Stay Current with GSS

The GSS email list (google group) receives “Stay Current” articles (excerpts and links to the source articles). To receive them email gssmail@berkeley.edu with subject line “Join GSS”. Please give your city, state, country, and your school (if you’re a teacher). See also “Stay Current” links in each book’s Contents table. Some news sources limit the number of articles one person can read. You can “divide and conquer” with different students reading and reporting to the class on different articles.

See E-mail updates from 2022 -|- 2021

CURRENT YEAR (2023) EMAIL UPDATES

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2023-12-08. People Just Ran Entirely on Renewable Energy for 149 Hours. [https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a45900085/portugal-renewable-energy/] By DARREN ORF, Popular Mechanics. Excerpt: For 149 consecutive hours in November, Portugal provided a stunning example of what that could look like, as it used a mix of solar, wind, and hydropower to provide more clean energy than the entire country needed. …Producing 1,102 GWh (according to the national grid operator Redes Energéticas Nacionais) for both industrial and residential use, the country’s renewable energy sources—a mix of wind, solar, and hydropower—provided 262 GWh more than was needed. …This exceeds the country’s previous record—it ran for 131 hours on renewable energy back in 2019—and for 95 hours during this recent test, Portugal even exported its excess clean energy to Spain. Although the country’s gas plants were on standby, Portugal’s renewable infrastructure proved to be more than up for the task. …Portugal’s 149 hours of renewable bliss is a hopeful vision of the future for a fossil fuel-weary present. Humans can adapt to the climate challenges that face us—we just have to do it one renewable megawatt at a time…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

2023-12-08. F.D.A. Approves Sickle Cell Treatments, Including One That Uses CRISPR. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/health/fda-sickle-cell-crispr.html] By Gina Kolata, , The New York Times. Excerpt: On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first gene editing therapy ever to be used in humans, for sickle cell disease, a debilitating blood disorder caused by a single mutated gene. …For the 100,000 Americans with the disease, most of them Black, the approvals offer hope for finally living without an affliction that causes excruciating pain, organ damage and strokes. While patients, their families and their doctors welcome the F.D.A.’s approvals, getting either therapy will be difficult, and expensive. …Vertex says its price to edit a patient’s genes will be $2.2 million; for, Bluebird it will be $3.1 million. But living with the disease is also extremely costly: On average, $1.7 million for those with commercial insurance over a patient’s lifetime…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4.

2023-12-08. How Much Can Forests Fight Climate Change? A Sensor in Space Has Answers. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/climate/forests-trees-climate-change.html] By Manuela Andreoni and Leanne Abraham, The New York Times. Excerpt: Over the last century, governments around the world have drawn boundaries to shield thousands of the world’s most valuable ecosystems from destruction…. These protected areas have offered lifelines to species threatened with extinction, supported the ways of life for many traditional communities and safeguarded the water supplies of cities. …Now, high in orbit, a new way of seeing forests is making it clear that…protected areas can still be a crucial buffer against climate change. …a study …which was published this year, showed that policies designed to protect nature can also be important for mitigating global warming, Dr. Duncanson said. She called the findings “a beautiful side benefit” of global forest conservation…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

2023-12-07. An Electrifying Approach to Carbon Capture. [https://eos.org/articles/an-electrifying-approach-to-carbon-capture] By Bill Morris, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: …a group of researchers at the University of Calgary is using electricity to enhance seawater’s ability to store carbon. The group is developing an instrument, dubbed PEACH (Practical Electrochemical Air Capture and Hydrogen), that uses an electrochemical cell, analogous to a lithium-ion battery, to capture alkaline sodium ions from salt water. …arrays could be lowered more than 500 meters into the ocean to gather ions, then raised to release them as sodium hydroxide at shallower depths, creating an “alkalinity pump” from deep water to the surface. …Alkaline surface waters draw carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, eventually converting it to bicarbonate, which can securely store carbon in the ocean for more than 10,000 years. A by-product of the ion exchange is hydrogen, which could be stored as a fuel. The group will present their research at AGU’s Annual Meeting 2023 in San Francisco…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

2023-12-07. Climate Change Makes East Africa’s Deadly Floods Worse, Study Finds. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/climate/climate-change-flooding-east-africa.html] By Delger Erdenesanaa, The New York Times. Excerpt: Heavy rain and floods in East Africa that started in October have killed at least 300 people and displaced millions more. …East Africa has an annual rainy season in fall, but this year’s disastrous rainfall is about double what it would have been without human-caused climate change, according to research made public on Thursday. A natural climate cycle called the Indian Ocean Dipole has also contributed to heavier rain than usual, but this phenomenon alone does not account for the extreme amount…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

2023-12-05. Inside the Marshall Islands’ life-or-death plan to survive climate change. [https://grist.org/extreme-weather/marshall-islands-national-adaptation-plan-sea-level-rise-cop28/] By Jake Bittle, Grist. Excerpt: The Marshall Islands extend across a wide stretch of the Pacific Ocean, with dozens of coral atolls sitting just a few feet above sea level. …Over the past two years, government officials have fanned out across the country, visiting remote towns and villages as well as urban centers like its capital of Majuro to examine how Marshallese communities are experiencing and coping with climate change. They found that a combination of rapid sea-level rise and drought has already made life untenable for many of the country’s 42,000 residents, especially on outlying atolls where communities rely on rainwater and vanishing land for subsistence. The survey was part of a groundbreaking, five-year effort by the Marshall Islands to craft a sweeping adaptation strategy that charts the country’s response to the threat of climate change. The plan, shared with Grist ahead of its release at COP28 in Dubai, calls for tens of billions of dollars of new spending to fortify low-lying islands and secure water supplies…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

2023-12-05. Will guilt-free long-haul flights ever be possible? Here’s what we know. [https://www.cnn.com/travel/the-long-road-to-guilt-free-flying-climate/index.html] By Jacopo Prisco, CNN. Excerpt: Aviation faces a steep climb towards a greener future. Although it has, like many other industries, committed to slashing its planet-warming pollution by 2050, it is not on track to reach its target… …the sector currently accounts for around 2.5% of global carbon emissions, its actual climate impact is actually higher, because of the emission of other greenhouse gases and the formation of heat-trapping condensation trails created by jet engines. Meanwhile, demand for air travel is projected to steadily rise, with the global fleet of commercial airplanes doubling in size by 2042 to keep up, according to Boeing. …Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is a type of alternative jet fuel that can curb carbon emissions by up to 80%. It …is usually made from plants that have absorbed carbon dioxide (CO₂) during their lifetime. When burned, that CO₂ is returned to the atmosphere, whereas burning traditional jet fuel kerosene made from fossil fuels releases CO₂ that had been previously locked away. …SAF…is …between 1.5 to 6 times pricier than regular jet fuel. …the most promising tech currently seems to be hydrogen …. [Gökçin Çınar, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan] reckons that hybrid electric planes — powered by both traditional and electric engines — will be introduced as early as 2040, but that they will be limited to regional aircraft, with capacity for up to 100 passengers. “In the longer term, widebody aircraft could integrate mild electrification, but the bigger impact would come from hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuels,” she says. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

2023-12-05. Diverse Forests Store More Carbon Than Monocultures. [https://eos.org/articles/diverse-forests-store-more-carbon-than-monocultures] By Saima May Sidik, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: It pays to mix it up—planted forests containing more than one tree species can store several times as much carbon as monocultures, as shown in a meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Researchers have long known that biodiversity increases forest productivity, ….Forestry companies often plant monocultures, so the study has the potential to affect industry practices. …Researchers sifted through more than 11,300 studies, including some from a worldwide network of tree diversity experiments called TreeDivNet, to find 18 that included the information necessary to compare carbon storage in monocultures with that in stands containing two or more species of trees. …Stands with two or more species contained at least 25% more aboveground carbon than the best-performing monocultures, …. When the researchers focused on forests containing four species, the effect became more striking. These mixed stands had more than 4 times as much carbon as the average monoculture and more than twice as much carbon as the best-performing monocultures…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

2023-12-05. Air-Conditioning Use Will Surge in a Warming World, U.N. Warns. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/climate/air-conditioning-electricity.html] By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times. Excerpt: Sixty nations committed on Tuesday to improve the efficiency of new air-conditioners by 50 percent and reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to those cooling machines by almost 70 percent, the latest in a flurry of global promises that aim to tackle climate change. …a daunting future facing a warming planet: As global temperatures rise, more people will turn to air-conditioners to ward off the heat. But additional air-conditioning in buildings and other spaces, which is also driven by rising incomes, population growth and urbanization, means that the world could use more than double the electricity it does now to stay cool, leading to more planet-warming emissions, according to research released by the United Nations on Tuesday…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 8.

2023-12-04. Protecting Power Grids from Space Weather. [https://eos.org/research-spotlights/protecting-power-grids-from-space-weather] By Rachel Fritts, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Activity from the Sun, such as solar flares, can cause fluctuations in Earth’s geomagnetic field that send electrical currents flowing through power grids. These geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) can cause problems ranging from temporary voltage instability to widespread blackouts to reduced life spans for transformers. It is therefore important to develop effective mitigation strategies that protect against GIC-induced power disruptions while maintaining power to consumers. Suggested solutions have included installing equipment such as capacitors to block GICs and making changes to network configurations. Mac Manus et al. worked with the energy company Transpower New Zealand Ltd. to test four mitigation strategies that could be used throughout the North and South Islands of New Zealand. The team did this by …modeling potential mitigation responses. …Working with Transpower, the researchers found that the mitigation strategy that best balanced effectiveness and practicality reduced the effects of GICs by 16% with a targeted disconnection of just 24 lines. Transpower has adopted this as the new operational procedure to manage space weather events. …the group determined that installing capacitor blocking devices on 14 specific transformers could reduce GICs by another 16%. … (Space Weather, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023SW003533, 2023)…. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 4.

2023-12-04. Climate Summit Leader Tries to Calm Uproar Over a Remark on Fossil Fuels. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/climate/cop28-aljaber-fossil-fuels.html] By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times. Excerpt: Simmering tensions around the decision to hold a global climate summit in a petrostate burst into the open on Monday when Sultan Al Jaber, the Emirati oil executive who is leading the conference, launched into an angry public defense of his position on ending fossil fuel use. Mr. Al Jaber, who runs the state-owned oil company, Adnoc, was under fire for a video that surfaced in which he said there is “no science” behind the idea that fossil fuels must be phased out in order to keep average global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. …“There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,” Mr. Al Jaber said during a panel discussion…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

2023-12-02. 2023 Hurricane Season Ends, Marked by Storms That ‘Really Rapidly Intensified’. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/02/us/hurricane-season-2023-rapid-intensification.html] By William B. Davis and Judson Jones, The New York Times. Excerpt: The 2023 hurricane seasons in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific came to an end this week, with both basins experiencing an above average number of storms, fueled by extremely warm ocean temperatures. The two basins had a combined 37 storms, 13 of which rapidly intensified, sometimes jumping multiple hurricane categories in less than a day. A high proportion of rapid-onset storms this year exceeded the standard definition of rapid intensification — an increase of at least 35 miles per hour in sustained winds, over 24 hours. Experts said that this emphasized the way hurricane seasons are changing and the need for more reliable forecast models. When storms intensify abruptly near land, it becomes more difficult to predict how severely places will be affected, and it leaves officials and residents with little time to prepare. Newer and more specific hurricane intensity models, like the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS), helped experts forecast some of this rapid strengthening, but some storms still caught meteorologists by surprise. In one major hurricane, at least 50 people died because conditions worsened precipitously in a matter of hours…. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 7.

2023-12-03. Al Gore’s climate watchdog spots rogue emissions. [https://www.science.org/content/article/al-gore-s-climate-watchdog-spots-rogue-emissions] By PAUL VOOSEN, Science. Excerpt: Backed by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Climate Trace is a coalition of nonprofits and academics that made headlines 2 years ago with its first analysis of 72,000 of the world’s largest greenhouse gas sources. Its newest assessment looks at 352 million greenhouse gas sources. “It is really incredibly powerful,” Gore says. “This serves a purpose that is at the top of humanity’s priority list.” Long term, Gore hopes Climate Trace will be integrated into the U.N. process. And in the meantime, it is helping less developed regions keep track of their emissions…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 3.

2023-12-02. Biden Administration Announces Rule to Cut Millions of Tons of Methane Emissions. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/climate/biden-methane-climate-cop28.html] By Jim Tankersley and Lisa Friedman, The New York Times. Excerpt: Vice President Kamala Harris pledged at a United Nations climate summit on Saturday that the United States would spend billions more to help developing nations fight and adapt to climate change…. Her remarks followed an announcement by U.S. officials at the summit the same day that the federal government would, for the first time, require oil and gas producers to detect and fix leaks of methane. It was the most ambitious move to reduce fossil fuel emissions that President Biden’s administration was expected to unveil at the summit, known as COP28. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that wafts into the atmosphere from pipelines, drill sites and storage facilities, and dangerously speeds the rate of global warming. …Methane is …the second-most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. Methane only lingers in the atmosphere about a decade after it is released, but it is about 80 times more powerful in the short term at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, which remains in the air for centuries. Scientists say methane is responsible for more than a quarter of the warming that the planet has experienced since the preindustrial era…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

2023-12-01. Surging U.S. Oil Production Brings Down Prices and Raises Climate Fears. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/business/energy-environment/us-oil-production-record-climate.html] By Clifford Krauss, The New York Times. Excerpt: American oil fields are gushing again, helping to drive down fuel prices but also threatening to undercut efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Only three years after U.S. oil production collapsed during the pandemic, energy companies are cranking out a record 13.2 million barrels a day, more than Russia or Saudi Arabia. The flow of oil has grown by roughly 800,000 barrels a day since early 2022, and analysts expect the industry to add another 500,000 barrels a day next year. …The United States now exports roughly four million barrels a day, more than any member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries except Saudi Arabia…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 3.

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2023-12-01. Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds. [https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-redwoods-recover-fire-sprouting-1000-year-old-buds] By ERIK STOKSTAD, Science. Excerpt: When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. …says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.” Yet many of them lived. In a paper published yesterday in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated, mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries. “This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime…. For GSS A New Wolrd View chapter 2.

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2023-11-30. Climate Change Drives New Cases of Malaria, Complicating Efforts to Fight the Disease. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/health/malaria-climate-change.html] By Stephanie Nolen, The New York Times. Excerpt: There were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria around the globe last year, the World Health Organization said on Thursday, an increase of five million over 2021. Malaria remains a top killer of children. Those new cases were concentrated in just five countries: Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Papua-New Guinea. Climate change was a direct contributor in three of them, said Dr. Daniel Ngamije, who directs the W.H.O. malaria program. In July 2022, massive flooding left more than a third of Pakistan underwater and displaced 33 million people. An explosion of mosquitoes soon followed. The country reported 3.1 million confirmed cases of malaria that year, compared with 275,000 the year before, with a fivefold increase in the rate of transmission…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-11-29. Astronomers stunned by six-planet system frozen in time. [https://www.science.org/content/article/astronomers-stunned-six-planet-system-frozen-time] By DANIEL CLERY, Science. Excerpt: Astronomers have discovered a highly unusual planetary system …six planets, all bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, a variety that is absent in our Solar System but common across the Milky Way. Moreover, all of the planets orbit in rhythmic harmony, which suggests the system has remained undisturbed since its formation billions of years ago. The brightness of the star, its relative proximity to Earth, and its six orbiting oddities could make the system a perfect laboratory for studying the formation of these planets, known as sub-Neptunes. …the study, published today in Nature. The planets’ orbits are all tighter than Mercury’s. …a mysterious [size] gap persists: Planets between 1.5 and two Earth diameters seem almost entirely absent and astronomers are eager to know why. …The new system’s discovery involved two space telescopes, multiple ground-based ones, and more than 3 years of detective work by dozens of astronomers. The hunt began in 2020 …from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which looks for dips in a star’s brightness caused by planets passing in front. He noticed intriguing but inconclusive dips associated with HD 110067, a Sun-like star just 100 light-years from Earth. …Subsequent observations by the European Space Agency’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS) identified a third planet, with an orbital period of 20.5 days. …The orbits of the three known planets showed a 3/2 resonance between each neighboring pair: For every three times the inner planet orbits, the outer neighbor orbits twice. On a hunch that others could also be in resonance, Luque’s team looked for additional hypothetical planets with resonances of 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, and so on. A fourth planet, in a 3/2 resonance and with an orbital period of 30.8 days, perfectly matched two of the transits. …the researchers were able to show how the two remaining transits would fit well with planets orbiting every 41.1 days and 54.7 days. Each of those planets is in a 4/3 resonance with its inner neighbor…. See also articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Sky & Telescope. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 8.

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2023-11-28. An architect has found a way to build flood-proof homes. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/flood-resistant-home-bamboo/] By Nick Aspinwall, The Washington Post. Excerpt: Yasmeen Lari spent a …career designing …structures out of concrete, glass and steel before stumbling into her ideal material. It was at a camp for refugees…. Residents there were struggling to secure bricks and wood to build communal kitchens — until she spotted a nearby bamboo grove. “Let’s use it,” recalls Lari…. The material worked so well that over the last decade, Heritage Foundation of Pakistan …has built some 85,000 structures for displaced Pakistanis, including victims of last year’s devastating monsoon rains. That disaster, the worst flooding in Pakistani history, left a third of the country underwater and destroyed more than 2.1 million homes. The thousands of bamboo structures Lari’s group had erected “all survived,” she said. …Many species of bamboo have been used as a building material in Asia for thousands of years and they are among the world’s fastest-growing plants. A type of grass, bamboo can be ready for harvest in as little as three years, a fraction of the time needed for timber wood to grow. Like manufactured timber, bamboo products can store carbon, and bamboo forests perform well as carbon sinks, meaning they absorb more carbon than they release. …A crew without much technical knowledge can manufacture and assemble the structures’ eight panels and the interior bamboo beams that support them on-site. Lari designed them so that homeowners can easily make repairs and even additions. “If bamboo is taken care of,” she said, “bamboo can last forever.” If a flood is coming, homeowners can dismantle the structure’s bamboo skeleton from its permanent foundation and move it to higher ground. Bigger buildings, such as community centers, stand on stilts several feet high…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-11-28. They Fled Climate Chaos. Asylum Law Made Decades Ago Might Not Help. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/us/climate-migrants-asylum.html] By Miriam Jordan, The New York Times. Excerpt: First came the hurricanes — two storms, two weeks apart in 2020 — that devastated Honduras and left the country’s most vulnerable in dire need. …homes were leveled and growing fields were ravaged. Then came the drug cartels, who stepped into the vacuum left by the Honduran government, ill-equipped to respond to the catastrophe. Violence soon followed. …Cosmi, who asked to be identified only by his first name out of concern for his family’s safety and that of relatives left behind, was staying at a squalid encampment on a spit of dirt along the river that separates Mexico and Texas. Hundreds of other Miskito were alongside him in tiny tents, all hoping to claim asylum. The story of the Miskito who have left their ancestral home to come 2,500 miles to the U.S.-Mexico border is in many ways familiar. Like others coming from Central and South America, they are fleeing failed states and street violence. But their lawyers also hope to test a novel idea: Extreme weather wrought by climate change can be grounds for asylum, a protection established more than seven decades ago in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-11-28. Americans Love Avocados. It’s Killing Mexico’s Forests. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/us/mexico-avocado-deforestation.html] By Simon Romero and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, The New York Times. Excerpt: In western Mexico forests are being razed at a breakneck pace and while deforestation in places like the Amazon rainforest or Borneo is driven by cattle ranching, gold mining and palm oil farms, in this hot spot, it is fueled by the voracious appetite in the United States for avocados. …A combination of interests, including criminal gangs, landowners, corrupt local officials and community leaders, are involved in clearing forests for avocado orchards, in some cases illegally seizing privately owned land. Virtually all the deforestation for avocados in the last two decades may have violated Mexican law, which prohibits “land-use change” without government authorization. Since the United States started importing avocados from Mexico less than 40 years ago, consumption has skyrocketed, bolstered by marketing campaigns promoting the fruit as a heart-healthy food and year-round demand for dishes like avocado toast and California rolls. Americans eat three times as many avocados as they did two decades ago…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 6.

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2023-11-24. Brought up in a creationist home, a scientist fights for evolution. [https://www.science.org/content/article/brought-creationist-home-scientist-fights-evolution] By JEFFREY MERVIS, Science. Excerpt: The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), known for fighting to defend evolution’s place in school curricula, has a new leader who knows how hard that work can be. Amanda (Glaze) Townley, who next month becomes executive director of the Oakland, California–based nonprofit, grew up in rural northeastern Alabama, where she learned firsthand how religion and culture can collide with one of the central tenets in biology. “I grew up in a young Earth creationism home, with a worldview that was based in evangelical Christianity and a literal translation of the Bible,” recalls the 42-year-old Townley. “And when I took honors biology in high school, my teacher said she’s not going to teach evolution because she doesn’t believe in it.” …NCSE is best known for monitoring state and local legislative and ballot initiatives affecting the teaching of evolution. It played a key role in a landmark 2005 case in which a federal judge ruled that intelligent design is not science and doesn’t belong in the classroom. In 2012 it added climate change to its portfolio. Threats to both subjects have increased in recent years as part of a broader campaign by conservatives to ban certain topics from classrooms…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 3.

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2023-11-24. Relax, Electric Vehicles Really Are the Best Choice for the Climate. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/opinion/electric-vehicle-tesla-hybrid.html] By Stephen Porder, The New York Times, opinion piece. Excerpt: …I am familiar with trepidation about electric vehicles; …worry about running out of battery power far from a charging station; …the upfront costs… though the E.V. has a lower total cost over the life of the car. …Those concerns will likely diminish in 2024 as money from the Inflation Reduction Act flows into building more charging stations and making discounts for electric vehicles available right at the dealership. …while there are environmental concerns with [electric vehicles], they are dwarfed by the benefit they provide regarding climate change. …Cobalt, another key component of batteries, has been in the public eye because of its scarcity and the horrific working conditions for miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those conditions need to be addressed, but it’s a mistake to view them in isolation. Oil extraction has its own horrific human and environmental costs, as does climate change. …Happily, an increasing number of E.V.s, including those of Tesla and the Chinese automaker BYD, no longer use cobalt in their batteries in most markets because the performance of cobalt-free alternatives is rapidly improving. Within a decade, many batteries may be built with sodium in place of lithium. …anyone who has already switched to an electric vehicle knows it is more fun to drive, and saves time. …And because electric vehicles have fewer parts — no gas tank, no exhaust system, no catalytic converter, no radiator, no fuel injector, no timing belt — downtime for repairs is practically eliminated…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-11-12. U.S. Bets on Small Nuclear Reactors to Help Fix a Huge Climate Problem. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/12/climate/nuclear-reactors-clean-energy.html] By Brad Plumer and Ivan Penn, The New York Times. Excerpt: Towering over the Savannah River in Georgia, the first nuclear reactors built from scratch in the United States in more than 30 years illustrate the enormous promise of nuclear power — and its most glaring weakness. The two new reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant will join two older units to create enough electricity to power two million homes, 24 hours a day, without emitting any of the carbon dioxide that is dangerously heating the planet. But those colossal reactors cost $35 billion, more than double the original estimates, and arrived seven years behind schedule. That’s why no one else is planning to build large reactors in the United States. Instead, the great hope for the future of nuclear power is to go small. Nearly a dozen companies are developing reactors that are a fraction of the size of those at Vogtle, betting that they will be quicker and cheaper to build. …nuclear plants can run at all hours, in any season. To those looking to replace coal and gas with wind and solar energy, nuclear power can provide a vital backstop when the air is calm or the sky is cloudy…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 4.

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2023-11-06. Avnos launches the World’s first Hybrid Direct Air Capture system in partnership with Southern California Gas Company. [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231106857589/en/] By BusinessWire. Excerpt: LOS ANGELES …Avnos, Inc. (Avnos), the Los Angeles-based company developing the novel Hybrid Direct Air Capture (HDAC™) technology for carbon dioxide removal, today began its first operational commercial pilot project in Bakersfield, California. …the HDAC pilot delivers the world’s first water-positive Direct Air Capture (DAC) solution. In launching this system, Avnos has inverted the water paradigm in DAC – producing 5 tons of liquid distilled water per ton of CO₂ captured, as compared to 5-10 tons of water consumption per ton of CO₂ captured in other DAC approaches. As a result, Avnos opens the geographic and climatic operating range for DAC to many more regions around the globe. The Bakersfield pilot will capture approximately 30 tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide and produce 150 tons of water per year. …Capturing water from the atmosphere allows Avnos to leverage a first-of-a-kind moisture-swing CO₂ adsorbent material, which in turn eliminates the need for heat input and reduces energy consumption by more than 50% as compared to other DAC technologies. These enhancements reduce operating costs, boost resource efficiency, and make HDAC more robust in more geographies, all while generating an additional value stream – a first in the industry. …For more information, please visit www.avnos.com…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-11-21. Rude Awakening. [https://www.science.org/content/article/how-rains-pigs-and-waterbirds-fueled-shocking-disease-outbreak-australia] By MEREDITH WADMAN, Science. Excerpt: The appearance of a “tropical” mosquito-borne illness in southeastern Australia has unsettled researchers. …McCann was the fourth patient in as many weeks admitted to Albury with encephalitis. Like McCann, the three others had turned up feverish and confused. …among the possible causes were mosquito-borne viruses, in particular two encephalitis-causing viruses endemic to Australia: Kunjin, a strain of West Nile virus, and Murray Valley encephalitis virus (MVEV), named for the river valley where McCann has swum, water skied, fished, and boated since he was a boy. …As with other weather events, the record-breaking wetness of the 2021–22 season can’t be attributed with certainty to climate change. But as the globe warms, the atmosphere holds more water, enabling more intense rainfall and flooding; daily rainfall associated with thunderstorms increased between 13% and 24% in Australia between 1979 and 2016. …“El Niño and La Niña cycles are natural, but they are more extreme than they have ever been before,” says Eloise Skinner, an epidemiologist at Stanford University and Griffith University. Those extremes can create and remove water sources, changing the distribution of species, including those that bear disease, she says. “As someone that looks at animals, diseases, and movement, I think climate change is critically important.”… For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-11-16. Solid waste, a lever for decarbonization. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl0557] By MICHAEL E. WEBBER AND YAEL R. GLAZER, Science. Excerpt: On 20 December 2015, a mountain of urban refuse collapsed in Shenzhen, China, killing at least 69 people and destroying dozens of buildings (1). The disaster exposed the horrible yet real idea that society’s wastes could pile up uncontrollably, directly threatening our lives. But there is another looming threat from solid waste beyond its sheer volumes and mass: the destabilizing impacts of the greenhouse gases it emits. …Hoy et al. (2) report that rapid and large reductions of methane emissions from the world’s solid waste sector are needed to meet the global warming limit set by the Paris Agreement. The good news is that this can be achieved with existing technologies and modified behaviors. …Municipal solid waste—the garbage that ends up in landfills, recycling centers, compost sites, and ecosystems—is particularly relevant to global warming because solid waste is a major source of atmospheric methane [carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane, and nitrous oxide are the primary greenhouse gases]. Methane’s molecular structure also traps more heat than does CO₂ and is responsible for approximately one-third of global warming (3)…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 3.

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2023-11-16. United Kingdom approves first-ever CRISPR treatment, a cure for sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. [https://www.science.org/content/article/united-kingdom-approves-first-ever-crispr-treatment-cure-sickle-cell-disease-and-beta] By JOCELYN KAISER, Science. Excerpt: …In a world first, U.K. regulators yesterday approved a therapy that uses the gene-editing technique CRISPR. The approach treats two inherited blood disorders, including sickle cell disease, which afflicts mostly people of African ancestry, by modifying a patient’s blood stem cells in the lab and returning them. …The treatment “has the potential to significantly improve the quality of life for so many,” said an official from the United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in a press release today. The agency approved the therapy, which the companies have called Casgevy, for patients ages 12 or older with sickle cell disease or beta thalassemia. …Questions will arise about whether the U.K.’s National Health Service and U.S. insurance companies will pay for the CRISPR treatment, also expected to be millions of dollars. Also clouding Casgevy’s approval is that most people with sickle cell disease live in Africa, which has few medical facilities that can offer the complex care needed to deliver the treatment. Those steps include chemotherapy to wipe out a patient’s existing blood cells and make room for the edited ones…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4.

