https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/27/big-irony-as-winter-sports-sponsored-by-climate-polluters-report-finds By Damian Carrington , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Winter sports are being sponsored by high-carbon companies despite their pollution helping to melt the snow the sports require to exist, according to a new report. The report found that more than 100 events, organisations and athletes were sponsored by fossil fuel companies, carmakers and airlines. The sponsorships were like “winter sport nailing the lid on its own coffin”, said one Olympic champion. The  report , by campaign group Badvertising and thinktank New Weather Sweden, found 83 sponsorship deals from car manufacturers. The largest governing body in winter sports, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS), is itself sponsored by Audi. Almost  90% of the vehicles produced by Audi in 2021 were petrol or diesel driven. The report also found sponsorship deals from 12 fossil fuel companies, including Gaz

https://eos.org/science-updates/how-hail-hazards-are-changing-around-the-mediterranean By Sante Laviola ,   Giulio Monte ,   Elsa Cattani  and   Vincenzo Levizzani , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A new method for studying hailstorms from space offers more consistent and more complete views of how and where hail forms, and how climate change might influence hail’s impacts in the future. The Mediterranean Basin is one of the most vulnerable areas on Earth to the effects of rapid climate change. Observed rates of temperature rise indicate that the region is  warming 20% faster  compared with the global average, inducing a trend toward drier conditions and changing precipitation regimes. The steep temperature rise increases the vulnerability of the Mediterranean Basin to several hazards that affect ecosystems and human health and security, such as heat waves, droughts, and fires. Along with such events, the frequency and intensity of storm-related hazards also may be amplified around the Mediterrane

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/business/energy-environment/oil-gas-renewable-energy-jobs.html By Clifford Krauss , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Oil and gas companies laid off roughly 160,000 workers in 2020, and they  maintained tight budgets and hired cautiously  over the last two years. But many renewable businesses expanded rapidly after the early shock of the pandemic faded, snapping up geologists, engineers and other workers from the likes of Exxon and Chevron. ...Executives and workers in energy hubs in Houston, Dallas and other places say steady streams of people are moving from fossil fuel to renewable energy jobs....

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/world/asia/china-birth-rate.html By  Nicole Hong  and  Zixu Wang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In China, a country that limits most couples to  three children , one province is making a bold pitch to try to get its citizens to procreate: have as many babies as you want, even if you are unmarried. The initiative, which came into effect this month, points to the renewed urgency of China’s efforts to spark a baby boom after its population  shrank  last year for the first time since a national famine in the 1960s. ... there are plans to expand national insurance coverage for fertility treatments, including I.V.F.  But the measures have been met with a wave of public skepticism, ridicule and debate, highlighting the challenges China faces as it seeks to stave off a shrinking work force that could imperil economic growth. Many young Chinese adults, who themselves were born during China’s draconian one-child policy, are pushing back on the government’s ind

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/climate/salton-sea-colorado-river-drought-crisis.html By Henry Fountain , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The vast California lake relies on runoff from cropland to avoid disappearing. But as farmers face water cuts due to drought and an ever drier Colorado River, the Salton Sea stands to lose again. ...As the sea has shrunk it’s become so salty — it’s currently nearly twice as salty as seawater — that only a handful of fish species, including tilapia and the endangered desert pupfish, remain. With fewer fish, bird populations along what is an important migratory flyway have declined. ...Human health has been affected, too. The retreating water has exposed huge expanses of lake bed, and with wind stirring up dust from them, air quality in the Imperial Valley is among the worst in the state. That’s led to a high incidence of childhood asthma and other respiratory illnesses among the valley’s 180,000 residents....

https://eos.org/features/finding-climate-history-in-the-rafters-of-new-york-city-buildings By Jenessa Duncombe , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: When renovating in the Big Apple, you might acquire a several-hundred-year-old climate database along with your new kitchen and bath. ...Hidden in wooden joists and beams in New York City’s oldest buildings is the largest repository of old-growth timber in the eastern United States, said Rao. These timbers can hold valuable information about past climates—but it can be uncovered only if scientists can get their hands on the timbers before they go to a landfill. ...Scientists and engineers  estimate  that 14,000 cubic meters of old-growth wood are removed from buildings in New York City (NYC) each year during demolitions or renovations; the city is continuously being remade. ...Dendrochronology emerged as a tool for studying past events in the late 1800s, when an astronomer, Andrew E. Douglass, recorded the patterns of wide and narrow rings on ponderosa pi

