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Category: Environment

How to buy a piece of a lawsuit and impoverish a country

How to buy a piece of a lawsuit and impoverish a country

Inside Climate News reports: When a foreign mining company sued Greenland in 2022, the government’s lead lawyer thought he was prepared. Paw Fruerlund had handled similar cases before, and he believed the law and facts were on his side. When he arrived at one of the first hearings, however, Fruerlund stared across the table at 12 corporate lawyers from two firms representing his opponent, an Australian company called Greenland Minerals. There were so many, they spilled across two rows of…

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Our morals change with the seasons

Our morals change with the seasons

Alice Sun writes: The seasons have been shown to influence many elements of our psyches and behavior: mood, color preferences, how charitable we are, even cognitive performance. But recently, researchers found they may also affect what we tend to consider among our most profoundly held convictions: how we decide what is right and wrong. A team of researchers looked at a decade’s worth of responses to an online survey about morals and analyzed how these responses changed from one season…

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To escape extreme heat, farmers and fisherfolk worldwide are adopting overnight hours

To escape extreme heat, farmers and fisherfolk worldwide are adopting overnight hours

Modern Farmer reports: Every morning, for years, Josana Pinto da Costa would venture out onto the waterways lining Óbidos, Brazil, in a small fishing boat. She would glide over the murky, churning currents of the Amazon River Basin, her flat nets bringing in writhing hauls as the sun ascended into the cerulean skies above. Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa…

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The alchemy that powers the modern world

The alchemy that powers the modern world

December 13, 2024 by Sarah Scoles The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” That universe must then invent the first atoms, which will make up the first stars, which will fuse those initial elements into larger ones. Stars will explode and die and crash into each other, those cataclysms building heavier elements. Eventually, billions of years later, the universe will produce an Earth whose insides…

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New set of human rights principles aims to end displacement and abuse of Indigenous people through ‘fortress conservation’

New set of human rights principles aims to end displacement and abuse of Indigenous people through ‘fortress conservation’

Many protected areas, including California’s Yosemite National Park, displaced Indigenous people in the name of protecting wildlands. Matthew Dillon/Flickr By John H. Knox, Wake Forest University For more than a century, conservationists have worked to preserve natural ecosystems by creating national parks and protected areas. Today the Earth faces a global biodiversity crisis, with more than 1 million species at risk of extinction. This makes it even more important to conserve places where at-risk species can thrive. In 2022, governments…

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As climate change melts permafrost, microbes that we have never been exposed to will emerge

As climate change melts permafrost, microbes that we have never been exposed to will emerge

Valerie Brown writes: The popular image of the Arctic is as a “frozen North,” which it was for all of human history until a couple of centuries ago. In that view, intrepid explorers and scientists clatter over tundra and ice roads in dogsleds and decrepit trucks, risking everything to bring back important samples and wild tales of howling winds. But this vision is growing passé. The Arctic is warming four times as fast as the global average. While there are…

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Human-caused ocean warming intensified recent hurricanes

Human-caused ocean warming intensified recent hurricanes

Yale Climate Connections reports: Human-caused climate change boosted the wind speeds of recent Atlantic hurricanes, making them more damaging and costly, according to a pair of scientific reports released today. Research published in the journal Environmental Research: Climate, “Human-caused ocean warming has intensified recent hurricanes,” found that between 2019 and 2023, the maximum sustained winds of Atlantic hurricanes were 19 mph (31 km/h) higher because of human-caused ocean warming. And a parallel report by Climate Central, a nonprofit scientific research…

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Hiker discovers first trace of entire prehistoric ecosystem in Italian Alps

Hiker discovers first trace of entire prehistoric ecosystem in Italian Alps

The Guardian reports: A hiker in the northern Italian Alps has stumbled across the first trace of what scientists believe to be an entire prehistoric ecosystem, including the well-preserved footprints of reptiles and amphibians, brought to light by the melting of snow and ice induced by the climate crisis. The discovery in the Valtellina Orobie mountain range in Lombardy dates back 280 million years to the Permian period, the age immediately prior to dinosaurs, scientists say. Claudia Steffensen, from Lovero,…

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Trump picks ally Lee Zeldin as environment chief and vows to roll back rules

Trump picks ally Lee Zeldin as environment chief and vows to roll back rules

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has picked Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), vowing the appointment will “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions” by the regulator. Trump, who oversaw the rollback of more than 100 environmental rules when he last was US president, said that Zeldin was a “true fighter for America First policies” and that “he will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to…

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Over a third of trees globally face threat of extinction

Over a third of trees globally face threat of extinction

BBC News reports: Scientists assessing dangers posed to the world’s trees have revealed that more than a third of species are facing extinction in the wild. The number of threatened trees now outweighs all threatened birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians put together, according to the latest update to the official extinction red list. The news was released in Cali, Colombia, where world leaders are meeting at the UN biodiversity summit, COP 16, to assess progress on a landmark rescue plan…

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Polar bears are getting horrific injuries because of climate change, researchers say

Polar bears are getting horrific injuries because of climate change, researchers say

Live Science reports: Polar bears are developing horrific wounds on their paws due to changing ice conditions in the Arctic, a new study reports. In the most severe cases, researchers describe two bears with crippling, dinner plate-size balls of ice stuck to their feet. Beneath the ice balls, the bears’ paw pads were covered in deep, bleeding cuts. “I’d never seen that before,” study lead author Kristin Laidre, a marine ecologist and associate professor at the University of Washington, said…

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Humanity is on the verge of ‘shattering Earth’s natural limits’, say experts in biodiversity warning

Humanity is on the verge of ‘shattering Earth’s natural limits’, say experts in biodiversity warning

The Guardian reports: Humanity is “on the precipice” of shattering Earth’s limits, and will suffer huge costs if we fail to act on biodiversity loss, experts warn. This week, world leaders meet in Cali, Colombia, for the Cop16 UN biodiversity conference to discuss action on the global crisis. As they prepare for negotiations, scientists and experts around the world have warned that the stakes are high, and there is “no time to waste”. “We are already locked in for significant…

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Half of all global food threatened by growing water crisis, report says

Half of all global food threatened by growing water crisis, report says

NBC News reports: The world has a worsening water crisis and half of all food production will be at risk of failure by the middle of this century. That’s the worrying message from a report released Wednesday by a major international study. Half of the world’s population already faces water scarcity and that proportion is growing too, according to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, which is funded by the Dutch government and facilitated by the Organization for…

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Rain may have helped form the first cells, kick-starting life as we know it

Rain may have helped form the first cells, kick-starting life as we know it

How did early cells keep themselves distinct while allowing for some amount of exchange? UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering/Peter Allen, Second Bay Studios, CC BY-ND By Aman Agrawal, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Billions of years of evolution have made modern cells incredibly complex. Inside cells are small compartments called organelles that perform specific functions essential for the cell’s survival and operation. For instance, the nucleus stores genetic material, and mitochondria produce energy. Another essential part…

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The Atlantic Ocean’s currents are on the verge of collapse. This is what it means for the planet

The Atlantic Ocean’s currents are on the verge of collapse. This is what it means for the planet

David Thornalley writes: Icy winds howl across a frozen Thames, ice floes block shipping in the Mersey docks, and crops fail across the UK. Meanwhile, the US east coast has been inundated by rising seas and there’s ecological chaos in the Amazon as the wet and dry season have switched around… The world has been upended. What’s going on? While these scenes sound like something from a Hollywood disaster movie, a new scientific study investigating a key element of Earth’s…

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Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?

Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?

The Guardian reports: It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year. This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together,…

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