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2023-11-14. Cosmic blast seared Earth’s atmosphere from 2 billion light-years away. [https://www.science.org/content/article/cosmic-blast-seared-earth-s-atmosphere-2-billion-light-years-away] By DANIEL CLERY, Science. Excerpt: On 9 October 2022, for 7 minutes, high energy photons from a gigantic explosion 1.9 billion light-years away toasted one side of Earth as never before observed. The event, called a gamma ray burst (GRB), was 70 times brighter than the previous record holder. …It also ionized atoms across the ionosphere, which spans from 50 to 1000 kilometers in altitude, researchers say. The findings highlight the faint but real risk of a closer burst destroying Earth’s protective ozone layer…. See also New York Times article A Supernova ‘Destroyed’ Some of Earth’s Ozone for a Few Minutes in 2022. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 6.

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2023-11-14. The Fifth National Climate Assessment. [https://nca2023.globalchange.gov] By U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). Excerpt: The effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States. Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions can limit future warming and associated increases in many risks. Across the country, efforts to adapt to climate change and reduce emissions have expanded since 2018, and US emissions have fallen since peaking in 2007. However, without deeper cuts in global net greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated adaptation efforts, severe climate risks to the United States will continue to grow. …In addition to reducing risks to future generations, rapid emissions cuts are expected to have immediate health and economic benefits (Figure 1.1). At the national scale, the benefits of deep emissions cuts for current and future generations are expected to far outweigh the costs. {2.1, 2.3, 13.3, 14.5, 15.3, 32.4; Ch. 2, Introduction}…. See also Eos article, Deep Emissions Cuts Still Needed to Prevent the Worst Climate Change Impacts and New York Times article The Toll of Climate Disasters Is Rising. But a U.S. Report Has Good News, Too. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

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2023-11-14. The Amazon’s record-setting drought: how bad will it be? [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03469-6?et_rid=40179168&et_cid=4985621] By Meghie Rodrigues, Nature. Excerpt: Last month, a portion of the Negro River in the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, Brazil, shrank to a depth of just 12.70 metres — its lowest level in 120 years, when measurements began. In Lake Tefé, about 500 kilometres west, more than 150 river dolphins were found dead, not because of low water levels, but probably because the lake had reached temperatures close to 40 °C. These are symptoms of the unprecedented drought gripping the Amazon rainforest this year. Climate change is involved. But researchers who study the rainforest say other factors have come together to exacerbate this crisis, …. The drought is the sum of three things, says Luciana Gatti, a climate-change researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) in São José dos Campos. The first is deforestation. …the second factor contributing to the drought: an El Niño climate pattern…. The third factor responsible for the Amazon’s severe drought is an unusual warming of the water in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Climate change is contributing to this anomaly…. For GSS A New World View chapter 5.

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2023-11-13. Capturing wellhead gases for profit and a cleaner environment. [https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/11/13/capturing-wellhead-gases-for-profit-and-a-cleaner-environment] By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: Burning of natural gas at oil and gas wells, called flaring, is a major waste of fossil fuels and a contributor to climate change. But to date, capturing the flared natural gas, estimated at some 140 billion cubic meters per year by the International Energy Agency, has not been economically feasible. University of California, Berkeley, chemists have now come up with a simple and green way to convert these gases — primarily methane and ethane — into economically valuable liquids, mostly alcohols like methanol and ethanol. The liquids are also easier to store. The alcohols can be used as feedstocks for production of numerous other petrochemical products, providing an additional revenue source for oil and gas companies but also lowering carbon dioxide emissions from flaring. Flaring is used to mitigate the more harmful effects of directly venting natural gas — methane is 34 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere. Details of the process were published Nov. 2 in the journal Science…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 3.

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2023-11-13. Climate Tipping Points Could Be Triggered by “Committed Warming”. [https://eos.org/research-spotlights/climate-tipping-points-could-be-triggered-by-committed-warming] By Rebecca Owen, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Unless we rapidly reach net zero emissions, the climate will inch closer to a point of no return—even after greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. As the planet warms, climate tipping points, such as the melting of ice sheets or loss of the Amazon rainforest, become increasingly likely. …A new study by Abrams et al. examines committed global warming, or warming that continues after greenhouse gas emissions are held constant until a new thermal balance is achieved. It’s a bit like how turning a running faucet from hot to cold doesn’t immediately change the temperature of the water, because there is still hot water in the pipeline. The authors present three scenarios for how the global mean temperature could rise and trigger tipping point events. One represents an increased use of fossil fuels, another represents rapidly reaching net zero emissions, and a third closely matches the current trajectory…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-11-13. Exxon Mobil Plans to Produce Lithium in Arkansas. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-lithium-arkansas.html] By Clifford Krauss, The New York Times. Excerpt: Exxon Mobil said on Monday that it planned to set up a facility in Arkansas to produce lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicles, which pose one of the biggest challenges to the company’s oil business. …the announcement signals that the large oil company intends to hedge its big bets on conventional fossil fuels with at least some investments in cleaner forms of energy that are needed to combat climate change. …The announcement does not represent a fundamental shift in corporate strategy, but it is an acknowledgment that battery-powered vehicles will increasingly compete with cars and trucks fueled by gasoline and diesel. It could also open the door for southern Arkansas to emerge as a major source of lithium. Most of the metal today comes from Australia and South America, and much of it is processed in China…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-11-13. Forests could suck up 226 gigatons of carbon if restored and protected, study argues. [https://www.science.org/content/article/forests-could-suck-226-gigatons-carbon-if-restored-and-protected-study-argues] By RIK STOKSTAD, Science. Excerpt: The restoration and protection of forests worldwide could help remove about 226 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, according to a study published today in Nature. That’s equivalent to roughly 20 years of emissions from burning fossil fuels and other sources at current rates. Some experts say the analysis provides a more reliable estimate of the carbon-capturing potential of forests than a previous, controversial study that analyzed only the potential benefit from restoring trees to degraded land. But critics are skeptical that the new number is even remotely achievable. …Humans have cut down a significant fraction—perhaps as much as half—of the forests that once existed. And every year, deforestation contributes 15% of all the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans. So, scientists have been interested in finding out how much carbon trees could take out of the atmosphere if forests are allowed to regrow…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

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2023-11-10. Low-intensity fires mitigate the risk of high-intensity wildfires in California’s forests. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi4123] By XIAO WU et al, Science. Excerpt: The increasing frequency of severe wildfires demands a shift in landscape management to mitigate their consequences. The role of managed, low-intensity fire as a driver of beneficial fuel treatment in fire-adapted ecosystems has drawn interest in both scientific and policy venues. Using a synthetic control approach to analyze 20 years of satellite-based fire activity data across 124,186 square kilometers of forests in California, we provide evidence that low-intensity fires substantially reduce the risk of future high-intensity fires. …These findings support a policy transition from fire suppression to restoration, through increased use of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire, of a presuppression and precolonial fire regime in California…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

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2023-11-09. How Llama Poop Is Helping an Andean Community Adapt to Melting Glaciers. [https://eos.org/articles/how-llama-poop-is-helping-an-andean-community-adapt-to-melting-glaciers] By Sofia Moutinho, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Ecologist Anaïs Zimmer was walking in the Peruvian Andes one day, explaining to community members how hard it is for vegetation and soil to establish itself in deglacierized areas, or areas where glacier ice is retreating. That was when locals suggested an unconventional solution: bringing in llamas to fertilize the soil with their poop. Zimmer, then at the University of Texas at Austin, had been studying the consequences of glacier loss in the Andes for the past decade. Peru, which is home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers, has lost more than half of them in the past 50 years because of climate change, according to the country’s ministry of agriculture. When the ice disappears, it uncovers metallic, rocky soil that had been covered for millennia. …But an ancient practice might offer a solution to these problems. The introduction of llamas, a camelid traditionally herded by native Inca populations, can speed up soil and vegetation development in areas of glacier retreat, suggests new research published in Scientific Reports. …The locals helped Zimmer realize llamas could act as natural gardeners, not only fertilizing the soil with nutrient-rich poop but also spreading seeds. After the llamas eat plants from the mountains and lower grasslands, they can carry seeds in their stomachs, wool, and hooves up to the high altitudes of the glacier forelands…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-11-08. Future Supercontinent Will Be Inhospitable for Mammals. [https://eos.org/articles/future-supercontinent-will-be-inhospitable-for-mammals] By Rebecca Owen, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: It sounds like something from an apocalyptic sci-fi movie: Continents collide and trigger volcanic turmoil. Toxic gases fill the air. The planet becomes a hot desert devoid of life…in the future as the continents regroup into one, Pangea Ultima. A new study published in Nature Geoscience projects that as this new supercontinent forms in around 250 million years, a hotter Sun, an absence of ocean coastline, and increased volcanic carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions mean that temperatures, particularly in landlocked areas, will skyrocket. The study suggests that this distant future foretells a mass extinction for mammals. Alexander Farnsworth, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Bristol and one of the authors of the study, usually studies climates of the past (though he has also built models to assess the accuracy of the climate in fictional worlds, like Game of Thrones’ Westeros). During the pandemic, he began wondering if it was possible to predict climate conditions hundreds of millions of years from now on a supercontinent. …One thing is certain from the study’s models: Pangea Ultima is going to be very, very unpleasant for mammals. Most of the landmass will be far from an ocean, and the arid expanses in the supercontinent’s interior will be between 50°C and 65°C during an average summer—too hot even for most plants to grow. …Two Hundred Fifty Million Years Is a Long Way Off…Although Pangea Ultima sounds bleak, the timescales of such tectonic upheavals mean the future presented in this study is not exactly imminent…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 7.

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2023-11-08. Impact of Holocene environmental change on the evolutionary ecology of an Arctic top predator. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf3326] By MICHAEL V. WESTBURY et al, Science Advances. Excerpt: The Arctic is among the most climatically sensitive environments on Earth, and the disappearance of multiyear sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is predicted within decades. As apex predators, polar bears are sentinel species for addressing the impact of environmental variability on Arctic marine ecosystems. …we investigate how Holocene environmental changes affected polar bears around Greenland. We uncover reductions in effective population size coinciding with increases in annual mean sea surface temperature, reduction in sea ice cover, declines in suitable habitat, and shifts in suitable habitat northward. …[over the past 11,000 years…Whenever temperatures rise, polar bear populations crash. For example, about 4500 years ago, sea surface temperatures climbed by 0.2°C, sea ice cover shrank by about 3%, and polar bear populations dropped by about 20%. Several thousand years before that, when water temps rose 0.5°C, their populations plummeted about 40%. “We see a disturbing connection between population decline and environmental changes,” says study co-author Michael Westbury. “The relationship is not linear.” In the next century, sea surface temperatures are expected to rise as much as 2 to 5°C—an order of magnitude more of a temperature increase than the animals faced before. “It doesn’t look good for the polar bear,” says co-author Eline Lorenzen…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-11-08. LUCY MISSION FLIES BY ASTEROID DINKINESH, FINDS BINARY MOON. [https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/lucy-mission-flies-by-asteroid-dinkinesh-finds-a-little-surprise] By EMILY LAKDAWALLA, Sky & Telescope. Excerpt: On November 1st, the Lucy mission zipped past the tiny asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh and discovered that it was actually a binary. …While the probe caught a view of the Dinkinesh’s small satellite in the one of the first images of the flyby, the mission turned as it flew by and captured another view from a different angle. That new perspective revealed that the little asteroidal moon is actually a contact binary, meaning it’s made of two objects in contact with one another. This is the first contact binary asteroid moon discovered. Read more details on NASA’s website…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-11-09. Adapting to growing wildfire property risk. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk7118] By JUDSON BOOMHOWER, Science. Excerpt: Wildfire-threatened communities are on the front lines of climate change. From 2013 to 2022, the share of global disaster losses caused by wildfires more than doubled compared with losses in previous decades (1). …Radeloff et al. (2) draw on a 30-year time series of housing counts and vegetation to show how housing expansion, area burned, and vegetative fuels contribute to wildfire losses and the increasing number of homes at risk in the United States. With tens of millions of US homes now confronting a growing risk of destruction by wildfires, adaptation is an urgent policy and research challenge. Success will require scaling up cost-effective investments in physical protection to reduce wildfire losses, ensuring well-functioning insurance markets to absorb risk that cannot be cost-effectively mitigated away, and addressing disparities in protection and postfire recovery for socially vulnerable populations…. See also New York Times article America’s New Wildfire Risk Goes Beyond Forests. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-11-09. Staying stably cool in the sunlight. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk9614] By DONGLIANG ZHAO AND HUAJIE TANG, Science. Excerpt: Terrestrial surfaces exposed to sunlight absorb solar heat and shed heat back to outer space as infrared radiation. If the radiated heat is greater than the solar energy absorbed, then daytime radiative cooling is achieved passively, without any energy input. However, this approach requires materials that strongly reflect sunlight and simultaneously emit long-wavelength infrared light—the wavelength needed to escape Earth’s atmosphere and not be reflected back. Ceramics composed mainly of silica (SiO₂) and alumina (Al₂O₃), and that permit long-wavelength infrared emission, can meet these requirements. …Zhao et al. (1) and Lin et al. (2), respectively, describe microporous materials— a glass-based ceramic coating and a ceramic composite—that exhibit passive daytime radiative cooling and resistance to harsh environments. These advances may lead to more environmentally friendly ways for keeping buildings cool…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 8.

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2023-11-08. Climate Change Is Causing Severe Drought in a Volatile Mideast Zone, Study Finds. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/climate/climate-change-drought-fertile-crescent.html] By Manuela Andreoni, The New York Times. Excerpt: Syria, Iraq and Iran were parched by high temperatures that would have been “virtually impossible” without the effects of global warming, scientists said…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-11-07. New space telescope embarks on biggest 3D map of the universe. [https://www.science.org/content/article/new-space-telescope-embarks-biggest-3d-map-universe] By DANIEL CLERY, Science. Excerpt: The European Space Agency (ESA) today released the first pictures of galaxies taken by its new space telescope, Euclid, which aims to help researchers understand the dark components that make up 95% of the universe. …the Perseus Cluster…, one of the most massive structures in the universe, shows 1000 of its galaxies 240 million light-years from Earth, as well as 100,000 more distant ones, some as far away as 10 billion light-years. Over its 6-year mission, Euclid, launched in July, is expected to take 30,000 such images, cataloging 1 billion galaxies across one-third of the sky. Researchers will use them to create the biggest 3D map of the universe, spanning three-quarters of its history…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 9.

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2023-11-07. Rapid disintegration and weakening of ice shelves in North Greenland. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42198-2] By R. Millan et al, Nature Communications. Abstract: The glaciers of North Greenland are hosting enough ice to raise sea level by 2.1 m, and have long considered to be stable. …Here, we show that since 1978, ice shelves in North Greenland have lost more than 35% of their total volume, three of them collapsing completely. For the floating ice shelves that remain we observe a widespread increase in ice shelf mass losses, that are dominated by enhanced basal melting rates. Between 2000 and 2020, there was a widespread increase in basal melt rates that closely follows a rise in the ocean temperature. …These results suggest that, under future projections of ocean thermal forcing, basal melting rates will continue to rise or remain at high level, which may have dramatic consequences for the stability of Greenlandic glaciers…. See also Greenland-wide accelerated retreat of peripheral glaciers in the twenty-first century by L. J. Larocca et al in Nature Climate Change. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-11-06. Algal outbreaks around the world are crowding out corals. [https://www.science.org/content/article/algal-outbreaks-around-world-are-crowding-out-corals] By ELIZABETH PENNISI, Science. Excerpt: Edmunds and colleagues report today in Current Biology that these algae are spreading rapidly in the Caribbean Sea and elsewhere, killing existing corals and crowding out new ones. The authors don’t have a solid explanation for the algae expansion, although warming waters or another aspect of climate change may be a driver. But they and others worry this new menace will hasten the demise of ecosystems already decimated in many places by multiple bleaching events, many also linked to climate change. …These latest coral killers are a group of more than 140 hard to distinguish red algal species belonging to the Peyssonneliaceae family. Some scientists mistake them for coralline algae, which also form crusts on reefs but help promote growth of the living structures. Whereas coralline algae form thin, hard crusts that are pink or whitish, peyssonnelid algae make thicker, brown or dark red crusts that are often a little squishy above a hard base. Fish love to eat the former but tend to avoid the red algae, Edmunds says, allowing them to grow unchecked until they smother corals to death. Peyssonneliaceae also keep damaged coral from regenerating by preventing drifting coral larvae from settling and maturing into sedentary adult polyps…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 7.

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2023-11-06. Gently Down the Stream: Carbon’s Journey from Land to Sea and Beyond. [https://eos.org/research-spotlights/gently-down-the-stream-carbons-journey-from-land-to-sea-and-beyond] By Nathaniel Scharping, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Movement of carbon from land to ocean and atmosphere plays an important, but understudied, role in the global carbon cycle. Rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs occupy just 1% of Earth’s surface, but they provide a route for large amounts of terrestrial carbon to reach the ocean. Along the journey, carbon dioxide is also released into the atmosphere in a process known as evasion. But much about the land-to-ocean carbon cycle is not yet understood. …Tian et al. present a global quantification of carbon export and carbon dioxide (CO₂) evasion from before the industrial era to the present. Their research indicates that inland waters move nearly half of the carbon absorbed by the land to the atmosphere and oceans. It also reveals significant anthropogenic perturbations to this land-to-ocean carbon cycle. Their work is the first global quantitative assessment of this process, addressing a knowledge gap identified in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 5.

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2023-11-06. The Scottish wildcat has been wiped out by breeding with domestic cats. [https://www.science.org/content/article/scottish-wildcat-has-been-wiped-out-breeding-domestic-cats] By DAVID GRIMM, Science. Excerpt: …A study published today in Current Biology finds that even though European wildcats and domestic cats overlapped in Great Britain for more than 2000 years—including at sites such as Kilton—they appear to have almost never interbred. That changed suddenly about 70 years ago, when domestic cats began to mate with wildcats in Scotland. In the span of mere decades, the genome of the Scottish wildcat—the last remaining wildcat in Great Britain—has become so corrupted that the animal is now effectively extinct, a second study in the same issue finds. The findings could complicate ongoing efforts to save the most endangered mammalian carnivore in Great Britain…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4.

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2023-11-06. The Moon Is Even Older Than Scientists Thought. [https://eos.org/articles/the-moon-is-even-older-than-scientists-thought] By Matt Hrodey, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Thanks to one of the slowest-ticking clocks in the universe, scientists have determined the Moon is about 40 million years older than previously thought. That means the Earth was a young 100 million years old when an object about the size of Mars slammed into it, slinging magma out into Earth’s orbit. …As the Moon’s mantle cooled, it formed tiny zircon crystals, …sometimes contain other elements, such as uranium …can be used to date when the crystal originally formed, going back billions of years, if necessary. …the researchers obtained lunar dust collected by Apollo 17 in 1972 and analyzed the tiny zircon crystals and uranium contained inside. …Radioactive isotopes of uranium (such as Uranium-238) contain unstable combinations of protons and neutrons in their nuclei and will eventually break down into lead… Scientists determined the age of the Moon by counting the proportion of lead remaining in a lunar zircon; they sharpened parts of the crystal to fine points and evaporated atoms from the tip with ultraviolet lasers. Once released, the atoms passed through a mass spectrometer that could detect their mass and thus their identity. Based on the balance they found, the researchers estimated the Moon’s age at 4.46 billion years old…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-11-02. Five Martian Mysteries That Have Scientists Scratching Their Heads. [https://eos.org/articles/five-martian-mysteries-that-have-scientists-scratching-their-heads] By Matthew R. Francis, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: .1. Why Is the Southern Hemisphere So Bulgy? 2. Where Has All the Water Gone? 3. Why Is Mars an Ice Ball? 4. Is There Methane? 5. How Much Does the Planet Wobble? …. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-11-00. . [] By . Excerpt: … For GSS chapter .

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2023-11-03. Electric Planes, Once a Fantasy, Start to Take to the Skies. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/business/electric-planes-beta-technologies.html] By Niraj Chokshi, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Over …16 days, [Chris Caputo] and his colleagues flew the plane, a CX300 built by their employer, Beta Technologies, down the East Coast. They would make nearly two dozen stops to rest and recharge, flying through congested airspace in Boston, New York, Washington and other cities. When the journey came to an end in Florida, Beta handed the plane over to the Air Force, which will experiment with it over the next few months. The trip offered a vision of what aviation could look like years from now — one in which the skies are filled with aircraft that do not emit the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming up the Earth. …the CX300, a sleek, futuristic plane with a 50-foot wingspan, large curved windows and a rear propeller …is designed to carry about 1,250 pounds of cargo and will be followed soon after by the A250, which shares about 80 percent of the CX300’s design and is outfitted with lift rotors to take off and land like a helicopter. Both aircraft, which Beta markets as the Alia, will eventually carry passengers, the company says. …Beta is one of many companies working on electric aviation. …Early on, electric aircraft are expected to compete mainly with helicopters and cars and trucks…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-11-02. AMAZON OBSERVATORY. [https://www.science.org/content/article/peru-20-year-study-charted-amazon-forests-revealed-warming-changed] By BARBARA FRASER, Science. Excerpt: PILLCOPATA, PERU—Twenty years ago, a dozen Peruvian biology undergraduates armed with machetes and tape measures laboriously cleared a trail down the steep eastern flank of the Andes Mountains near this sleepy Amazonian town. They staked out eight study plots along a 15-kilometer-long transect that stretched from the grasslands found near the relatively cool, treeless top of a 4020-meter-high mountain known as Apu Kañajhuay down the fog-shrouded Kosñipata Valley to the warmer forests below, which are soaked by as much as 5 meters of rain a year. Along the transect lies some of the world’s richest biodiversity. Now, those 1-hectare plots in and near Manu National Park and Biosphere Reserve are the centerpiece of one of the longest running field studies of how an Amazon forest is responding to climate change. The effort, known as the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG), involves researchers from around the world. It has produced thousands of data points and scores of publications that have offered new insights into how warming and drying are reshuffling tropical ecosystems. …many of the students who helped hack out the original study plots went on to earn doctorates and academic posts and are now helping train a new generation of Peruvian scientists. The initiative became a “cradle of biologists,” says William Farfán-Ríos, a Peruvian ecologist at Wake Forest University (WFU) who was one of those machete-wielding students…. For GSS A New World View chapter 5.

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2023-11-01. Offshore Wind Firm Cancels N.J. Projects, as Industry’s Prospects Dim. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/energy-environment/offshore-wind-farm-new-jersey.html] By Stanley Reed and Tracey Tully, The New York Times. Excerpt: Plans to build two wind farms off the coast of New Jersey were scrapped, the company behind them said on Wednesday, a blow to the state’s efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the latest shakeout in the U.S. wind industry. …Offshore wind and other parts of the renewable industry have hit some snags in Europe, especially in Britain. But Mr. Nipper said the problems were more acute in the United States because early contracts lacked protection from inflation and developers incurred high costs because of delays in approvals during the Trump administration. …In its announcement, Orsted said it would move forward with a $4 billion project called Revolution Wind intended to supply power to consumers in Rhode Island. And other developers have projects under construction, like Vineyard Wind, which will eventually have 62 turbines in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard, Mass…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-11-01. Drought Saps the Panama Canal, Disrupting Global Trade. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-canal-drought-shipping.html] By Peter Eavis, The New York Times. Excerpt: For over a century, the Panama Canal has provided a convenient way for ships to move between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, helping to speed up international trade. But a drought has left the canal without enough water, which is used to raise and lower ships, forcing officials to slash the number of vessels they allow through. That has created expensive headaches for shipping companies and raised difficult questions about water use in Panama. The passage of one ship is estimated to consume as much water as half a million Panamanians use in one day. …The problems at the Panama Canal, an engineering marvel that opened in 1914 and handles an estimated 5 percent of seaborne trade, is the latest example of how crucial parts of global supply chains can suddenly seize up…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-28. The World Is Becoming More African. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/28/world/africa/africa-youth-population.html] By Declan Walsh, The New York Times. Excerpt: Astonishing change is underway in Africa, where the population is projected to nearly double to 2.5 billion over the next quarter-century. …The median age on the African continent is 19. In India, the world’s most populous country, it is 28. In China and the United States, it is 38. …Africa’s challenge is to manage unbridled growth. It has always been a young continent — only two decades ago the median age was 17 — but never on such a scale. Within the next decade, Africa will have the world’s largest work force, surpassing China and India. By the 2040s, it will account for two out of every five children born on the planet…. For GSS Population Growth chapter 8.

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2023-10-24. Clean Energy, Cherished Waters and a Sacred California Rock Caught in the Middle. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/travel/chumash-marine-sanctuary-morro-bay-california.html] By Lauren Sloss, The New York Times. Excerpt: The proposed Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary could create a new model for Native collaborative management of public lands. But the sanctuary faces headwinds with a last-minute boundary change to accommodate a wind farm…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-10-27. Gene therapy restores hearing in children with rare form of deafness. [https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-therapy-restores-hearing-children-rare-form-deafness] By JOCELYN KAISER, Science. Excerpt: Several deaf children can hear after receiving gene therapy—a first for the approach—a team at Fudan University reported today at a meeting in Belgium. The children were born deaf because they inherited two defective copies of the gene for a protein called otoferlin that helps the inner ear’s hair cells transmit sound to the brain. …researchers injected harmless viruses carrying DNA for a working copy of the otoferlin gene into the children’s ears. Four of five patients treated now have some hearing, the MIT Technology Review reports. …The U.S. company Regeneron yesterday reported similar success for the first patient treated with its otoferlin gene therapy. Otoferlin-related deafness is very rare—it explains only 1% to 3% of cases of inherited deafness, the MIT Technology Review writes—but the results offer hope for treating other genetic forms of hearing loss…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4.

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2023-11-00. . [] By . Excerpt: … For GSS chapter .