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/business/hemp-construction-buildings.html By  Kevin Williams , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Interest in hemp as a viable substitute for construction material is growing as developers seek greener building options. Hemp can be used in block form, as it was in the building of the sports center, or poured like traditional concrete using hempcrete, a combination of lime, hemp fibers and a chemical binder. Hemp panels can also be used. ...Hemp is already used in a variety of industrial products, including rope, textiles and biofuel. But hemp construction is hampered by high costs and a supply chain that is not fully formed. And proponents must overcome resistance to a product that is often mistakenly tied to recreational drug use. ...A building constructed from ready-to-use hemp blocks can chop 20 to 30 percent off the typical production schedule, with no need for cement joints or the drying time required with traditional concrete blocks.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/climate/argentina-drought.html By  Henry Fountain , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Lack of rainfall that caused severe drought in Argentina and Uruguay last year was not made more likely by climate change, scientists said Thursday. But global warming was a factor in extreme heat experienced in both countries that made the drought worse, they said. The researchers, part of a loose-knit group called  World Weather Attribution  that studies recent extreme weather for signs of the influence of climate change, said that the rainfall shortage was a result of natural climate variability. Specifically, they said, the presence of La Niña, a climate pattern linked to below-normal sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific that influences weather around the world, most likely affected precipitation. La Niña usually occurs once every three to five years, often alternating with El Niño, which is linked to above-normal sea temperatures. But La Niña conditions have pers

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/02/16/copper-catalyst-converts-co2-into-liquid-fuels/ By Theresa Duque, Berkeley Lab.  Excerpt: ...new insights could help advance the next generation of solar fuels. ...a research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has gained new insight by capturing real-time movies of copper nanoparticles (copper particles engineered at the scale of a billionth of a meter) as they convert CO 2  and water into renewable fuels and chemicals: ethylene, ethanol, and propanol, among others. The work was  reported in the journal  Nature  last week. ...Peidong Yang, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences and Chemical Sciences Divisions who led the study ...is also a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. “Knowing how copper is such an excellent electrocatalyst brings us steps closer to turning CO 2  into new, renewable solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis.”... 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/hot-cold-extreme-temperature-deaths/ By Harry Stevens , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Both heat and cold can kill. But cold is far more deadly. For every death linked to heat, nine are tied to cold. The scientific paper published in the June 2021 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change was alarming. Between 1991 and 2018,  the peer-reviewed study  reported, more than one-third of deaths from heat exposure were linked to global warming. ...A month later,  the same research group , which is based out of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine but includes scientists from dozens of countries, released another  peer-reviewed study  that told a fuller, more complex story about the link between climate change, temperature and human mortality. ...the second paper reported that between 2000 and 2019, annual deaths from heat exposure increased. But deaths from cold exposure, which were far more common, fell by an

https://www.science.org/content/article/could-solar-geoengineering-cool-planet-u-s-gets-serious-about-finding-out By Paul Voosen, Science.  Excerpt: Any work on solar geoengineering—the notion of artificially making the atmosphere more reflective to cool an overheated planet—is fraught with controversy. ...The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is venturing ...to understand the types, amounts, and behavior of particles naturally present in the stratosphere. ...Research on solar geoengineering—also called solar radiation management—has long been anathema to some climate scientists and activists. They fear it could distract from emissions cuts, could have unforeseen risks, and would not address some impacts of rising carbon dioxide, including ocean acidification. Federal agencies have largely steered clear of the work, even after a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in 2021  recommended a $200 million research progra

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/the-global-health-benefits-of-going-net-zero By Kirsten Steinke , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Fossil fuel combustion produces greenhouse gases that heat the planet, but it also emits air pollutants that harm human health. Fine particulate matter and ozone, for example, have been linked to  fatal lung and heart issues . And a recent  study  published in  GeoHealth  adds to the growing body of research that shows that when countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the associated improvements in air quality could save countless lives. ...The team concluded that particulate matter and ozone caused more than 2.2 million premature deaths each year in G20 countries. Reducing emissions in these countries from power plants alone could reduce that death toll by nearly 300,000 lives by 2040....

