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Category: Environment

The complexity of the biodiversity crisis

The complexity of the biodiversity crisis

Nature reports: Scientists say it’s clear that there’s a biodiversity crisis, but there are many questions about the details. Which species will lose? Will new communities be healthy and desirable? Will the rapidly changing ecosystems be able to deal with climate change? And where should conservation actions be targeted? To find answers, scientists need better data from field sites around the world, collected at regular intervals over long periods of time. Such data don’t exist for much of the world,…

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New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

Science Alert reports: As a child grows and develops, the neurons in their brain are said to branch like trees. Being around this very type of foliage could actually help the process along. A long-term study among 3,568 students in London, between the ages of 9 and 15, has found those kids who spent more time near woodlands showed improved cognitive performance and mental health in adolescence. On the other hand, other natural environments, like grasslands or lakes and rivers,…

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New York air quality among worst in world as haze from Western wildfires shrouds city

New York air quality among worst in world as haze from Western wildfires shrouds city

The Guardian reports: New York City air quality was among the worst in the world as cities across the eastern US were shrouded in smoke from wildfires raging several thousand miles away on the country’s west coast. State officials in New York advised vulnerable people, such as those with asthma and heart disease, to avoid strenuous outdoor activity as air pollution soared to eclipse Lima in Peru and Kolkata in India to be ranked as the worst in the world…

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Space tourism is a waste

Space tourism is a waste

Gizmodo reports: Bezos’ New Shepard rocket, made by his company Blue Origin, runs on a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Though neither of those emit carbon when they’re burned, producing liquid hydrogen usually does. Compressing and liquifying the oxygen for the fuel is also an energy-intensive process that, if not done using renewables, results in carbon pollution. Refining and burning these fuels isn’t just the equivalent of a tank of gas for your car. They’re not even necessarily…

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Across Siberia, extreme summer heat is feeding enormous fires, thawing the permafrost

Across Siberia, extreme summer heat is feeding enormous fires, thawing the permafrost

The New York Times reports: For the third year in a row, residents of northeastern Siberia are reeling from the worst wildfires they can remember, and many are left feeling helpless, angry and alone. They endure the coldest winters outside Antarctica with little complaint. But in recent years, summer temperatures in the Russian Arctic have gone as high as 100 degrees, feeding enormous blazes that thaw what was once permanently frozen ground. Last year, wildfires scorched more than 60,000 square…

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Brazil’s Amazon is now a carbon source, unprecedented study reveals

Brazil’s Amazon is now a carbon source, unprecedented study reveals

Mongabay reports: The Amazon has long done its part to balance the global carbon budget, but new evidence suggests the climate scales are tipping in the world’s largest rainforest. Now, according to a study published July 14 in Nature, the Amazon is emitting more carbon than it captures. “The Amazon is a carbon source. No doubt,” Luciana Gatti, a researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and lead author of the study, told Mongabay. “By now we can…

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The ocean is full of tiny plastic particles – we found a way to track them with satellites

The ocean is full of tiny plastic particles – we found a way to track them with satellites

Plastic fragments washed onto Schiavonea beach in Calabria, Italy, in a 2019 storm. Alfonso Di Vincenzo/KONTROLAB /LightRocket via Getty Images By Christopher Ruf, University of Michigan Plastic is the most common type of debris floating in the world’s oceans. Waves and sunlight break much of it down into smaller particles called microplastics – fragments less than 5 millimeters across, roughly the size of a sesame seed. To understand how microplastic pollution is affecting the ocean, scientists need to know how…

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EPA approved toxic chemicals for fracking a decade ago, new files show

EPA approved toxic chemicals for fracking a decade ago, new files show

The New York Times reports: For much of the past decade, oil companies engaged in drilling and fracking have been allowed to pump into the ground chemicals that, over time, can break down into toxic substances known as PFAS — a class of long-lasting compounds known to pose a threat to people and wildlife — according to internal documents from the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. in 2011 approved the use of these chemicals, used to ease the flow of…

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Like in ‘postapocalyptic movies’: Heat wave killed marine wildlife en masse