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2023-10-27. Critical Minerals for a Carbon-Neutral Future. [https://eos.org/features/critical-minerals-for-a-carbon-neutral-future] By Douglas C. Kreiner, Jane Hammarstrom and Warren Day, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Imagine driving an electric car past a solar farm …below a ridge of wind turbines. Or …changing a thermostat to cool or heat your home, …not …increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Transitioning to carbon-neutral economies and lifestyles will require substantial sources of mineral commodities …including the cobalt, nickel, lithium, manganese, germanium, gallium, indium, and graphite needed for EV batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage…. In some cases, supplier countries have histories of poor environmental, social, or governance practices…. In 2019, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with the Association of American State Geologists and other federal, state, and private-sector organizations, initiated the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative (Earth MRI) to provide the high-quality data needed for evaluation of critical minerals. …In its first few years, the effort has already helped scientists better grasp the country’s critical minerals landscape…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-10-26. Hurricane Otis smashed into Mexico and broke records. Why did no one see it coming?. [https://www.science.org/content/article/hurricane-otis-smashed-mexico-and-broke-records-why-did-no-one-see-it-coming] By PHIE JACOBS, Science. Excerpt: Early Wednesday morning, Hurricane Otis became the strongest storm in recorded history to strike the Pacific coast of Mexico. The Category 5 hurricane made landfall near Acapulco, where its heavy rain and 265-kilometer-per-hour (kph) winds unleashed massive landslides and knocked out power lines, killing at least 2 dozen people and causing widespread devastation. But just 2 days earlier, meteorologists doubted whether Otis—then a tropical storm—would even achieve hurricane status. Forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center expected the storm to undergo “gradual strengthening,” with most computer models predicting maximum wind speeds of about 100 kph. Instead, as Otis careened toward Mexico’s coastline, its winds increased by 180 kph in 24 hours, a record amount of “rapid intensification.” …ocean waters have been “unusually warm” throughout this year’s hurricane season, with the El Niño climate pattern channeling even more heat into the tropical Pacific Ocean. As Otis neared shore, it crossed over a patch of water that reached 31°C—several degrees above the average expected for late October. …some scientists are concerned that rapidly intensifying hurricanes like Otis will become more frequent…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-25. Chasing Big Mergers, Oil Executives Dismiss Peak Oil Concerns. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/business/energy-environment/exxon-chevron-oil-mergers-peak.html] By Clifford Krauss, The New York Times. Excerpt: Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the two largest U.S. oil companies, this month committed to spending more than $50 billion each to buy smaller companies in deals that would let them produce more oil and natural gas for decades to come. But a day after Chevron announced its acquisition, the International Energy Agency released an exhaustive report concluding that demand for oil, gas and other fossil fuels would peak by 2030 as sales of electric cars and use of renewable energy surged. The disconnect between what oil companies and many energy experts think will happen in the coming years has never been quite this stark…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-10-25. Mars has a surprise layer of molten rock inside. [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03271-4] By Alexandra Witze, Nature. Excerpt: A meteorite that slammed into Mars in September 2021 has rewritten what scientists know about the planet’s interior. By analysing the seismic energy that vibrated through the planet after the impact, researchers have discovered a layer of molten rock that envelops Mars’s liquid-metal core. The finding, reported today in two papers in Nature^1,2, means that the Martian core is smaller than previously thought. It also resolves some lingering questions about how the red planet formed and evolved over billions of years. The discovery comes from NASA’s InSight mission, which landed a craft with a seismometer on Mars’s surface. Between 2018 and 2022, that instrument detected hundreds of ‘marsquakes’ shaking the planet. Seismic waves produced by quakes or impacts can slow down or speed up depending on what types of material they are travelling through, so seismologists can measure the waves’ passage to deduce what the interior of a planet looks like. …the September 2021 meteorite impact “unlocked everything”, says Henri Samuel, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris and lead author of one of today’s papers¹. The meteorite struck the planet on the side opposite to where InSight was located. That’s much more distant than the marsquakes that InSight had previously studied, and allowed the probe to detect seismic energy travelling all the way through the Martian core⁴…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-10-25. Can Indigenous knowledge and Western science work together? New center bets yes. [https://www.science.org/content/article/can-indigenous-knowledge-and-western-science-work-together-new-center-bets-yes] By JEFFREY MERVIS, Science. Excerpt: Last month, NSF [funded] a 5-year, $30 million grant designed to weave together traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Western science. Based at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst, the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS) aims to fundamentally change the way scholars from both traditions select and carry out joint research projects and manage data. The center will explore how climate change threatens food security and the preservation of cultural heritages through eight research hubs in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. …Each hub will also serve as a model for how to braid together different knowledge traditions, or what its senior investigators call “two-eyed seeing” through both Indigenous and Western lenses…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-10-25. Can We Save the Redwoods by Helping Them Move? [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/magazine/redwoods-assisted-migration.html] By Moises Velasquez-Manoff, The New York Times. Excerpt: “It’s highly likely that many of the giant sequoias in their current groves may not make it for the next century,” Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of California …the soil is becoming drier in the southern Sierra Nevada, and snowpack is disappearing earlier in the year, ushering in a longer dry season. …in 2020, one of the trees …was killed by wildfire, after having survived climatic lashings for millenniums. …This problem — a species under increasing threat in the place it has long inhabited — isn’t limited to giant sequoias. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 12,000 species are in similar situations. …what…can be done to prevent a raft of extinctions driven by our remaking of the earth’s climate. …“assisted migration”: moving species to more hospitable areas. …[but] unintended consequences could be irreversible and dire. Any biologist can cite a litany of disasters following the movement of plants and animals from the environments in which they evolved — from the constraints imposed there by competitors, predators and parasites — into new ecosystems. The cane toad, native to Central and South America, was released in Australia in 1935 ostensibly to control agricultural pests; it didn’t, reproduced exponentially and became a pest in its own right…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

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2023-10-24. Arctic Warming Triggers Abrupt Ecosystem Shift in North America’s Deepest Lake. [https://eos.org/articles/arctic-warming-triggers-abrupt-ecosystem-shift-in-north-americas-deepest-lake] By Cheryl Katz, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Great Slave Lake looks like a giant goose winging across Canada’s Northwest Territories. Spanning an area the size of Belgium and reaching depths of up to 614 meters, it’s the 10th largest freshwater lake in the world and North America’s deepest. Its huge mass of cold water helped shield Great Slave Lake from the climate impacts that have upended the ecosystems of shallower lakes in high northern latitudes. But no longer, according to a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Spurred by accelerating Arctic warming, the microscopic algae, or phytoplankton, at the foundation of this massive lake’s food web have made a radical regime shift since the turn of the century. …Great Slave Lake’s abrupt transformation corresponds to accelerating Arctic climate change, said the study’s lead author, Queen’s University paleolimnologist Kathleen Rühland. The region is now warming several times faster than the global average…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-22. A Glimpse Into Spain’s Future, Where Water Comes by Truck, Not Tap. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/world/europe/spain-drought-water.html] By Rachel Chaundler, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Spain has been blighted by a long-running drought, caused by record-high temperatures in 2022, a string of heat waves in 2023, and almost three years of reduced rainfall. Throughout the country, reservoirs have been depleted; in the worst-affected areas, they are at less than 20 percent of their capacity. …Pozoblanco, a village of about 18,000 in southern Spain, where the daily struggle for drinkable water has become a glimpse of what may lie ahead for parts of Europe where drought and extreme heat have become increasingly common. …Pozoblanco and 22 other villages in this traditional pig- and cattle-farming area north of the city of Córdoba have needed deliveries of fresh water since April, when the Sierra Boyera reservoir, which supplies the area, completely dried up. …If precipitation levels remain low this winter, the southernmost region of Spain, Andalusia, could lose 7 percent of its gross domestic product, according to local officials. Deeper into the future, studies have shown that 74 percent of Spain risks encroachment by deserts this century…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-20. From green to red: Urban heat stress drives leaf color evolution. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3542] By YUYA FUKANO et al, Science. Abstract: Prevalence of impervious surface and resulting higher temperatures in urban areas, known as urban heat islands, comprises prominent characteristics in global cities. However, it is not known whether and how urban plants adapt to such heat stress. This study …examined whether the leaf color variation is associated with urban heat stress. Field observations revealed that green-leaved plants were dominant in green habitats, and red-leaved individuals were dominant in urban habitats…. Growth and photosynthesis experiments demonstrated that red-leaved individuals performed better under heat stress, while green-leaved individuals performed better under nonstressful conditions. …the red leaf may have evolved multiple times from the ancestral green leaf. Overall, the results suggest that the red leaves of O. corniculata observed in cities worldwide are evidence of plant adaptive evolution due to urban heat islands…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-19. Scientists discover deepest known evidence of coral reef bleaching. [https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/news/scientists-discover-deepest-known-evidence-of-coral-reef-bleaching] By Alan Williams, University of Plymouth. Excerpt: Scientists have discovered the deepest known evidence of coral reef bleaching, more than 90 metres below the surface of the Indian Ocean. The damage – attributed to a 30% rise in sea temperatures caused by the Indian Ocean dipole – harmed up to 80% of the reefs in certain parts of the seabed, at depths previously thought to be resilient to ocean warming. …The findings, highlighted in a study published in Nature Communications, were discovered by researchers from the University of Plymouth…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 7.

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2023-10-19. Agriculture and hot temperatures interactively erode the nest success of habitat generalist birds across the United States. [https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.add2915] By KATHERINE S. LAUCK et al, Science. Summary: For several weeks after hatching, baby birds that live in nests are largely immobile, unable to feed themselves or even regulate their body temperature, making them vulnerable to extreme heat. …agricultural landscapes are often 10°C hotter than neighboring forests, researchers …examined more than 150,000 nesting attempts spanning 23 years by 58 bird species in forests, grasslands, farms, and cities across the continental United States. They found that, during periods of extreme heat, the probability of a nest successfully fledging at least one young bird dropped a whopping 46% in agricultural settings. And birds already considered endangered, such as the oak titmouse, were particularly vulnerable. Surprisingly, extreme heat modestly increased the reproductive success of forest-dwelling birds—though the team says these results don’t indicate that climate change is good for these species, as it likely has detrimental effects on the survival of adult birds. The researchers hope their findings will grant insight into the decline of bird populations across North America and help guide efforts to conserve their natural habitats…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-19. Webb telescope discovers intense jet stream in Jupiter’s atmosphere. [https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/10/19/webb-telescope-discovers-intense-jet-stream-in-jupiters-atmosphere] By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a fast-moving jet stream in Jupiter’s atmosphere that is blowing twice as fast as the visible cloud layers below it, creating wind shears that far exceed anything seen on Earth. The high-speed jet stream, which is traveling at 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour) and is more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide, sits over Jupiter’s equator, 15 to 30 miles (25 to 50 kilometers) above the main cloud deck familiar from optical photos. …winds in the visible cloud layer blow at about 180 mph (250 km/hour). This means that for every kilometer above these visible clouds, the wind speed increases by 7 to 10 kilometers per hour, according to Ricardo Hueso, lead author of a paper describing the findings published today in the journal Nature Astronomy…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-10-19. AFTER THE FLOOD. [https://www.science.org/content/article/historic-dam-removal-poses-challenge-of-restoring-both-river-and-landscape] By WARREN CORNWALL, Science. Excerpt: Next year, [Joahua Chenowith will] be confronted with nearly 1000 hectares of bare ground stretching along 36 kilometers of the Klamath and its tributaries, after authorities remove Iron Gate and three other dams in California and Oregon. …with thousands of dams targeted for removal worldwide, more and larger efforts are likely to follow. …Chenoweth, who was hired by the Yurok, a local tribe taking the lead in the revegetation effort, has spent years preparing for the moment. His crews have scoured the surrounding area, diligently collecting seeds that will be used to immediately populate the barren ground. …THE KLAMATH WAS ONCE a fabled source of salmon, the third most productive in the western United States…. As many as 1 million of the fish journeyed each year up the 420-kilometer-long waterway, which flows from the dry plains of eastern Oregon to the Pacific Ocean. Near the river’s mouth…the yearly salmon runs were once the lifeblood of the Yurok, who erected temporary wooden dams to catch them. Farther upstream…salmon were an important source of sustenance for members of the Karuk, Klamath, and other tribes. Then, in 1918, an energy company erected a 36-meter-tall concrete dam in a narrow canyon 325 kilometers upriver. With no provision for fish to get past, it effectively walled off some 560 kilometers of habitat for migratory fish…. It was the first of the six dams that now choke the Klamath River. Those blockages…led to severe declines in salmon populations, which now number at less than 5% of predam levels. …In the early 2000s, however, the federal license for many of the dams was approaching its expiration date. Under pressure from tribes, environmentalists, and anglers, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission signaled that before the license could be renewed, the dams would need to be renovated to help fish get upstream. …the owner—PacifiCorp—agreed in 2010 to relinquish the dams and allow them to be torn down …, setting in motion what has become the world’s largest dam removal project, a $450 million to $500 million effort funded by the state of California and PacifiCorp…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 4.

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2023-10-19. What is biochar? Why an ancient farming technique could help fight climate change. [https://www.fastcompany.com/90966491/what-is-biochar-why-an-ancient-farming-technique-could-help-fight-climate-change] By ADELE PETERS, Fast Company. Excerpt: On a site next to a sawmill in Waverly, Virginia, a startup takes sawdust and offcuts from the mill and heats it up to turn it into biochar, a material that can store carbon for hundreds or thousands of years. The project, which recently began operating, will capture a little more than 10,000 metric tons of CO2 each year. Microsoft will buy the carbon removal credits as part of its plan to become a carbon negative company. It’s one of a growing number of biochar production plants. The potential is big: A new study calculated that if biochar production scales up as much as possible globally, it could capture as much as 3 billion metric tons of CO2 a year, or 6% of global emissions. …When organic waste (like wheat stalks or manure from a farm, or sawdust from forestry) is heated up to extremely high temperatures without oxygen, it turns into a charcoal-like material known as biochar. The material has a long history—indigenous communities in South America used it at least 8,000 years ago in farming, because when it’s added to the soil, it helps plants grow. But it’s also increasingly becoming one tool to help tackle climate change. …Biochar is considered a relatively permanent form of carbon storage, unlike planting trees that face the risk of later being cut down or burning in a forest fire. It’s also cheaper than technology like direct air capture, massive machines that suck CO2 out of the air…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-10-19. Atlantic Hurricanes Are Getting More Dangerous, More Quickly. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/atlantic-hurricanes-are-more-likely-to-power-up-quickly-180983104/] By Brian Handwerk, Smithsonian Magazine. Excerpt: …a new study, published Thursday in Scientific Reports, found that in recent decades Atlantic hurricanes were far more likely to dial up from weak Category 1 to major Category 3 or higher storms in only 24 hours. Storms from 2001 to 2020 did so at more than twice the rate as the same types of storms between 1970 and 1990. …While the study did not include an analysis that attempts to firmly identify the cause or causes of the more quickly intensifying storms, Garner interprets the results as a warning call on how climate change is raising sea surface temperatures. …Hurricanes are fueled by warm surface water. …since reliable global satellite data began to be collected in the 1980s, there has been a remarkably consistent average of about 80 tropical cyclones each year. Most current research suggests that Atlantic hurricanes …may actually become less frequent with climate change. That sounds like good news, but …Research also shows that the hurricanes we are experiencing are becoming more destructive, and that trend also seems likely to continue—because of climate change and human behavior. Climate change is causing hurricanes to produce more rainfall, according to reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For every degree Celsius of warming, studies suggest, rainfall rates may rise by about 7 percent. So under a 2-degree Celsius warming scenario, hurricanes will be expected to saturate impacted communities with 14 percent more rainfall…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-19. The collapse of eastern Bering Sea snow crab. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf6035] By CODY S. SZUWALSKI et al, Science. Editor’s summary: Marine heatwaves, a component of our impact on the Earth’s climate, can bring both expected and unexpected environmental change. Between 2018 and 2021, after a period of historically high crab abundance and a series of marine heatwaves, the population of snow crab in the Bering Sea declined by 10 billion. Szuwalksi et al. used survey data to model the potential drivers of the decline in this ecologically and commercially important species. They found that the temperature of the water was not above the species’ thermal limits, but it did increase their caloric needs considerably (see the Perspective by Kruse). This increase, in conjunction with a restriction in range, led to an unexpected mass starvation event. —Sacha Vignieri. See also Are crabs in hot water? by GORDON H. KRUSE. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 7.

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2023-10-17. Lack of ambition and attention risks making electricity grids the weak link in clean energy transitions. [https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-grids-and-secure-energy-transitions] By International Energy Agency (IEA). Excerpt: First-of-its-kind global study finds the world must add or replace 80 million km of grids by 2040, equal to all grids globally today, to meet national climate targets and support energy security. …Achieving all national climate and energy goals will require adding or replacing 80 million kilometres of power lines by 2040 – an amount equal to the entire existing global grid – according to a detailed country-by-country analysis carried out for the report. Major changes to how grids operate and are regulated are also essential, while annual investment in grids, which has remained broadly stagnant, needs to double to more than USD 600 billion a year by 2030…. See also the Oct 19 article US invests $3.5 billion to bolster power grid, deploy clean energy by Timothy Gardner, Reuters. For GSS Energy Use chapter 5.

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2023-10-16. Blood Memory–The American Buffalo. [https://www.pbs.org/video/american-buffalo-episode-1-blood-memory/] Documentary By Ken Burns. Description: For untold generations, America’s national mammal sustained the lives of Native people, whose cultures were intertwined with the animal. Newcomers to the continent bring a different view of the natural world, and the buffalo are driven to the brink of extinction…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 2.

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2023-10-16. Amazon River falls to lowest in over a century amid Brazil drought. [https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/amazon-rainforest-port-records-lowest-water-level-121-years-amid-drought-2023-10-16/] By Bruno Kelly and Jake Spring, Reuters. Excerpt: Rapidly drying tributaries to the mighty Amazon have left boats stranded, cutting off food and water supplies to remote villages, while high water temperatures are suspected of killing more than 100 endangered river dolphins. …The port of Manaus …recorded 13.59 meters (44.6 ft) of water on Monday compared to 17.60 a year ago, according to its website. That is the lowest level since records began in 1902, passing a previous all-time low set in 2010. …Some areas of the Amazon have seen the least rain from July to September since 1980, according to the Brazilian government disaster alert center, Cemaden. …Brazil’s Science Ministry blames the drought on this year’s onset of the El Nino climate phenomenon, which is driving extreme weather patterns globally. In a statement earlier this month, the ministry said it expects the drought will last until at least December, when El Nino’s effects are forecast to peak…. For GSS A New World View chapter 5.

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2023-10-00. . [] By . Excerpt: … For GSS chapter .

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2023-10-14. ‘It was a plague’: Killarney becomes first Irish town to ban single-use coffee cups. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/14/it-was-a-plague-killarney-becomes-first-irish-town-to-ban-single-use-coffee-cups] By Rory Carroll, The Guardian. Excerpt: Killarney used to accept it as a price of being a tourist town: ubiquitous disposable coffee cups spilling from bins, littering roads and blighting the area’s national park. The County Kerry town went through about 23,000 cups a week – more than a million a year – adding up to 18.5 tonnes of waste. Not any more. Three months ago, Killarney became the first town in Ireland to phase out single-use coffee cups. If you want a takeaway coffee from a cafe or hotel, you must bring your own cup or pay a €2 deposit for a reusable cup that is returned when the cup is given back. The results are evident in bins, which now seldom overflow, and on streets and forest trails where it is rare to see abandoned cups…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 7.

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2023-10-13. NASA launches spacecraft to a mysterious metal-rich asteroid. [https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-launches-spacecraft-mysterious-metal-rich-asteroid] By MICHAEL GRESHKO, Science. Excerpt: …a $1.2 billion NASA mission to Psyche launched today. …Psyche will be the first to rendezvous with an “M-type” asteroid: a group of unusually reflective and dense asteroids. For decades, scientists have wondered whether Psyche could be the denuded metal core of a larger protoplanet. …Once the spacecraft arrives at Psyche in 2029, it will spend more than 2 years in orbit…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-10-13. Recycling is about to get much easier. [https://www.axios.com/2023/10/13/qr-codes-recycling-smartlabel-recycle-check] By Jennifer A. Kingson, AXIOS. Excerpt: QR codes with hyperlocal recycling instructions will soon show up on your milk cartons, ice cream tubs and more — meaning you’ll be able to scan an item, type in your ZIP code and see if it’s eligible to go in the blue bin. “Just because a product says it’s recyclable, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s recyclable where you live,” notes Rishi Banerjee, director of the Consumer Brands Association’s SmartLabel program. …60% of consumers are confused about what and how to recycle, according to The Recycling Partnership, a national nonprofit — depressing the already-low recycling law compliance rate. …Recycle Check, a new program run by The Recycling Partnership, launched earlier this year and is busy signing up consumer brands to add local recycling info to their packaging via QR codes. …Two early adopters are General Mills (maker of Yoplait, Pillsbury, Chex, Betty Crocker, etc.) and Horizon Organics, which makes dairy products…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 7.

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2023-10-13. I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/opinion/climate-change-excessive-heat-2023.html] By Zeke Hausfather, The New York Times Opinion piece. Excerpt: Data from Berkeley Earth released on Wednesday shows that September was an astounding 0.5 degree Celsius (almost a full degree Fahrenheit) hotter than the prior record, …. …while many experts have been cautious about acknowledging it, there is increasing evidence that global warming has accelerated over the past 15 years rather than continued at a gradual, steady pace…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 4.

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2023-10-13. U.S. hands out $7 billion for hydrogen hubs. [https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-hands-out-7-billion-hydrogen-hubs] By KATHERINE BOURZAC, Science. Excerpt: President Joe Biden’s administration today announced $7 billion in funding for seven regional “hubs” to produce hydrogen, which produces water as exhaust when combusted. If made cleanly, hydrogen could help fight global warming by replacing fossil fuels in the fertilizer and steel industries, and in tricky-to-electrify vehicles such as long-haul trucks. …Hydrogen has had a “chicken and egg” problem, says Keith Wipke, program manager for fuel cell vehicles at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Nobody will start large-scale production until there are customers,” he says. And customers are reluctant to switch to hydrogen without a steady and cheap supply of the gas. “It’s the same story as we’ve seen with solar and wind. The more you build, the cheaper it becomes,” says Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-10-12. One million (paper) satellites. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi4639] By ANDREW FALLE, EWAN WRIGHT, AARON BOLEY, AND MICHAEL BYERS, Science. Abstract: The occupation of Earth orbits by large constellations of satellites has received considerable attention in recent years. About 4500 Starlink and 630 OneWeb satellites are on orbit as of July 2023 (1), but this is only the beginning. Recent filings for radio spectrum with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) suggest that a dramatic increase in satellite numbers is possible, much more than the tens of thousands often reported. Constellations much larger than SpaceX’s Starlink have been filed, including a 337,320-satellite constellation named Cinnamon-937 that was filed in September 2021. By treating orbital space as an unlimited resource, humanity is creating serious safety and longterm sustainability challenges to the use of low Earth orbit (LEO), including science conducted from space and the ground. The ITU filings are the warning, and also part of the solution. There is urgent need for the ITU and its member states to adopt meaningful controls…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 2.

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2023-10-06. Plants Worldwide Reach a Stomata Stalemate. [https://eos.org/articles/plants-worldwide-reach-a-stomata-stalemate] By Emily Shepherd, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The underside of a leaf is equipped with many thousands of stomata—microscopic pores that act as pathways for carbon dioxide and water vapor. As climate change causes temperatures to rise, stomata are narrowing, reducing plants’ ability to take in carbon, according to a new study published in Science…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 5.

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2023-10-04. Why China’s clean energy tech will determine our climate future. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2395586-why-chinas-clean-energy-tech-will-determine-our-climate-future/] By James Dinneen, New Scientist. Excerpt: As the world’s biggest carbon emitter and the largest producer of clean energy tech, China is crucial to our climate future, …. In 2023, which will be a record year for global development of renewable energy, more than half of all new wind and solar capacity is set to be installed in China. It is also adding more new nuclear power and hydropower than anywhere else, and in August overtook Europe as the largest builder of offshore wind. In June, two years ahead of schedule, fossil fuels made up less than half of China’s electricity generating capacity, though coal remains a big and growing part of its energy mix. …China boasts record adoption of electric vehicles too, with these making up more than a fifth of all new vehicles sold in China in 2022, as well as the world’s largest high-speed train system. …All of this gives observers confidence that China will, at the very least, be able to meet its near-term target of reaching peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 or earlier. …One report from Norwegian research firm Rystad Energy has even projected that China’s emissions from burning fossil fuels could peak as soon as this year, and fall 10 per cent by 2030. …China now makes at least 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-10-06. The American Buffalo. [https://www.pbs.org/show/the-american-buffalo] By PBS. Excerpt: The American Buffalo, a new two-part, four-hour series, takes viewers on a journey through more than 10,000 years of North American history and across some of the continent’s most iconic landscapes, tracing the animal’s evolution, significance to the Great Plains, near demise, and relationship to the Indigenous People of North America…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 2.

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2023-10-05. How to build a heat-resilient city. [https://grist.org/project/cities/extreme-heat-resilient-city-design-urban-planning-climate/] By Jake Bittle & Naveena Sadasivam, Grist. Excerpt: As climate change fuels a succession of historic heat waves, the urban heat island effect in many American cities is pushing the limits of human survivability. That’s the case in desert cities like Phoenix, where temperatures crested 110 degrees F for 30 straight days this summer, and also in cooler climes like Chicago, which has seen a series of scalding triple-digit weeks over the past few months. Dealing with this type of heat requires more than isolated interventions — reflective roofs here or mist machines there. …Drawing on feedback from climate experts, architects, and urban planners, …Grist set out to design a city built from scratch to handle extreme heat, all while reducing carbon emissions. City Centers: SHADED STRUCTURES, TREES, MISTERS, COOL PAVEMENT, REFLECTIVE GLASS, GREEN WALLS. Residential Areas: WINDOW FILMS AND AWNINGS, COOLING TOWERS, REFLECTIVE SURFACES, COVERED PLAYGROUNDS. Commercial Zones: WASTE HEAT CAPTURE, BUFFER ZONES, PUBLIC TRANSIT, SOLAR PANELS ON PARKING, GREEN ROOFS AND WALLS, … For GSS Energy Use chapter 8.

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2023-10-05. New technology uses good old-fashioned wind to power giant cargo vessels. [https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1200788439/wind-power-cargo-ships-carbon-emissions] By Scott Neuman, NPR. Excerpt: Well over a century after the Age of Sail gave way to coal- and oil-burning ships, climate change concerns are prompting a new look at an old technology that could once again harness wind to propel commercial cargo ships — this time with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Imagine what looks like Boeing 747 wings with movable flaps, set vertically on a ship’s deck. The vessel cruises under minimum power from its giant engine as computerized sensors adjust the fiberglass wings to take advantage of the wind’s speed and direction. This wind-assisted propulsion saves a substantial amount of fuel and reduces the carbon belching from the ship’s stack. Many experts think the idea has the potential to navigate the notoriously dirty shipping industry toward a greener future. …About 90% of the world’s goods — everything from soybeans to sneakers — are transported by sea. The tens of thousands of ships used to get these goods to global markets account for an estimated 3% of the world’s carbon emissions each year, a figure that exceeds Japan’s annual emissions. Left unchecked, the shipping industry’s greenhouse gas emissions are expected to grow 50% by 2050…. See also New York Times article In Shipping, a Push to Slash Emissions by Harnessing the Wind. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-10-05. Preventing Heat-Related Illness among Outdoor Workers — Opportunities for Clinicians and Policymakers. [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2307850] By Rosemary K. Sokas, M.D., M.O.H.,  and Emily Senay, M.D., M.P.H., New England Journal of Medicine. Excerpt: Efforts to implement heat-safety protections for workers are falling short. Given these gaps, clinicians can help support their patients who may be at risk for heat-related illness. [Hear 14 min interview with first author Rosemary Sokas] See also New York Times article Workers Exposed to Extreme Heat Have Few Protections. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-05. James Webb telescope makes ‘JuMBO’ discovery of planet-like objects in Orion. [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66974738] By Jonathan Amos, The Guardian. Excerpt: Jupiter-sized “planets” free-floating in space, unconnected to any star, have been spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). What’s intriguing about the discovery is that these objects appear to be moving in pairs. Astronomers are currently struggling to explain them. The telescope observed about 40 pairs in a fabulously detailed new survey of the famous Orion Nebula. They’ve been nicknamed Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or “JuMBOs” for short. …”Gas physics suggests you shouldn’t be able to make objects with the mass of Jupiter on their own, and we know single planets can get kicked out from star systems. But how do you kick out pairs of these things together? Right now, we don’t have an answer. It’s one for the theoreticians,” the European Space Agency’s (Esa) senior science adviser told BBC News…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 8.

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2023-10-05. Independent age estimates resolve the controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5007] By JEFFREY S. PIGATI et al, Science. Excerpt: Traditionally, researchers believed that humans arrived in North America around 16,000 to 13,000 years ago. Recently, however, evidence has accumulated supporting a much earlier date. In 2021, fossilized footprints from White Sands National Park in New Mexico were dated to between 20,000 and 23,000 years ago, providing key evidence for earlier occupation, although this finding was controversial. Pigati et al. returned to the White Sands footprints and obtained new dates from multiple, highly reliable sources (see the Perspective by Philippsen). They, too, resolved dates of 20,000 to 23,000 years ago, reconfirming that humans were present far south of the ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum. —Sacha Vignieri…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 10.

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2023-10-04. Study of 17,000 years of fish fossils reveals rapid evolution. [https://www.science.org/content/article/study-17-000-years-fish-fossils-reveals-rapid-evolution] By ELIZABETH PENNISI, Science. Excerpt: When a new island or lake appears, the plants and animals that get there first have a leg up on later arrivals and are more likely to diversify into new species—or so evolutionary biologists have long assumed. But a study of fossils from East Africa’s Lake Victoria shows that it takes more than arriving early to win the speciation race. Although several kinds of fish colonized this lake around the same time, only cichlids took off, forming 500 species in less than 17,000 years, the team reports today in Nature. …The findings suggest opportunity and versatility matter more than primacy, adds George Turner, an evolutionary biologist and cichlid fish expert at Bangor University who was also not involved. Most cases of adaptive radiation, wherein one species gives rise to many more, took place over millions of years, making it nearly impossible for scientists to figure out why that one colonizing species became so successful. But the extreme diversity within a group of fish called cichlids began to arise a mere 17,000 years ago, when the modern version of Lake Victoria began to fill where today the borders of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania meet. Now 500 species strong—each inhabiting a particular niche within the lake—this group’s evolution represents “the most rapid radiation event known among vertebrates,” says Nare Ngoepe, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bern…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 3.

