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Category: Environment

How America’s diet is feeding the groundwater crisis

How America’s diet is feeding the groundwater crisis

The New York Times reports: America’s striking dietary shift in recent decades, toward far more chicken and cheese, has not only contributed to concerns about American health but has taken a major, undocumented toll on underground water supplies. The effects are being felt in key agricultural regions nationwide as farmers have drained groundwater to grow animal feed. In Arkansas for example, where cotton was once king, the land is now ruled by fields of soybeans to feed the chickens, a…

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Amazon protector: the Brazilian politician who turned the tide on deforestation

Amazon protector: the Brazilian politician who turned the tide on deforestation

Nature reports: In a year that brought unrelenting bad environmental news, with record global warming, searing heatwaves and fires, Marina Silva delivered a hopeful message on 3 August. Brazil’s environment and climate-change minister announced that there had been a 43% drop in deforestation alerts on the basis of satellite images of the Amazon rainforest between January and July 2023, compared with the same period in 2022. This was a sharp shift from the previous four years, which had seen a…

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Amazon drought: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this’

Amazon drought: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this’

BBC World Service reports: The Amazon rainforest experienced its worst drought on record in 2023. Many villages became unreachable by river, wildfires raged and wildlife died. Some scientists worry events like these are a sign that the world’s biggest forest is fast approaching a point of no return. As the cracked and baking river bank towers up on either side of us, Oliveira Tikuna is starting to have doubts about this journey. He’s trying to get to his village, in…

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House speaker did little to fight toxic ‘burn pit’ his father campaigned against

House speaker did little to fight toxic ‘burn pit’ his father campaigned against

The Guardian reports: Mike Johnson was a few months away from assuming elected office in late 2014 when he was confronted with an impassioned appeal by the man he would later pay tribute to in his first speech as House speaker: his father Patrick. The elder Johnson, a former firefighter in the Louisiana city of Shreveport, had survived a near fatal industrial explosion when Mike was 12 years old, a defining event in both men’s lives. He had just joined…

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Biden’s EPA launches crackdown on planet-warming methane

Biden’s EPA launches crackdown on planet-warming methane

Politico reports: The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled sweeping new regulations targeting methane emissions from the oil and gas sector on Saturday, a significant milestone for President Joe Biden’s strategy for curbing the pollution driving up the Earth’s temperatures. The rule’s 3 a.m. rollout was timed to coincide with the ongoing U.N. climate talks in Dubai, where the U.S. has sought to play a leading role in global efforts to reduce emissions of the powerful planet-heating gas. But its biggest test…

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A glimpse of the world’s heart

A glimpse of the world’s heart

Nick Hunt writes: I am standing on the beach in Santa Marta, a small port city on Colombia’s humid Caribbean coast. Around me, brightly dressed families are eating ice cream and grilled meat. Venezuelan refugees beg for coins, and shredded plastic bags are snagged in the cactuses. Offshore, cargo vessels idle on blue-grey waves, perhaps heading east towards the Atlantic, or west to Panama and the Pacific. The industrial port bristles with cranes and gantries. Looking inland, my view is…

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U.S. coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people in past 20 years, report finds

U.S. coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people in past 20 years, report finds

The Guardian reports: Coal-fired power plants killed at least 460,000 Americans during the past two decades, causing twice as many premature deaths as previously thought, new research has found. Cars, factories, fire smoke and electricity plants emit tiny toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5, which elevate the risk of an array of life-shortening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight and some cancers. Researchers analyzed Medicare and emissions data from 1999 and 2020, and…

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Climate change and habitat loss push amphibians closer to extinction

Climate change and habitat loss push amphibians closer to extinction

NPR reports: When JJ Apodaca was starting graduate school for biology in 2004, a first-of-its-kind study had just been released assessing the status of the world’s least understood vertebrates. The first Global Amphibian Assessment, which looked at more than 5,700 species of frogs, toads, salamanders, newts and other amphibians became “pretty much the guiding light of my career,” said Apodaca, who now heads the nonprofit group Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. Nineteen years later, a second global assessment of the world’s…

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A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations

A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations

Wired reports: Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It’s like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols that affect the climate. Clouds are the largest source of uncertainty in climate predictions. Depending on location, cloud cover can reflect sunlight away from land and ocean that would otherwise absorb its…

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Antarctica just hit a record low in sea ice — by a lot

Antarctica just hit a record low in sea ice — by a lot

The Washington Post reports: Sea ice levels around Antarctica just registered a record low — and by a wide margin — as winter comes to a close, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This significant milestone adds worry that Antarctic sea ice may be entering a state of decline brought on by climate change. Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every Tuesday and…

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How America’s war devastated Afghanistan’s environment

How America’s war devastated Afghanistan’s environment

Lynzy Billing writes: Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land. Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war. Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have…

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Giant fracking is threatening America’s fragile aquifers

Giant fracking is threatening America’s fragile aquifers

The New York Times reports: Along a parched stretch of La Salle County, Texas, workers last year dug some 700 feet deep into the ground, seeking freshwater. Millions of gallons of it. The water wouldn’t supply homes or irrigate farms. It was being used by the petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped right back underground — forcing oil and gas from the bedrock. It was a…

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We thought we were saving the planet, but we were planting a time bomb

We thought we were saving the planet, but we were planting a time bomb

Claire Cameron writes: At first, it looked like a sunset. It was just after five o’clock in June. I was running in Toronto beside Lake Ontario when I stopped to glance at my watch and noticed that the sky was no longer blue but a rusted orange. It took only a few breaths to realize the bonfire smell in the air was the drifting product of faraway wildfires. It’s quite possible you had a similar experience this summer: The plumes…

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From carbon sink to source: the stark changes in Arctic lakes

From carbon sink to source: the stark changes in Arctic lakes

Cheryl Katz writes: A family of muskox rumbles along craggy hilltops overlooking the small parade of humans crossing the West Greenland tundra. Ecologist Václava Hazuková, in the lead, sets a brisk pace as we bushwhack through knee-high willow and birch. Leaning forward under an equipment-filled pack nearly half her size, she high-steps over “pillows and mattresses” — hummocks of plants interspersed with troughs of rain-soaked permafrost. The twin blades of a kayak paddle protrude from Hazuková’s pack, pointing to our…

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Giant cracks in the ground emerging across U.S. Southwest, scientists warn

Giant cracks in the ground emerging across U.S. Southwest, scientists warn

Science Alert reports: The United States has been pumping so much groundwater that the ground is beginning to split open across southwestern parts of the country for miles on end. These giant cracks, aka fissures, have been spotted in states including Arizona, Utah, and California. Groundwater is one of the main sources of freshwater on Earth – it provides almost half of all drinking water, and about 40% of global irrigation. But humans are pumping groundwater faster than Earth can…

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Fungi could be the answer to breaking down plastic junk

Fungi could be the answer to breaking down plastic junk

Ars Technica reports: Plastic is becoming a plague on Earth. Not only are landfills bursting with it, but it has also polluted our oceans to the point that a tiny creature that had apparently made microplastics part of its diet was named Eurythenes plasticus. Can we possibly hold back the spread of a material that piles up faster than it could ever decay? There might be an answer, and that answer is fungus. Researchers from the University of Kelaniya and…

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