Like in ‘postapocalyptic movies’: Heat wave killed marine wildlife en masse

The New York Times reports: Dead mussels and clams coated rocks in the Pacific Northwest, their shells gaping open as if they’d been boiled. Sea stars were baked to death. Sockeye salmon swam sluggishly in an overheated Washington river, prompting wildlife officials to truck them to cooler areas. The combination of extraordinary heat and drought that hit the Western United States and Canada over the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of marine animals and continues to threaten…

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How marginalized communities in the South are paying the price for ‘green energy’ in Europe

How marginalized communities in the South are paying the price for ‘green energy’ in Europe

CNN reports: Andrea Macklin never turns off his TV. It’s the only way to drown out the noise from the wood mill bordering his backyard, the jackhammer sound of the plant piercing his walls and windows. The 18-wheelers carrying logs rumble by less than 100 feet from his house, all day and night, shaking it as if an earthquake has taken over this tranquil corner of North Carolina. He’s been wearing masks since long before the coronavirus pandemic, just to…

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Heatwaves and drought are killing trees at an alarming rate

Heatwaves and drought are killing trees at an alarming rate

Juniper trees, common in Arizona’s Prescott National Forest, have been dying with the drought. Benjamin Roe/USDA Forest Service via AP By Daniel Johnson, University of Georgia and Raquel Partelli Feltrin, University of British Columbia Like humans, trees need water to survive on hot, dry days, and they can survive for only short times under extreme heat and dry conditions. During prolonged droughts and extreme heat waves like the Western U.S. is experiencing, even native trees that are accustomed to the…

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Incursions into indigenous lands not only threaten tribal food systems, but the planet’s well-being

Incursions into indigenous lands not only threaten tribal food systems, but the planet’s well-being

Georgina Gustin writes: For thousands of years Indigenous people have survived by hunting, fishing, foraging and harvesting in ways that sustain them while maintaining an equilibrium with nature. But a major report from the United Nations warns that this balance is being severely tested by climate change and by incursions into Indigenous lands—many of them illegal. And as these food systems come under threat, the world risks losing not only the tribes, but their service as crucial protectors of biodiversity…

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The dark side of solar power

The dark side of solar power

Atalay Atasu, Serasu Duran, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove write: It’s sunny times for solar power. In the U.S., home installations of solar panels have fully rebounded from the Covid slump, with analysts predicting more than 19 gigawatts of total capacity installed, compared to 13 gigawatts at the close of 2019. Over the next 10 years, that number may quadruple, according to industry research data. And that’s not even taking into consideration the further impact of possible new regulations and…

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Drought-stricken communities push back against resource hungry data centers

Drought-stricken communities push back against resource hungry data centers

NBC News reports: On May 17, the City Council of Mesa, Arizona, approved the $800 million development of an enormous data center — a warehouse filled with computers storing all of the photos, documents and other information we store “in the cloud” — on an arid plot of land in the eastern part of the city. But keeping the rows of powerful computers inside the data center from overheating will require up to 1.25 million gallons of water each day,…

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Rocky Mountain forests burning more now than any time in the past 2,000 years

Rocky Mountain forests burning more now than any time in the past 2,000 years

Colorado’s East Troublesome Fire jumped the Continental Divide on Oct. 22, 2020, and eventually became Colorado’s second-largest fire on record. Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory By Philip Higuera, The University of Montana; Bryan Shuman, University of Wyoming, and Kyra Wolf, The University of Montana The exceptional drought in the U.S. West has people across the region on edge after the record-setting fires of 2020. Last year, Colorado alone saw its three largest fires in recorded state history, one burning late in…

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Pesticides are killing the world’s soils

Pesticides are killing the world’s soils

Nathan Donley and Tari Gunstone write: Scoop up a shovelful of healthy soil, and you’ll likely be holding more living organisms than there are people on the planet Earth. Like citizens of an underground city that never sleeps, tens of thousands of subterranean species of invertebrates, nematodes, bacteria and fungi are constantly filtering our water, recycling nutrients and helping to regulate the earth’s temperature. But beneath fields covered in tightly knit rows of corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops,…

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