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2023-10-03. Monarch butterfly is not endangered, conservation authority decides. [https://www.science.org/content/article/monarch-butterfly-not-endangered-conservation-authority-decides] By DENNIS NORMILE, Science. Excerpt: In an unusual reversal, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has decided North America’s monarch butterfly is not “endangered.” Instead, the insect is only “vulnerable” to extinction, the group said last week—adding that it could lower the alarm still further, changing the listing to “near threatened” if an upcoming census suggests the population is stable or growing. The 27 September decision followed a researcher’s challenge to population models an IUCN team used to justify the endangered designation, conferred just 14 months ago. The team committed a “scientific injustice” by ignoring data showing monarchs are “doing really well,” argued ecologist Andrew Davis of the University of Georgia. IUCN’s shift marks the latest twist in a scientific debate over the health of the showy black and orange insect. Monarchs are found worldwide, but the North American subspecies, called the migratory monarch (Danaus plexippus plexippus), has become “a poster child of species conservation because of its awesome ecology and migration,” says ecologist Anurag Agrawal of Cornell University, who was not involved in IUCN’s assessment or the challenge…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 1.

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2023-10-03. Tree-planting schemes threaten tropical biodiversity, ecologists say. [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/03/carbon-tree-planting-schemes-threaten-tropical-biodiversity-aoe] By Patrick Greenfield, The Guardian. Excerpt: Monoculture tree-planting schemes are threatening tropical biodiversity while only offering modest climate benefit, ecologists have said, warning that ecosystems like the Amazon and Congo basin are being reduced to their carbon value. Amid a boom in the planting of single-species plantations to capture carbon, scientists have urged governments to prioritise the conservation and restoration of native forests over commercial monocultures, and cautioned that planting swathes of non-native trees in tropical regions threatens important flora and fauna for a negligible climate impact. Writing in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, ecologists said the increasing popularity of commercial pine, eucalyptus and teak plantations in the tropics for carbon offsetting is having unintended consequences, such as drying out native ecosystems, acidifying soils, crowding out native plants and turbocharging wildfires. “Despite the broad range of ecosystem functions and services provided by tropical ecosystems, society has reduced the value of these ecosystems to just one metric – carbon,” the paper reads. “It is broadly assumed that maximising standing carbon stocks also benefits biodiversity, ecosystem function and enhances socioeconomic co-benefits – yet this is often not the case.”… For GSS A New World View chapter 5.

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2023-10-02. Arctic Ice Loss Could Shorten Winter Feeding Time for Zooplankton. [https://eos.org/articles/arctic-ice-loss-could-shorten-winter-feeding-time-for-zooplankton] By Veronika Meduna, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Hauke …Flores, a polar ecologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, has coauthored a study warning that ongoing ice loss in the Arctic could force copepods and other zooplankton to stay at depth for longer, cutting their winter feeding time by up to a month. The Arctic has been losing sea ice at a rate of almost 13% per decade since the start of satellite monitoring. As ice floes shrink and thin, more sunlight reaches deeper into the ocean. …“Any negative repercussions for the zooplankton will have impacts on the whole food web because the zooplankton is the switch that transmits the carbon to higher predators,” he explained…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-10-01. Maybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and Then Mars. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/realestate/nasa-homes-moon-3-d-printing.html] By Debra Kamin, The New York Times. Excerpt: …NASA is going to build houses on the moon — ones that can be used not just by astronauts but ordinary civilians as well. They believe that by 2040, Americans will have their first subdivision in space. Living on Mars isn’t far behind. Some in the scientific community say NASA’s timeline is overly ambitious, particularly before a proven success with a new lunar landing. But seven NASA scientists interviewed for this article all said that a 2040 goal for lunar structures is attainable if the agency can continue to hit their benchmarks. The U.S. space agency will blast a 3-D printer up to the moon and then build structures, layer by additive layer, out of a specialized lunar concrete created from the rock chips, mineral fragments and dust that sits on the top layer of the moon’s cratered surface and billows in poisonous clouds whenever disturbed — a moonshot of a plan made possible through new technology and partnerships with universities and private companies…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 2.

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2023-09-30. Where German Cars Falter, E-Bikes Gain in Power. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/30/world/europe/germany-ebikes-transportation.html] By Melissa Eddy, The New York Times. Excerpt: Germany’s automakers are facing steep challenges as they convert to battery-powered lineups and confront rising competition from China. But business is booming in another corner of the German transport industry: e-bikes. Sales of bicycles in Germany reached a record 7.36 billion euros, or $7.8 billion, in 2022, with e-bikes accounting for nearly half of sales, according to the German Bicycle Industry Association. The group is forecasting that this year, for the first time, Germans will buy more e-bikes than conventional models. Electric bicycles and scooters are the backbone of what’s known as micromobility, seen as crucial to cutting the carbon emissions of transportation and helping to ease pollution and congestion in European cities…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-09-28. Low-Tech, Energy-Free Tool Collects and Cleans Fog Water. [https://eos.org/articles/low-tech-energy-free-tool-collects-and-cleans-fog-water] By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Communities in some regions of the world lack easy access to clean fresh water, some due to their remote locations, some to insufficient or damaged infrastructure, and others to changing climate conditions. People in these regions often rely on alternate methods of gathering fresh water, such as harvesting rain, dew, vapor, and fog—but that water can be polluted and dangerous to use. Now, an innovative update to a tried-and-true method of harvesting fog water can purify it, too. Researchers developed and tested how well a polymer-based coating on a metal mesh collected water that had been contaminated with organic pollutants. They found that not only did the coated mesh outperform existing fog harvesters, but also the coating purified the water by 91%, producing nearly pure water without requiring any power…. See also NPR article Harvesting water from fog and air in Kenya with jerrycans and newfangled machines. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-08-15. An ultra-light sustainable sponge for elimination of microplastics and nanoplastics. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304389423009688] By Jianxin Fu et al, Journal of Hazardous Materials. Abstract: The currently established tools and materials for elimination of the emerging contaminants from environmental and food matrices, particularly micro- and nano-scale plastics, have been largely limited by complicated preparation/operation, high cost, and poor degradability. Here we show that, crosslinking naturally occurring corn starch and gelatin produces ultralight porous sponge upon freeze-drying that can be readily enzymatically decomposed to glucose; The sponge affords capture of micro- and nano-scale plastics into its pores by simple pressing in an efficiency up to 90% while preserving excellent mechanical strength. …Investigations into the performance of the sponge in complex matrices including tap water, sea water, soil surfactant, and take-out dish soup, further reveal a considerably high removal efficiency (60%∼70%) for the microplastics in the real samples. …With combined merits of sustainability, cost-effectiveness, and simple operation without the need for professional background for this approach, industrial and even household removal of tiny plastic contaminants from environmental and food samples are within reach…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 7.

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2023-10-00. . [] By . Excerpt: … For GSS chapter .

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2023-09-28. Chemical cages could store hydrogen, expand use of clean-burning fuel. [https://www.science.org/content/article/chemical-cages-could-store-hydrogen-expand-use-clean-burning-fuel] By ROBERT F. SERVICE, Science. Excerpt: Cheap molecular “sponges” made with aluminum can be low-pressure gas tanks. Hydrogen seems like the perfect fuel. By weight it packs more punch than any other fuel. It can be made from water, meaning supply is almost limitless, in principle. And when burned or run through a fuel cell, it generates energy without any carbon pollution. But hydrogen takes up enormous volume, making it impractical to store. Compressing it helps, but is expensive and essentially turns hydrogen storage tanks into high-pressure explosives. Now, a molecular sponge made of organic compounds and cheap aluminum promises a practical solution, holding significant amounts of hydrogen at low pressures. Described in a paper accepted last week at the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), it is the latest in a series of promising metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and it suggests that the materials could be close to a mass market application, serving as fuel depots for backup power sources at industrial operations…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-09-28. HEAT-PROOFING INDIA. [https://www.science.org/content/article/ferociously-hot-weather-could-make-some-cities-unlivable-low-tech-solutions-can-help] By VAISHNAVI CHANDRASHEKHAR, Science. Excerpt: MUMBAI, INDIA …Before the monsoon rains arrive, temperatures can top 37°C, with humidity at a sweltering 95%. …Sometimes, Mumbai’s heat becomes deadly. In April, on a day the temperature reached 36°C, 11 people sitting through an hourslong outdoor ceremony died from heat stroke. At least 20 others were hospitalized. …It wasn’t until 2015 that officials designated heat waves as a natural disaster at the national level. …heat action plans, or HAPs, have been proliferating in India in the past few years. In general, an HAP spells out when and how officials should issue heat warnings and alert hospitals and other institutions. …IN THE LONG RUN, cooling India’s cities will mean changing the way they are built. One possibility is to look to the past, when structures were designed to insulate people from their local climates. …In Nagpur, Kotharkar likes to show her students—and visiting reporters—a one-story, 300-year-old mansion in Mahal. It is built of brick, stone, and wood, not the concrete and plastics that make nearby modern apartment blocks absorb and radiate heat. The walls are thick, delaying heat gain. …FOR MANY LOW-INCOME Indians living in cities, the possibility of moving to a newly constructed, climate-resilient residence is remote. That is why some groups are retrofitting existing homes. The most popular retrofit involves covering roofs with white reflective paint…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 8.

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2023-09-26. AN UNHEALTHY CLIMATE. [https://www.science.org/content/article/heat-and-disease-will-exact-heavy-toll-climate-warms] Collection of articles in Science. Excerpt: …the stories in this special package will explore the threats, and how we can minimize them. Vector-borne diseases are a special worry. A warmer climate favors the mosquito that spreads dengue and may already be fueling a worldwide surge in the debilitating disease. Warming may also have enabled malaria-carrying mosquitoes to flourish in Africa’s cooler highlands and ticks that carry Lyme disease to advance northward. Migratory birds, which ferry cargoes of pathogens such as West Nile virus and influenza across continents, are changing the timing and routes of their journeys, with consequences that have yet to emerge. Then there are the direct effects of heat on the human body. The worsening toll of heat waves is unmistakable, with thousands dying every summer, but researchers are also discerning subtler impacts. Among the most vulnerable to extreme heat are pregnant people and their fetuses. Here are the articles (For GSS Climate Change chapter 8):

• FEELING THE HEAT (Warming is making many places more suitable for the dengue-carrying mosquito Aedes aegypti. By FERNANDO DA CUNHA)
• FLIGHT RISKS (Migratory birds efficiently ferry pathogens around the world. As a warming climate reshapes their journeys, infectious disease experts are on guard for new threats to humans)
• LURKING IN THE DEEP FREEZE? (Climate change may release dangerous pathogens frozen for centuries in Arctic permafrost, By JON COHEN)
• EXPECTING EXTREMES (Intense heat is a particular hazard in pregnancy. New studies are probing why. By MEREDITH WADMAN)

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2023-09-26. If earthworms were a country, they’d be the world’s fourth largest producer of grain. [https://www.science.org/content/article/if-earthworms-were-country-they-d-be-world-s-fourth-largest-producer-grain] By ERIK STOKSTAD, Science. Excerpt: According to the first worldwide estimate of the invertebrates’ contribution to crop yields, earthworms add more than 140 million tons of food each year. For wheat harvests alone, that’s roughly equivalent to one slice in every loaf of bread. Earthworms do many things to make soil more fertile. By feeding on dead plant matter, they release nutrients much faster than soil microbes would by themselves. They also improve the physical structure of soil. As worms digest plant matter, they excrete tiny, stable clumps of particles. Together with the earthworm burrows, these aggregates make soil more porous. This allows rainwater to soak in and enables roots to grow more easily. …To calculate how much these silent soil engineers augment food production worldwide, Steven Fonte, a soil and agroecosystem ecologist at Colorado State University, and colleagues combined a global atlas of earthworm abundance with maps of agricultural harvests. They also factored in previous estimates of their enhancement of plant productivity. The team found that earthworms are responsible for nearly 7% of global grain harvests, such as rice, wheat, and corn. The contribution is smaller—about 2%—for legumes, including soybeans and lentils, because these crops can cooperate with microbes to produce their own nitrogen and are therefore less reliant on the worms to make that nutrient available…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 5.

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2023-09-26. A new climate change report offers something unique: hope. [https://www.npr.org/2023/09/26/1201781387/climate-change-emissions-report-offers-hope] By Jeff Brady, NPR. Excerpt: Countries are setting records in deploying climate-friendly technologies, such as solar power and electric vehicles, according to a new International Energy Agency report. The agency, which represents countries that make up more than 80% of global energy consumption, projects demand for coal, oil and natural gas will peak before 2030. While greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, the IEA finds that there’s still a path to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s what’s needed to avoid the the worst effects of climate change, such as catastrophic flooding and deadly heatwaves. …overall message is more optimistic than the one issued in 2021, when the IEA released its first Net Zero Roadmap. In addition to optimism, the 2023 version shows that the transition from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy will have to speed up even more in the coming decade. For example, the world is on track to spend $1.8 trillion on clean energy this year. To meet the target outlined in the 2015 Paris climate agreement among the world’s nations, the IEA finds annual spending would have to more than double to $4.5 trillion by the early 2030s…. See also article in Axios. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-09-25. Oceans of Opportunity. [https://eos.org/agu-news/oceans-of-opportunity] By Caryl-Sue Micalizio, Eos/AGU. Our solar system’s ocean worlds—planets and moons covered in ice-crusted oceans—are weird, wonderful, and ripe for exploration. [Here are a series of articles] Uranus: A Time to Boldly Go by Kimberly Cartier; Marine Science Goes to Space by Damond Benningfield on how ocean worlds are redefining what constitutes a habitable zone and how missions in development, like JUICE and Europa Clipper, are relying on terrestrial deep-sea scientific advances to look for oceanic activity that’s out of this world. …older missions are still contributing to the discourse, as archival Cassini data helped scientists identify phosphorus—the rarest element necessary for life as we know it—on Enceladus. …Erik Klemetti explores Cryovolcanism’s Song of Ice and Fire…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-09-25. Air Force eyes supply missions for its first electric air taxi. [https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/09/air-force-eyes-future-logistics-missions-its-first-electric-air-taxi/390614/] By BY AUDREY DECKER, Defense One. Excerpt: Joby Aviation delivered its battery-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to Edwards AFB in California. The U.S. Air Force will soon begin testing how it will use battery-powered planes to transport people and cargo. …The aircraft holds one pilot and four passengers, can carry a payload of up to 1,000 pounds, and flies at speeds up to 200 miles per hour, said Greg Bowles, head of government affairs for Joby. It will primarily fly missions between 25 to 50 miles, “but the aircraft has the capability to do a lot more than that,” Bowles told Defense One on Friday. If the Air Force decides to use the aircraft in operations, it could be to fly cargo and personnel short distances in the Pacific. The Joby aircraft could be helpful within “some of the island clusters that don’t have those large ranges,” said Col. Tom Meagher, AFWERX Prime Division Chief. “Some of the possible long-time use cases are just-in-time parts, people to repair aircraft. Think of it kind of like a hub-and-spoke type of logistics scenario,” Meagher said…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-09-25. ‘Monster Fracks’ Are Getting Far Bigger. And Far Thirstier. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/25/climate/fracking-oil-gas-wells-water.html] By Hiroko Tabuchi and Blacki Migliozzi, The New York Times. Excerpt: Giant new oil and gas wells that require astonishing volumes of water to fracture bedrock are threatening America’s fragile aquifers. …energy giants are drilling not just for oil, but for the water they need. …Along a parched stretch of La Salle County, Texas, workers last year dug some 700 feet deep into the ground, seeking freshwater. Millions of gallons of it. The water wouldn’t supply homes or irrigate farms. It was being used by the petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped right back underground — forcing oil and gas from the bedrock. …Fracking a single oil or gas well can now use as much as 40 million gallons of water or more. These mega fracking projects, called “monster fracks” by researchers, have become the industry norm. They barely existed a decade ago. Now they account for almost two out of every three fracking wells in Texas…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 3.

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2023-09-25. Inside the Great British Seaweed Race to Save the Earth. [https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-great-british-seaweed-race-to-save-the-earth] By Charlotte Lytton, Daily Beast. Excerpt: …97 percent of seaweed farming currently happens in Asia, British companies are looking to muscle in on the $13.3 billion industry. …A 2021 study from the University of California, Davis found that mixing a small amount of seaweed into cow feed over five months reduced Earth-polluting methane emissions by 82 percent—making it a potential green goldmine…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-09-24. NASA delivers bounty of asteroid samples to Earth. [https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-delivers-bounty-asteroid-samples-earth] By PAUL VOOSEN, Science. Excerpt: …today, after detaching from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, a capsule carrying asteroid samples descended gently by parachute before touching down in the Utah desert. The cupful of pebbles and grit it delivered—the culmination of 7 years of effort and $1 billion of expense—is only the third sample of an asteroid ever returned to Earth, and it’s the largest haul of extraterrestrial material NASA has collected since the Apollo Moon missions. …In 2020, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft returned some 5 grams of material from Ryugu, another carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid, which was thought to be relatively dry. Instead, it appears to have been fully altered by water. “We were all terribly wrong about Ryugu,” says Edward Young, a cosmochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles. …If they are wrong about Bennu, it will be the opposite mistake. Remote observations suggest some 10% of Bennu’s mass is made up of water locked in clays. …As it orbited Bennu, OSIRIS-REx glimpsed another sign of a watery past: meter-long veins of carbonate, a mineral that precipitates out of solution. The water may have flowed on Bennu’s parent body, which likely formed beyond Jupiter’s orbit, at the Solar System’s very beginning 4.56 billion years ago. See also NASA OSIRIS-Rex overview and science briefing videos…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-09-22. For Many Big Food Companies, Emissions Head in the Wrong Direction. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/business/food-companies-emissions-climate-pledges.html] By Julie Creswell, The New York Times. Excerpt: Five years ago McDonald’s said it planned to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third in parts of its operations by 2030. A few years later, it pledged to be “net zero” — cutting emissions to as close to zero as possible — by 2050. But in its most recent report, McDonald’s disclosed that things were moving in the wrong direction: The company’s emissions in 2021 were 12 percent higher than its 2015 baseline. McDonald’s is hardly alone. An examination of various climate-related reports and filings for 20 of the world’s largest food and restaurant companies reveals that more than half have not made any progress on their emissions reduction goals or have reported rising emissions levels. The bulk of emissions — in many cases more than 90 percent — come from the companies’ supply chains. In other words, the cows and wheat used to make burgers and cereal…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-08-30. Hydrothermal enrichment of lithium in intracaldera illite-bearing claystones. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh8183] By THOMAS R. BENSON, MATTHEW A. COBLE, and JOHN H. DILLES, Science. Excerpt: Developing a sustainable supply chain for the global proliferation of lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles and grid storage necessitates the extraction of lithium resources that minimize local environmental impacts. Volcano sedimentary lithium resources have the potential to meet this requirement, as they tend to be shallow, high-tonnage deposits with low waste…. Illite-bearing Miocene lacustrine sediments within the southern portion of McDermitt caldera (USA) at Thacker Pass [Nevada] contain extremely high lithium grades (up to ~1 weight % of Li), more than double the whole-rock concentration of lithium in smectite-rich claystones in the caldera and other known claystone lithium resources globally (<0.4 weight % of Li). Illite concentrations measured in situ range from ~1.3 to 2.4 weight % of Li within fluorine-rich illitic claystones…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-09-00. . [] By . Excerpt: … For GSS chapter .

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2023-09-21. White House directs agencies to consider climate costs in purchases, budgets. [https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4217336-white-house-directs-agencies-to-consider-climate-costs-in-purchases-budgets/] By  RACHEL FRAZIN, The Hill. Excerpt: The White House is directing agencies to account for climate costs in purchasing decisions and budget proposals. The White House said in a Thursday fact sheet that agencies should weigh the costs of potential climate damages as they make purchases and put together budget proposals. …A source briefed on the directive told The Hill that they expect it to also expand the use of climate accounting in environmental reviews for infrastructure projects. “It’s a way to balance climate effects against other economic effects,” said Max Sarinksy, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. For example, he said, the “social cost of carbon offers even stronger support for the purchase of electric vehicles because you would add the climate cost savings to the budgetary cost savings.” The White House’s decision specifically directs agencies to use what are known as the social costs of greenhouse gasses — which quantify in a dollar amount the climate costs of an action —  to make these decisions. These costs are already used in some federal decisions like rulemaking…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

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2023-09-21. The distribution of CO₂ on Europa indicates an internal source of carbon. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg4155] By SAMANTHA K. TRUMBO AND MICHAEL E. BROWN, Science. Excerpt: [Editor’s summary:] Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, has a subsurface ocean beneath a crust of water ice. Solid carbon dioxide (CO₂) has previously been observed on its surface, but the source was unknown. Two teams analyzed infrared spectroscopy of Europa from the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate the CO₂ source. Trumbo and Brown found that the CO₂ is concentrated in a region with geology that indicates transport of material to the surface from within the moon, and they discuss the implications for the composition of Europa’s internal ocean. Villanueva et al. also identified an internal origin of the CO₂ and measured its ¹²C/¹³C isotope ratio. They searched for plumes of volatile material breaching the surface but found a lower activity than earlier observations. Together, these studies demonstrate that there is a source of carbon within Europa, probably in its ocean. —Keith T. Smith…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-09-20. How much stuff does it take to not be poor? About 6 tons per year. [https://www.science.org/content/article/how-much-stuff-does-it-take-not-be-poor-about-6-tons-year] By ERIK STOKSTAD, Science. Excerpt: How much stuff do people need to lead a decent life? It’s a hard, and subjective, question. But researchers have now estimated for the first time what it takes, quantitatively speaking, to keep one person out of abject poverty: about 6 tons per year of food, fuel, clothing, and other supplies, researchers report this month in Environmental Science & Technology. …The study comes as the United Nations wrestled this week with exactly that daunting challenge. The U.N. is trying to kick-start progress on its Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 grand ambitions that include ending poverty worldwide by 2030, while also preventing environmental degradation and fighting climate change. Fossil fuels get a lot of attention in this debate, but raw materials such as cement, metal, timber, and grain are also important because their production and refining contributes about 23% of carbon emissions and more than 90% of biodiversity loss…. For GSS Population Growth chapter 5.

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2023-09-20. Worms with spider genes spin silk tougher than bulletproof Kevlar. [https://www.science.org/content/article/worms-spider-genes-spin-silk-tougher-bulletproof-kevlar] By KATHERINE BOURZAC, Science. Excerpt: …researchers have used gene editing to make silkworms that can spin spider fibers tougher than the Kevlar used in bulletproof vests. The material, described today in Matter, is “a really high-performance fiber,” says Justin Jones, a biologist who engineers spider silks at Utah State University but who was not involved with the research. It could be used to make lightweight but tough structural materials for fuel-efficient planes and cars, he says, wound dressings for faster healing, and superthin but tough sutures for eye surgeries. …researchers have tried for years to genetically engineer silkworms to make spider fibers. But spider silk proteins are large, and the correspondingly large genes have been difficult to insert in the genomes of other animals. So in the new study, Junpeng Mi, a biotechnologist at Donghua University, and colleagues chose to work with a relatively small spider silk protein. Called MiSp, it’s found in Araneus ventricosus, an orb-weaving spider found in East Asia. The scientists used CRISPR to insert MiSp in place of the gene in silkworms that codes for their primary silk protein. But the scientists retained some silkworm sequences in their MiSp gene construct, Mi says, in order to ensure the worm’s internal machinery could still work with the spider protein…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4.

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2023-09-19. Climate change exacerbates deadly floods in Libya and worldwide. [https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199273629/climate-change-exacerbates-deadly-floods-worldwide] By Rebecca Hersher,  Lauren Sommer, NPR. Excerpt: Catastrophic floods in eastern Libya killed at least 3,958 people, according to the United Nations. The disaster comes after a string of deadly floods around the world this month, from China to Brazil to Greece. In every case, extremely heavy rain was to blame. The enormous loss of life on multiple continents reinforces the profound danger posed by climate-driven rain storms, and the need for better warning systems and infrastructure to protect the most vulnerable populations. Climate change makes heavy rain more common, even in arid places where the total amount of precipitation is small. That’s because a hotter atmosphere can hold more moisture. Everyday rainstorms, as well as bigger storms such as hurricanes, are increasingly dangerous as a result. Human-caused warming made the extreme rainfall in Libya 50 times more likely to happen, according to a rapid analysis done by World Weather Attribution, a team of international climate scientists. It was also up to 50 percent more intense, compared to a climate without the added greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. The magnitude of the storm was outside the bounds of historical weather records, which means the study’s findings have more uncertainty about how strong a role climate change played…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-09-20. Hurricane Nigel, a Category 2 Storm, Is Expected to Weaken. [https://www.nytimes.com/article/tropical-storm-nigel-hurricane.html] By Judson Jones, The New York Times. Excerpt: …The Atlantic hurricane season started on June 1 and runs through Nov. 30. In late May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that there would be 12 to 17 named storms this year, a “near-normal” amount. On Aug. 10, NOAA officials revised their estimate upward, to 14 to 21 storms. …A record 30 named storms took place in 2020. This year features an El Niño pattern, which arrived in June. …it typically impedes the number of Atlantic hurricanes …increases the amount of wind shear, …. Hurricanes need a calm environment to form, and the instability caused by increased wind shear makes those conditions less likely. (El Niño has the opposite effect in the Pacific, reducing the amount of wind shear.) At the same time, this year’s heightened sea surface temperatures pose a number of threats, including the ability to supercharge storms. …There is solid consensus among scientists that hurricanes are becoming more powerful because of climate change. …Climate change is also affecting the amount of rain that storms can produce. In a warming world, the air can hold more moisture, which means a named storm can hold and produce more rainfall, like Hurricane Harvey did in Texas in 2017, when some areas received more than 40 inches of rain in less than 48 hours. …storms have slowed down, sitting over areas for longer, over the past few decades. …the amount of moisture the storm can absorb increases. …the amount of rain that falls over a single location increases; in 2019, for example, Hurricane Dorian slowed to a crawl over the northwestern Bahamas, resulting in a total rainfall of 22.84 inches in Hope Town during the storm…. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 8.

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2023-09-19. Biden’s Green Energy Money Is Sugar on a Poison Pill. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/opinion/climate-summit-2023-un.html] By Lydia Millet, Opinion Piece in New York Times. Excerpt: …federal funding for clean technologies …[is] a crucial step but brutally inadequate: If we keep drilling, pumping and using oil and gas, green-energy money will remain a sprinkling of sugar on a poison pill. …The more difficult and more essential task is to remove incentives for oil and gas companies to continue their frantic pace of production, transport and profiteering. …U.S. crude oil exports have gone up almost 850 percent since an important export ban was lifted in 2015, and in 2023 domestic oil production will hit an all-time high. Cleaning up our domestic portfolio won’t mean much if we keep shipping out dirty fuels to be combusted abroad. …Fossils are currently subsidizing conflicts from Russia’s war against Ukraine to militias in Myanmar. …while the Paris Agreement doesn’t even make mention of fossil fuels, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is now targeting them directly by welcoming only nations that will commit to no new fossil fuel development and to concrete transition and phaseout plans to speak at the climate summit. …Congress is deeply entangled with the fossil fuel industry, and in the short term will stay that way. …stop saying yes to all new oil and gas projects — including the planned Sea Port Oil Terminal off the Texas coast, intended to increase our exports — and more exploration and drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico. …stop the billions of dollars in fossil fuel financing invested abroad, which locks in decades’ worth of extraction…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-09-17. California Governor to Sign Landmark Climate Disclosure Bill. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/climate/california-climate-disclosure-law.html] By Coral Davenport, The New York Times. Excerpt: Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said that he would sign a landmark climate bill that passed the state’s legislature last week requiring major companies to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, a move with national and global repercussions. The new law will require about 5,000 companies to report the amount of greenhouse gas pollution that is directly emitted by their operations and also the amount of indirect emissions like employee travel, waste disposal and supply chains. Climate policy advocates have long argued that such disclosures are an essential first step in efforts to harness financial markets to rein in planet-warming pollution. For example, when investors are made aware of the climate-warming impacts of a company, they may choose to steer their money elsewhere. The law would apply to public and private businesses that make more than $1 billion annually and operate in California. But because the state is the world’s fifth-largest economy, California often sets the trend for the nation, and many of the affected businesses are global corporations…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

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2023-09-15. Exploring Just How Extreme Future Storms Could Get. [https://eos.org/research-spotlights/exploring-just-how-extreme-future-storms-could-get] By Sarah Stanley, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Storms that drop exceptionally high volumes of precipitation often cause flooding and otherwise imperil human safety, infrastructure, and ecosystems. As climate change progresses, such extreme events are likely to become even more intense and more frequent in many regions around the world. …Gessner et al. demonstrate a novel way to combine storm simulations with statistical approaches to better estimate how extreme future precipitation events could become. …analysis suggested that precipitation events much more intense than previously have been recorded will be possible in the near future in the region. …estimates indicating that near-future extreme events might result in precipitation volumes that are 30%–40% higher than those seen in past events. The researchers note that even higher precipitation magnitudes cannot be ruled out. …The researchers say the findings together suggest that the ensemble boosting and statistical approaches can complement each other well in efforts to estimate the intensity of future extreme events, providing a way to “stress test” the resilience of infrastructure and ecosystems in the face of such events. (Earth’s Future, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF003628, 2023)…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 7.

