My Climate Change News

A record-breaking heat wave is broiling parts of Asia, helping drive surging demand for cooling options, including air-conditioning.

AC exhaust units are a common feature of urban landscapes in many parts of Asia, clinging like limpets to towering apartment blocks in Hong Kong or tucked in a cross formation between the windows of a building in Cambodia.

They offer relief from temperatures that have toppled records in recent weeks, with many countries in the region hitting 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) or higher.

Scientists have long warned that human-induced climate change will produce more frequent, longer and more intense heat waves.

Only 15 percent of homes in Southeast Asia have air-conditioning, according to a 2019 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

But that figure obscures vast variations: ranging from around 80 percent installation in Singapore and Malaysia, to less than 10 percent in Indonesia and Vietnam, the IEA said.

The death toll from flood-related incidents in Kenya has crossed 200 since March, the interior ministry said Friday, as a cyclone barrelled towards the Tanzanian coast.

Torrential rains have lashed much of East Africa, triggering flooding and landslides that has destroyed crops, swallowed homes, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Some 210 people have died in Kenya "due to severe weather conditions," the interior ministry said in a statement, with 22 killed in the past 24 hours.

More than 165,000 people had been uprooted from their home, it added and 90 others missing, raising fears that the toll could rise higher.

Kenya and neighboring Tanzania, where at least 155 people have been killed in flooding, are bracing for cyclone Hidaya, bringing heavy rain, wind and waves to their coasts.

Tanzanian authorities warned Friday that Hidaya had "strengthened to reach the status of a full-fledged cyclone," at 3:00 am local time (0000GMT) when it ...

Shell and others say they plan to drill for oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico in part because doing so releases fewer greenhouse gases than drilling on land.

Reporting from Shell’s Appomattox offshore platform, New Orleans, Houston and Los Angeles

About 80 miles southeast of Louisiana’s coast, 100,000 metric tons of steel floats in the Gulf of Mexico, an emblem of the hopes of oil and gas companies.

This hulk of metal, a deepwater platform called Appomattox and owned by Shell, collects the oil and gas that rigs tap from reservoirs thousands of feet below the seafloor. Equipment on the platform pipes that fuel to shore.

Political and corporate leaders have pledged to reduce planet-warming emissions to net-zero by 2050. But oil companies like Shell are betting that the world will need oil and gas for decades to come. To serve that demand, they are expanding offshore oil and gas drilling into deeper and deeper waters, especially here in the Gulf of Mexico.

Since 2010, the United Nations environmental organization UNEP has taken an annual measurement of the emissions gap—the difference between countries' climate protection pledges and what is necessary to limit global heating to 1.5ºC, or at least below 2ºC.

The UNEP Emissions Gap Reports are clear: climate policy needs more ambition. This new study now explicitly applies this analytical concept to carbon dioxide removal (CDR)—the removal of the most important greenhouse gas, CO2, from the atmosphere.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, was led by the Berlin-based Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) and involved an international team of scientists.

"In the Emissions Gap Reports, carbon removals are only accounted for indirectly," said lead author Dr. William Lamb, of the MCC Applied Sustainability Science working group.

"After all, the usual benchmark for climate protection ...

As a result of the climate crisis, global warming is driving up temperatures around the world - and bumblebees, like humans, are struggling to cope with homes that can't beat the heat.

In a new article published in Frontiers in Bee Science, scientists identify rising heat as a potential culprit for the decline in bumblebee populations worldwide, compromising bumblebees' ability to construct livable nests in which healthy larvae can develop.

"The decline in populations and ranges of several species of bumblebees may be explained by issues of overheating of the nests and the brood," said Dr. Peter Kevan of the University of Guelph, Canada, lead author of the article.

"The constraints on the survival of the bumblebee brood indicate that heat is likely a major factor, with heating of the nest above about 35 degrees Celsius being lethal, despite the remarkable capacity of bumblebees to thermoregulate."

There are many bumblebee species around the world, ...

The development of synthetic cells could one day hold the answers to developing new ways to fight disease, supporting long-duration human space flight, and better understanding the origins of life on Earth.

In a paper published recently in ACS Synthetic Biology, researchers outline the potential opportunities that synthetic cell development could unlock and the challenges that lie ahead in this groundbreaking research. They also present a roadmap to inspire and guide innovation in this intriguing field.

"The potential for this field is incredible," said Lynn Rothschild, the lead author of the paper and an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "It's a privilege to have led this group in forming what we envision will be a founding document, a resource that will spur this field on."

Synthetic cell development could have wide ranging benefits to humanity. Analyzing the intricacies that go into building a cell could guide ...

Florida bans lab-grown meat; the G-7 nations double down on their intention to phase out fossil fuel-powered utilities.

