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Category: Environment

Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

The New York Times reports: With the help of a small rope tied around his ankles, Eugenio Sánchez, lithe at age 50, shimmied himself all the way up a towering tree like a human inchworm, his chest heaving from the exertion, just to pick a few leaves. The leaves, found only on the highest branches, would help the scientists waiting below identify the species. And that, along with the tree’s exact size (or at least as close as one can…

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In California’s Park Fire, an indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction

In California’s Park Fire, an indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction

Sarah Hopkins writes: Where others might see only catastrophe, Don Hankins scans fire-singed landscapes for signs of renewal. Hankins, a renowned Miwkoʔ (Plains Miwok) cultural fire practitioner and scholar, has kept an eye on the Park Fire’s footprint as it sweeps through more than 429,000 acres across four Northern California counties. It started late last month and became one of the largest fires in state history in a matter of days, fueled by dry grasslands. The fire has since risen…

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The asteroid-in-spring hypothesis

The asteroid-in-spring hypothesis

Kerry Howley writes: It remains a matter of dispute when and where and with what antecedent Melanie During came up with the idea for determining the season the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. But the idea was this: Sturgeon bones grow like tree rings, and the bone cells grow thickest in summer, when food is most plentiful. A slice of bone, then, should reveal a succession of seasons. Months of plenty would be thicker, as the fish grew fat on plankton….

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just incinerated his credibility as an environmentalist

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just incinerated his credibility as an environmentalist

The Washington Post reports: As he suspended his independent presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump on Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked at length about the “many key issues” on which he claims that he and Trump are aligned. What he did not explain were their profound disagreements in the area that for many years was central to Kennedy’s career and public image: environmental protection. Kennedy had promised to be “the best environmental president in American history.” For decades, as…

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Megatsunami risk on the rise as glacial melt drives landslides

Megatsunami risk on the rise as glacial melt drives landslides

The Guardian reports: Just under a year ago, the east coast of Greenland was hit by a megatsunami. Triggered by a large landslide entering the uninhabited Dickson Fjord, the resulting tsunami was 200 metres high – equivalent to more than 40 double-decker buses. Luckily no one was hurt, though a military base was obliterated. Now analysis of the seismic data associated with the event has revealed that the tsunami was followed by a standing wave, which continued to slosh back…

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How methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

How methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

Rob Jackson reports: Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within…

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When is ‘recyclable’ not really recyclable? When the plastics industry gets to define what the word means

When is ‘recyclable’ not really recyclable? When the plastics industry gets to define what the word means

By Lisa Song This story was originally published by ProPublica Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag? They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them….

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How a Washington tax break for data centers snowballed into one of the state’s biggest corporate giveaways

How a Washington tax break for data centers snowballed into one of the state’s biggest corporate giveaways

By Lulu Ramadan and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times, photography by Karen Ducey, The Seattle Times This story was originally published by ProPublica In 2010, as the country still reeled from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, tech companies, real estate developers and rural lobbyists went to the state Capitol in Olympia, Washington, to press for a tax break for data centers. Turning it down, supporters argued, would mean rejecting high-paying, long-term and environmentally friendly jobs in distressed…

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Antarctic temperatures rise 10C above average in near record heatwave

Antarctic temperatures rise 10C above average in near record heatwave

The Guardian reports: Ground temperatures across great swathes of the ice sheets of Antarctica have soared an average of 10C above normal over the past month, in what has been described as a near record heatwave. While temperatures remain below zero on the polar land mass, which is shrouded in darkness at this time of year, the depths of southern hemisphere winter, temperatures have reportedly reached 28C above expectations on some days. The globe has experienced 12 months of record…

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Food as you know it is about to change

Food as you know it is about to change

David Wallace-Wells writes: From the vantage of the American supermarket aisle, the modern food system looks like a kind of miracle. Everything has been carefully cultivated for taste and convenience — even those foods billed as organic or heirloom — and produce regarded as exotic luxuries just a few generations ago now seems more like staples, available on demand: avocados, mangoes, out-of-season blueberries imported from Uruguay. But the supermarket is also increasingly a diorama of the fragility of a system…

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How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths

How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths

BBC News reports: Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India. The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs. But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows. By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal…

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How the U.S. became the world’s biggest fossil fuel producing state

How the U.S. became the world’s biggest fossil fuel producing state

The Guardian reports: To witness how the United States has become the world’s unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire’s home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana. Allaire’s looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas (or LNG) plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo…

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Ukrainian ecologists document what they say is Russian ecocide

Ukrainian ecologists document what they say is Russian ecocide

Ghanna Mamonova writes: Before the dam explosion, residents of the Kherson region in southeastern Ukraine referred to the local reservoir simply as the “sea.” Now, just one year after the June 6, 2023, attack on the Kakhovka Dam, they call it the “dead sea.” Once vast, its water irrigated farms and kept hundreds of thousands of people hydrated. It was replete with fish that had provided sustenance to the local population for generations. The attack, which was carried out by…

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How ‘carbon cowboys’ are cashing in on protected Amazon forest

How ‘carbon cowboys’ are cashing in on protected Amazon forest

The Washington Post reports from Portel, Brazil: Over the past two decades, a new financial commodity known as carbon credits has become one of the world’s most important tools in the fight against climate change. Companies and organizations seeking to offset their emission of carbon have spent billions of dollars on them. The Amazon rainforest, because of its size and global environmental importance, has increasingly drawn those pursuing carbon credits. Here, these people are called “carbon cowboys.” They’ve launched preservation…

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Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science

Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science

Scientific American reports: Project 2025, the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency, would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education. It would impose religious and conservative ideology on the federal civil service to such an extent that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, dubiously, tried to distance himself from the plan. But in 2022 Trump said the Heritage Foundation—the think tank that authored Project 2025—would “lay the…

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Data centers are draining resources in water-stressed communities

Data centers are draining resources in water-stressed communities

Eric Olson, Anne Grau, and Taylor Tipton write: The rapid growth of the technology industry and the increasing reliance on cloud computing and artificial intelligence have led to a boom in the construction of data centers across the United States. Electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, and the smart grid are particularly reliant on data centers to optimize energy utilization. These facilities house thousands of servers that require constant cooling to prevent overheating and ensure optimal performance. Unfortunately, many data…

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