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2023-09-14. August 2023 was Earth’s hottest August on record. [https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/09/august-2023-was-earths-hottest-august-on-record/] By JEFF MASTERS, Yale Climate Connection. Excerpt: August 2023 smashed the record for hottest August in Earth’s history, spiking to a remarkable 1.25 degrees Celsius (2.25°F) above the 20th-century average, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information reported September 14. NASA, Berkeley Earth, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service also rated August 2023 as the warmest August on record, crushing the previous August record by a huge margin. Global temperature analyses extend back to 1850 in the NOAA database. …The period June-August 2023 (summer in the Northern Hemisphere) was the hottest on record globally by a huge margin, according to NOAA. …According to an analysis by Climate Central, 3.9 billion people across the world suffered extreme temperatures made at least three times more likely by climate change for over 30 days during the June-August period; 1.5 billion people experienced extreme temperatures at this level for all 92 days of the June-August period. About 98% of the global population was exposed to extreme heat made at least two times more likely by human-caused global warming during this period…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 4.

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2023-09-13. Eclipse Records Pin Dates of 12th and 13th Century Eruptions. [https://eos.org/articles/eclipse-records-pin-dates-of-12th-and-13th-century-eruptions] By Kate Evans, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: …ancient observations of rare dark lunar eclipses have recently taken on new importance after scientists used the records to date notable volcanic eruptions that occurred nearly a thousand years ago. The findings, published in Nature, could help answer some big questions about volcanism and climate change. …University of Geneva paleoclimatologist Sébastien Guillet …had been poring over hundreds of medieval manuscripts, searching for records of lunar eclipses that described the color of the Moon in totality. …The 12th and 13th centuries were among the most volcanically active of the past 2,500 years. Scientists know from telltale sulfate layers in Greenland and Antarctic ice cores that there were seven significant volcanic eruptions between 1108 and 1286. But only one of them—the eruption of Samalas on the island of Lombok in Indonesia in 1257—has been linked to a specific volcano or location. “These eruptions are very interesting because they happen at a quite critical moment,” Guillet said: the transition from the warm Medieval Climate Anomaly to the much colder Little Ice Age. “Did they contribute to this transition? And if so, to what extent? …The beauty of eclipses is that we know exactly when they occurred. And crucially, the color of the Moon during totality turns out to be a good proxy for whether there’s been a massive volcanic eruption lately. …Records of dark lunar eclipses showed up in 1110, 1172, 1229, 1258, and 1276, contemporaneous with five of the seven largest volcanic sulfate signals recorded in polar ice cores. …Medieval chroniclers recorded not just dark moons, but frosts, crop failures, and famines, she said. The eclipse records help to link these disruptions to large volcanic eruptions. If there is enough volcanic dust in the stratosphere to turn the eclipsing Moon black, there’s likely enough to cool the climate—something scientists can corroborate by checking tree rings for years of poor growth. …That knowledge may also help scientists to predict the effects of future volcanoes…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 12.

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2023-09-15. A Fireball Whacked Into Jupiter, and Astronomers Got It on Video. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/science/jupiter-comet-flashes.html] By Katrina Miller, The New York Times. Excerpt: Ko Arimatsu, an astronomer at Kyoto University in Japan, received an intriguing email… An amateur astronomer in his country had spotted a bright flash in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Dr. Arimatsu, who runs an observation program to study the outer solar system using backyard astronomy equipment, put out a call for more information. Six more reports of the Aug. 28 flash — which, according to Dr. Arimatsu, is one of the brightest ever recorded on the giant gas planet — came in from Japanese skywatchers. Flashes like these are caused by asteroids or comets from the edges of our solar system that impact Jupiter’s atmosphere. “Direct observation of these bodies is virtually impossible, …,” Dr. Arimatsu wrote…. But Jupiter’s gravity lures in these objects, which eventually slam into the planet, “making it a unique and invaluable tool for studying them directly,” he said. …In 1994, one comet whacked into Jupiter with so much force that it left a visible debris field. Astronomers saw another massive impact in 2009. Most collisions with Jupiter, the solar system’s fifth planet, are witnessed opportunistically by amateur astronomers. (Eight of the nine flashes seen on Jupiter since 2010 were reported by amateurs, according to Dr. Arimatsu.) Typically they use a technique called lucky imaging, which takes a video of a portion of the sky at a high frame rate. …the flash reported in August had an impact comparable to the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia, which experts believe was an asteroid that ripped apart 800 square miles of forest. This is the second Jupiter event observed in the past decade with this much energy, said Dr. Arimatsu, who reported the last one in 2021, with an estimated energy equivalent to two megatons of TNT…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 1.

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2023-09-15. Peak solar activity is arriving sooner than expected, reaching levels not seen in 20 years. [https://www.science.org/content/article/peak-solar-activity-arriving-sooner-expected-reaching-levels-not-seen-20-years] By ZACK SAVITSKY, Science. Excerpt: In 2019, as the Sun approached a minimum in its 11-year cycle of magnetic activity, a dozen scientists assembled for a traditional exercise: forecasting the next peak. Now, a few years into the Sun’s resurgence, it’s becoming clear that the official prediction from the panel, convened by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the International Space Environment Service (ISES), missed the mark. The Sun’s activity has already surpassed the forecast, reaching levels not seen in 20 years, and solar maximum may arrive within the next year, months ahead of its presumed schedule…. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 4.

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2023-09-14. New files shed light on ExxonMobil’s efforts to undermine climate science. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/14/exxonmobil-documents-wall-street-journal-climate-science] By Dharna Noor, The Guardian. Excerpt: ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents revealed by the Wall Street Journal. The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-09-14. Meet the Oil Man in Charge of Leading the World Away From Oil. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/climate/sultan-al-jaber-uae-cop28.html] By Max Bearak, The New York Teimos. Excerpt: The [United Arab] Emirates, made wealthy by decades of oil exports, wants to be seen as a climate-friendly renewable energy superpower, even as it helps lock developing nations around the world into decades more fossil fuel use. Straddling that split is one man: Sultan al-Jaber. He founded the renewable energy company, Masdar, which has invested billions of dollars in zero-emissions energy technologies like wind and solar power across 40 countries. Simultaneously, he directs Adnoc, the national oil company, a behemoth that makes Masdar look minuscule. Adnoc pumps millions of barrels of oil per day and aims to spend $150 billion over the next five years, mostly to ramp up its output. And this year, the United Nations has in effect vested Mr. al-Jaber with one of humanity’s most pressing tasks: steering its annual global climate negotiations [COP 2023; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)], which are set to begin in November in Dubai. …Advocates for bold climate action have been outraged by his approach, which rests on bringing fossil fuel companies to the table, and which he claims will break that cycle of recrimination. A group of 133 U.S. Senators and European Union lawmakers signed a letter this year calling for him to be replaced. Multinational fossil fuel companies have a well-documented track record of countering climate science through misinformation and lobbying campaigns, even as now-public internal documents have revealed they were well aware of the effects of their products on the atmosphere…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

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2023-09-13. Earth ‘well outside safe operating space for humanity’, scientists find. [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/13/earth-well-outside-safe-operating-space-for-humanity-scientists-find] By Damian Carrington, The Guardian. Excerpt: …planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing. …Six boundaries have been passed and two are judged to be close to being broken: air pollution and ocean acidification. The one boundary that is not threatened is atmospheric ozone, after action to phase out destructive chemicals in recent decades led to the ozone hole shrinking. …The planetary boundaries are not irreversible tipping points…. Instead, they are points after which the risks of fundamental changes in the Earth’s physical, biological and chemical life support systems rise significantly. …Prof Johan Rockström…said: “…But what worries us, even more, is the rising signs of dwindling planetary resilience.” …this failing resilience could make restricting global heating to the 1.5C climate goal impossible and could bring the world closer to real tipping points. Scientists said in September that the world was on the brink of multiple disastrous tipping points. …The assessment, which was published in the journal Science Advances and was based on 2,000 studies, indicated that several planetary boundaries were passed long ago. The boundary for biosphere integrity, which includes the healthy functioning of ecosystems, was broken in the late 19th century, …the boundary for land use was broken last century. …the safe boundary for climate change was surpassed in the late 1980s. For freshwater, this boundary was crossed in the early 20th century. …The boundary for synthetic pollution, such as pesticides, plastics and nuclear waste, was shown to have been passed by a 2022 study. …Ocean acidification is also assessed as getting worse and being close to exceeding the safe boundary. The scientists said: “…that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”… See also September 18 article in Smithsonian Magazine by Tara Wu. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 4.

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2023-09-12. New York University will divest from fossil fuels in win for student activists. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/12/new-york-university-fossil-fuel-divestment] By Dharna Noor, The Guardian. Excerpt: New York University plans to divest from fossil fuels, the Guardian has learned, following years of pressure from student activists. The move from one of the US’s largest private universities, whose endowment totals over $5bn, represents a significant win for the climate movement, organizers said…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-09-11. Red fire ants, a dreaded pest, have invaded Europe. [https://www.science.org/content/article/red-fire-ants-dreaded-pest-have-invaded-europe] By Erik Stokstadt, Science. Excerpt: Last week, international experts warned that invasive species are costing the world economy almost half-a-trillion dollars annually. Today, researchers confirmed that one of the most fearsome invaders—the red fire ant (Solenopsis invicta), a pest native to South America that packs a painful sting and infests houses and crops—has taken hold in Italy. It is the first European detection of colonies, which are known to drive out native ants and other wildlife and damage electrical equipment. …A genetic analysis of the Italian ants suggests they likely came from either China or the United States. In the U.S., the species causes an estimated $6 billion in damage each year. The insects spread internationally via shipping, especially of plants and soil. …The scientists behind the new study are planning an eradication campaign in Sicily. …Only New Zealand has completely eradicated fire ants after an invasion. Australia has stopped six incursions at ports since 2001, including one with at least 370 colonies over 8300 hectares…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 6.

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2023-09-08. Temperature Extremes Hit Lower- and Middle-Income Countries Hardest. [https://eos.org/articles/temperature-extremes-hit-lower-and-middle-income-countries-hardest] By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In an analysis of 13,000 cities around the globe, researchers furthermore found that smaller cities in lower- and middle-income countries were more likely to experience excessive heat and cold than larger urban areas in more affluent regions. …Using data spanning 2003–2019, the researchers estimated monthly averaged maximum and minimum thermal discomfort for each city. The 10 hottest cities were clustered across four countries: Bahrain, Pakistan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The 10 coldest cities, on the other hand, spanned just two countries: China and Russia. Manama, Bahrain (population: 1,250,000), and Yakutsk, Russia (population: 216,000), took the honors of being the world’s hottest and coldest cities, respectively. …But these results shouldn’t trigger a sense of hopelessness, Tuholske was quick to point out. Research has shown that people living in smaller cities, which can be conducive to tighter social networks and stronger familial ties, are sometimes well poised to enact positive change…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-09-07. Announcing $24.3M Investment Advancing Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Research. [https://oceanacidification.noaa.gov/fy23-nopp-mcdr-awards/] By NOAA. Excerpt: The NOAA Ocean Acidification Program on behalf of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) announces $24.3M of funding aimed at bringing together academic researchers, federal scientists and industry to advance research in marine carbon dioxide removal. Funding supports research that expands understanding of various aspects of marine carbon dioxide removal approaches, risks and co-benefits including ocean acidification mitigation, and science needed to build regulatory frameworks for testing and scaling of marine carbon dioxide removal…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 7.

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2023-09-04. 2,000 Southern White Rhino to be Released into the Wild Over Next 10 Years. [https://www.africanparks.org/2000-southern-white-rhino-be-released-wild-over-next-10-years] By African Parks. Excerpt: Johannesburg, South Africa, 04 September 2023 African Parks, a conservation NGO that manages 22 protected areas in partnership with 12 governments across Africa, announced that it will rewild over 2,000 southern white rhino over the next 10 years. African Parks has stepped in as the new owner of the world’s largest private captive rhino breeding operation, “Platinum Rhino”, a 7,800-hectare property in the North West province of South Africa, which currently holds 2,000 southern white rhino, representing up to 15% of the world’s remaining wild population…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 1.

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2023-09-00. . [] By . Excerpt: … For GSS chapter .

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2023-09-07. Off the Grid. [https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-digital-roadblock-keeping-green-electricity-u-s-grid] By DAN CHARLES, Science. Excerpt: Computer models that forecast overloaded power lines are holding back U.S. solar and wind energy projects. …Southwest Power Pool (SPP) …and other U.S. grid operators are facing an unprecedented tsunami of requests from energy firms to connect thousands of proposed wind, solar, and power storage projects to their transmission lines. The projects are essential to meeting the U.S. goal of eliminating all planet-warming carbon emissions from the nation’s electricity supply by 2035, analysts say. Together, they could generate almost 2000 gigawatts of electricity—exceeding the total capacity of the country’s existing power plants. Most of these projects, however, have been stuck in limbo for years, waiting in what energy insiders call the “interconnection queue.” One contributor to the bottleneck: mathematical simulations that SPP and other operators use to predict how electricity from those new power generators will affect the grid’s stability and reliability. …grid operators require renewable power producers to pay up front for expensive transmission upgrades. But many can’t afford those improvements and must abandon their plans. …“Interconnection is becoming one of the leading barriers to bringing projects online,” says Joe Rand, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who tracks projects in the interconnection queue. …Some researchers and renewable power advocates argue that the interconnection logjam is, in part, a product of flawed simulations based on assumptions that are too conservative and sometimes unreasonable…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 5.

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2023-09-07. U.S. bets it can drill for climate-friendly hydrogen—just like oil. [https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-bets-it-can-drill-climate-friendly-hydrogen-just-oil] By ERIC HAND, Science. Excerpt: …Today, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the high-risk, high-reward arm of the Department of Energy (DOE), announced it would fund $20 million in grants to advance technologies for extracting clean-burning hydrogen from deep rocks. …some researchers have concluded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Earth harbors vast deposits of the gas that could be tapped like oil—and that reserves could be stimulated by pumping water and catalysts into the crust. …Most hydrogen today is manufactured by combining steam and methane in factories that emit carbon dioxide (CO₂) and add to global warming. Governments are supporting efforts to make hydrogen cleanly, either by capturing the emitted CO₂ and storing it underground (blue hydrogen) or by using renewable electricity to split water and harvesting the resulting hydrogen (green hydrogen). …For decades, few geologists believed Earth held significant hydrogen deposits, because the gas is so readily eaten up by microbes or chemically altered into other forms. But prospectors are now fanning out across the globe, spurred by the discovery of a massive hydrogen field underneath a village in Mali and records suggesting puzzling surges of nearly pure hydrogen in old boreholes. Whereas oil and gas companies tend to tap relatively youthful basins of sedimentary rock, hydrogen hunters are probing the crystalline, ancient hearts of continents for the iron-rich rocks thought to fuel hydrogen production. …The grant program will not support the hunt for existing deposits, because that is better left to USGS and industry, says ARPA-E Program Director Doug Wicks. Instead, it will focus on ways to artificially stimulate one of the main hydrogen producing reactions, called serpentinization, which occurs when water encounters iron-rich rocks at high temperatures and pressures. The reactions transform minerals such as olivine into serpentine, releasing hydrogen in the process…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-09-02. A California Beach Town Is Desperate to Save Its Vanishing Sand. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/us/oceanside-california-sand.html] By Jill Cowan, The New York Times. Excerpt: In Oceanside …The sand is disappearing. …Visitors who could once sprawl on wide stretches of sand near the pier must now compete for space on a narrow stretch studded with rocks. …A recent study predicted that California could lose as much as 75 percent of its beaches by 2100, given projected sea level rise related to climate change…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-09-01. Can Plastic Recycling Ever Really Work? [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/headway/plastic-recycling-california-law.html] By Susan Shain, The New York Times. Excerpt: Jan Dell …collects what she calls “bad plastic containers.” …Her specimens include lids from oatmeal canisters, cups from fast-food joints, cleaners wrapped in shrink sleeves, and many, many Amazon mailers. Each carries the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol; none, she believes, will ever be recycled. …Ms. Dell has run a one-woman nonprofit, the Last Beach Cleanup,…. Ms. Dell also headed an advisory committee that pushed for a landmark truth-in-labeling law in California. Starting in the fall of 2025, that law will prohibit companies from placing recycling symbols on products that are not widely recycled in the state. Yogurt tubs could be among them. So could baby food pouches. And takeout containers. And coffee cup lids…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 7.

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2023-08-31. Arctic sea ice may melt faster in coming years due to shifting winds. [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ice-melting-dipole-arctic-oscillation] By arolyn Gramling, Science. Excerpt: From 2007 to 2021, winds over North America and Eurasia were circulating in such a way that they reduced the influx of warmer Atlantic water into the Arctic, researchers report in the Sept. 1 Science. That helped slow the rate of sea ice loss during that time period — even as atmospheric warming ramped up (SN: 8/11/22). But that grace period may come to an end within just a few years. When the winds shift back, enhanced “Atlantification” of the Arctic may speed up sea ice loss, by giving an extra oomph of warming from below. “This phase has lasted about 15 years. We’re about at the end,” says physical oceanographer Igor Polyakov of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. …From 1979 to 2006, the Arctic Dipole was in a “negative” phase, with winds rotating counterclockwise over North America and clockwise over Eurasia. That brought more Atlantic water into the Arctic via the Fram Strait, a narrow strip of ocean between Greenland and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. During that time period, summertime sea ice extent shrank rapidly from year to year, vanishing at a rate of about 1 million square kilometers per decade. …The year 2007, a record-breaking year for Arctic sea ice loss, marked the end of this “negative” phase of the Arctic Dipole (SN: 12/9/20). From then until 2021, the rate of sea ice loss across the entire Arctic slowed, shrinking by only about 70,000 square kilometers per decade…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-31. Greenland Was Much Greener 416,000 Years Ago. [https://eos.org/articles/greenland-was-much-greener-416000-years-ago] By Bill Morris, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In 2019, a team of scientists glimpsed an ancient, shrubby landscape at the base of a long-forgotten ice core—rare evidence that Greenland wasn’t always completely covered in ice. Now, they have pinpointed the age of that ecosystem, and the implications are disturbing—Greenland’s ice sheet, the finds show, could melt at any time, contributing to catastrophic sea level rise. …The team reported the find in 2021 but at the time were unable to accurately date the deposits. Doing so, said coauthor Tammy Rittenour, a paleoclimatologist with Utah State University, is crucial for “understanding the conditions at which you can melt the Greenland ice sheet.” …Climate variability driven by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, and other patterns, Cronin said, could have driven Earth’s climate, ocean circulation, and ice dynamics to tipping points not predicted by current CO₂ modeling. “I think this variability represents aspects of Earth’s climate system that we don’t fully understand or appreciate,” Cronin said. …Although it is not yet possible to say whether Greenland was completely ice free during this period, the scale of the loss was immense. At Camp Century, “nearly a mile of ice disappeared,” Bierman said. “It means that nature on its own, without fossil fuel emissions in the atmosphere, removed a significant portion of the ice sheet.” …At the very minimum, the melting detected at Camp Century would have added around 1.4 meters (5 feet) to sea level. If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, it would have added 7 meters (23 feet). If that happened today, it would devastate most of the world’s coastal towns and cities…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 10.

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2023-08-31. Scorching Heat Is Contributing to Migrant Deaths. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/us/heat-migrant-deaths-texas-mexico.html] By Edgar Sandoval, The New York Times. Excerpt: …at 100 degrees or higher. The heat has been stifling for many Texans, but deadly for some of those making their way through the hot, barren shrub land where migrants travel to avoid detection from Border Patrol agents. …Fewer people are crossing from Mexico this year compared with last year, but already there have been more than 500 deaths in 2023…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-31. Human ancestors may have survived a brush with extinction 900,000 years ago. [https://www.science.org/content/article/human-ancestors-may-have-survived-brush-extinction-900-000-years-ago] By ELIZABETH PENNISI, Science. Excerpt: About 1 million years ago, our distant ancestors hunted in small bands and gathered their food with sophisticated stone tools. Then, about 900,000 years ago, something happened: The number of breeding individuals dwindled to only about 1300, according to a new study modeling ancient population sizes. Our ancestors came within a hair’s breadth of extinction, and populations remained that low for the next 100,000 years or more, researchers argue today in Science. …Janet Kelso, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is skeptical. She notes that the genetic signal for the bottleneck is strongest only in present-day African populations, and not in people who today live outside Africa…. The conclusions, “though intriguing, should probably be taken with some caution and explored further,” she says….. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 11.

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2023-08-31. Gardens blooming with endangered plants could prove a boon to conservation. [https://www.science.org/content/article/gardens-blooming-endangered-plants-could-prove-boon-conservation] By GRETCHEN VOGEL, Science. Excerpt: …For years, conservationists have heralded the benefits of growing native species in yards and gardens. But the potential for gardeners to help slow biodiversity loss by planting threatened species has received less attention, says Ingmar Staude, a botanist at the University of Leipzig. He and his colleagues now report in Scientific Reports that if more gardeners opted for conservation-relevant species, the overall threat level for plants—defined as the ratio of at-risk plant species to all species—could fall by 25% across Germany. They suggest other countries could see similar benefits….. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 7.

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2023-08-28. A New, Underground Atlas of Subduction Zones. [https://eos.org/articles/a-new-underground-atlas-of-subduction-zones] By J. Besl, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Subduction zones are complex. But mapping them is now as simple as cropping a family photo. That’s thanks to Submap, an online resource hosted by the University of Montpellier in France. The latest version was intentionally designed for a wide audience, suitable for students, teachers, and professional researchers. The fast, free service incorporates dozens of data sets and makes mapping available to anyone with an Internet connection…. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 2.

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2023-08-28. There’s a Vast Source of Clean Energy Beneath Our Feet. And a Race to Tap It. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/climate/geothermal-energy-projects.html] By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: In a sagebrush valley full of wind turbines and solar panels in western Utah, Tim Latimer gazed up at a very different device he believes could be just as powerful for fighting climate change — …a drilling rig, of all things, transplanted from the oil fields of North Dakota …drilling for heat. Mr. Latimer’s company, Fervo Energy, is part of an ambitious effort to unlock vast amounts of geothermal energy from Earth’s hot interior, a source of renewable power that could help displace fossil fuels that are dangerously warming the planet. “There’s a virtually unlimited resource down there if we can get at it,” said Mr. Latimer. “Geothermal doesn’t use much land, it doesn’t produce emissions, it can complement wind and solar power….” …Traditional geothermal plants …work by tapping natural hot water reservoirs underground to power turbines that can generate electricity 24 hours a day. Few sites have the right conditions for this …so geothermal only produces 0.4 percent of America’s electricity currently. …But hot, dry rocks lie below the surface everywhere on the planet. And by using advanced drilling techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, some experts think it’s possible to tap that larger store of heat and create geothermal energy almost anywhere. …The Energy Department estimates there’s enough energy in those rocks to power the entire country five times over and has launched a major push to develop technologies to harvest that heat….. For GSS Energy Use chapter 4.

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2023-08-28. America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groundwater-drying-climate-change.html] By Mira Rojanasakul, Christopher Flavelle, Blacki Migliozzi and Eli Murray, The New York Times. Excerpt: …another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view. Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole. The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. The investigation reveals how America’s life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves if they recover at all…. See also Five Takeaways From Our Investigation Into America’s Groundwater Crisis. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-28. Once rhabdomyosarcoma, now muscle. [https://www.cshl.edu/once-rhabdomyosarcoma-now-muscle/] By Luis Sandoval, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Excerpt: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Christopher Vakoc …has been on a mission to transform sarcoma cells into regularly functioning tissue cells. Sarcomas are cancers that form in connective tissues like muscle. …A devastating and aggressive type of pediatric cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) resembles children’s muscle cells. …Vakoc and his team created a new genetic screening technique. Using genome-editing technology, they hunted down genes that, when disrupted, would force RMS cells to become muscle cells. That’s when a protein called NF-Y emerged. With NF-Y impaired, the scientists witnessed an astonishing transformation. Vakoc recounts: “The cells literally turn into muscle. The tumor loses all cancer attributes. They’re switching from a cell that just wants to make more of itself to cells devoted to contraction. Because all its energy and resources are now devoted to contraction, it can’t go back to this multiplying state.”…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4.

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2023-08-28. You’re doing it wrong: Recycling and other myths about tackling climate change. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/08/28/climate-action-poll/] By Kate Selig and Emily Guskin, The Washington Post. Excerpt: A slim majority of Americans think their individual actions can reduce the effects of climate change, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. But do they know which actions are the most effective? Not quite. The poll finds most people believe recyclinghas a lot or some impact on climate change. About three-quarters say not eating meat or dairy would have a little or no effect on climate change. Climate experts say they’re wrong on those and other counts. …Among the 10 actions Americans were polled on, experts said flying less and cutting out meat and dairy are among the best steps people can take…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-08-27. How Indigenous Techniques Saved a Community From Wildfire. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/27/world/canada/canada-wildfires-kelowna-british-columbia.html] By Ian Austen, The New York Times. Excerpt: The fire advanced on the city of Kelowna [Canada] for 19 days — consuming 976 hectares, or about 2,400 acres — of forest. But at the suburban fringes, it encountered a fire prevention zone and sputtered, burning just a single house. The fire prevention zone — an area carefully cleared to remove fuel and minimize the spread of flames — was created by a logging company owned by a local Indigenous community. And as a new wildfire has stalked the suburb of West Kelowna this month, its history with the previous one — the Mount Law fire, in 2021 — offers a valuable lesson: A well-placed and well-constructed fire prevention zone can, under the right conditions, save homes and lives. It’s a lesson not only for Kelowna but also for a growing number of places in Canada and elsewhere threatened by increased wildfire amid climate change…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-08-25. A Lake Paves the Way for Defining the Anthropocene. [https://eos.org/articles/a-lake-paves-the-way-for-defining-the-anthropocene] By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Just as chemists have their periodic table, Earth scientists can lay claim to their own brightly colored reference diagram: the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, which divides our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history into meaningful chunks of time. Last month, researchers laid the groundwork for defining the current epoch of geologic time—a new line on that chart—that would cap the Holocene. They voted that Crawford Lake, a small body of water in southern Canada, serve as the reference site of the new proposed geologic epoch: the Anthropocene. …deciding on one location that typifies humans’ influence on the planet was no small feat, said Waters. The proverbial fingerprints of our species—fallout from nuclear weapons testing, particulate matter from combustion, and nitrogen from fertilizer runoff, to name a few—are littered across the recent geologic record…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 10.

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2023-08-25. Will climate change amplify epidemics and give rise to pandemics?. [https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adk4500] By TULIO DE OLIVEIRA AND HOURIIYAH TEGALLY, Science. Excerpt: While the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis continues to spiral at a much faster speed than was expected. Climate change is dominating our lives and causing a high level of distress. Countries all over the world are struggling to survive the damage caused by extreme events. …However, there is also a new threat that is being overlooked—the interaction between climate change and infectious diseases. A comprehensive meta-analysis revealed that climate change could aggravate more than 50% of known human pathogens. Unfortunately, this is happening now. …some people may think neither climate change nor epidemics are real or that both will pass. However, there is overwhelming evidence that climate change is fueling disease outbreaks and epidemics and that it is not a matter of if, but when, such events will precipitate another pandemic…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-25. Sweltering Temperatures Disrupt the New School Year. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/us/heat-wave-school-year.html] By Ernesto Londoño, Ann Hinga Klein and Colbi Edmonds, The New York Times. Excerpt: The late-summer heat wave that blanketed a large portion of the country this week prompted several schools to cancel classes or send students home early, underscoring how ill-prepared many districts are to cope with extreme weather events that have become more common. In Des Moines, school bus drivers received medical aid at the end of sweltering shifts. Chicago teachers were told to turn off overhead lights and draw shades to keep classrooms bearable. A marching band instructor outfitted students with water backpacks to prevent them from passing out from the heat — at 7:30 a.m…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-24. Forest carbon offsets are failing. [https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adj6951] By JULIA P. G. JONES AND SIMON L. LEWIS, Science. Excerpt: Changes in land use, mostly deforestation in the tropics, emit 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually—second only to fossil fuel use, which emits 35 billion tons (1). Reducing emissions to net zero is necessary to stabilize global temperatures (2). One controversial approach to tackle fossil-fuel emissions from private companies, individuals, and governments has been to “offset” them by investing in projects to either stop emissions that would have otherwise occurred, such as by reducing deforestation, or by investing in carbon uptake projects, such as forest restoration. …West et al. (3) show that offsetting through paying projects to reduce emissions by conserving tropical forests is not reducing deforestation as claimed and is worsening climate change…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

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2023-08-00. . [] By . Excerpt: …. For GSS chapter .

