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Category: Climate Change

The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt

The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt

The Guardian reports: Seaweed has been having a moment. Eco-influencers and columnists rave about its benefits, in everything from beauty products to biofuels. Jamie Oliver has embraced it as a recipe ingredient; Victoria Beckham uses it to keep off the pounds. And they’re right: seaweed is packed with nutrition, it sucks up carbon and is an amazingly versatile addition to the green economy. But one type of seaweed is not a benign force. Vast fields of sargassum, a brown seaweed,…

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How wildfires deplete the Earth’s ozone layer

How wildfires deplete the Earth’s ozone layer

Carolyn Gramling writes: Towering clouds of smoke sent into the stratosphere by ferocious wildfires can eat away at Earth’s ozone layer thanks to a potent mix of smoke, atmospheric chemistry and ultraviolet light, a new study finds. During late 2019 and early 2020, Australia’s skies turned black, darkened by thick columns of wildfire smoke that reached into the stratosphere. In the aftermath, satellite data revealed that the smoke was somehow reacting with atmospheric molecules to eat away at Earth’s ozone…

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Big Oil shuts the door on Ukraine’s foremost energy campaigner

Big Oil shuts the door on Ukraine’s foremost energy campaigner

Bill McKibben writes: 🔴BREAKING:Just found out I've been banned from #CERAWeek,the world's most influential energy conference 🛢️.Are they afraid of a strong advocate for ending #War and #FossilFuels? I will not be quiet; we need #ClimateJustice now, and together the energy majors won't stop us! pic.twitter.com/97iHBlUsGN — Svitlana Romanko (@SvitlanaRomanko) March 6, 2023 You may recall that last year, days after the invasion of Ukraine, this newsletter launched the (ultimately successful) campaign to get the Biden administration to invoke the…

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Biden admin paradox: Boost oil — and cut CO2?

Biden admin paradox: Boost oil — and cut CO2?

E&E News reports: The Biden administration’s seemingly contradictory energy and climate strategy was on full display here Wednesday: Try to pivot away from fossil fuels, but promote them for now. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm faced that paradox as she addressed energy leaders and insiders gathered in a hotel ballroom, praising the uptick in U.S. oil and gas exports during Russia’s war in Ukraine while touting a clean energy shift. “Europe is poised to reach the spring without major outages or…

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1,000 super-emitting methane leaks risk triggering climate tipping points

1,000 super-emitting methane leaks risk triggering climate tipping points

The Guardian reports: More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars. Separate data also reveals 55 “methane bombs” around the world – fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse…

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Climate impacts have made human-wildlife conflicts a global problem

Climate impacts have made human-wildlife conflicts a global problem

Inside Climate News reports: Climate change is driving more conflicts between humans and wildlife, as expanding development, deepening drought and quickly changing ecosystems force animals and people into new territories where they’re more likely to encounter each other, a new study says. Experts have long called for a concerted effort to address these human-wildlife clashes, which can lead to property damage, as well as injuries and death for both humans and animals. In fact, human-wildlife conflicts are already the leading…

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Solar geoengineering should be regulated, UN report says

Solar geoengineering should be regulated, UN report says

E&E News reports: A panel of climate experts convened by the United Nations is calling for international regulations to extend into the stratosphere. The recommendation — detailed in a report released Monday — could help manage the risks associated with spraying sunlight-reflecting aerosols dozens of miles above the Earth’s surface. Such stratospheric aerosol injection is largely untested and potentially harmful, but it’s attracting attention as an emergency measure to avoid catastrophic climate change. “This group unanimously suggests [stratospheric aerosol injection]…

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What Denmark’s North Sea coast can teach us about the virtues of respecting the planet

What Denmark’s North Sea coast can teach us about the virtues of respecting the planet

