My Climate Change News

Rotating crops, conserving soil nutrients and deploying other strategies to "diversify" agriculture all at the same time can yield major benefits for the environment and people alike -- including increased crop yields and improved food security for entire communities.

That's the take-home message of a landmark new study, including researchers from more than 15 nations and data from 2,655 farms on five continents. The team published its findings April 4 in the journal Science.

"This is evidence that this can actually work -- we can imagine agricultural systems that are more diverse and serve people and nature at the same time," said Zia Mehrabi, a co-author of the new study and assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The study comes as farms across much of the world are increasingly growing just one type of crop or raising a single kind of animal -- a transition to "monoculture" agriculture that may bring with it a ...

Lanthanide elements are important for clean energy and other applications. To use them, industry must separate mixed lanthanide sources into individual elements using costly, time-consuming, and waste-generating procedures. An efficient new method can be tailored to select specific lanthanides. The technique combines two substances that do not mix and that prefer different types of lanthanides. The process would allow for smaller equipment, less use of chemicals, and less waste production.

The metals called lanthanides have valuable properties for clean energy technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines and for many other applications. These elements include several critical materials. In nature, lanthanides are often found mixed together. Industry must separate them to take advantage of their individual properties. But conventional approaches to this separation are time consuming and costly and generate waste. Scientists have developed an efficient new ...

Even if CO2 emissions were to be drastically cut down starting today, the world economy is already committed to an income reduction of 19 % until 2050 due to climate change, a new study published in Nature finds. These damages are six times larger than the mitigation costs needed to limit global warming to two degrees. Based on empirical data from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) assessed future impacts of changing climatic conditions on economic growth and their persistence.

"Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected. These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure," says PIK scientist and first author of the study Maximilian Kotz. ...

Common "hard" coastal defenses, like concrete sea walls, might struggle to keep up with increasing climate risks. A new study shows that combining them with nature-based solutions could, in some contexts, create defenses which are better able to adapt. Researchers reviewed 304 academic articleson the performance of coastal defenses around the world, including: natural environments; soft measures (which support or enrich nature); hard measures (such as concrete sea walls); and hybrids of the aforementioned. Soft and hybrid measures turned out to be more cost-effective than hard measures, and hybrid measures provided the highest hazard reduction overall in low-risk areas. Although their comparative performance during extreme events that pose a high risk is not clear due to lack of data, these results still support the careful inclusion of nature-based solutions to help protect, support and enrich coastal communities.

Japan's dramatic natural coastline, with iconic views of ...

Soil contains about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere and plants combined. It is a major carbon sink, capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it releases. Management of soil carbon is key in efforts to mitigate climate change, in addition to being vital to soil health and agricultural productivity.

Measuring soil carbon, however, is a painstaking, expensive process. Samples must be dug from the ground and sent to a lab for analysis, making upscaling measurements on a large spatial scale challenging.

Now environmental scientists have combined field-level data with machine-learning techniques to estimate soil organic carbon at the U.S. continental scale. The Journal of Geophysical Research -- Biogeosciences published the new soil organic carbon estimate, which improves the overall estimate for the United States and gives new insights into the effects of environmental variables on soil organic carbon.

"There is growing recognition ...

As any surfer will tell you, waves pack a powerful punch. Now, we are one step closer to capturing the energy behind the ocean's constant ebb and flow with an improved "blue energy" harvesting device. Researchers report in ACS Energy Letters that simply repositioning the electrode -- from the center of a see-sawing liquid-filled tube to the end where the water crashes with the most force -- dramatically increased the amount of wave energy that could be harvested.

The tube-shaped wave-energy harvesting device improved upon by the researchers is called a liquid-solid triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). The TENG converts mechanical energy into electricity as water sloshes back and forth against the inside of the tube. One reason these devices aren't yet practical for large-scale applications is their low energy output. Guozhang Dai, Kai Yin, Junliang Yan and colleagues aimed to increase a liquid-solid TENG's energy harvesting ability by optimizing the location of the ...

A city's skyline -- the distinctive shapes and arrangements of its buildings -- impacts the safety of its population during floods. When the streets flood, pedestrians can be swept under the current and injured or killed. With climate change and rising urbanization, the likelihood and severity of urban flooding are increasing.

Not all city blocks are created equal. In Physics of Fluids, an AIP Publishing journal, researchers from Beijing Normal University, Beijing Hydrological Center, and the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research investigated how city design contributes to pedestrian safety during flooding.

"Climate change leads to an increasing trend of extreme precipitation events in terms of frequency and intensity," said author Zhong-Fan Zhu. "Rapid urbanization alters the hydrological properties of the underlying surface in urban areas. For example, previous forestland, wetland, and agricultural land have been paved to construct ...