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Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change and the greenhouse effect. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI] Youtube. For GSS Climate Change chapter 1.

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2023-08-24. Emperor penguins abandon breeding grounds as ice melts around them. [https://www.science.org/content/article/emperor-penguins-abandon-breeding-grounds-ice-melts-around-them] By ERIK STOKSTAD, Science. Excerpt: Emperor penguins need stable sea ice to reproduce and raise their chicks. But with the ocean waters warming around Antarctica, the ice is breaking up earlier and earlier in the season, causing widespread abandonment of penguin breeding colonies. The finding, reported today in Communications Earth & Environment, “is bad news,” says Annie Schmidt, a seabird ecologist at Point Blue Conservation Science who was not involved in the work. Sea ice conditions vary from year to year, and colonies have failed to breed before. But if a whole region becomes unsuitable, penguins will find it difficult to locate an alternate spot, Schmidt says…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 4.

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2023-08-23. Like hard-working farmers, corals cultivate and eat their resident algae. [https://www.science.org/content/article/hard-working-farmers-corals-cultivate-and-eat-their-resident-algae] By MOLLY RAINS, Science. Excerpt: …How do vibrant corals flourish in often-barren ocean landscapes? Known as the Darwin Paradox, this mystery has continued to puzzle generations of oceanographers. A new study published today in Nature offers a solution. According to its authors, corals make up for nutrient scarcity by harvesting and feeding on their resident algae, like hungry farmers…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 7.

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2023-08-23. India makes history by landing spacecraft near Moon’s south pole. [https://www.science.org/content/article/india-makes-history-landing-spacecraft-near-moon-s-south-pole] By SANJAY KUMAR, Science. Excerpt: “India is on the Moon!” declared Sreedhara Somanath, chair of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), today to a packed mission control room. At 6:04 p.m. local time, the Chandrayaan-3 mission softly deposited the Vikram lander on the Moon’s surface, making India the fourth nation to succeed at the task after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. India also becomes the first nation to land near the lunar south pole, an uncharted territory thought to contain frozen water that could support future human exploration…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 2.

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2023-08-23. When will the next ocean heat wave strike? Scientists develop early warning systems. [https://www.science.org/content/article/when-will-next-ocean-heat-wave-strike-scientists-develop-early-warning-systems] By WARREN CORNWALL, Science. Excerpt: When heat waves began to sweep the world’s oceans in June, Alistair Hobday was not surprised. The biological oceanographer had foreseen the coming temperature spikes in forecasting models he’d helped develop. The massive pool of hot water in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, the coral-killing warmth in the Caribbean Sea, and the sweltering sea in the north Pacific Ocean had all appeared months earlier as orange and red patches on his computer screen at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The forecasts, which weren’t widely disseminated beyond fisheries managers and those in the fishing and aquaculture industry, proved to be a prescient warning of what was to come. …As the global climate continues to warm, scientists around the world have been working to develop models that predict when and where marine heat waves are likely to hit. …Scientists hope that as the models are fine-tuned, their predictions will be robust enough to alert people 3 months in advance or more, informing decisions for fisheries, aquaculture, and marine conservation…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-22. More Than Half the World’s Ocean Surface Is Getting Greener. [https://eos.org/articles/more-than-half-the-worlds-ocean-surface-is-getting-greener] By Meghie Rodrigues, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Tropical oceans are changing color, according to new research. Over the past 2 decades, 56% of ocean surfaces have become greener, and that means microorganisms living close to the surface are changing as well. The study, recently published in Nature, points to climate change as a possible cause for the shift. The world’s oceans get their color from sunlight bouncing off water molecules and whatever else is floating near the surface. That includes tiny phytoplankton, which contain abundant chlorophyll—a pigment that reflects green light…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 4.

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2023-08-20. One Neighborhood, 90 Trees and an 82-Year-Old Crusader. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/us/trees-heat-wave-new-haven-ct.html] By Colbi Edmonds, The New York Times. Excerpt: As the United States sweats through another unbearable summer of record-breaking heat, planting more trees has emerged as a practical solution to cooling cities, especially areas known as “heat islands” where concrete and congestion magnify already brutal temperatures. Yet filling a neighborhood with trees is not as simple as it seems. Funding and maintenance are issues for cities grappling with crime and housing. And not everyone, it turns out, wants a tree. …Mr. Rodriguez, who volunteers with the Urban Resources Initiative, a nonprofit partnered with Yale University, spends much of his time persuading his neighbors that trees are worth the trouble. Because the trees are planted by a volunteer organization, residents have to take some responsibility for making sure the trees survive and thrive. The city of New Haven pays for tree planting and maintenance through a contract with the Urban Resources Initiative. Residents are responsible for watering the trees for the first three years. …One neighbor whom Mr. Rodriguez talked to feared a shade tree would attract people who might see it as a spot for using drugs. Others wondered why the focus was on trees when their neighborhood had other issues. …Urban forests — the forests and green spaces in cities and towns — have, on average, temperatures that are 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit lower than unforested urban areas, according to the Environmental Protection Agency…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

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2023-08-19. How gas station economics will change in the electric vehicle charging future. [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/19/how-gas-station-economics-will-change-in-the-ev-charging-future.html] By Cheryl Winokur Munk, CNBC. Excerpt: …Gas station numbers have been decreasing at a sharp rate in the past three decades and the trend is expected to continue, with at least a quarter of service stations globally at risk of closure by 2035 without significant business model tweaks, according to consulting firm BCG. …Gas stations making the switch to electric vehicle charging will be investing in Level 3 chargers, which are the most powerful and generally charge in 20 to 30 minutes, but for multiple units can incur investment costs between $500,000 to $1 million. …Major oil companies are supporting franchise filling stations, including BP and Shell, and in the U.S. there are numerous federal, state and utility-based incentives for commercial businesses to purchase and install fast chargers. …Franchise car dealers are also increasingly getting on board, thanks to pushes from automakers like GM and Ford. As of late last year, 65% of Ford’s dealers had opted into the EV certification program (a little under 2,000, according to data shared by Ford), as it has started to make the role of car dealers central to the EV transition process. The National Automobile Dealers Association said in a May release that franchise owners will spend an estimated $5.5 billion on EV infrastructure across OEM brands, with per store costs ranging from $100,000 to over $1 million…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-08-19. With TikTok and Lawsuits, Gen Z Takes on Climate Change. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/climate/young-climate-activists.html] By David Gelles, The New York Times. Excerpt: As Kaliko Teruya was coming home from her hula lesson on August 8, her father called. The apartment in Lahaina was gone, he said, and he was running for his life. He was trying to escape the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century, …. But for Kaliko, 13, the destruction of the past week has reinforced her commitment to a cause that is coming to define her generation. “The fire was made so much worse due to climate change,” she said. “How many more natural disasters have to happen before grown-ups realize the urgency?” Like a growing number of young people, Kaliko is engaged in efforts to raise awareness about global warming and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, last year she and 13 other young people, age 9 to 18, sued their home state, Hawaii, over its use of fossil fuels. With active lawsuits in five states, TikTok videos that mix humor and outrage, and marches in the streets, it’s a movement that is seeking to shape policy, sway elections and shift a narrative that its proponents say too often emphasizes climate catastrophes instead of the need to make the planet healthier and cleaner. …Young people are helping organize a climate march in New York next month, during the United Nations General Assembly. And their force is being felt even in deep-red states like Montana, where a judge on Monday handed the movement its biggest victory to date, ruling in favor of 16 young people who had sued the state over its support for the fossil fuel industry…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-08-18. Why—and How to—Engage Artists in Science. [https://eos.org/opinions/why-and-how-to-engage-artists-in-science] By Kimberly Blaeser, Dwight Owens, Sarah Zhou Rosengard, Kathryn Semmens and Mika Tosca, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Breaking down the artificial barriers between science and art can lead to collaborations, broaden the understanding of problems facing communities, and grow engagement to explore solutions…. For GSS A New World View chapter 1.

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2023-08-17. Uncovering Death by Fire. [https://www.science.org/content/article/raging-wildfires-may-doomed-californias-ancient-megamammals-tar-pit-fossils-reveal] By MICHAEL PRICE, Science. Excerpt: Paleontologists have long tried to understand why once-numerous populations of these and other megafauna vanished across North America toward the end of the last ice age. A study published in this issue of Science points to a new catalyst that ties together the two leading hypotheses: human activity and climate change. Each played a role, but fire was the key mediator, the authors argue. In their scenario, when the climate suddenly became warmer and drier toward the end of the last ice age, human-caused blazes grew out of control, permanently altering the landscape—and spelling the end for the animals…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 10.

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2023-08-17. Bacteria stretch and bend oil to feed their appetite. [https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adj4430] By TERRY J. MCGENITY AND PIERRE PHILIPPE LAISSUE, Science. Excerpt: It is imperative to understand the fate of crude oil that escapes into the ocean to minimize its environmental, economic, and societal harm. Large amounts of crude oil enter the sea, as occurred this past month on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil does not easily mix with water, which can restrict oil degradation through microbes, a key pathway to remove hydrocarbons from the environment. However, turbulent seas and response measures, such as dispersant addition, generate smaller oil droplets that are attractive to voracious microbial activity. …Prasad et al report that bacteria attach to oil droplets, then grow as a film on the oil surface, sometimes reshaping spherical droplets into finger-like protrusions. This dynamic process increases the oil’s surface area and accelerates its biodegradation. The finding should improve predictions of spilled oil transport to ecologically sensitive sites…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 3.

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2023-08-17. South Africa to ban fishing around African penguin colonies for 10 years. [https://www.science.org/content/article/south-africa-ban-fishing-around-african-penguin-colonies-10-years] By MUNYARADZI MAKONI, Science. Excerpt: South Africa will impose a decadelong ban on commercial fishing around six areas home to the endangered African penguin starting next year. The measure, announced by the government on 4 August, comes after an expert panel concluded that a full ban on fishing was vital for the recovery of Africa’s only penguin species…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 8.

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2023-08-17. The global impact of EU forest protection policies. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj0728] By Gianluca Cerullo et al, Science. Excerpt: The European Union’s Biodiversity and Forest Strategies for 2030 mandate protecting all remaining old-growth forests across the EU, increasing the area of habitat patches set aside within forests harvested for timber, and limiting clear-felling in timber-producing landscapes. Although saving old-growth forests is critical, stand-alone policies can produce unintended consequences. Without simultaneously reducing demand for forest products or increasing supply from plantations and secondary forests, such measures can lead to increased harvesting elsewhere, often in tropical countries …with weaker legal protections…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

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2023-08-14. Subsurface Oceans Could Boost Exoplanet Habitability. [https://eos.org/articles/subsurface-oceans-could-boost-exoplanet-habitability] By Javier Barbuzano, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: A group of researchers led by planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha of Rutgers University crunched the numbers to reveal that our galaxy is likely brimming with planets hosting subsurface oceans like those on Enceladus, Europa, and Ganymede. “Before we started to consider this subsurface water, it was estimated that around one rocky planet [orbiting] every 100 stars would have liquid water,” Ojha said. “The new model shows that if the conditions are right, this could approach one planet per star.”… For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 8.

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2023-08-14. ‘Gamechanger’: judge rules in favor of young activists in US climate trial. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/14/montana-climate-trial-young-activists-judge-order] By Dharna Noor, The Guardian. Excerpt: The judge who heard the US’s first constitutional climate trial earlier this year has ruled in favor of a group of young plaintiffs who had accused state officials in Montana of violating their right to a healthy environment. …In a case that made headlines around the US and internationally, 16 plaintiffs, aged five to 22, had alleged the state government’s pro-fossil fuel policies contributed to climate change. In trial hearings in June, they testified that these policies therefore violatedprovisions in the state constitution that guarantee a “clean and healthful environment”, among other constitutional protections. On Monday, Judge Kathy Seeley said that by prohibiting government agencies from considering climate impacts when deciding whether or not to permit energy projects, Montana is contributing to the climate crisis and stopping the state from addressing that crisis. The 103-page order came several weeks after the closely watched trial came to a close on 20 June…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

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2023-08-13. How Invasive Plants Caused the Maui Fires to Rage. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/us/hawaii-wildfire-factors.html] By Simon Romero and Serge F. Kovaleski, The New York Times. Excerpt: When Hawaii’s last sugar cane plantation shut down in Maui in 2016,…the last harvest at the 36,000-acre plantation underscored another pivotal shift: the relentless spread of extremely flammable, nonnative grasses on idled lands where cash crops once flourished. Varieties like guinea grass, molasses grass and buffel grass — which originated in Africa and were introduced to Hawaii as livestock forage — now occupy nearly a quarter of Hawaii’s landmass. …After West Maui was hit in 2018 by an earlier round of fires …, Clay Trauernicht, one of Hawaii’s most prominent wildfire experts, warned in a letter then to the Maui News that the island was facing a hazard it had the potential to do something about. “The fuels — all that grass — is the one thing that we can directly change to reduce fire risk,” he wrote. …Fast forward to 2023, and Mr. Trauernicht, a specialist in wildland fire science and management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said the deadly Maui blaze has shown clearly how nonnative grasses — many of them on former plantation lands that have been left substantially unmanaged by large corporate landowners — can cause what might be an otherwise manageable fire to balloon in size. …Heavy rains that fall across the Hawaiian islands can cause nonnative grasses to grow in some cases as much as six inches in a day. Then the dry season arrives, and the grasses burn. Moreover, after fires ravage certain areas the nonnative grasses quickly sprout and spread, displacing native plants less adapted to wildfires, making the cycle more destructive…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 6.

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2023-08-12. The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/12/climate/clean-energy-us-fossil-fuels.html] By David Gelles, Brad Plumer, Jim Tankersley, Jack Ewing, The New York Times. Excerpt: The United States is pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other renewable energy, even in areas dominated by the oil and gas industries. …renewables are now expected to overtake coal by 2025 as the world’s largest source of electricity. …China, which already leads the world in the sheer amount of electricity produced by wind and solar power, is expected to double its capacity by 2025, five years ahead of schedule. In Britain, roughly one-third of electricity is generated by wind, solar and hydropower. And in the United States, 23 percent of electricity is expected to come from renewable sources this year, up 10 percentage points from a decade ago…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-08-11. Herbivore Diversity Helps Maintain Arctic Tundra Diversity. [https://eos.org/articles/herbivore-diversity-helps-maintain-arctic-tundra-diversity] By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: A long-term experiment in southwestern Greenland reveals that the presence of musk oxen and caribou helps stave off declines in Arctic tundra diversity brought on by climate change.… For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 1.

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2023-08-11. U.S. unveils plans for large facilities to capture carbon directly from air. By Robert F. Service, Science. Excerpt: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced it will spend $1.2 billion for two pioneering facilities—one in Texas, the other in Louisiana—that will remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) annually from the atmosphere using a technology known as direct air capture (DAC). Part of a controversial effort to combat global warming, the awards represent the first phase of $3.5 billion in funding for DAC hubs set aside in last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and mark the first major governmental backing in the world for the emerging carbon capture technology. …But critics of the strategy are plentiful as well. Benson’s Stanford colleague Mark Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist, calls the program “a boondoggle” and “a complete waste of money.” He argues that because DAC requires so much energy to capture CO₂, purify it, and pump it underground for permanent storage, it is one of the most expensive and inefficient ways to sequester carbon. A better climate strategy, Jacobson says, would be to simply spend the money on building out renewable energy faster, so that coal and natural gas electricity plants can be retired more quickly. But DAC proponents counter that even though the world is spending more than $1 trillion a year on clean energy technologies, that won’t be enough for countries to meet their carbon reduction goals…. See also New York Times article U.S. to Fund a $1.2 Billion Effort to Vacuum Greenhouse Gases From the Sky by Coral Davenport. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-08-11. Amendments to Indian biodiversity laws could open doors to exploitation. [https://www.science.org/content/article/amendments-indian-biodiversity-laws-could-open-doors-exploitation] By Tanvi Dutta Gupta, Science. Excerpt: Legal experts and environmental campaigners say a bill passed last week by India’s Parliament could magnify commercial exploitation of the country’s ecosystems and harm the communities that depend on them. The amendments to the landmark 2002 Biological Diversity Act streamline the approval processes for commercial use of India’s trees, plants, and other biological resources—as well as traditional knowledge based on those resources—making it easier for companies to patent and sell them as products. The legislation also decriminalizes violations of the act…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 8.

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2023-08-11. The ‘Great Indian Desert’ could disappear within a century. [https://www.science.org/content/article/great-indian-desert-could-disappear-within-century] By Tanvi Dutta Gupta, Science. Excerpt: …Each year, the South Asian monsoon deluges the verdant east of India and leaves the west, where India and Pakistan share a border, bone-dry. That asymmetry, between the Himalayan rainforests and the “Great Indian Desert”—the most populated in the world—has shaped civilizations. But as climate change heats up, the monsoon is moving farther west into this region. Within a century, a new study suggests, the desert could disappear completely. “This is going to affect a billion people,” says Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography …the study’s findings portend an increased risk of floods in the Great Indian Desert, also known as the Thar Desert, similar to what happened in 2022, when a deluge in Pakistan displaced 8 million people and caused almost $15 billion in property damage….Most studies predict that Earth’s deserts will grow with global warming. The Sahara desert, for example, is expected to expand more than 6000 square kilometers per year by 2050. But the South Asian monsoon may have the opposite impact for the Thar, located in the dry northwest of the South Asian subcontinent. …To make the find, reported this month in Earth’s Future, researchers gathered weather data for South Asia over the past 50 years…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 4.

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2023-08-10. Plastic waste recycling is gaining momentum. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj2807] By Kevin M. Van Germ, Science. Excerpt: …the public is dissatisfied with recycling rates, notably below 9% in the United States…. This makes governments respond by enforcing a minimum recycled plastic content, such as the 30% target in the European Union. Therefore, a plastics circular economy, in which new, high-quality plastics can be remanufactured from plastic waste, is becoming increasingly popular. Plastics should no longer be considered waste but rather valuable resources. …A recent study showed that it is possible, by 2050, to produce all plastics in a circular way, without requiring fossil resources…. …Reducing CO₂ emissions for plastic recycling technologies is also crucial. By electrifying the chemical process and using electricity from nonfossil sources, millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions can be avoided…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 7.

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2023-08-10. Cultural water and Indigenous water science. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi0658] By Erin O’Donnell et al, Science. Excerpt: Water management failings in [Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin] MDB, which is home to more than 40 First Nations who have lived sustainably with water for tens of thousands of years through the creation and application of Indigenous water science …, have drawn attention to the living legacies of colonial exploitation and the associated social and ecological impacts. We need to learn from Australia’s failures and change the way we know, value, and manage water, including learning from Indigenous scientists and Elders. The MDB, which supports a center of irrigated agriculture across more than 1 million km², is known for its multiyear “boom-bust” riverine cycles, but climate change is intensifying these extremes. …When the British invaded Australia, the legitimacy of their occupation was founded on the assumption of terra nullius, or land belonging to no one, despite the clear presence of First Nations with laws governing access to and use of land. This flawed beginning enabled the equally erroneous assumption of aqua nullius, or water belonging to no one, with no acknowledgment that First Nations had and continue to have laws governing the care and management of water…. These flawed assumptions became the foundation for more than two centuries of extractive, unsustainable water management…. Although Western science has recognized the importance of integrated water management, it gives far less weight to the cultural and spiritual well-being that is essential for First Nations. Water managers still categorize water into different uses that can be traded-off against each other, whereas Indigenous knowledge shows that cultural water economies are built on healthy Country and support healthy people…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 3.

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2023-08-10. Using climate to model ancient human migration. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj4631] By Emily J. Beverly. Excerpt: …Although there is now consensus that all modern humans originated from a population in Africa, there is considerable disagreement as to how, when, and why they migrated to Europe and what happened once they arrived. Therefore, the focus of research has shifted to the identification of when humans could feasibly have migrated out of Africa. For example, a climate model was used to identify windows of time over the past 300,000 years in which humans could have migrated across difficult terrain in northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula…. Other researchers took a different approach, determining whether freshwater springs would persist through major climate swings in Africa related to long-term changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This was combined with mapping the maximum distance that a human could travel from these perennial sources of water (∼3 days, 150 km) to determine potential migration pathways during different wet and dry scenarios from the Pleistocene (∼2.58 million to 11,700 years ago)…. …The model showed that around 1.1 million years ago, habitats in Europe would likely have been unsuitable for permanent hominin occupation. This is because glacial conditions were so strong that it would have been too cold for hominins to survive without adaptations such as fire or clothing, for which there is currently no evidence. This suggests that hominins might not have permanently settled in Europe at this time and may have instead repeatedly repopulated from Asia, but additional hominin sites with better age control are needed to further test this hypothesis…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 11.

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2023-08-09. Climate Education That Builds Hope and Agency, Not Fear. [https://eos.org/opinions/climate-education-that-builds-hope-and-agency-not-fear] By Jeffrey D. Corbin,  Meghan A. Duffy,  Jacquelyn L. Gill and  Carly Ziter, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Reframing climate change education around a message of “hopeful alarm” not only will underscore the threats we face but will also show students how they can act to shape the future. …The urgency of the climate crisis grows every year; meanwhile, disinformation and politicization have made communicating the science of climate change increasingly challenging. For the past 2 decades, such communication efforts have focused mainly on convincing people that climate change is real while also combating organized campaigns of denialism [Mann, 2012]. These efforts have largely succeeded: Polls show that the public now overwhelmingly accepts the reality of climate change. …So although challenging climate change denial may still be necessary in some contexts, scientists, educators, and others who communicate about climate science face a new challenge: the clear gap between the public’s concern over climate disruptions and its understanding of what can be done today to affect our tomorrow. We must better convey to audiences the needed changes—in energy sources and land use, for example—and that humanity can, indeed, influence the scale of disruptions that unfold [Marris, 2021; Mann, 2021]…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-08-00. . [] By . Excerpt: … For GSS chapter .

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2023-08-11. Devastating Hawaii fires made ‘much more dangerous’ by climate change. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/11/hawaii-fires-made-more-dangerous-by-climate-crisis] By Oliver Milan, The Guardian. Excerpt: Katharine Hayhoe, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that global heating is causing vegetation to dry out, priming it as fuel for an outbreak of fire. “Climate change doesn’t usually start the fires; but it intensifies them, increasing the area they burn and making them much more dangerous,” Hayhoe tweeted. …Nearly a fifth of Maui, the Hawaiian island where the fires have occurred, is in severe drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. The island has experienced other serious fires in recent years, with blazes in 2018 and 2021 razing hundreds of homes and causing the evacuation of thousands of residents and tourists. Experts say that wildfires in Hawaii are now burning through four times the amount of area than in previous decades, in part due to the proliferation of more flammable non-native grasses but also rising global temperatures. …Hawaii is experiencing increasingly dry conditions, with scientists calculating that 90% of the state is getting less rainfall than it did a century ago, with the period since 2008 particularly dry…. See also New York Times article How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-10. Engineered bacteria detect tumor DNA. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf3974] By Robert M. Cooper et al, Science. Excerpt: Bacteria have been previously engineered to detect diseases by responding to specific metabolites or pathogens. Cooper et al. have now engineered a species of bacteria to detect specific mutations in human DNA. These bacteria, Acinetobacter baylyi, are normally nonpathogenic and naturally competent to take up DNA by horizontal gene transfer. The authors took advantage of this property, engineering these bacteria to become resistant to a specific drug only when they took up DNA containing a cancer-associated mutation in a specific oncogene, but not its wild-type counterpart. The bacteria detected their target both in culture and in mice bearing tumors with the relevant mutation after the bacteria were delivered by rectal enema, suggesting a potential clinical application…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4.

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2023-08-10. Wandering Seeds. [https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-people-shaped-australias-curious-geography-plants] By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science. Excerpt: On shady, densely wooded riverbanks in eastern Australia, the black bean tree is easily missed. It can reach 12 stories tall, but Castanospermum australe mostly blends in with its rainforest peers. …each seed weighs about as much as a mouse—too heavy to be carried off by the wind or easily dispersed by birds and most rodents. Therein lies a mystery: Black bean trees sprout not just along waterways and coastal areas, but also along ridges high above rivers, far from the water. A few years ago, Maurizio Rossetto, an evolutionary ecologist at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, began to wonder how they got there. …“Increasingly, there is an acceptance that it would make a lot of sense to consult the people who have lived here for tens of thousands of years” when trying to reconstruct Australia’s ecological evolution, says Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, a cultural historian at the University of Western Australia (UWA). …two groups are finding that the seemingly natural distributions of key food plants likely reflect the habits and travels of the first Australians. “We are increasingly aware that what we thought of as ‘wild’ ranges of species did not take into account traditional activities,” Rossetto says. …In Australia, the work has helped further undermine colonial-era assumptions that native people were aimless wanderers, as well as claims of terra nullius—that the land belonged to no one when the first British settlers arrived. …In a paper published in Genes in 2022, the researchers identified 15 species with nutritious, edible seeds too large to be easily dispersed by other means. Five of those species have known cultural significance, and Fahey is now working with Indigenous collaborators to decide which ones to study further…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 1.

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2023-08-10. Federal officials promise renewed conservation efforts for endangered red wolves. [https://www.science.org/content/article/federal-officials-promise-renewed-conservation-efforts-endangered-red-wolves] By Erik Stokstad, Science. Excerpt: In a turning point for a long-running conservation dispute, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has agreed to continue to release captive-bred red wolves (Canis rufus) to boost the world’s only remaining wild population of this endangered species. The court settlement, announced yesterday, stems from a lawsuit from conservation groups that objected to FWS’s decision in 2015 to stop releasing red wolves into a 688,000-hectare recovery area in North Carolina. …Although the species once lived in most of the southeastern United States, hunting and habitat loss caused a massive decline. By 1972 only a handful of wolves remained in Texas and Louisiana. FWS trapped all of them and established an experimental recovery population in Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on a North Carolina peninsula in 1987. Decades of captive breeding and release boosted the population to a peak of 100 to 120 animals in 2012. …But their numbers have since fallen. Hunting—which is illegal for federally protected species—and cars continue to be the largest sources of mortality. Meanwhile, local landowners and state officials complain that the wolves leave the refuge and kill game animals such as deer. In 2015, the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission argued that the program wasn’t working and called on FWS to end it, remove the remaining wolves, and declare the species extinct in the wild…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 8.

