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Category: Environment

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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Microbes are a missing piece in the biodiversity puzzle

Microbes are a missing piece in the biodiversity puzzle

Ian Morse writes: Scientists are clear: the number of plant and animal species on Earth is declining. The climate crisis, habitat loss, pollution and the illegal wildlife trade are all pushing species toward extinction. Researchers especially worry that losing too much biodiversity could push the earth past a tipping point into irreversible change, and on into a new paradigm in which humanity and other life can’t survive. Which partly explains humanity’s self-interest and urgency in understanding and maintaining global biodiversity….

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Fevers are plaguing the oceans — and climate change is making them worse

Fevers are plaguing the oceans — and climate change is making them worse

Nature reports: Ten years ago, dead fish began washing ashore on the beaches of Western Australia. The culprit was a huge swathe of unusually warm water that ravaged kelp forests and scores of commercially important marine creatures, from abalone to scallops to lobster. Over the following weeks, some of Western Australia’s most lucrative fisheries came close to being wiped out. To this day, some of them have not recovered. After the crisis, scientists came together to assess the damage and…

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If we want to save the planet, the future of food is insects

If we want to save the planet, the future of food is insects

Richard Godwin writes: My first attempts at feeding insects to friends and family did not go down well. “What the hell is wrong with you?” asked my wife when I revealed that the tomato and oregano-flavoured cracker bites we had been munching with our G&Ts were made from crickets. “Hang on, I’m vegetarian!” cried our friend – which prompted a slightly testy discussion on whether insects count as meat, how many thousand arthropods equate to one mammal and considering almost…

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Space junk is blocking our view of the stars, scientists say

Space junk is blocking our view of the stars, scientists say

Live Science reports: The night sky is becoming increasingly filled with shiny satellites and space junk that pose a significant threat to our view of the cosmos, as well as astronomical research, a new study warns. The researchers found that the more than 9,300 tons (8,440 metric tons) of space objects orbiting Earth, including inoperative satellites and chunks of spent rocket stages, increase the overall brightness of the night sky by more than 10% over large parts of the planet….

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Brazilian Amazon released more carbon than it absorbed over past 10 years

Brazilian Amazon released more carbon than it absorbed over past 10 years

AFP reports: The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20% more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the past decade than it absorbed, according to a startling report that shows humanity can no longer depend on the world’s largest tropical forest to help absorb manmade carbon pollution. From 2010 through 2019, Brazil’s Amazon basin gave off 16.6bn tonnes of CO2, while drawing down only 13.9bn tonnes, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study looked at the volume of…

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Microbial diversity is under threat — which puts the entire planet at risk

Microbial diversity is under threat — which puts the entire planet at risk

By Muhammad Saleem It’s no secret that our planet is in crisis. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 37,400 species are at risk of becoming extinct. That includes 26 percent of mammals, 36 percent of sharks and rays and 41 percent of amphibians. But the conservation posters that feature cute, fuzzy pandas and majestic elephants don’t feature other species that are no less important and probably no less under threat: microorganisms. These are the viruses, bacteria,…

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Why Bitcoin is bad for the environment

Why Bitcoin is bad for the environment

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: Money, it’s often said, is a shared fiction. I give you a slip of paper or, more likely these days, a piece of plastic. You hand me eggs or butter or a White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino, and we both walk away satisfied. With cryptocurrency, the arrangement is more like a shared metafiction, and the instability of the genre is, presumably, part of the thrill. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was created as a spoof, has risen in value…

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Just 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact, study suggests

Just 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact, study suggests

The Guardian reports: Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat, a study suggests. These fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities are mainly in parts of the Amazon and Congo tropical forests, east Siberian and northern Canadian forests and tundra, and the Sahara. Invasive alien species including cats, foxes, rabbits, goats and camels have had a major impact on native species in Australia, with the study finding…

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