My Climate Change News

The Economist is looking for an Editorial analyst to join its digital team in London. This role supports The Economist's digital offering, that provides topical, habit-forming and high-quality analysis to suit a variety of different audiences; from long-form and in-depth reporting to responsive views of the day’s essential global stories.

The mission is to deliver regular data-driven insights and visualisations to our editorial teams in order to inform and improve daily decision-making. This role will be fully embedded within our digital workflows, in order to ensure quick, accurate feedback to our newsdesk and audience teams.

The ideal candidate will have excellent technical and communications skills; analytical rigour; experience of working in a subscription-media environment; an understanding of editorial processes and principles; and curiosity about the world.

As part of their application, candidates should describe how they would approach the following ...

Nine years after Hurricane Sandy, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to rising seas. The fight over a plan to protect them reveals why progress on our most critical challenges is so hard.

Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times

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The day after the storm swallowed her neighborhood, Nancy Ortiz woke before dawn to buy ice. It was 2012, and Hurricane Sandy had reclaimed Lower Manhattan for Mother Nature. Making landfall near Atlantic City, it swept north, ravaging the New Jersey coast, destroying thousands of homes and inundating New York City with waves as high as 14 feet.

Sandy shuttered Wall Street, rattling global markets, and for a moment the storm restored Manhattan’s early 17th-century coastline. A brackish murk of waist-high water submerged all the landfill that humans had dredged, salvaged and shipped to widen the island, ...

The financial industry will be relied on to meet climate goals. NatWest, a lender to oil giants, provides a template.

Advocates descended on the streets of Glasgow last month, pressing banks and other financial institutions at 26th United Nations climate summit to be more responsible stewards of the climate. But a bank based just 50 miles east of the Scottish city is already showing what that might look like.

NatWest, formerly the Royal Bank of Scotland, has made the unlikely transformation from substantial financier of the oil and gas industry to a leader in green finance, whittling down its fossil fuel exposure and pledging to funnel 100 billion pounds, or $133 billion, into sustainable-energy projects in the next four years.

The bank, with headquarters in Edinburgh, could serve as an example of the huge shift necessary for Britain’s banking and investment sector to become, in the government’s words, “the world’s first net-zero-aligned financial ...

The European Union promised to reduce its emissions 20 percent by 2020. Did it happen?

Credit...Mike Haddad

Hindsight is a series from the Headway team looking back at predictions and promises from the past.

As the 2009 global climate summit in Copenhagen approached, the European Union raced to announce an ambitious target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The bloc’s leaders worked to smooth over the competing interests of more than two dozen members, settling on a three-part plan that it promised to meet by 2020, nicknamed the 20-20-20 Pledge: The bloc would reduce its emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels, increase renewable energy to 20 percent of electricity use, and increase energy efficiency by 20 percent.

By the 2020 deadline, the European Union had achieved two of its three goals - an example of a major emitter achieving a climate pledge. Overall emissions were 24 percent lower than in 1990, by the bloc’s accounting, and renewable energy ...

Ever since scientists started looking at meteorites with microscopes, they've been puzzled - and fascinated - by what's inside. Most meteorites are made of tiny beads of glass that date back to the earliest days of the solar system, before the planets were even formed. Scientists with the University of Chicago have published an analysis laying out how these beads, which are found in many meteorites, came to be - and what they can tell us about what happened in the early solar system.

"These are big questions," said UChicago alum Nicole Xike Nie, Ph.D.'19, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science and first author of the study. "Meteorites are snapshots that can reveal the conditions this early dust experienced - which has implications for the evolution of both Earth and other planets."

'This question goes back 50 years'

The beads of glass inside these meteorites are called chondrules. Scientists think they are bits of rock left over from ...

Strawberry harvest in California. Image Via Unsplash/ Tim Mossholder

It's a pesticide called 1,3-Dichloropropene that's commonly sold under the brand name Telone.

And although it's largely unknown outside agricultural circles, 1,3-D has an outsized footprint. In 1990, state regulators banned use of the carcinogenic pesticide after unsafe levels were found in the air.

Yet in 2018, the most recent year for which we have records, California used more than 12.5 million pounds of 1,3-D and detected it at levels more than three times higher than those that triggered the 1990 ban.

How is this possible? Because California's Department of Pesticide Regulation backtracked on commitments to ban and limit 1,3-D's use, and in 1995 began to reinstate its use under a plan in coordination with manufacturer Dow. That's why a state court of appeals last month agreed with farmworkers and pesticide reform advocates that state regulators can't rely on underground ...