With the evolution of artificial intelligence comes discussion of the technology's environmental impact. A new study has found that for the tasks of writing and illustrating, AI emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans performing the same tasks. That does not mean, however, that AI can or should replace human writers and illustrators, the study's authors argue.

Andrew Torrance, Paul E. Wilson Distinguished Professor of Law at KU, is co-author of a study that compared established systems such as ChatGPT, Bloom AI, DALL-E2 and others completing writing and illustrating to that of humans.

Like cryptocurrency, AI has been subject to debate about the amount of energy it uses and its contributions to climate change. Human emissions and environmental impact have long been studied, but comparisons between the two have been scant. The authors conducted a comparison and found that AI systems emit between 130 and 1,500 times less CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per ...

Over the past 60 years, climate change has forced certain ant species, unable to tolerate higher temperatures, out of their original habitats in Gregory Canyon near Boulder, Colorado, according to a new research published April 9 in the journal Ecology.

The resulting biodiversity change could potentially alter local ecosystems, according to first author Anna Paraskevopoulos, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Like all insects, ants are ectothermic, meaning their body temperature, metabolism and other bodily functions depend on the environment's temperature. As a result, ants are sensitive to temperature fluctuations, making them a good marker to study the impact climate change has on ecosystems.

More than six decades ago, CU Boulder entomologist Robert Gregg and his student John Browne surveyed the ant populations in Gregory Canyon. After reading their study, Paraskevopoulos and her ...

A new study finds that universities scoring strongly on measures of sustainability are associated with innovation and economic growth in their surrounding communities. However, the study did not find similar connections between university sustainability performance and environmental sustainability in their home communities.

"Society is facing a slew of global challenges, and we wanted to assess the extent to which higher education is contributing to the sort of transformative change needed to address these challenges," says Christopher Galik, co-author of the study and a professor of public administration at North Carolina State University. "For this study, we started at the local level, exploring whether there was any association between university sustainability performance and sustainability in their surrounding communities."

To explore the issue, researchers looked at data from 105 metropolitan areas in the United States, which are collectively home to 427 ...

Carbon monoxide emissions from industrial production have serious consequences for human health and are a strong indicator of overall air pollution levels. Many countries aim to reduce their emissions, but they cannot control air flows originating in other regions. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at global flows of air pollution and how they relate to economic activity in the global supply chain.

"Our study is unique in combining atmospheric transport of air pollution with supply chain analysis as it tells us where the pollution is coming from and who is ultimately responsible for it," said lead author Sandy Dall'erba, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) and director of the Center for Climate, Regional, Environmental and Trade Economics (CREATE), both part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at Illinois.

"There is a direct link between a country's level of ...

Australia could soon see megadroughts that last for more than 20 years, according to new modelling from The Australian National University (ANU) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

According to the scientists, the findings paint a worrying picture of future droughts in Australia that are far worse than anything in recent experience.

Megadroughts are exceptionally severe, long-lasting and widespread. They can last multiple decades or even centuries. An example of this is the megadrought in the United States' southwestern region that started in the year 2000 and has continued for more than two decades.

Co-lead author Dr Georgy Falster, from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences, said that if a megadrought occurred in Australia today, the consequences would be made even worse because of climate change, as any drought would occur against a backdrop of hotter weather.

"The combination of climate change on top of naturally occurring ...

A group of researchers led by University of Massachusetts Amherst engineers have created ultraviolet (UV) rays-emitting glass that can reduce 98% of biofilm from growing on surfaces in underwater environments, as reported in the journal Biofilm.

Biofilm is a slimy layer of various types of microorganisms that grows on wet surfaces. "If you look down your sink and touch the inner side of it -- that slimy substance is biofilm," describes Mariana Lanzarini-Lopes, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMass Amherst, and a corresponding author on the paper.

Biofilm is a significant issue for underwater applications. The United States Navy estimates that biofilms cost its fleet between $180 and $260 million annually. Biofilm growth on all underwater surfaces increases a ship's drag and subsequent fuel usage, as well as corrosion damage on ships or oceanographic equipment.

Biofilm can also fog up windows used for cameras and other sensing ...

The boreal forest, covering much of Canada and Alaska, and the treeless shrublands to the north of the forest region, may be among the worst impacted by climate change over the next 500 years, according to a new study.

The study, led by researchers at the White Rose universities of York and Leeds, as well as Oxford and Montreal, and ETH, Switzerland, ran a widely-used climate model with different atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to assess the impact climate change could have on the distribution of ecosystems across the planet up to the year 2500.

