https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/health/malaria-climate-change.html By  Stephanie Nolen , The New York Times.  Excerpt: There were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria around the globe last year,  the World Health Organization said on Thursday , an increase of five million over 2021. Malaria remains a top killer of children. Those new cases were concentrated in just five countries: Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Papua-New Guinea. Climate change was a direct contributor in three of them, said Dr. Daniel Ngamije, who directs the W.H.O. malaria program. In July 2022, massive flooding left more than a third of Pakistan underwater and displaced 33 million people. An explosion of mosquitoes soon followed. The country reported 3.1 million confirmed cases of malaria that year, compared with 275,000 the year before, with a fivefold increase in the rate of transmission....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/flood-resistant-home-bamboo/ By Nick Aspinwall, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Yasmeen Lari spent a …career designing …structures out of concrete, glass and steel before stumbling into her ideal material. It was at a camp for refugees…. Residents there were struggling to secure bricks and wood to build communal kitchens — until she spotted a nearby bamboo grove. “Let’s use it,” recalls Lari…. The material worked so well that over the last decade, Heritage Foundation of Pakistan …has built some 85,000 structures for displaced Pakistanis, including victims of last year’s devastating monsoon rains. That disaster, the worst flooding in Pakistani history, left a third of the country underwater and  destroyed more than 2.1 million homes . The thousands of bamboo structures Lari’s group had erected “all survived,” she said. …Many species of bamboo have been used as a building material in Asia for thousands of years and they are

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/us/climate-migrants-asylum.html By  Miriam Jordan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: First came the hurricanes — two storms, two weeks apart in 2020 — that devastated Honduras and left the country’s most vulnerable in dire need. …homes were leveled and growing fields were ravaged. Then came the drug cartels, who stepped into the vacuum left by the Honduran government, ill-equipped to respond to the catastrophe. Violence soon followed. …Cosmi, who asked to be identified only by his first name out of concern for his family’s safety and that of relatives left behind, was staying at a squalid encampment on a spit of dirt along the river that separates Mexico and Texas. Hundreds of other Miskito were alongside him in tiny tents, all hoping to claim asylum. The story of the Miskito who have left their ancestral home to come 2,500 miles to the U.S.-Mexico border is in many ways familiar. Like others coming from Central and South America, they are fleeing failed

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/opinion/electric-vehicle-tesla-hybrid.html By Stephen Porder , The New York Times, opinion piece.  Excerpt: ...I am familiar with trepidation about electric vehicles; ...worry about running out of battery power far from a charging station; ...the upfront costs... though the E.V.  has a lower total cost  over the life of the car. ...Those concerns will likely diminish in 2024 as money from the Inflation Reduction Act flows into building more charging stations and making discounts for electric vehicles available right at the dealership. ...while there are environmental concerns with [electric vehicles], they are dwarfed by the benefit they provide regarding climate change. ...Cobalt, another key component of batteries, has been in the public eye because of its scarcity and the  horrific working conditions for miners  in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those conditions need to be addressed, but it’s a mistake to view them in isolation. Oil extraction h

https://www.science.org/content/article/brought-creationist-home-scientist-fights-evolution By JEFFREY MERVIS , Science.  Excerpt: The  National Center for Science Education  (NCSE), known for fighting to defend evolution’s place in school curricula, has a new leader who knows how hard that work can be. Amanda (Glaze) Townley, who next month becomes executive director of the Oakland, California–based nonprofit, grew up in rural northeastern Alabama, where she learned firsthand how religion and culture can collide with one of the central tenets in biology. “I grew up in a young Earth creationism home, with a worldview that was based in evangelical Christianity and a literal translation of the Bible,” recalls the 42-year-old Townley. “And when I took honors biology in high school, my teacher said she’s not going to teach evolution because she doesn’t believe in it.” ...NCSE is best known for monitoring state and local legislative and ballot initiatives affecting the teaching of evolution

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-rains-pigs-and-waterbirds-fueled-shocking-disease-outbreak-australia By MEREDITH WADMAN , Science.  Excerpt: The appearance of a “tropical” mosquito-borne illness in southeastern Australia has unsettled researchers. ...McCann was the  fourth patient in as many weeks  admitted to Albury with encephalitis. Like McCann, the three others had turned up feverish and confused. ...among the possible causes were mosquito-borne viruses, in particular two encephalitis-causing viruses endemic to Australia: Kunjin, a strain of West Nile virus, and Murray Valley encephalitis virus (MVEV), named for the river valley where McCann has swum, water skied, fished, and boated since he was a boy. ...As with other weather events, the record-breaking wetness of the 2021–22 season can’t be attributed with certainty to climate change. But as the globe warms, the atmosphere holds more water, enabling more intense rainfall and flooding; daily rainfall associated with th