Scientists now have a deeper understanding of how a fungus develops a symbiotic lifestyle inside grass leaf and why the grass leaf fails to defend itself against the intruder, thanks to research coming from Massey University in New Zealand and the University of Münster in Germany. Fungal endophytes of the Epichloë species are known to form symbiotic associations with aerial tissues of cool season grasses. These endophytes form networks within the leaf sheath and blade as well as the flower stems and play an important role in protecting the grass from biotic and abiotic stresses, including insects and drought.

When observing this relationship between these fungal endophytes and perennial ryegrass, scientists noticed that chitin, which primarily makes up cell walls in fungi, was depleted or modified once the endophytes infected the grass. They found instead that these cell walls contained chitosan, a natural plant defense activator derived from chitin. Once the endophytes ...

The world body said it needed $41 billion to fund humanitarian aid to help 183 million people in 63 countries.

GENEVA - When the United Nations made its last appeal for humanitarian aid funding before the pandemic, it asked donors for about $29 billion. But in the past year alone, there has been a huge jump in the number of people needing help. And so the United Nations is asking for more aid - $41 billion.

As the pandemic enters a third year, and the toll of conflicts and climate change rise, the United Nations said on Thursday that it needed to help 183 million people in 63 countries who are suffering the consequences. That compared with 100 million people at the time of the last appeal, in 2019.

More than 1 percent of the world’s population are now displaced by conflicts and disasters, Martin Griffiths, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator, told reporters in Geneva in announcing the organization’s 2022 funding drive. About 45 million people now ...

When forecasting how storms may change in the future, it helps to know something about their past. Judging from historical records dating back to the 1850s, hurricanes in the North Atlantic have become more frequent over the last 150 years. However, scientists have questioned whether this upward trend is a reflection of reality, or simply an artifact of lopsided record-keeping. If 19th-century storm trackers had access to 21st-century technology, would they have recorded more storms? This inherent uncertainty has kept scientists from relying on storm records, and the patterns within them, for clues to how climate influences storms.

A new MIT study published today in Nature Communications has used climate modeling, rather than storm records, to reconstruct the history of hurricanes and tropical cyclones around the world. The study finds that North Atlantic hurricanes have indeed increased in frequency over the last 150 years, similar to what historical records have shown.

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For the first series from the Headway initiative, we followed up on forecasts from decades past to ask what the passage of time has revealed.

Credit...Mike Haddad

Our forebears had a lot of ideas about where we’d be by now.

Go back just a few years, and you’ll find no end of prophecies about the world we’d inhabit today - tech fantasies of roads filled with self-driving machines, dire visions of critical water sources gone dry, projections of cities and markets growing and shrinking. In The Times of even a decade ago, the year 2020 was considered a rich canvas for visions of the future, “far enough in the distance to dream, yet seemingly within arm’s reach.”

Imagining futures - to pursue, avoid, or merely prepare for - is how we often wrestle with change in the present. Yet our ability to envision - and therefore shape - the future is constantly pressed in by the world we inhabit today.

Few people, even a decade ago, could have imagined how we ...

Plans to restore Indonesian peatlands are a cost-effective strategy for reducing the impacts of peatland fires to the environment, climate and human health, says a new study. The analysis, led by the University of Leeds, demonstrates that the benefits of effective Indonesian peatland restoration will outweigh the cost of restoration, and provides evidence to support ongoing peatland restoration efforts in Indonesia.

Currently, the Indonesian government has committed to restore 2.5 million hectares of degraded peatland, with a projected cost of US$3.2-7 billion.

The 2015 fires in Indonesia, the largest in recent years, resulted in economic losses totaling US$28 billion, while the six largest fire events between 2004 and 2015 caused a total of US$93.9 billion in economic losses resulting from damage to plantations, forestry and agriculture, CO2 emissions and health impacts due to exposure to air pollution.

The study states that if restoration had already been ...

Oceano Fresco developed the world’s first open-sea clam farm. Image via Shutterstock.

Yes, you’re seeing that right - Food Weekly’s startup roundup is back. The Q3 edition got lost somewhere in the newsletter handover from Jim to me, but we are back on it for this last quarter of 2021 (hi there, December!).

Let’s look at the startups with potential to move the needle on food sustainability and what interesting moves they’ve made over the past couple of months.

Precision ag is an important tool for more sustainable farming and a wealth of startups are developing in this space. While the most advanced technologies are within controlled environments such as greenhouses and indoor farms, they are expanding to more traditional field-based farms as well.