Two lab-grown cubes of beef. Photo: Shutterstock/Firn

Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that bans lab-grown meat in Florida. Specifically, SB 1084 bans the manufacturing and sale of lab-grown meat in an effort to protect the state’s cattle industry against the rising competition. Opponents say the ban will limit future venture capital flowing into Florida; Emily Bogan, head of business operations at cultivated meat company Fork & Good, testified before a state legislative panel in February that "(a) ban like this threatens a free market and set a dangerous precedent for government interference."

The G-7 nations - U.S., France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy and the U.K. - committed toeliminating coal from their power sector by 2035unless utilities are able to capture their emissions. This news follows the Biden ...

Three long-running satellites will soon be switched off, forcing scientists to figure out how to adjust their views of our changing planet.

Marine stratocumulus clouds over the southeastern Pacific Ocean, captured by NASA’s Terra satellite in 2002.Credit...NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team

Sometime in the next few years - no one knows exactly when - three NASA satellites, each one as heavy as an elephant, will go dark.

Already they are drifting, losing height bit by bit. They have been gazing down at the planet for over two decades, far longer than anyone expected, helping us forecast the weather, manage wildfires, monitor oil spills and more. But age is catching up to them, and soon they will send their last transmissions and begin their slow, final fall to Earth.

It’s a moment scientists are dreading.

When the three orbiters - Terra, Aqua and Aura - are powered down, much of the data they’ve been collecting will end with them, and newer satellites ...

For Earth scientists, these are important questions as we try to improve projections to prepare communities for hazardous events in the future.

We rely on instrumental measurements, but such records are often short. To extend these, we use geological archives. And at the heart of this research is geochronology—a toolkit of geological dating methods that allow us to assign absolute ages to rocks.

In recent years, we have been using a state-of-the-art technique known as cosmogenic surface exposure dating which allows us to quantify the time a rock has spent on the surface, exposed to signals from outer space.

Using cosmic rays as a clock

Earth is constantly bombarded by high-energy charged particles, known as cosmic rays, coming from the depths of our galaxy. Most are intercepted by Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere. But some are sufficiently energetic to reach Earth's surface.

On impact, they break apart atoms of common elements in ...

The 2D fluorescence measurement method generates spectroscopic data directly on site in the clarifier. In conjunction with intelligent evaluation software, this process is the key to energy- and resource-efficient water treatment.

It will be presented to the public for the first time at IFAT 2024, the world's leading trade fair for water, sewage, waste and raw materials management in Munich.

In order to monitor water treatment processes in wastewater treatment plants, operators have so far relied on 24-hour composite samples. These are collected continuously throughout the day and then analyzed in the laboratory for sum parameters, such as the total amount of organic carbon (TOC), dissolved organic carbon (DOC) or the amount of oxygen consumed by the complete aerobic degradation of biological substances (biological oxygen demand; BOD).

However, in view of the increasing population density in urban areas and varying wastewater compositions, this 24-hour grid ...

In their paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, the group describes their study of sediment core samples collected from the bottom of Leonard Lake, in northern California.

Over the past two winters, parts of California have seen much more rain than is normal for the region. The reason for it has been the creation of what have come to be called atmospheric rivers over parts of the Pacific Ocean, which dump wave after wave of rain as they move over land.

For this new study, the researchers focused on the history of atmospheric rivers dumping rain on California. They traveled to Leonard Lake in northern California to collect core sediment samples. The lake was chosen due to its relatively stable history going back thousands of years and its geographical features.

The team collected core soil samples by pushing soil samplers down to the lake bottom from a boat. Their samples reflected layers deposited over approximately 3,200 years. ...

The findings come in a broad-ranging study by ecologists at the University of Exeter looking at potential relationships between brain size, wing shape, nesting habits and the use of urban areas. It suggests that species such as the herring gull, the lesser black-backed gull and the black-legged kittiwake possess a behavioral flexibility that enables them to nest in more challenging locations.

The study, "From the sea to the city: explaining gulls' use of urban habitats," has been published in the latest edition of Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

"Many people will be familiar with gulls nesting and foraging in urban areas," says lead author Dr. Madeleine Goumas, formerly a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for Ecology and Conservation, based at Exeter's Cornwall campus in Penryn. "It's not something you might expect from a seabird, so we wanted to try to understand why they do it."

Dr. Goumas and the team searched research databases to find ...

Cattle ranches have ruled the Amazon for decades. Now, new companies are selling something else: the ability of trees to lock away planet-warming carbon.

Forest restoration workers planted native Amazonian seedlings on degraded pastureland in Mãe do Rio, Brazil.Credit...

Manuela Andreoni visited restoration projects and ranches in the northern Amazon to understand how local economies there are changing.

