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Category: Environment

As Africa loses forest, its small farmers are bringing back trees

As Africa loses forest, its small farmers are bringing back trees

Fred Pearce writes: For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation of Africa. And they are true — the continent’s forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making. But the trees? Maybe not, according to new satellite data analyzed by artificial intelligence and a growing body of on-the-ground studies. This new research is finding ever more trees outside forests, many of them nurtured by farmers and sprouting on their previously treeless fields. Across the continent —…

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Humanity has entered a fire age

Humanity has entered a fire age

The Washington Post reports: When the sky over New York City turned a thick, silty orange on Wednesday, 8 million residents woke up in a new era. Until this week, the East Coast had remained cocooned, thousands of miles away from the walls of choking smoke that have become commonplace in Washington state, California, Oregon and British Columbia. Not anymore. The East Coast, along with the rest of the planet, has entered a new fire era, or — as Stephen…

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Oil lobby pushed pollution loophole for wildfire smoke

Oil lobby pushed pollution loophole for wildfire smoke

The Lever reports: Seventy-five million people nationwide have been under air quality alerts, as days of smoke-filled skies sent soot levels soaring more than 10 times beyond what federal regulators consider safe for breathing. But in federal air quality data, it will be as if those days never happened. That’s because a Big Oil-backed exemption in federal environmental law allows states to discount pollution from “exceptional events” beyond their control, including wildfires. And while environmental regulators are considering cracking down…

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The Kakhovka Dam collapse is an ecological disaster

The Kakhovka Dam collapse is an ecological disaster

Chris Baraniuk writes: A push notification news alert on his phone, then images of the deluge—that’s how Heorhiy Veremiychyk learned of the disaster. With water pouring through the stricken Kakhovka Dam in the Kherson region of Ukraine, he immediately understood the enormity of what had happened. “The water raised very sharply,” he says, referring to the terrible effects on wildlife downstream. “There was no possibility to escape.” Veremiychyk, of the National Ecological Center of Ukraine (NECU), says the impact of…

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There’s a deeper problem hiding beneath global warming

There’s a deeper problem hiding beneath global warming

Mark Buchanan writes: During the past two centuries at least (and likely for much longer), our yearly energy use has doubled roughly every 30 to 50 years. Our energy use seems to be growing exponentially, a trend that shows every sign of continuing. We keep finding new things to do and almost everything we invent requires more and more energy: consider the enormous energy demands of cryptocurrency mining or the accelerating energy requirements of AI. If this historical trend continues, scientists estimate waste heat will pose…

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Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by mafia, ex-police chief warns

Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by mafia, ex-police chief warns

The Guardian reports: The rapid advance of organised crime groups in the Brazilian Amazon risks turning the region into a vast, conflict-stricken hinterland plagued by heavily armed “criminal insurgents”, a former senior federal police chief has warned. Alexandre Saraiva, who worked in the Amazon from 2011 to 2021, said he feared the growing footprint of drug-trafficking mafias in the region could spawn a situation similar to the decades-long drug conflict in Rio de Janeiro, where the police’s battle with drug…

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Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can’t recycle our way out of this’

Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can’t recycle our way out of this’

France 24 reports: The scale of plastic pollution is growing, relentlessly. The world is producing twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, reaching 353 million tonnes in 2019, according to OECD figures. The vast majority goes into landfills, gets incinerated or is “mismanaged”, meaning left as litter or not correctly disposed of. Just 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled. Ramping up plastic recycling might seem like a logical way to transform waste into a resource. But recent…

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Stars could be invisible within 20 years as light pollution brightens night skies

Stars could be invisible within 20 years as light pollution brightens night skies

Robin McKie writes: The Herefordshire hills basked in brilliant sunshine last weekend. Summer had arrived and the skies were cloudless, conditions that would once have heralded succeeding nights of coal-dark heavens sprinkled with brilliant stars, meteorites and planets. It was not to be. The night sky was not so much black as dark grey with only a handful of stars glimmering against this backdrop. The Milky Way – which would once have glittered across the heavens – was absent. Summer’s…

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Supreme Court has appointed itself as ‘national decision maker on environmental policy,’ writes Justice Kagan

Supreme Court has appointed itself as ‘national decision maker on environmental policy,’ writes Justice Kagan

The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to police millions of acres of wetlands, delivering another setback to the agency’s ability to combat pollution. Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters. The decision was a second major blow to…

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As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

Nicola Jones writes: Off the coast of southeastern China, one particular fish species is booming: the oddly named Bombay duck, a long, slim fish with a distinctive, gaping jaw and a texture like jelly. When research ships trawl the seafloor off that coast, they now catch upwards of 440 pounds of the gelatinous fish per hour — a more than tenfold increase over a decade ago. “It’s monstrous,” says University of British Columbia fisheries researcher Daniel Pauly of the explosion…

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Manchin attacked EPA’s new rules that could cost him millions

Manchin attacked EPA’s new rules that could cost him millions

Politico reports: When Sen. Joe Manchin upbraided EPA on Wednesday for requiring power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, he didn’t mention that the agency’s rules could threaten his personal income. The West Virginia Democrat vowed to oppose President Joe Biden’s EPA nominees because the agency’s rules being proposed Thursday could push coal- and gas-fired power plants “out of existence,” he said. The risk to one plant, in particular, could jeapordize a lucrative source of money for Manchin. His family…

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Satellite data reveal nearly 20,000 previously unknown deep-sea mountains

Satellite data reveal nearly 20,000 previously unknown deep-sea mountains

Science News reports: The number of known mountains in Earth’s oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science. Just as mountains tower over Earth’s surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity. That’s…

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Our way of life is poisoning us

Our way of life is poisoning us

Mark O’Connell writes: There is plastic in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and in our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us. We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink and the food we eat, and even in the air that we breathe. We don’t know, yet, what it’s doing to us, because we have only quite recently become aware of its presence; but since we have learned of it, it has become a…

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The oceans are missing their rivers

The oceans are missing their rivers

Erica Gies writes: Gazing out from the eighth floor of a hotel in Georgetown, Guyana, the broad expanse of the Atlantic Ocean was a muddy brown. Only a thin rim of blue on the horizon showed the ocean’s true color; the rest swirled with sediment emerging from the mouth of the Essequibo River. In a rhythm that’s pulsed through epochs, a river’s plume carries sediment and nutrients from the continental interior into the ocean, a major exchange of resources from…

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A mystery in the Pacific is complicating climate projections

A mystery in the Pacific is complicating climate projections

Yale Climate Connections reports: Nothing has a bigger influence on year-to-year variations in the global climate than the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, commonly called ENSO. And the tropical waters at the heart of ENSO aren’t behaving exactly as climate scientists expected they would in a warming world, with potentially major implications for Atlantic hurricane seasons, droughts in the U.S. Southwest and the Horn of Africa, and other weather phenomena around the world. ENSO is a recurring ocean-and-atmosphere pattern that warms and…

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More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered

More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered

Science reports: The U.S. submarine fleet’s biggest adversary lately hasn’t been Red October. In 2005, the nuclear-powered USS San Francisco collided with an underwater volcano, or seamount, at top speed, killing a crew member and injuring most aboard. It happened again in 2021 when the USS Connecticut struck a seamount in the South China Sea, damaging its sonar array. With only one-quarter of the sea floor mapped with sonar, it is impossible to know how many seamounts exist. But radar…

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