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/electric-vehicle-batteries-require-precious-minerals-cellphone-solution/story?id=96977978 By Morgan Korn , ABC News.  Excerpt: That old laptop, cellphone and TV remote may have a newfound purpose: powering the next generation of electric vehicles. Luxury brand Audi recently partnered with Redwood Materials, a battery recycling startup, to collect rechargeable batteries found in everyday consumer devices -- phones, hearing aides, electric toothbrushes and video game controllers. ...Devices dropped off at dealerships are shipped to Redwood's Nevada facilities for the sorting, recycling and remanufacturing of cobalt and lithium -- two minerals required for EV battery production. ...Growing interest in EVs has accelerated the push for valuable minerals like cobalt, nickel and lithium that are extracted from overseas mines at heavy environmental and humanitarian costs. Recycling of consumer batteries can reduce the forced extraction of precious minerals a

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/10/cacti-replacing-snow-on-swiss-mountainsides-due-to-global-heating By  Alessio Perrone , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The residents of the Swiss canton of Valais are used to seeing their mountainsides covered with snow in winter and edelweiss flowers in summer. But as global heating intensifies, they are increasingly finding an invasive species colonising the slopes: cacti.... For GSS Climate Change chapter 8.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/politics/democrats-biden-unions.html By Jonathan Weisman , New York Times.  E xcerpt: In places like West Virginia, money from three major laws passed by Congress is pouring into the alternative energy industry and other projects. “I think it’s a renaissance for the labor movement,” said one union official. ...Money is just starting to flow from the last Congress’s three huge legislative victories — a  $1 trillion infrastructure bill , a  $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry  and the  Inflation Reduction Act , which included $370 billion for clean energy to combat climate change....

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/business/electric-vehicles-price-cost.html By Jack Ewing , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Competition, government incentives and falling raw material prices are making battery-powered cars more affordable sooner than expected....

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/09/profits-energy-fossil-fuel-resurgence-climate-crisis-shell-exxon-bp-chevron-totalenergies By Oliver Milman , The Guardian .  Excerpt: Last year’s combined $200bn profit for the ‘big five’ oil and gas companies brings little hope of driving down emissions. ...Exxon, the Texas-based oil giant,  led the way  with a record $55.7bn in annual profit, taking home about $6.3m every hour last year. California’s Chevron had a  record  $36.5bn profit, while Shell  announced  the best results of its 115-year history, a $39.9bn surplus, and BP, another London-based firm,  notched a $27.7bn profit. The French company TotalEnergies also had a  record , at $36.2bn....

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/upshot/china-population-decline.html By Andrew Jacobs  and  Francesca Paris , The New York Times.  Excerpt: China’s population has  begun to decline , a demographic turning point for the country that has global implications. ...China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or even negative net migration, a group that includes Italy, Greece and Russia, along with swaths of Eastern and Southern Europe and several Asian nations like South Korea and Japan. ...History suggests that once a country crosses the threshold of negative population growth, there is little that its government can do to reverse it. ...Two decades ago, Australia tried a “baby bonus” program that paid the equivalent of nearly 6,000 U.S. dollars a child at its peak. At the time the campaign started in 2004, the country’s fertility rate was around 1.8 children per woman. (For most developed nations, a fertility

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/08/they-get-the-big-picture-the-swedish-tech-startup-helping-cities-go-green By Jon Henley  , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Online tool ...used in ...a rapidly lengthening list of cities – now more than 50 – including Helsingborg and Malmö in Sweden, Madrid in Spain, Kiel and Mannheim in Germany, Cincinnati in the US, and Bristol and Nottingham in the UK. ... “Cities account for more than 70% of global CO 2  emissions,” Shalit said. “They are clearly critical to climate action, but they are also complex and highly interconnected systems – and they really lacked the tools to plan and manage their transition.” ClimateOS, the integrated platform developed by Shalit’s Stockholm-based startup, ClimateView, aims to help cities plan and manage their transition to zero carbon by breaking it down into distinct but interconnected “building blocks”....