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2023-08-10. Heat Singes the Mind, Not Just the Body. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/health/heat-mental-health.html] By Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Soaring temperatures can damage not just the body but also the mind. As heat waves become more intense, more frequent and longer, it has become increasingly important to address the impact on mental health, scientists say. “It’s really only been over the past five years that there’s been a real recognition of the impact,” said Dr. Joshua Wortzel, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s committee on climate change and mental health, which was set up just two years ago. …High temperatures are strongly associated with an increase in suicides, researchers have found. Heat has been linked to a rise in violent crime and aggression, emergency room visits and hospitalizations for mental disorders, and deaths — especially among people with schizophrenia, dementia, psychosis and substance use. For every 1 degree Celsius (or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in temperature, scientists have estimated that there is a nearly 5 percent increase in the risk of death among patients with psychosis, dementia or substance use. Researchers have reported a 0.7 percent increase in suicides linked to rising temperatures, and about a 4 percent to 6 percent increase in interpersonal violence, including homicides. Heat not only fuels feelings like irritability and anger, but also seems to exacerbate mental illnesses, such as anxiety, schizophrenia and depression. Older adults, adolescents and people with pre-existing mental illnesses are particularly vulnerable, as are people who do not have housing or are of lower socioeconomic status…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-09. Ancient mud cracks on Mars point to conditions favorable for life. [https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-mud-cracks-mars-point-conditions-favorable-life] By Phil Jacobs, Science. Excerpt: …the discovery of distinctive mud cracks on the planet’s surface suggest ancient Mars cycled through sustained wet and dry seasons for millions of years. Not only would the climate have been habitable, scientists say, but the cycling might have also given the basic chemistry of life a boost. The discovery, reported today in Nature, is compelling evidence for an Earth-like climate on early Mars…. the Curiosity rover has discovered patterns of hexagon-shaped cracks in ancient rocks that add to the evidence for a sustained warm climate. They resemble patterns found on Earth in places like Death Valley, where they only form after years of wet-dry cycling…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-08-08. Amazon Countries, Led by Brazil, Sign a Rainforest Pact. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/climate/amazon-rainforest-belem-protections.html] By Manuela Andreoni and Max Bearak, The New York Times. Excerpt: On Tuesday, the leaders of eight countries that are home to the Amazon River basin agreed to work together to conserve the world’s largest rainforest at a groundbreaking meeting convened by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. The agreement, called the Belém Declaration, for the Brazilian city where the meeting was held, provides a road map to stave off the rampant deforestation, caused in large part by industrial agriculture and land-grabbing, that has severely damaged the rainforest and has major implications for Earth’s climate. The meeting was also expected to yield a separate agreement on Wednesday among other nations with major rainforests — including the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Indonesia — to more closely coordinate protecting the ecosystems globally. The Amazon rainforest is not only a haven of biodiversity but also plays an important role in the fight against climate change because it pulls huge amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it away. Over the past half-century, around 17 percent of the forest has been razed and an even bigger share is severely degraded…. For GSS A New World View chapter 5.

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2023-08-07. What if Your Town Doubled as a Private Power Grid?. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/realestate/microgrid-solar-power-energy.html] By Kaya Laterman, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Heron’s Nest, a new cottage community in Shallotte, N.C., …calling itself an “environmental village,” …homes were reasonably priced, between $300,000 to $400,000. …each house came with a three-kilowatt rooftop solar system, which would reduce their carbon footprint and cut their utility bill by a third. …the 31-home community, …North Carolina’s first residential “microgrid” development. …A microgrid is a network of buildings that essentially acts as a miniature power grid. It can operate outside of the larger municipal electrical system by ensuring backup power for the entire development, which can be produced by a solar array system and stored in a battery. …The U.S. Energy Department estimated that there were more than 450 operational microgrids in the United States in 2022. …The California Public Utilities Commission…recently approved a $200 million program to bring community microgrids to disadvantaged and tribal communities that are vulnerable to power outages. Americans experienced an average of about seven hours of power interruptions in 2021. It was more in Louisiana, Oregon and Texas, where residents went without power anywhere between 20 and 80 hours during the year. Two-thirds of North Americans are at risk of energy shortfalls this summer, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit regulatory authority. …developers are finding that energy-resilient homes and communities are powerful marketing tools to lure buyers and renters…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 5.

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2023-07-25. Alien-looking viruses discovered in Massachusetts forest. [https://www.science.org/content/article/alien-looking-viruses-discovered-massachusetts-forest] By Christie Wilcox, Science. Excerpt: Researchers have unearthed a trove of wonders in the soil of a Massachusetts forest: an assortment of giant viruses unlike anything scientists had ever seen. The find suggests this group of relatively massive parasites has an even greater ecological diversity and evolutionary importance than researchers knew. Giant viruses can exceed 2 micrometers in diameter, on par with some bacteria. They can also harbor immense genomes, which reach 2.5 megabases—larger than the genomes of far more complex organisms. …DNA sequencing has long indicated that giant viruses are diverse and abundant elsewhere, too—especially in sediments and soils, which are estimated to host some 97% of all the viral particles on Earth…. See also Science article An entire ecosystem lives beneath scorching hydrothermal vents (2023 August 9). For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 5.

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2023-08-04. On the Afghanistan-Iran border, climate change fuels a fight over water. [https://www.science.org/content/article/afghanistan-iran-border-climate-change-fuels-fight-over-water] By Ruchi Kumar, Science. Excerpt: Fueled in part by a prolonged drought, tensions over water between Iran and Afghanistan have escalated this year, with Iran accusing Taliban leaders of violating a long-standing agreement to share water from the Helmand River that flows from Afghanistan into Iran. In late May, clashes near the river reportedly led to the deaths of at least two Iranian border guards and one Taliban fighter. Climate change could only worsen the conflict, researchers say. Although detailed data are scarce, a recent study concluded that average temperatures in Afghanistan have risen by between 0.6°C and 1.8°C since 1950. And, “If you look at the map [of Afghanistan], the area that has the highest change in temperatures [is] … where the conflict has occurred,” says water specialist Assem Mayar, a former lecturer at Kabul Polytechnic University…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-08-04. Voyager 2 Communications Pause [and resumes]. [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-communications-pause] By Calla Cofield, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Excerpt: …Voyager 2 is located more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth…A series of planned commands sent to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft July 21 inadvertently caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth. As a result, Voyager 2 [was] unable to receive commands or transmit data back to Earth. The agency’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar “shout” more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory.… For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 2.

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2023-08-04. A Maverick in the genome. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade0705] By Sonya A. Widen, Israel Campo Bes, Alevtina Koreshova, Pinelopi Pliota, Daniel Krogull, Alejandro Burga, Science. Excerpt: It was long thought that the barriers to gene flow between animal species were impenetrable. Without reproduction, there was simply no way that DNA could move from one animal to another. Indeed, even after the discovery that bacteria can give and receive genes with reckless abandon, the notion that something similar could happen in insects or fish—let alone reptiles or mammals—seemed ridiculous on its face. …But, against all odds, cases of horizontal gene transfer kept cropping up. Now, it’s clear DNA can and has jumped between animals—the big question that remains is how. Lots of ideas have been proposed, but the evidence has been handwavy. That is, until a largely overlooked paper published in Science last month reported that virus-like segments of mobile DNA called Mavericks have been shuttling genes between different species of roundworms (nematodes) for millennia…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 3.

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2023-08-02. ‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unforeseen test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth. [https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unforeseen-test-geoengineering-fueling-record-ocean-warmth] By Paul Voosen, Science. Excerpt: …Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.” By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. …The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 7.

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2023-08-01. ‘Everyone is aghast.’ India’s move to weaken forest protections outrages conservationists. [https://www.science.org/content/article/everyone-aghast-india-s-move-weaken-forest-protections-outrages-conservationists] By Tanvi Dutta Gupta, Science. Excerpt: Conservation scientists fear more than one-quarter of forests in India could lose legal protection under controversial legislation that the nation’s Parliament could approve as early as this week. The legislation amends India’s flagship 1980 Forest Conservation Act. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi says it will help India meet its commitments to combat climate change by planting trees, and “eliminate ambiguities” in rules that govern how officials legally define forests and regulate their use. But researchers and others worry the measure—which has triggered nationwide protests—will irrevocably transform India’s landscape. They say the amendments will open forests to development, harm biodiversity, and weaken the rights of Indigenous people…. For GSS A New World View chapter 6.

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2023-07-31. Electrified cement could turn houses and roads into nearly limitless batteries. [https://www.science.org/content/article/electrified-cement-could-turn-houses-and-roads-nearly-limitless-batteries] By Robert F. Service, Science. Excerpt: …Researchers have come up with a new way to store electricity in cement, using cheap and abundant materials. If scaled up, the cement could hold enough energy in a home’s concrete foundation to fulfill its daily power needs. Scaled up further, electrified roadways could power electric cars as they drive. And if scientists can find a way to do this all cheaply the advance might offer a nearly limitless capacity for storing energy from intermittent renewable sources, such as solar and wind. So far, the cement devices are small, only big enough to power a few LED lightbulbs. But efforts are already underway to scale them up. …The cement devices are a kind of simplified battery called supercapacitors. They consist of two electrically conductive plates separated by an ion-conducting electrolyte and a thin membrane. As the device is charged, positively charged ions from the electrolyte accumulate on one plate, while negatively charged ions accumulate on the other. The amount of power storage depends on the total surface area of the supercapacitor’s conductive plates. For decades, researchers have tried to incorporate them into structural materials, such as the concrete used in roads and buildings, or the carbon composites used in automotive and aircraft bodies. Unlike today’s best batteries, supercapacitors typically use nonflammable electrolytes, making them safer…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 8.

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2023-07-31. Displaced from Home and Sheltered in an Extreme Environment. [https://eos.org/articles/displaced-from-home-and-sheltered-in-an-extreme-environment] By Humberto Basilio, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Millions of people, displaced from their home countries, take refuge in areas that are highly vulnerable to extreme weather. …Kakuma refugee camp, …which includes refugees from more than 20 countries, often lacks access to services such as clean water and nutritious food. A common building material in the camp is wood-iron sheets, which are vulnerable to dust storms and hailstorms. The refugee community must also endure the latent threat posed by Kenya’s increasing heat, combined with unprecedented drought and a lack of trees. …In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, scientists analyzed refugees’ exposure to extreme weather events in Kakuma and 19 other large refugee settlements. The results confirmed that refugee camps are exposed to harsher conditions than those found in the rest of the host country…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-31. ‘Shocking levels of stress.’ A marine heat wave is devastating Florida’s corals. [https://www.science.org/content/article/shocking-levels-stress-marine-heat-wave-devastating-florida-s-corals] By Warren Cornwall, Science. Excerpt: Ocean water temperatures off southern Florida have spiked to record levels, with sea surface temperatures hovering at more than 2°C above typical seasonal peaks for the past few weeks. The heat wave threatens coral reef ecosystems already buffeted by years of ocean warming, disease, and pollution. Coral bleaching, in which heat-stressed coral polyps eject the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues and help nourish the coral, is already widespread this year off Florida’s coast. Corals are also shedding tissue and swiftly dying without going through bleaching…. [Interview with Ian Enochs, a coral reef ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, heads the coral program at the agency’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory] For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-27. Making Renewable, Infinitely Recyclable Plastics Using Bacteria [https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/07/27/making-renewable-infinitely-recyclable-plastics-using-bacteria/] By Lauren Biron, Berkeley Lab. Excerpt: Scientists engineered microbes to make the ingredients for recyclable plastics – replacing finite, polluting petrochemicals with sustainable alternatives. The new approach shows that renewable, recyclable plastics are not only possible, but also outperform those from petrochemicals. …Most plastics can’t be recycled, and many use finite, polluting petrochemicals as the basic ingredients. But that’s changing. In a study published today in Nature Sustainability, researchers successfully engineered microbes to make biological alternatives for the starting ingredients in an infinitely recyclable plastic known as poly(diketoenamine), or PDK. …PDKs can be used for a variety of products, including adhesives, flexible items like computer cables or watch bands, building materials, and “tough thermosets,” rigid plastics made through a curing process. Researchers were surprised to find that incorporating the bioTAL into the material expanded its working temperature range by up to 60 degrees Celsius compared to the petrochemical version. This opens the door to using PDKs in items that need specific working temperatures, including sports gear and automotive parts such as bumpers or dashboards…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 7.

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2023-07-26. Meltwater from Antarctic Glaciers Is Slowing Deep-Ocean Currents. [https://eos.org/articles/meltwater-from-antarctic-glaciers-is-slowing-deep-ocean-currents] By Veronika Meduna, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Antarctic ice drives crucial deep-ocean currents that help regulate Earth’s climate. But the system is slowing down. …When the sea freezes around Antarctica’s fringes in winter, the ice expels salt into the water below. Trillions of metric tons of this briny, supercooled, heavy water cascade down Antarctica’s continental slope, dropping into the deep ocean in submarine waterfalls. As these waters sink from the Antarctic shelf, they spread north through the Southern Ocean, driving abyssal circulation—the lower limb of the global ocean overturning circulation. They are the densest water masses in the world’s oceans and the engine room of a current system that conveys heat, dissolved gases, and nutrients around the world. …But diminishing glaciers in West Antarctica—primarily the Amundsen Sea—are freshening the shelf waters in the Ross Sea and slowing the production of bottom water, according to research led by Kathy Gunn, a physical oceanographer at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Hobart, Tasmania…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-26. Webb Snaps Highly Detailed Infrared Image of Actively Forming Stars. [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-snaps-highly-detailed-infrared-image-of-actively-forming-stars ] By NASA, ESA, CSA. Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI). Excerpt: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the “antics” of a pair of actively forming young stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. …They are buried deeply in a disk of gas and dust that feeds their growth as they continue to gain mass. The disk is not visible, but its shadow can be seen in the two dark, conical regions surrounding the central stars. The most striking details are the two-sided lobes that fan out from the actively forming central stars, represented in fiery orange. Much of this material was shot out from those stars as they repeatedly ingest and eject the gas and dust…over thousands of years. When material from more recent ejections runs into older material, it changes the shape of these lobes. …The stars’ more recent ejections appear in a thread-like blue. …Ejections regulate how much mass the stars ultimately gather…. See also https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/53072881464/in/album-72177720305127361/ and Sky & Telescope article. Find latest JWST images at https://webb.nasa.gov by tapping the accordion main navigation menu in the upper right corner and choosing “Webb 2023 – Flickr” or similar selection. Another type of collection is at https://webbtelescope.org/images. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 2.

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2023-07-27. Shaky Ground. [https://www.science.org/content/article/farmers-paid-millions-trap-carbon-soils-will-it-actually-help-planet] By Gabriel Popkin, Science. Excerpt: Lance Unger …on his farm near the Wabash River in southwestern Indiana …rather than leaving his fields fallow, he sowed some of them with cover crops of oats and sorghum that grew until the winter cold killed them off. And before [spring] planting …, Unger drove a machine to shove aside yellowing stalks—last season’s “trash,” as he calls it—rather than tilling the soil and plowing the stalks under. For these efforts, a Boston-based company called Indigo paid Unger $26,232 in late 2021 and an even larger chunk late last year. That’s how much an emerging market values the hundreds of tons of carbon that, in theory at least, Unger yanked out of the atmosphere with his cover crops or left in the soil by not tilling. Slowing climate change isn’t a priority for him, he says, …[but] the money made it worthwhile. Indigo also made money in the deal. It took a 25% cut of the bundle of credits it then sold at about $40 per ton of captured carbon. Buyers were companies such as IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and Shopify, which were looking to offset greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and bolster their green bona fides. For advocates, the exchange represents a beautiful marriage of idealism and capitalism in the service of an urgently needed climate solution. …But as the industry heats up, so does the skepticism. Some researchers say the science of how soils store and release carbon is too uncertain to support an industry claiming to be cooling the planet. They accuse companies like Indigo of exaggerating the benefits of their programs…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-07-27. An American Energy Giant Sees Israel as a Springboard to Europe. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/business/energy-environment/israel-gas-europe.html] By Stanley Reed, The New York Times. Excerpt: Chevron finds itself with an abundance of natural gas on Europe’s doorstep. Amid competing regional interests, the question is how to develop it…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 3.

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2023-07-26. View the Thin Crescent of Venus. [https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/spot-venuss-creeping-cusps-at-solar-conjunction] By Bob King, Sky & Telescope. Excerpt: With Venus approaching inferior conjunction in August, here’s a foolproof way to follow its thinning crescent as the planet transitions from Evening Star to Morning Star. …Venus currently shines about 25° east of the Sun and sets about 45 minutes after sundown. On August 13th the two bodies will be in conjunction and rise and set together. For about a week before and after that date, Venus will be difficult-to-impossible to see with the naked eye because of interference from solar glare but remain visible in a telescope if you know exactly where to look. The orbit of Venus is tipped 3.4° relative to the plane of the ecliptic [Earth’s orbit plane]. At inferior conjunction, when the two planets are closest, Venus can pass up to 8.4° north or south of the Sun. If Venus lies at or close to either one of its nodes — the two points where it intersects the plane of Earth’s orbit — we’ll see it transit across the Sun’s face. That last happened in June 2012 and will happen again in December 2117. During the present apparition, Venus will pass 7.7° south of the Sun’s center, close to its maximum distance, making it possible to safely follow the planet up to and beyond solar conjunction. This only happens occasionally. For instance, during the June 2020 conjunction, Venus sat just 0.5° north of the Sun — much too close to safely view. At its last conjunction in January 2022, the Sun and planet were less than 5° apart…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-07-26. Ship noises prove a nuisance for arctic narwhals. [https://www.science.org/content/article/ship-noises-prove-nuisance-arctic-narwhals] By Tanvi Dutta Gupta, Science. Excerpt: The Arctic Ocean is a noisy place. Creatures of the deep have learned to live with the cacophony of creaking ice sheets and breaking icebergs, but humanmade sources of noise from ships and oil and gas infrastructure are altering that natural submarine soundscape. Now, a research team has found that even subtle underwater noise pollution can cause narwhals to make shallower dives and cut their hunts short. The research, published today in Science Advances, uncovers “some really great information on a species we know very little about,” says Ari Friedlaender, an ocean ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, not involved in the study. Knowing how the whales react to these noises could help conservationists “act proactively” to protect the animals in their Arctic home where warming waters already threaten their lifestyles. Narwhals…live in one of the most extreme environments in the world, explains Outi Tervo, an ecologist at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and the study’s first author. Each narwhal returns in summer to the same small fjord where it was born in order to feed on fish, squid, and shrimp. As humans increasingly encroach on Arctic waters, though, scientists, conservationists, and Inuit communities have worried about how development and ship traffic will affect the whales…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 1.

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2023-07-26. Ancient people in China systematically mined and burned coal up to 3600 years ago. [https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-people-china-systematically-mined-and-burned-coal-3600-years-ago] By Celina Zhao, Science. Excerpt: Long before coal fueled the Industrial Revolution, ancient societies around the world were already exploiting its power to smelt metal or heat water for toasty baths. Now, excavations at a Bronze Age site in northwestern China show people were burning coal on a large scale up to 3600 years ago, 1 millennium earlier than previously thought. The research, reported today in Science Advances, also traces where the coal came from and how a shortage of other fuel may have encouraged ancient people to turn to this new energy source…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 3.

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2023-07-26. The death of supercontinents brings diamonds to the surface. [https://www.science.org/content/article/death-supercontinents-brings-diamonds-surface] By Paul Voosen, Science. Excerpt: Forged under extreme temperatures and pressures more than 150 kilometers down in the mantle, diamonds ride rockets to reach Earth’s surface: narrow pipes of magma called kimberlite that can erupt at the speed of sound. Strangely, most kimberlite pipes are found in the quiet, ancient interiors of continents. They are far from where most other eruptions occur: at the edges of tectonic plates and near mantle plumes, broad upwellings that form volcanic hot spots such as Hawaii or Yellowstone. “How on Earth did these get here?” asks Thomas Gernon, a geologist at the University of Southampton. “It was an elephant in the room that no one had a good explanation for.” Now, Gernon and his colleagues believe they do. They say the timing and location of these diamond-bearing eruptions suggest they are aftereffects of the breakup of supercontinents, which causes whirling turbulence in the viscous mantle rock below. Like slow-motion tidal waves of rock, the researchers say, these swells ripple beneath the continents, traveling hundreds of kilometers over the course of millions of years…. The finding, published today in Nature, is about more than diamonds and kimberlites, …It suggests that tectonic action near Earth’s surface can influence the behavior of the mantle on a broader scale than once thought. It also indicates that the underground waves keep the margins of newly divided continents volcanically active far longer than expected, possibly explaining other volcanic rocks that had previously been chalked up to mantle plumes…. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 3.

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2023-07-25. Saguaro cacti collapsing in Arizona extreme heat, scientist says. [https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/saguaro-cacti-collapsing-arizona-extreme-heat-scientist-says-2023-07-25/] By Liliana Salgado, Reuters. Excerpt: Arizona’s saguaro cacti, a symbol of the U.S. West, are leaning, losing arms and in some cases falling over during the state’s record streak of extreme heat, a scientist said on Tuesday. Summer monsoon rains the cacti rely on have failed to arrive, testing the desert giants’ ability to survive in the wild as well as in cities after temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) for 25 days in Phoenix, said Tania Hernandez…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 3.

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2023-07-25. July Heat Waves Nearly Impossible Without Climate Change, Study Says. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/july-heat-waves-nearly-impossible-without-climate-change-study-says-a6dad9e1] By Eric Niiler, The Wall Street Journal. Excerpt: Record temperatures have been fueled by decades of fossil-fuel emissions. …The extreme heat blanketing the southern regions of the U.S., Mexico, and Europe this month would have been nearly impossible without the warming effects of human-induced climate change, according to a study released Tuesday by a group of European scientists who carry out rapid assessments of extreme weather events. The study by World Weather Attribution, a group of researchers based in London and the Netherlands, found that three separate heat waves in July across the Northern Hemisphere were made much worse because of decades of fossil-fuel emissions that have raised the planet’s average temperature by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-25. 101.1 degrees? Water temperatures off Florida Keys among hottest in the world. [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/07/25/water-temperatures-in-florida/70463489007/] By Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA Today. Excerpt: Water temperatures in the bays between the mainland and the Florida Keys were so warm that meteorologists say they were among the hottest ocean temperatures ever recorded on Earth. Water temperature at a buoy in Manatee Bay south of Miami reached an incredible 101.1 degrees Monday evening. That’s higher than an unofficial 99.7 degrees once reported in Kuwait, but meteorologists say the Florida gauge’s location in shallower, darker water near land means the two measurements can’t be fairly compared. Heat has been building in South Florida for weeks as the region and much of the western United States sweltered in temperatures much warmer than normal. …Federal officials say more than 40% of the world’s oceans are experiencing marine heat waves, a figure that could reach 50% by September…. See also The Guardian article Florida ocean records ‘unprecedented’ temperatures similar to a hot tub, New York Times article Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century, and Axios article As ocean temperatures hit 101°F, scientists rush to move corals. For GSS Climate Change chapter 4.

2023-07-24. Webb Detects Water Vapor in Rocky Planet-Forming Zone. [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-detects-water-vapor-in-rocky-planet-forming-zone] By NASA. Excerpt: Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New insights may come from the planetary system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away. The star hosts both an inner disk and outer disk of gas and dust, separated by a 5 billion-mile-wide (8 billion kilometer) gap, and within that gap are two known gas-giant planets. New measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) have detected water vapor in the system’s inner disk, at distances of less than 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the star – the region where rocky, terrestrial planets may be forming. (The Earth orbits 93 million miles from our Sun.) This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two or more protoplanets. “We’ve seen water in other disks, but not so close in and in a system where planets are currently assembling. We couldn’t make this type of measurement before Webb,” said lead author Giulia Perotti of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany…. See also Nature article, Water in the terrestrial planet-forming zone of the PDS 70 disk. For GSS Changing Cosmos chapter 8.

2023-07-21. The Inequality of Heat Stress. [https://eos.org/articles/the-inequality-of-heat-stress] By Rebecca Owen, Eos/AGU. When record-breaking temperatures and heat domes envelop swaths of the United States each summer, people across the country experience these extreme heat events differently. Those living in historically redlined neighborhoods, where discriminatory land use and housing policies caused segregation and racism to flourish, are still, even today, at higher risk for hotter temperatures and the health effects caused by heat stress. In a new study published in One Earth, researchers showed that heat stress disproportionately affects poor and non-white residents in 481 American cities.… For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

2023-07-20. Magnetic Tangles Drive Solar Wind. [https://eos.org/articles/magnetic-tangles-drive-solar-wind] By atthew R. Francis, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Though the effects of solar wind are well documented, what causes it has been a mystery for more than 50 years. Now, thanks to a solar close-up, some researchers think the energy behind the flow of particles comes from the Sun’s own magnetic fields snapping together. The process, known as reconnection, may illuminate not only solar wind but winds from other stars as well as the behavior of comets and planetary atmospheres. In part to solve the solar wind mystery—and perhaps learn ways to spot solar storms before they form—researchers developed NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which launched in 2018 and has been flying in ever-closer orbits to the Sun. …Reconnection occurs in plasmas when magnetic fields pointing in opposite directions cancel out, rapidly dumping their energy into the surrounding electrons and ions. A simplified picture would be taking two bar magnets pointed in opposite directions and letting them snap together: The noise of their collision is analogous to reconnection energy release. In the solar corona, this process happens when the magnetic fields that turned back toward the Sun come into proximity with those stretching out into the solar system, and the energy released is dumped into the charged particles that make up the solar wind…. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 4.

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2023-07-19. ‘We are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come. [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/19/climate-crisis-james-hansen-scientist-warning] By Oliver Milman, The Guardian. Excerpt: The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s. Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is cited as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned in a statement with two other scientists that the world was moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years, bringing impacts such as stronger storms, heatwaves and droughts. …The world has already warmed by about 1.2C since mass industrialization, causing a 20% chance of having the sort of extreme summer temperatures currently seen in many parts of the northern hemisphere, up from a 1% chance 50 years ago, Hansen said. “There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts,” Hansen, who is 82, told the Guardian. “These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality – we knew it was coming.”… For GSS Climate Change chapter 4.

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2023-07-19. Fervo heralds a revolution in geothermal power technology. [https://newatlas.com/energy/fervo-geothermal-test/] By Loz Blain, New Atlas. Excerpt: There’s a near-unlimited amount of clean energy under our feet, in the form of hot rocks. You can generate clean electricity 24/7 – not intermittently, like solar and wind – if you can get water down into that rock and back to the surface to drive steam turbines. A reliable source like this would make the clean energy transition much smoother. . . However . . . there are only limited places where geothermal power currently makes economic sense – places like Iceland and New Zealand, for example, where the heat is close to the surface, easily accessible, and the site is close enough to a grid connection to make it worth exploiting. Fervo’s solution is a bit more down-to-Earth, as it were, and draws on much more established, high-volume machinery and techniques from oil and gas production. Essentially, Fervo aims to do for geothermal what shale oil and fracking did for hydrocarbons, radically improving access to resources and unlocking energy where previously it was too expensive to get to…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 4.

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[template] 2023-07-00. . [] By . Excerpt: … For GSS chapter .

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2023-07-20. Warning signs detected hours ahead of big earthquakes. [https://www.science.org/content/article/warning-signs-detected-hours-ahead-big-earthquakes] By Paul Voosen, Science. Excerpt: Established earthquake warning systems provide at best just a minute or two of notice—and that’s only if the shaking doesn’t start under your feet. …Now, researchers say they have identified nearly imperceptible shifts along fault zones up to 2 hours before large earthquakes, according to a report today in Science. Although existing monitoring systems cannot yet pick up this signal in real time, the discovery points toward a future where residents could retreat to safe havens ahead of the most catastrophic quakes. …Bletery and Nocquet stacked the time series on top of each other. For the first 46 hours, they found the records to be basically featureless. But in the 2 hours before the earthquake, the duo found signs of increasing movement—as if the faults were starting to slip ahead of the main rupture, Bletery says…. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 2.