The residents of Maracaçumé, an impoverished town on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, are mystified by the company that recently bought the biggest ranch in the region. How can it possibly make money by planting trees, which executives say they’ll never cut down, on pastureland where cattle have been grazing for decades?

“We are killing pasture that a lot of farmers need,” said Josias Araújo, a former cowboy who now works in reforestation, as he stood on a patch of soil he was helping to fertilize. “It’s all strange.”

The new company, which is ...

Dust levels have increased in many parts of the Middle East chiefly due to global warming, but other human activities also share credit, says Zahra Kalantari, associate professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She cites such factors as oil extraction, military conflicts and lack of cross-border coordination of water management.

Analyzing multiple sets of data over the last 40 years, the researchers found an increase in dust levels in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, parts of Iran and Egypt and countries around the Persian Gulf, while it has declined in northern Iran and southwest Turkey.

The area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in northern Iraq and along the Syria-Iraq border was reported to have the highest concentration of dust sources in the region, reflecting a sharp increase over the last 20 years.

The environmental consequences include soil erosion, biodiversity loss and desertification, she says. Economic losses may result from damaged ...

A new study led by scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory finds that coastal conditions have changed since 1979, driving nearshore hurricanes around the world to intensify at a quickening pace. What's more, new projections suggest this rate will continue climbing should current warming trends continue. The paper is published in the journal Earth's Future.

Much work has been done to document how hurricanes are changing in our warmer world. Past research has shown these storms may grow wetter, threatening heightened risks of flooding. Other work suggests they may strike more often in some areas and that their intensity may peak closer to the coast, posing additional risk to the roughly 40 percent of the world's population that lives within 100 kilometers (62.13 miles) of a coastline, according to the United Nations.

Yet, until now, no one has documented whether coastal hurricanes are intensifying faster at a global scale. ...

The energy capacity and charge-recharge cycling (cyclability) of lithium-iron-oxide, a cost-effective cathode material for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, is improved by adding small amounts of abundant elements. The development, achieved by researchers at Hokkaido University, Tohoku University, and Nagoya Institute of Technology, is reported in the journal ACS Materials Letters.

Lithium-ion batteries have become indispensable in modern life, used in a multitude of applications including mobile phones, electric vehicles, and large power storage systems.

A constant research effort is underway to increase their capacity, efficiency, and sustainability. A major challenge is to reduce the reliance on rare and expensive resources. One approach is to use more efficient and sustainable materials for the battery cathodes, where key electron exchange processes occur.

"We have now found that the cyclability could be significantly enhanced by doping small amounts of ...

Decentralized household and community scale renewable energy systems like biogas plants may provide a solution. Ehiaze Ehimen and Thomas Robin study energy efficiency and energy poverty in marginalized communities. They unpack what they found in their research into the potential role of small biogas plants in meeting rural energy needs.

Why are biogas plants such a good idea?

Biogas plants are easy to set up and can be relatively inexpensive. They use readily available materials such as manure and vegetable waste, and can be built with cement and bricks. They could potentially be used to meet the electricity needs of households and small communities, especially in rural areas where connection to the national electricity grid may not be economically viable.

Biogas plants exploit the fact that rural communities in countries like Malawi have abundant biomass resources such as agricultural residues, animal waste and organic municipal waste (grass and vegetables ...

"We found that because these organisms are so small, they can be swept up by ocean currents that then bring them deeper than where they grow," said Mara Freilich, an assistant professor in Brown University's Division of Applied Mathematics and Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences who launched the work as a Ph.D. student a joint program at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "It's often a one-way trip for these organisms, but by taking this trip, they play a critical role in connecting different parts of the ocean."

Freilich conducted the research during her Ph.D. with Amala Mahadevan, senior scientist at Woods Hole, in a close collaboration with senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory Alexandra Z. Worden and her team.

The currents the team found are called intrusions, and by sweeping up the tiny organisms, they help change the types of food available in the deeper layers of the ocean while also transporting a ...

By leveraging intense and broad-band ultrafast terahertz pulses, scientists from Yokohama National University and their colleagues at the California Institute of Technology have demonstrated atomic excitation in a two-dimensional semiconductor material, advancing the development of electronic devices.

Their paper was published on March 19 and appears as an Editor's Pick in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials, or sheet-like nanomaterials, are promising platforms for future semiconductor applications due to their unique electronic properties. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), a prominent group of 2D materials, consist of layers of transition metal atoms sandwiched between layers of chalcogen atoms.

Arranged in a lattice structure, these atoms can vibrate or oscillate around their equilibrium positions—this collective excitation is known as a coherent phonon and plays a crucial role in determining and controlling ...