Video: The story of Ethiopia’s church forests
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Joe Manchin’s dirty money and the Biden administration’s painful turn from climate action
The New York Times reports: On a hilltop overlooking Paw Paw Creek, 15 miles south of the Pennsylvania border, looms a fortresslike structure with a single smokestack, the only viable business in a dying Appalachian town. The Grant Town power plant is also the link between the coal industry and the personal finances of Joe Manchin III, the Democrat who rose through state politics to reach the United States Senate, where, through the vagaries of electoral politics, he is now…
Ice shelf collapses in East Antarctica, an area previously viewed as stable
The Associated Press reports: An ice shelf the size of New York City has collapsed in East Antarctica, an area long thought to be stable and not hit much by climate change, concerned scientists said Friday. The collapse, captured by satellite images, marked the first time in human history that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse. It happened at the beginning of a freakish warm spell last week when temperatures soared more than 70 degrees (40 Celsius) warmer…
Recent megafire smoke columns have reached the stratosphere, threatening Earth’s ozone shield
Inside Climate News reports: Scientists researching how the recent spike in extreme wildfires affects the climate say that just a few weeks of smoke surging high into the stratosphere from one intense fire can wipe out years of progress restoring Earth’s life-protecting ozone layer. Close study of Australia’s intense Black Summer fires in late 2019 and early 2020 suggests the smoke they emitted was a “tremendous kick” to the atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer by 1 percent, said MIT scientist…
Investors push 10,000 companies to disclose environmental data to CDP
Reuters reports: Investors managing over $130 trillion in assets have written to more than 10,000 companies calling on them to supply environmental data to non-profit disclosure platform CDP. The call comes as money managers demand better information on climate change, biodiversity and water security to help them analyse the performance of company boards as the world looks to come good on a plan to limit human-driven global warming. While more companies are committing to net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century and…