Kiley Bense writes: When the writer Dorthe Nors was a little girl in Denmark, she had a formative encounter with the North Sea, a moment that would stay with her for the rest of her life. “I was holding my mother’s hand,” she writes, in “A Line in the World,” her book of essays about the North Sea coast that was published in English in November. “As we walked along the beach, letting the waves splash around our ankles, one…

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Ants aren’t adapting to warmer temperatures

Ants aren’t adapting to warmer temperatures

Eos reports: Ants are a bedrock of forest ecosystems, and they might not be adjusting well to warming temperatures. In newly published research, scientists found that foraging ants preferred to gather food placed at specific temperatures but did not avoid food that was too hot or too cold. Long-term exposure to these hot, but sublethal, temperatures could be changing the ants’ food and energy usage, harming colonies and broader forest ecosystems. Hotter temperatures force ants to use more energy to…

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Warming seas are carving into glacier that could trigger major sea level rise

Warming seas are carving into glacier that could trigger major sea level rise

The Washington Post reports: Rapidly warming oceans are cutting into the underside of the Earth’s widest glacier, startling new data and images show, leaving the ice more prone to fracturing and ultimately heightening the risk for major sea level rise. Using an underwater robot at Thwaites Glacier, researchers have determined that warm water is getting channeled into crevasses in what the researchers called “terraces” — essentially, upside-down trenches — and carving out gaps under the ice. As the ice then…

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What the end-Triassic mass extinction tells us about our planet’s current condition

What the end-Triassic mass extinction tells us about our planet’s current condition

Ars Technica reports: The end-Triassic extinction, which happened 201 million years ago, was Earth’s third most severe extinction event since the dawn of animal life. Like today, CO2 rise and global warming were present, but the similarities don’t end there. As with today, it was a time of wildfires, deforestation, downpours, erosion, ocean acidification, marine dead zones, vanishing coral reefs, sea-level rise, and even insect plagues. There was also pollution by mercury, sulfur dioxide, halocarbons, and methane—and possibly even a…

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Atlanta shooting part of alarming U.S. crackdown on environmental defenders

Atlanta shooting part of alarming U.S. crackdown on environmental defenders

The Guardian reports: The shooting of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, believed to be the first environmental defender killed in the US, is the culmination of a dangerous escalation in the criminalization and repression of those who seek to protect natural resources in America, campaigners have warned. The death of the 26-year-old, who was also known as “Tortuguita” or “Little Turtle,” in a forest on the fringes of Atlanta was the sort of deadly act “people who have been paying attention…

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Melting Alaska wants to drill more oil

Melting Alaska wants to drill more oil

Bill McKibben writes: If you wanted an example of the reason we’re still losing the fight to slow the earth’s heating, the proposed Willow oil project in Alaska should suffice. This should be the no-brainer of all time. The ConocoPhillips plan for a massive new oil field development flies in the face of all climate science and reason. It would be producing huge quantities of oil for at least the next three decades—long past the point when scientists say we…

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Microplastics are filling the skies. Will they affect the climate?

Microplastics are filling the skies. Will they affect the climate?

Nicola Jones writes: Plastic has become an obvious pollutant over recent decades, choking turtles and seabirds, clogging up our landfills and waterways. But in just the past few years, a less-obvious problem has emerged. Researchers are starting to get concerned about how tiny bits of plastic in the air, lofted into the skies from seafoam bubbles or spinning tires on the highway, might potentially change our future climate. “Here’s something that people just didn’t think about — another aspect of…

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How California’s ambitious new climate plan could help speed energy transformation around the world

How California’s ambitious new climate plan could help speed energy transformation around the world

Electrifying trucks and cars and shifting to renewable energy are crucial for California’s zero-emissions future. Sergio Pitamitz / VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images By Daniel Sperling, University of California, Davis California is embarking on an audacious new climate plan that aims to eliminate the state’s greenhouse gas footprint by 2045, and in the process, slash emissions far beyond its borders. The blueprint calls for massive transformations in industry, energy and transportation, as well as changes in institutions and human…

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