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2023-07-19. U.S. and China on Climate: How the World’s Two Largest Polluters Stack Up. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/climate/us-china-climate-issues.html] By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times. Excerpt: …China, the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, produces 12.7 billion metric tons of emissions annually. That dwarfs U.S. emissions, currently about 5.9 billion tons annually. …Since 1850, China has emitted 284 billion tons of carbon dioxide. But the United States, which industrialized far earlier, has released almost twice that amount: 509 billion tons of emissions. …The average Chinese person uses far less energy than the average American, about 10.1 tons of carbon pollution annually compared to 17.6 tons in the U.S. …The United States consumes 20 percent of the world’s oil and China consumes about 14 percent. The United States is also a top oil exporter. China imports most of its oil. …Natural gas now accounts for about 30 percent of energy use in the United States. In China, natural gas, most of it imported, accounts for 9 percent of its energy mix…. The United States has not built a new coal plant since 2013. There has been a 40 percent decline in coal-fired power generation in America over the last decade…. China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. A study last year found China permitted a total of 106 gigawatts of new coal power projects in 2022, the equivalent of two large coal power plants per week…. China manufactures more solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicle batteries than any other nation. In 2022 China invested $546 billion into clean energy. The United States invested $141 billion.… One in four cars sold in China last year was an electric vehicle. …In the United States, one in 17 new cars sold last year was electric…. See also Why Heat Waves Are Deepening China’s Addiction to Coal. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

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2023-07-18. How Canada’s Record Wildfires Got So Bad, So Fast. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/18/climate/canada-record-wildfires.html] By Nadja Popovich, The New York Times. Excerpt: Wildfires in Canada have burned a staggering 25 million acres so far this year, an area roughly the size of Kentucky. …“The recipe for a wildfire is simple,” said Mike Flannigan, a professor who studies wildland fires at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. “You need three ingredients: First, vegetation. We call it fuel. Second: ignition, which in Canada is people and lightning. And, third: hot, dry, windy weather.” Those ingredients came together over and over again this year across much of the country, he said, resulting in a fire season that stands “head and shoulders above any other year.”… For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-18. Heat Waves Grip 3 Continents as Climate Change Warms Earth. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/world/extreme-heat-wave-us-europe-asia.html] By Alan Yuhas, The New York Times. Excerpt: Punishing heat waves gripped three continents on Tuesday, breaking records in cities around the Northern Hemisphere less than two weeks after the Earth recorded what scientists said were likely its hottest days in modern history. Firefighters in Greece scrambled to put out wildfires, as parched conditions raised the risk of more blazes throughout Europe. Beijing logged another day of 95-degree heat, and people in Hangzhou, another Chinese city, compared the choking conditions to a sauna. From the Middle East to the American Southwest, delivery drivers, airport workers and construction crews labored under blistering skies. …In the United States, Phoenix broke a nearly half-century-old record on Tuesday, with the city’s 19th consecutive day of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius)…. See also June Was Earth’s Hottest on Record. August May Bring More of the Same. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-17. Soil Fungi May Be a Carbon Pool. [https://eos.org/articles/soil-fungi-are-a-major-carbon-sink] By Caroline Hasler, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Mycorrhizal fungi—soil-dwelling fungi that exchange nutrients with plant roots—are important players in plant and soil health. A new study suggests they are also significant carbon pools. Researchers estimated that the fungi receive the equivalent of 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) annually from plants—equal to 36% of current annual fossil fuel emissions…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 5.

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2023-07-16. As Climate Shocks Multiply, Designers Seek Holy Grail: Disaster-Proof Homes. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/climate/climate-geodesic-dome-house.html] By Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times. Excerpt: Jon duSaint, a retired software engineer, recently bought property near Bishop, Calif., in a rugged valley east of the Sierra Nevada. The area is at risk for wildfires, severe daytime heat and high winds — and also heavy winter snowfall. But Mr. duSaint isn’t worried. He’s planning to live in a dome. The 29-foot structure will be coated with aluminum shingles that reflect heat, and are also fire-resistant. Because the dome has less surface area than a rectangular house, it’s easier to insulate against heat or cold. And it can withstand high winds and heavy snowpack. …As weather grows more extreme, geodesic domes and other resilient home designs are gaining new attention from more climate-conscious home buyers, and the architects and builders who cater to them…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 10.

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2023-07-16. A New Job for Electric Vehicles: Powering Homes During Blackouts. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/business/energy-environment/electric-vehicles-backup-power.html] By Ivan Penn, The New York Times. Excerpt: Some energy experts say battery-powered vehicles will increasingly help keep the lights on and support electric grids, rather than straining them…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 9.

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2023-07-15. Why Sunscreen Is the Only Anti-Aging Product You Need. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/well/live/sunscreen-aging-skin-care.html] By Dana G. Smith, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Dr. Frey said that as much as 80 percent of the skin changes we associate with age are actually caused by the sun’s ultraviolet rays. The best way to avoid them, aside from staying indoors, in the shade or permanently covered up? Sunscreen. …Years of exposure to both UVA and UVB rays damages cells on the top layer of the skin, called keratinocytes. When that happens, the skin starts to look red, rough and scaly in patches — a condition called actinic keratosis. “It’s due to DNA mutations that occur specifically in the keratinocytes, and they then proliferate and become abnormal,” said Dr. Lena Von Schuckmann, a dermatologist and clinician researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia. In some cases, actinic keratosis can become cancerous. …Below the keratinocytes are the melanocytes — the cells that produce melanin and cause the skin to darken. UVA rays primarily activate these cells, resulting in a suntan. (Sunburn is different; it’s caused by UVB rays injuring the top layer of the skin.) With long-term UV exposure, the melanocytes become damaged, resulting in permanent hyperpigmentation. These brown spots are sometimes called sunspots, age spots, liver spots or their technical name, solar lentigines…. For GSS Ozone chapter 3.

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2023-07-13. Marine Protection Does Not Affect Fish Catches in Mexico. [https://eos.org/articles/marine-protection-does-not-affect-fish-catches-in-mexico] By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Catches of species such as tuna and swordfish did not decrease after a marine protected area the size of New York State was established off the coast of Mexico in 2017. Marine protected areas are the oceanic versions of national parks: In the most stringently protected regions, fishing and other extractive activities are banned. Some critics in the fishing industry have long argued that such restrictions negatively affect fishers by reducing catches and forcing mariners to travel longer distances to fish. However, researchers have now analyzed maritime data to show that’s not true, at least for North America’s largest marine protected area. Their results were published in Science Advances…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 7.

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2023-07-14. Some Squirmy Stowaways Got to the Arctic. And They Like It There. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/14/climate/invasive-worms-arctic-environment.html] By Sofia Quaglia, The New York times. Excerpt: Worms are …taking over territory in the Far North that’s been wormless since the last ice age. Scientists say the expansion will inevitably change northern ecosystems, with implications for the whole planet, in ways we don’t fully understand and probably can’t undo. …In much of the temperate world, shoveling up a clump of ground full of common earthworms is a sign of healthy soil full of flora, fungi and good bacteria. Earthworms actively contribute to soil health by munching on decaying organic matter and pooping out nutrient-rich fertilizer. But that means worms also have the potential to upend the natural balance of ecosystems in Arctic and sub-Arctic zones. For example, by encouraging the growth of certain plants at the expense of others, altering entire food webs and squeezing out rare, native flora that is already threatened by climate change. …They can also trigger microbial activity that can help to unlock potent greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen that are stored in the soil. …Worms didn’t make it to the Far North on their own. Research shows that humans have been bringing them, intentionally and unintentionally, to remote places above the Arctic Circle and to sub-Arctic areas since at least the middle of the 1800s by importing soil for lawns and gardens and for use as fishing bait. Recent increases in travel to these areas can also contribute to the invasion. …Now, as human-caused climate change raises temperatures and thaws the permafrost, the worms are getting a foothold…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 5.

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2023-07-13. Genetically edited wood could make paper more sustainable. [https://www.science.org/content/article/genetically-edited-wood-could-make-paper-more-sustainable] By Robert F. Service, Science. Excerpt: Paper products may seem like the ultimate green technology. They are recyclable, biodegradable, and renewable. Their main ingredient, cellulose fibers, literally grows on trees. But separating the cellulose from other substances in the plant, such as the stiff, woody material called lignin, comes with a heavy environmental toll. Every year, paper mills generate millions of tons of chemical waste and more than 150 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Today in Science, researchers report they have found a way to reduce that burden. By using CRISPR gene-editing tools, they grew engineered poplar trees with far less lignin than usual. Milling these trees, they argue, could lower papermaking pollution while saving the industry billions of dollars…. For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4.

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2023-07-13. Leaks Can Make Natural Gas as Bad for the Climate as Coal, a Study Says. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/climate/natural-gas-leaks-coal-climate-change.html] By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times. Excerpt: Natural gas, long seen as a cleaner alternative to coal and an important tool in the fight to slow global warming, can be just as harmful to the climate, a new study has concluded, unless companies can all but eliminate the leaks that plague its use. It takes as little as 0.2 percent of gas to leak to make natural gas as big a driver of climate change as coal, the study found. That’s a tiny margin of error for a gas that is notorious for leaking from drill sites, processing plants and the pipes that transport it into power stations or homes and kitchens. …The peer-reviewed study, which also involved researchers from Harvard and Duke Universities and NASA and is set to be published next week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind. The findings throw up difficult questions about how much more money the nations of the world should invest in gas infrastructure to ward off the worst of global warming. The $370 billion Inflation Reduction Act passed by the United States Congress last year, designed to move the country away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, includes credits that would apply to some forms of natural gas…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 3.

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2023-07-13. Scientist Invents the ‘World’s Whitest Paint’ To Cool Down Your House. [https://www.entrepreneur.com/green-entrepreneur/scientist-invents-the-worlds-whitest-paint-to-cool-down/455739] By Jonathan Small, Entrepreneur. Excerpt: A scientist at Purdue University concocted a white paint that can cool down buildings and prevent global temperatures from rising. Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering, created white paint that reflects 98% of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface. When applied to the roof of structures, the paint cools down surfaces as much as eight degrees during the day and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, according to a report in The New York Times. “If you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet [93 m2], we estimate that you could get a cooling power up to 10 kilowatts. That’s more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses,” Ruan said…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 8.

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2023-07-12. Perseverance Finds Complex Organics (Not Life) On Mars. [https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/perseverance-finds-complex-organics-not-life-on-mars/] By Colin Stuart, Sky & Telescope Magazine. Excerpt: Planetary scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Perseverance rover have found signs of organic molecules on Mars, hinting that the planet had a more complex geochemical cycle in the past than previously thought. If true, it shows that the building blocks of life have been present on the Red Planet for around billions of years. These new findings, published in Nature, come from examining the floor of Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer- (28-mile-) wide impact basin just north of the Martian equator. NASA picked it as Perseverance’s landing site due to geological signs that an ancient river flooded into the crater some 2.5 billion years ago…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7.

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2023-07-12. Massive lava outburst may have led to Snowball Earth. [https://www.science.org/content/article/massive-lava-outburst-may-have-led-snowball-earth] By Maia Wei-Haas, Science. Excerpt: About 717 million years ago, a climate catastrophe struck the planet, as temperatures plunged and glaciers enveloped the globe. The cause of this “Snowball Earth” episode has been mysterious, but it took place around the same time as a massive outburst of volcanism. Many researchers thought there might be a connection. But the timing was uncertain. Now, more precise dates, reported last month in Earth and Planetary Science Letters (EPSL) and in November 2022 in Science Advances, show the eruptions preceded the Snowball Earth event by 1 million to 2 million years. The lag points to a particular way the fire could have triggered the ice: through a chemical alteration of the fresh volcanic rocks known as weathering, which sucks carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, turning down the planetary thermostat. The studies highlight the power of weathering as a key driver behind shifts in Earth’s climate, and how components of the planet as disparate as rocks and the atmosphere are inextricably linked, says EPSL study co-author Galen Halverson, a sedimentary geologist at McGill University. …Geoscientists debating the cause of the so-called Sturtian glaciation, which lasted 57 million years, have pointed to a number of possibilities—meteorite strikes, biologic activity, shifts in Earth’s orbit, and more. But recent studies have zeroed in on one of the largest volcanic outbursts ever, preserved today across northern Canada in what’s called the Franklin large igneous province (LIP). The eruptions spewed lava across an area at least the size of Argentina—and perhaps bigger than China…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 8.

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2023-07-12. Aomawa Shields on Searching For Life in Space, and at Home. [https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101893676/aomawa-shields-on-searching-for-life-in-space-and-at-home] KQED podcast. Excerpt: Does it matter if life exists on another planet? To UC Irvine astrobiologist Aomawa Shields it matters in the same way that a mountain matters and screams to be climbed: not knowing is unbearable. Shields has devoted her career to studying the climate and habitability of exoplanets to further the search for extraterrestrial life. She’s also one of very few Black women in a field dominated by white men and a classically trained actor. We talk to her about her journey as a scientist and an artist and her new book “Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe.”… See also TED Talk, How we’ll find life on other planets. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 8.

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2023-07-12. Parts of Arizona have seen 110-degree temperatures every day this month. And it’s about to get hotter. [https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/us/arizona-southwest-heat-wave/index.html] By Christina Maxouris, CNN. Excerpt: Arizonans have endured scorching temperatures for more than two weeks and that hot streak is about to get even hotter, with a brutal heat wave starting to take shape ahead of the weekend. Temperatures in Phoenix have reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit every single day this month. On Wednesday, the city’s high was 111 degrees, making it the third longest streak in history during which Phoenix recorded continuous temperatures of at least 110 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. The longest streak, set in 1974, was 18 days. Meteorologists expect the weekend heat will be record-breaking, reaching a staggering 119 degrees in some parts. …CNN Meteorologist Taylor Ward said “Over the coming days many locations will experience some of the top 10 temperatures they have ever recorded. This type of heat has to be taken seriously as heat stress can occur very quickly for those out in the elements.” …Over the next week, nearly 70% of all Americans will see a high temperature at or above 90 degrees, while more than 55 million people will see temperatures at or above 100 degrees…. See also New York Times article In Phoenix, Heat Becomes a Brutal Test of Endurance. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-12. The Energy Transition Is Underway. Fossil Fuel Workers Could Be Left Behind. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/us/politics/coal-gas-workers-transition.html] By Madeleine Ngo, The New York Times. Excerpt: …The United States is undergoing a rapid shift away from fossil fuels as new battery factories, wind and solar projects, and other clean energy investments crop up across the country. An expansive climate law that Democrats passed last year could be even more effective than Biden administration officials had estimated at reducing fossil fuel emissions. While the transition is projected to create hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs, it could be devastating for many workers and counties that have relied on coal, oil and gas for their economic stability. Estimates of the potential job losses in the coming years vary, but roughly 900,000 workers were directly employed by fossil fuel industries in 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. …Beyond construction, wind and solar farms typically require few workers to operate, and new clean energy jobs might not necessarily offer comparable wages or align with the skills of laid-off workers. …U.S. coal-fired generation capacity is projected to decline sharply to about 50 percent of current levels by 2030, according to the Energy Information Administration. About 41,000 workers remain in the coal mining industry, down from about 177,000 in the mid-1980s…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-07-11. Taking a Fine-Grained Approach to Investigating Climate’s Impact on Crops. [https://eos.org/articles/taking-a-fine-grained-approach-to-investigating-climates-impact-on-crops] By Jane Palmer, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Studying the effects of variable weather on all three aspects of production—planting, harvesting, and yield—can help farmers and policymakers build resilience to climate change. …To study climate change’s impacts on food and other crop systems, scientists have typically measured the change in crop yield in different weather scenarios. But when it comes to building a resilient food production system, it is valuable to look beyond this single metric, according to the authors of a new study published in Nature Sustainability…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-11. Heat Down Below Is Making the Ground Shift Under Chicago. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/climate/chicago-underground-heat.html] By Raymond Zhong, The New York Times. Excerpt: Underneath downtown Chicago’s soaring Art Deco towers, its multilevel roadways and its busy subway and rail lines, the land is sinking, and not only for the reasons you might expect. Since the mid-20th century, the ground between the city surface and the bedrock has warmed by 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit on average, according to a new study out of Northwestern University. All that heat, which comes mostly from basements and other underground structures, has caused the layers of sand, clay and rock beneath some buildings to subside or swell by several millimeters over the decades, enough to worsen cracks and defects in walls and foundations. …In big cities worldwide, humans’ burning of fossil fuels is raising the mercury at the surface. But heat is also pouring out of basements, parking garages, train tunnels, pipes, sewers and electrical cables and into the surrounding earth, a phenomenon that scientists have taken to calling “underground climate change.”… For GSS Energy Use chapter 8.

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2023-07-10. Humans Adapted to Diverse Habitats as Climate and Landscapes Changed. [https://eos.org/articles/humans-adapted-to-diverse-habitats-as-climate-and-landscapes-changed] By Deepa Padmanaban, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Our genus, Homo, evolved over 3 million years by adapting to increasingly diverse environments. Now, a new study published in Science deeply explores how six species of Homo(H. ergaster, H. habilis, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and early H. sapiens) adapted to habitats across Africa and Eurasia. In its analysis, the team of scientists from South Korea and Italy used data from more than 3,000 human fossil specimens and archaeological sites. They then combined those data with climate and vegetation models of the past 3 million years. …during the early to middle Pleistocene (about 2.6 million years ago to 0.5 million years ago), massive changes in Earth’s climate played a role in the distribution of vegetation, as well as the evolutionary development of the Homo species studied. …the climate has cooled considerably over the past 3 million years. Reasons for this pattern of climate change include a gradual decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, glacial cycles brought on by long-term changes in Earth’s orbit and axis, and, after the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) about 1 million years ago, a lengthening of glacial cycles from about 41,000 years to about 100,000 years. …“Because cold air holds less water, planetary cooling was accompanied by an overall drying.” This global cooling resulted in a shrinking of warm tropical forests in central Africa and southern Europe—habitats to which the early hominins H. ergaster and H. habilis were adapted. Forests were replaced by more open environments such as grassland and dry shrubland…. For GSS Life and Climate chapter 11.

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2023-07-10. Florida in hot water as ocean temperatures rise along with the humidity. [https://apnews.com/article/florida-ocean-heat-climate-coral-record-bfc3010460eb077fc14d53a6f768931d] By Seth Borenstein and Mike Schneider, AP. Excerpt: ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Record global ocean heating has invaded Florida with a vengeance. Water temperatures in the mid-90s (mid-30s Celsius) are threatening delicate coral reefs, depriving swimmers of cooling dips and adding a bit more ick to the Sunshine State’s already oppressive summer weather. Forecasters are warning of temperatures that with humidity will feel like 110 degrees (43 degrees Celsius) by week’s end. If that’s not enough, Florida is about to get a dose of dust from Africa’s Saharan desert that’s likely to hurt air quality. …Water temperature near Johnson Key came close to 97 degrees (36.1 degrees Celsius) Monday evening, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration buoy. Another buoy had a reading close to 95 (35 Celsius) near Vaca Key a day earlier. These are about 5 degrees warmer than normal this time of year, meteorologists said…. See also New York Times article, How Hot Is the Sea Off Florida Right Now? Think 90s Fahrenheit. Researchers are recording ocean temperatures that pose severe risks to coral reefs and other marine life. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-07. Ambidextrous Microbes May Pump Out CO₂ as Temperatures Rise. [https://eos.org/articles/ambidextrous-microbes-may-pump-out-co2-as-temperatures-rise] By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Some tiny forms of life double-dip to sustain themselves: They’re both photosynthetic and predatorial. But as the planet warms, such “mixotrophic microbes” are apt to shift away from being sunlight driven to being more predatory, researchers have found. And because photosynthesis consumes carbon dioxide (CO₂) and respiration expels the greenhouse gas, that transition has important implications for the climate. Furthermore, the early-warning signs that signal an impending shift from a carbon sink state to a carbon source state are muted in the presence of high levels of nutrients, the team reported in Functional Ecology….The collective amount of all the CO₂ that mixotrophic microbes are capable of sequestering or releasing is apt to be substantial, Wieczynski said. That’s because the combined biomass of Earth’s microbes, including bacteria and plantlike organisms known as protists, exceeds that of animals by roughly a factor of 40, according to recent estimates…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 4.

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2023-07-06. Toxic algae a slimy mess for Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-lake-okeechobee-toxic-algae-problem-2018-07-06/] By Manuel Bojorquez. Excerpt: PORT MAYACA, Fla. — Rain, heat and pollutants have caused an outbreak of toxic algae blooms, which can cause health problems. Now, lawmakers in Florida want the governor to declare a state of emergency over an algae problem at Lake Okeechobee, the aquatic lifeblood of South Florida. …It’s a recurring nightmare. This year’s early bloom, however, could signal one of the worst summers yet. The problem starts at Lake Okeechobee. After heavy rains, the Army Corps of Engineers released millions of gallons to relieve pressure on the lake’s old earthen dam. But the water is chock full of chemicals and nutrients — much of it runoff from commercial agriculture and sprawling development. When that mix bakes in the summer sun, the algae population explodes. …Once the algae starts to cover a waterway, it deprives it of oxygen, essentially sucking the life out of it. Wildlife like manatees can choke to death. Under water, the entire marine ecosystem is at risk. So are waterside businesses. Sebastian Lahara held a mock funeral for his kayak rental operation, and Wittman said he has lost $20,000 on canceled trips this summer. …The federal government and the state have approved a $1.6 billion plan to clean and store some of the lake water, but it still has not been funded. Even the private sector is stepping in, offering a $10 million reward for the best plan to fix the problem…. For GSS Ecosystem Change chapter 7.

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2023-07-06. Hand-held water harvester powered by sunlight could combat water scarcity. [https://data.berkeley.edu/news/hand-held-water-harvester-powered-sunlight-could-combat-water-scarcity] By Rachel Leven, UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Excerpt: UC Berkeley researchers have designed an extreme-weather proven, hand-held device that can extract and convert water molecules from the air into drinkable water using only ambient sunlight as its energy source, a study published in Nature Water today shows. This atmospheric water harvester used an ultra-porous material known as a metal-organic framework (MOF) to extract water repeatedly in the hottest and driest place in North America, Death Valley National Park. These tests showed the device could provide clean water anywhere, addressing an urgent problem, as climate change exacerbates drought conditions “Almost one-third of the world’s population lives in water-stressed regions. The UN projects in the year 2050 that almost 5 billion people on our planet will experience some kind of water stress for a significant part of the year,” said Omar Yaghi, the Berkeley chemistry professor who invented MOFs and is leading this study. “This is quite relevant to harnessing a new source for water.” …It is also extremely efficient at harvesting water, releasing as drinking water 85 to 90 percent of the water it captures as atmospheric vapor. It harvested up to 285 grams of water per kilogram of metal-organic framework in a day, the equivalent of a cup of water…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-06-08. UC Berkeley Goes All-Electric As Part of Ambitious Clean Energy Campus Plan. [https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/2023-spring-summer/berkeley-goes-all-electric-as-part-of-ambitious-clean-energy-campus-plan/] By Pat Joseph, California Magazine. Excerpt: Goodbye 36-year-old gas turbine, hello electric thermal plant. …In 2028, as part of Berkeley’s ambitious Clean Energy Campus plan, the 36-year-old gas-fired cogeneration plant will be replaced with a new electrified heating and cooling plant, to be located at North Field, the extramural playing field just north of Hearst Gym, and a utility-fed electrical system.  The current power plant provides about 90 percent of the electricity and 100 percent of the steam needs of campus. When it was first brought online in 1987, the cogen plant was state of the art, efficiently producing both electricity and steam, the latter used for heating and lab processes. But now, says Kira Stoll, chief sustainability and carbon solutions officer, it’s time to move on to a better, cleaner source of power—one that doesn’t emit 135,000 metric tons of CO₂ annually. “One really critical piece of this is the heightened awareness that we need to act on the climate and create solutions,” Stoll said. “If we’re investing in infrastructure that’s going to be around for 50 or more years, we really don’t want to invest in last-century technology. We really need to invest in the future.” Indeed, if all goes according to plan, Berkeley will become the first University of California campus to achieve zero-carbon energy goals…. For GSS Energy Use chapter 10.

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2023-07-06. The Starwatcher. [https://www.science.org/content/article/amateur-astronomer-may-worlds-top-supernova-hunter] By Dennis Normile. Excerpt: Amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki is one of the most prolific supernova hunters of all time. …he drove to his private observatory in the hills above his home in Yamagata, Japan, 290 kilometers north of Tokyo. …SN 2023ixf is his 172nd supernova, a total topped only by U.S.-based Tim Puckett, whose private observatory in Georgia has bagged at least 360 supernovae with the help of a worldwide network of volunteers who manually examine his images. Itagaki, by contrast, works alone. He “is one of the most prolific supernova observers in the world,” says Andrew Howell, an astronomer at the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 6.

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2023-07-06. Why a sudden surge of broken heat records is scaring scientists. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/06/earth-record-heat-climate-extremes/] By Scott Dance, The Washington Post. Excerpt: New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleled low sea ice levels around Antarctica, …and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted, according to new data. And then, on Monday, came Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years. Tuesday was hotter. “We have never seen anything like this before,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. He said any number of charts and graphs on Earth’s climate are showing, quite literally, that “we are in uncharted territory.” …Ocean heat is to be expected during El Niño — it is marked by unusually warm sea surface temperatures along the equatorial Pacific. But shocking warmth has developed far beyond that zone, including in the North Pacific, around New Zealand and across most of the Atlantic…. See also New York Times Heat Records Are Broken Around the Globe as Earth Warms, Fast. For GSS Climate Change chapter 4.

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2023-07-05. Agriculture 3.0: Preparing for a Drier Future in the Colorado River Basin. [https://eos.org/features/agriculture-3-0-preparing-for-a-drier-future-in-the-colorado-river-basin] By Jane Palmer, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Years of drought and climate change are causing water resources to dwindle in the Colorado River Basin. But farmers and scientists are collaborating to learn how to grow crops with less water. …Colorado River flow has shrunk by nearly 20% in the past 2 decades. And in 2022, the nation’s largest reservoirs—Lake Mead (in Arizona and Nevada) and Lake Powell (in Arizona and Utah)—were at unprecedented low levels. If the water levels at Lake Powell were to drop much further, in the future, the dam would no longer be able to deliver hydropower or water to people, farmers, and businesses in Arizona, California, and Nevada. To prevent this doomsday scenario, in 2022, the Interior Department said that the seven states relying on the Colorado River need to reduce water usage by as much as 4 million acre-feet (493 cubic kilometers)—30% of what the states have historically used…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-04. Webb Finds Complex Molecules in a Galaxy Long Ago. [https://www.fraknoi.com/astronomy/pahs-found-in-distant-galaxy/] By Andrew Fraknoi. Excerpt: Astronomers working with the Webb Space Telescope have found a fortunate alignment in the sky that has enabled them to detect the faint signal of a complex building block of life just 1.5 billion years after the origin of the universe. The discovery of PAH’s (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) so soon after the Big Bang is another powerful demonstration that assembling the ingredients for the chemistry of life is a process that began in the vast clouds of raw material between the stars. And, it seems, it began quite quickly after the first generations of stars produced the required elements…. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 2.

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2023-07-04. Climate change: World’s hottest day since records began. [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66104822] By Matt McGrath, BBC News. Excerpt: The world’s average temperature reached a new high on Monday 3 July, topping 17 degrees Celsius for the first time. Record spring heat in Spain and in many countries in Asia was followed by marine heatwaves in places that don’t normally see them, such as in the North Sea. This week China continued to experience an enduring heatwave with temperatures in some places above 35C, while the southern US has also been subject to stifling conditions.  Against this background, the global average temperature reached 17.01C on 3 July, according to the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction. This broke the previous record of 16.92C that had stood since August 2016. Monday’s high was also the warmest since satellite monitoring began in 1979…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 4.

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2023-07-03. Canada Offers Lesson in the Economic Toll of Climate Change. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/business/economy/canada-wildfires-economy.html] By Lydia DePillis, The New York Times. Excerpt: Canada’s wildfires have burned 20 million acres, blanketed Canadian and U.S. cities with smoke and raised health concerns on both sides of the border, with no end in sight. The toll on the Canadian economy is only beginning to sink in. The fires have upended oil and gas operations, reduced available timber harvests, dampened the tourism industry and imposed uncounted costs on the national health system. …What long seemed a faraway concern has snapped into sharp relief in recent years, as billowing smoke has suffused vast areas of North America, floods have washed away neighborhoods and heat waves have strained power grids. That incurs billions of dollars in costs, and has longer-reverberating consequences, such as insurers withdrawing from markets prone to hurricanes and fires. In some early studies of the economic impact of rising temperatures, Canada appeared to be better positioned than countries closer to the Equator; warming could allow for longer farming seasons and make more places attractive to live in as winters grow less harsh. But it is becoming clear that increasing volatility — ice storms followed by fires followed by intense rains and now hurricanes on the Atlantic coast, uncommon so far north — wipes out any potential gains…. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

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2023-07-02. A Climate Laggard in America’s Industrial Heartland Has a Plan to Change, Fast. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/02/climate/michigan-climate-change.html] By Coral Davenport, The New York Times. Excerpt: From toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes to sewage pouring into Detroit basements to choking wildfire smoke that drifted south from Canada, Michigan has been contending with the fallout from climate change. Even the state’s famed cherry trees have been struggling against rising temperatures, forcing some farmers to abandon the crop. But this state at the center of the American auto industry has also been a laggard when it comes to climate action, resistant to environmental regulations that could harm the manufacturing that has underpinned its economy for generations. That may soon change. Michigan is one of three states where Democrats won a “blue trifecta” last year, taking control of the governor’s office and both legislative chambers, and they are seizing that opportunity to propose some of the most ambitious climate laws in the world. The centerpiece is based on a 58-page “MI Healthy Climate” plan offered by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. It would require Michigan to generate all of its electricity from solar, wind or other carbon-free sources by 2035, …. For GSS Climate Change chapter 9.

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