Swiss startup PhytlSigns, self-anointed "Fitbit of plants," falls directly into this category. It offers growers AI technology that identifies early warnings of disease, pests, nutrient deficiencies and water ...

The Biden administration has announced ambitious plans to scale up leasing for offshore wind energy projects along the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts. In an announcement released Oct. 13, the U.S. Department of the Interior stated that it will "use the best available science as well as knowledge from ocean users and other stakeholders to minimize conflict with existing uses and marine life." University of Massachusetts Boston public policy scholar David W. Cash, who worked at senior levels in state government for a decade, describes how this process works.

President Joe Biden has set a goal for the U.S. to achieve net-zero emissions economywide by 2050. That will require an unprecedented expansion of renewable energy to replace fossil fuels that release climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that U.S. offshore wind resources could provide over 2,000 gigawatts of generating capacity - nearly twice as much ...

They come with eagle-eyed drones and high-precision instruments. Aided by satellites, they analyze gas emissions and the flows of molten rock. On the ground, they collect everything from the tiniest particles to "lava bombs" the size of watermelons that one of nature's most powerful forces hurl as incandescent projectiles. Scientists from around the world are flocking to La Palma, one of Spain's Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, to take advantage of a volcanic eruption happening just an hour's drive from an international airport and the safety of being able to work under the escort of military brigades. They are applying cutting-edge technologies to scrutinize a rare volcanic eruption from the land, the sea, the air - and even space.

As in the two dozen other major live eruptions across the planet, from Hawaii to Indonesia, the ultimate goal on La Palma is to use a unique window of opportunity to better understand volcanic eruptions: how they form, develop and, even ...

As the United States turns to electric vehicles, solar and wind for its clean energy transition, the demand for lithium – used in rechargeable batteries – is on the rise. In a remote corner of the Nevada desert sits Thacker Pass, the site of a planned lithium mine that would make a major contribution to domestic supply of the mineral. But the project faces opposition from members of nearby Indigenous communities, who say the area holds spiritual, cultural and historical importance and would be irreversibly damaged by large-scale mining activity

Briana Flin, Josh Landis, Alastair Gee, Frida Garza, Laurence Topham and Charlie Phillips, Source: The Guardian

Physical science of climate change, effects

Relative humidity gradients as a key constraint on terrestrial water and energy fluxes Kim et al. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Open Access pdf 10.31223/x59880

Improving Ground Heat Flux Estimation: Considering the Effect of Freeze/thaw Process on the Seasonally Frozen Ground Wang et al. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres Open Access pdf 10.1029/2021jd035445

Observations of climate change, effects

Multi-decadal increase of forest burned area in Australia is linked to climate change Canadell et al. Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-021-27225-4

Observed increases in extreme fire weather driven by atmospheric humidity and temperature Jain et al. Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-021-01224-1

Precipitation climatology and spatiotemporal trends over the Arabian Peninsula Alsaaran & Alghamdi Theoretical and Applied Climatology ...

Coastal plants and animals have found a new way to survive in the open ocean - by colonizing plastic pollution. A new commentary published Dec. 2 in Nature Communications reports coastal species growing on trash hundreds of miles out to sea in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, more commonly known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." "The issues of plastic go beyond just ingestion and entanglement," said Linsey Haram, lead author of the article and former postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). "It's creating opportunities for coastal species' biogeography to greatly expand beyond what we previously thought was possible."

Gyres of ocean plastic form when surface currents drive plastic pollution from the coasts into regions where rotating currents trap the floating objects, which accumulate over time. The world has at least five plastic-infested gyres, or "garbage patches." The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, between California and ...

New lead rules Michigan instated in 2018 following the Flint water crisis were heralded as the nation’s strictest, but lax enforcement and flaws in testing protocols are making the state’s drinking water appear safer than it likely is, a Planet Detroit and HuffPost analysis of state records finds.

Public health advocates say some of the most at-risk water systems are not following a key provision that requires systems that exceed lead limits to check water from lead pipes in follow-up testing.

The systems are instead checking water from pipes made of a different or unknown material. That makes their lead levels look lower than they may actually be, and allows officials to legally claim that the water is safe to drink.

“It’s giving residents a false sense of confidence in their water quality,” said Elin Betanzo, a former Environmental Protection Agency scientist who now runs the Michigan-based clean water advocacy group Safe Water Engineering.

Moreover, ...