Most climate prediction models run to the year 2100, but researchers are keen to explore longer-term projections that give a global picture of how much humans, animals and plant-life may need to adapt to climate change beyond the next century, which is important as long-lived trees adapt at scales of centuries rather than decades.

Modelling climate change over a 500 year period shows that much of the ...

Energy harvesting, an eco-friendly technology, extends beyond solar and wind power in generating electricity from unused or discarded energy in daily life, including vibrations generated by passing car engines or trains. Recent intriguing research has been announced, aiming to enhance the efficiency of energy harvesting using a new type of metasurface that can be reconfigured, resembling the assembly of LEGO bricks.

Professor Junsuk Rho from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and PhD/MS student Geon Lee from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) have joined Professor Miso Kim from the School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) to collaborate on a research project. Together, they developed a multifunctional elastic metasurface that can be freely configured by attaching and detaching components for practical ...

California, a state known for its aggressive greenhouse gas reduction policies, is ironically the nation's greatest emitter of one: sulfuryl fluoride.

As much as 17% of global emissions of this gas, a common pesticide for treating termites and other wood-infesting insects, stem from the United States. The majority of those emissions trace back to just a few counties in California, finds a new study led by Johns Hopkins University.

"When we finally mapped it out, the results were puzzling because the emissions were all coming from one place," said co-author Scot Miller, an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins who studies greenhouse gases and air pollutants. "Other greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are found everywhere across the U.S. On our sulfuryl fluoride map, only California lit up like a Christmas tree."

Miller and lead author Dylan Gaeta, a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins, analyzed more than 15,000 ...

Over the next 25 years, as the world shifts away from fossil fuels, the oil and gas wells that have sustained the fossil fuel age will have to be plugged.

No big deal, you might think, drilling those wells was the hard part. Plugging them should be no problem. But think again.

The Norwegian Continental Shelf, as an example, is punctured by more than 2000 wells. Harald Linga, centre director for SWIPA (see box), a Centre for Research Based Innovation based at SINTEF, Scandinavia's largest independent research institute, estimates that plugging them using today's technology will cost upwards of NOK 800 billion -- that's USD 73 billion.

And while oil companies are responsible for plugging the wells, Norwegian taxpayers will have to shoulder 78 per cent of these costs.

And that's just Norway. The total number of oil wells across the globe could number in the millions, all of which at some time will have to be plugged.

Today's technology involves using ...

In the paper, "Methyl Termination of p-Type Silicon Enables Selective Photoelectrochemical CO2 Reduction by a Molecular Ruthenium Catalyst," published in ACS Energy Letters, the researchers explain how they use a process called methyl termination that uses a simple organic compound of one carbon atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms to modify the surface of silicon, an essential component in solar cells, to improve its performance in converting carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide using sunlight.

"One challenge with solar energy is that it's not always available when we have the highest need for it," said Gabriella Bein, the paper's first author and a Ph.D. student in chemistry. "Another challenge is that renewable electricity, like that from solar panels, doesn't directly provide the raw materials needed for making chemicals. Our goal is to store solar power in the form of liquid fuels that can be used later."

Jillian Dempsey, a co-author of the paper and Bowman and ...

Wind power is a source of energy that is both affordable and renewable.

However, decision-makers have been reluctant to invest in wind energy due to a perception that wind farms require a lot of land compared to electric power plants driven by fossil fuels. Research led by McGill University and based on the assessment of the land-use of close to 320 wind farms in the U.S. (the largest study of its kind) paints a very different picture.

Misplaced preconceptions about the land use of gas-fuelled electricity

The study, which was published recently in Environmental Science and Technology, shows that, when calculations are made, the entire wind farm area is usually considered as land given over to wind development. However, the wind power infrastructure (such as the turbines and roads) typically only uses 5 per cent of the entire farmland -- the rest is often used for other purposes, such as agriculture.

"The land use of wind farms has often been viewed as ...

Changing weather patterns induced by climate change are contributing to shifts in the location of terrorist activity, according to new research.

An exploratory study led by extremism expert Dr Jared Dmello, from the University of Adelaide's School of Social Sciences, found some climatological variables affected terrorist activity in India.

"Suitability analyses indicate that all the climatological variables tested -- temperature, precipitation, and elevation -- relate to shifting patterns of terrorist activity," says Dr Dmello.

"Urban centres have increasingly grown in population density, particularly in spaces with favourable climates, and some of the more remote areas once used by extremists have experienced such increasingly dynamic climates that they are no longer fit for human habitation, forcing these groups to migrate elsewhere."

It was not only the intensity of these climatological variables that led to terrorists moving to new locales, this ...