst drought in decades, fueling a blistering fire season that has set residents and governments on edge.

"Quito is under attack," the city's security chief Carolina Andrade told reporters.

Authorities in Ecuador believe that a fire that broke out Tuesday in the east of the city and swathed it in huge plumes of smoke was started by arsonists.

On ...