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Category: Environment

Study identifies outdoor air pollution as ‘largest existential threat to human and planetary health’

Study identifies outdoor air pollution as ‘largest existential threat to human and planetary health’

Inside Climate News reports: Since the turn of the century, global deaths attributable to air pollution have increased by more than half, a development that researchers say underscores the impact of pollution as the “largest existential threat to human and planetary health.” The findings, part of a study published Tuesday in The Lancet Planetary Health, found that pollution was responsible for an estimated 9 million deaths around the world in 2019. Fully half of those fatalities, 4.5 million deaths, were…

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The race against radon

The race against radon

Chris Baraniuk writes: Deep in the frozen ground of the north, a radioactive hazard has lain trapped for millennia. But UK scientist Paul Glover realized some years back that it wouldn’t always be that way: One day it might get out. Glover had attended a conference where a speaker described the low permeability of permafrost — ground that remains frozen for at least two years or, in some cases, thousands. It is an icy shield, a thick blanket that locks…

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Indian court rules nature has legal status on par with humans. We are required to protect it

Indian court rules nature has legal status on par with humans. We are required to protect it

Inside Climate News reports: The highest court in one of India’s 28 states ruled last month that “Mother Nature” has the same legal status as a human being, which includes “all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person.” The decision from Madras High Court, located in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, also said that the natural environment is part of the human right to life, and that humans have an environmental duty to future generations. “The past…

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A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

Inside Climate News reports: Lichens that help hold together soil crusts in arid lands around the world are dying off as the climate warms, new research shows. That would lead deserts to expand and also would affect areas far from the drylands, as crumbling crusts fill winds with dust that can speed snowmelt and increase the incidence of respiratory diseases. Biologically rich soil crusts, sometimes called cryptobiotic soils or biocrusts, are spread out across dry and semi-dry regions of every…

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Why you should care about the insect crisis

Why you should care about the insect crisis

Allie Wilkinson writes: Imagine a world without insects. You might breathe a sigh of relief at the thought of mosquito-free summers, or you might worry about how agriculture will function without pollinators. What you probably won’t picture is trudging through a landscape littered with feces and rotting corpses — what a world devoid of maggots and dung beetles would look like. That’s just a snippet of the horrifying picture of an insect-free future that journalist Oliver Milman paints in the…

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The environmental costs of war in Ukraine

The environmental costs of war in Ukraine

Genevieve Kotarska and Lauren Young write: The Russian attack on a Ukrainian nuclear power plant at the beginning of March 2022 led to fears of a nuclear disaster worse than Chernobyl. Fortunately, the fire at the Zaporizhzhia plant was contained with no damage to essential equipment or change in radiation levels. However, the incident alerted the international community to the many threats the conflict poses to environmental security. The conflict in Ukraine is resulting in a devastating loss of human…

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Record-breaking simulation hints at how climate shaped human migration

Record-breaking simulation hints at how climate shaped human migration

Nature reports: A colossal simulation of the past two million years of Earth’s climate provides evidence that temperature and other planetary conditions influenced early human migration — and possibly contributed to the emergence of the modern-day human species around 300,000 years ago. The finding is one of many to come out of the largest model so far to investigate how changes in Earth’s movement have influenced climate and human evolution, published in Nature today. “This is another brick in the…

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Thawing permafrost is roiling the Arctic, driven by hidden changes beneath the surface as the climate warms

Thawing permafrost is roiling the Arctic, driven by hidden changes beneath the surface as the climate warms

Permafrost and ice wedges have built up over millennia in the Arctic. When they thaw, they destabilize the surrounding landscape. Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images By Mark J. Lara, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some…

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A biomass power plant reignites concerns over clean energy and environmental justice

A biomass power plant reignites concerns over clean energy and environmental justice

Inside Climate News reports: A North Carolina power plant that generates electricity from poultry waste and wood chips has touched off a controversy over an operating permit that, if granted, would imperil public health and wellbeing, residents and environmental advocates in the surrounding community say. Since it started operating in Robeson County in 2015, North Carolina Renewable Power’s South Lumberton plant has repeatedly exceeded allowable emissions for carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, known as PM2.5, and methane–a…

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Indigenous myths carry warning signals about natural disasters

Indigenous myths carry warning signals about natural disasters

Carrie Arnold writes: Shortly before 8am on 26 December 2004, the cicadas fell silent and the ground shook in dismay. The Moken, an isolated tribe on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, knew that the Laboon, the ‘wave that eats people’, had stirred from his ocean lair. The Moken also knew what was next: a towering wall of water washing over their island, cleansing it of all that was evil and impure. To heed the Laboon’s warning signs, elders…

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Five Supreme Court justices used the shadow docket to revive a Trump-era pro-pollution rule

Five Supreme Court justices used the shadow docket to revive a Trump-era pro-pollution rule

Mark Joseph Stern writes: On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 shadow docket order reviving a Trump-era ruling that radically limited the ability of states and tribes to restrict projects, like pipelines, that will damage the environment. With their decision, the majority upended decades of settled law recognizing states’ authority to protect their own waters without bothering to issue a single sentence of reasoning. Just two days earlier, Justice Amy Coney Barrett once again declared that the Supreme Court…

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Permafrost is thawing under the sea, burping up planet-warming gases

Permafrost is thawing under the sea, burping up planet-warming gases

Wired reports: Around 20,000 years ago, the world was so frigid that massive glaciers sucked up enough water to lower sea levels by 400 feet. As the sea pulled back, newly exposed land froze to form permafrost, a mixture of earth and ice that today sprawls across the far north. But as the world warmed into the climate we enjoy today (for the time being), sea levels rose again, submerging the coastal edges of that permafrost, which remain frozen below…

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Once again, environmentalists are sabotaging climate progress

Once again, environmentalists are sabotaging climate progress

Eric Levitz writes: New York City is among the most progressive and climate-conscious municipalities in the United States. It is legally obligated to bring its greenhouse emissions to 40 percent below their 2005 peak by the end of the decade. And yet over the past year, NYC has dramatically expanded its reliance on fossil fuels – thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of Empire State environmentalists. In 2019, when the city put its ambitious climate goals into law,…

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Falling oxygen levels are putting ocean ecosystems on life support

Falling oxygen levels are putting ocean ecosystems on life support

Jessica Camille Aguirre writes: People who make their living catching fish on the open ocean first noticed the strange phenomenon a few decades ago. It occurred in the shadow zones, the spots between the great ocean currents where sea water doesn’t circulate, off the coasts of Peru, West Africa, and California. The fisher people shared the knowledge among them like a common secret, a bounty that had an even stranger explanation: Sometimes, when the conditions were right, fish would swim…

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Indigenous land rights are critical to realizing goals of the Paris climate accord, a new study finds

Indigenous land rights are critical to realizing goals of the Paris climate accord, a new study finds

Inside Climate News reports: The land rights of Indigenous peoples across millions of acres of forests in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru must be protected and strengthened if the world has any hope of achieving the goals set forth in the 2015 Paris Agreement, a study released on Thursday found. The study, by the World Resources Institute and Climate Focus, two non-profit global research organizations focused on alleviating climate change, supports a growing body of research emphasizing the important role…

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