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/climate/mauna-loa-carbon-dioxide-eruption.html By Raymond Zhong , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Two and a half miles above the Pacific, with the combined exhalations of a vast swath of humankind and its cars and factories blowing toward him, Aidan Colton looked out over the volcano’s snow-streaked summit and lifted up a glass flask the size of a coconut. He held his breath — even the carbon dioxide from his lungs might corrupt the sample. After a moment, he opened the valve. The air he is collecting at Mauna Kea is feeding the world’s  longest-running record  of direct readings of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. ...in November,  Mauna Loa erupted  for the first time in almost 40 years. No one was hurt, but lava flows up to 30 feet deep toppled the observatory’s power lines and buried a mile of the main road up the mountain. The facility was paralyzed. It took a transoceanic scramble, and a dose of luck, for scientists with the Mauna Loa observa

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/03/us-clean-energy-transition-jigar-shah-interview By  Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Deep in the confines of the hulking, brutalist headquarters of the US Department of  Energy , down one of its long, starkly lit corridors, sits a small, unheralded office that is poised to play a pivotal role in America’s shift away from fossil fuels and help the world stave off disastrous global heating. The department’s  loan programs office  (LPO) was “essentially dormant” under Donald Trump, according to its head, Jigar Shah, but has now come roaring back with a huge war chest to bankroll emerging clean energy projects and technology. Last year’s vast  Inflation Reduction Act  grew the previously moribund office’s loan authority to $140bn,   while adding  a new program  worth another $250bn in loan guarantees to retool projects that help cut planet-heating emissions. Which means that Shah, a debonair former clean energy entrepreneur and podcast

https://www.science.org/content/article/global-alarm-system-watches-methane-superemitters By Paul Voosen, Science.  Excerpt: Methane is a stealthy greenhouse gas, erupting unpredictably from sources such as pipelines and gas fields. Scientists have wanted to catch these emitters in the act. In the past, watchdogs had to monitor likely sites from the ground or by airplane. Now, massive, short-lived leaks can be detected automatically, from space, anywhere in the world—a first step toward plugging them and slowing climate change. ...Although so far the technique only captures the largest blowouts, there’s no better place to begin, says Ilse Aben, an atmospheric scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and co-author of the new work. ...SRON’s automatic methane spotter relies on the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) aboard the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite, launched in 2017 as part of Europe’s Copernicus program of Earth observation.... 

https://eos.org/articles/centuries-old-archive-reveals-far-flung-impacts-of-major-eruptions By  Shannon Banks , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 1815, an Earth-shattering explosion sent roughly  130 cubic kilometers  of gaseous fumes, ash, and rocks high into the atmosphere above the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. Mount Tambora had blown its top. Temperatures tanked worldwide as sooty debris circulated in the skies of the Northern Hemisphere, blocking the Sun’s rays. The chilling effects lasted through 1816—later dubbed the “Year Without a Summer.” ... Alice Bradley  and her team of undergraduate researchers at Williams College are studying how Tambora and other major volcanic eruptions affected the climate in New England. Their source material is a weather data set that dates back more than 2 centuries to the Tambora eruption. It has been updated daily by Williams staff and students ever since. ...According to the team’s analysis, daily low temperatures after the Tambora and Pinatubo eruptions we

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/02/shell-profits-2022-surging-oil-prices-gas-ukraine By Alex Lawson , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The government is under pressure to rethink its windfall tax on energy companies after Shell reported one of the largest profits in UK corporate history, with the surge in energy prices sparked by Russia’s invasion of  Ukraine  pushing the oil company’s annual takings to $40bn (£32bn)....

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fungi-spread-last-of-us-valley-fever-climate-11675260773 By Dominique Mosbergen , Wall Street Journal.  Excerpt: Dangerous fungal infections are on the rise, and a growing body of research suggests warmer temperatures might be a culprit. ...Climate change might also be creating conditions for some disease-causing fungi to expand their geographical range , research shows. ... Deaths from fungal infections are increasing , due in part to growing populations of people with weakened immune systems who are more vulnerable to severe fungal disease, public-health experts said. At least 7,000 people died in the U.S. from fungal infections in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, up from hundreds of people each year around 1970. ...A January study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that higher temperatures may prompt some disease-causing fungi to evolve faster to survive....

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/02/01/an-easy-new-way-to-recycle-batteries-is-here/ By Aliyah Kovner, UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized electronics and enabled an accelerating shift toward clean energy. These batteries have become an integral part of 21 st  century life, but we’re at risk of running out before 2050. The main elements used in each battery – lithium, nickel, and cobalt metals as well as graphite – are increasingly scarce and expensive, and there is little environmental or fair-labor oversight of  some of the remaining international supply chains . There is a pressing need to start reusing the materials we’ve already dug up and to make the battery production process safer and more equitable for all. A team of scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has invented  an award-winning new battery material  that can check both boxes. Their product, called the Quick-Release Binder, makes it simple and affordable to