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl0557 By MICHAEL E. WEBBER  AND  YAEL R. GLAZER , Science.  Excerpt: On 20 December 2015, a mountain of urban refuse collapsed in Shenzhen, China, killing at least 69 people and destroying dozens of buildings ( 1 ). The disaster exposed the horrible yet real idea that society’s wastes could pile up uncontrollably, directly threatening our lives. But there is another looming threat from solid waste beyond its sheer volumes and mass: the destabilizing impacts of the greenhouse gases it emits. ...Hoy  et al.  ( 2 ) report that rapid and large reductions of methane emissions from the world’s solid waste sector are needed to meet the global warming limit set by the Paris Agreement. The good news is that this can be achieved with existing technologies and modified behaviors. ...Municipal solid waste—the garbage that ends up in landfills, recycling centers, compost sites, and ecosystems—is particularly relevant to global warming because solid wast

https://nca2023.globalchange.gov By U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) . Excerpt: The effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States. Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions can limit future warming and associated increases in many risks. Across the country, efforts to adapt to climate change and reduce emissions have expanded since 2018, and US emissions have fallen since peaking in 2007. However, without deeper cuts in global net greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated adaptation efforts, severe climate risks to the United States will continue to grow. ...In addition to reducing risks to future generations, rapid emissions cuts are expected to have immediate health and economic benefits (Figure  1.1 ). At the national scale, the benefits of deep emissions cuts for current and future generations are expected to far outweigh the costs. { 2.1 ,  2.3 ,  13.3 ,  14.5 ,  15.3 ,  32.4 ; Ch.  2, Introduction

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/11/13/capturing-wellhead-gases-for-profit-and-a-cleaner-environment By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: Burning of natural gas at oil and gas wells, called flaring, is a major waste of fossil fuels and a contributor to climate change. But to date, capturing the flared natural gas, estimated at some 140 billion cubic meters per year by the International Energy Agency, has not been economically feasible. University of California, Berkeley, chemists have now come up with a simple and green way to convert these gases — primarily methane and ethane — into economically valuable liquids, mostly alcohols like methanol and ethanol. The liquids are also easier to store. The alcohols can be used as feedstocks for production of numerous other petrochemical products, providing an additional revenue source for oil and gas companies but also lowering carbon dioxide emissions from flaring. Flaring is used to mitigate the more harmful effects of directly ventin

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-lithium-arkansas.html By Clifford Krauss , The New York Times. Excerpt: Exxon Mobil said on Monday that it planned to set up a facility in Arkansas to produce lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicles, which pose one of the biggest challenges to the company’s oil business. ...the announcement signals that the large oil company intends to hedge its big bets on conventional fossil fuels with at least some investments in cleaner forms of energy that are needed to combat climate change. ...The announcement does not represent a fundamental shift in corporate strategy, but it is an acknowledgment that battery-powered vehicles will increasingly compete with cars and trucks fueled by gasoline and diesel. It could also open the door for southern Arkansas to emerge as a major source of lithium. Most of the metal today comes from Australia and South America, and much of it is processed in China....

https://www.science.org/content/article/forests-could-suck-226-gigatons-carbon-if-restored-and-protected-study-argues By RIK STOKSTAD , Science.  Excerpt: The restoration and protection of forests worldwide could help remove about 226 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, according to a study published today in  Nature . That’s equivalent to roughly 20 years of emissions from burning fossil fuels and other sources at current rates. Some experts say the analysis provides a more reliable estimate of the carbon-capturing potential of forests than a previous, controversial study that analyzed only the potential benefit from restoring trees to degraded land. But critics are skeptical that the new number is even remotely achievable. ...Humans have cut down a significant fraction—perhaps as much as half—of the forests that once existed. And every year, deforestation contributes 15% of all the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans. So, scientists have been interested in finding out how m

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/climate-tipping-points-could-be-triggered-by-committed-warming By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Unless we rapidly reach net zero emissions, the climate will inch closer to a point of no return—even after greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. As the planet warms, climate  tipping points , such as the melting of ice sheets or loss of the Amazon rainforest, become increasingly likely. ...A new study by  Abrams et al.  examines  committed global warming , or warming that continues after greenhouse gas emissions are held constant until a new thermal balance is achieved. It’s a bit like how turning a running faucet from hot to cold doesn’t immediately change the temperature of the water, because there is still hot water in the pipeline. The authors present three scenarios for how the global mean temperature could rise and trigger tipping point events. One represents an increased use of fossil fuels, another represents rapidly reaching net zero emissio

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/12/climate/nuclear-reactors-clean-energy.html By Brad Plumer and Ivan Penn , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Towering over the Savannah River in Georgia, the first nuclear reactors built from scratch in the United States in more than 30 years illustrate the enormous promise of nuclear power — and its most glaring weakness. The  two new reactors  at the Vogtle nuclear power plant will join two older units to create enough electricity to power two million homes, 24 hours a day, without emitting any of the carbon dioxide that is dangerously heating the planet. But those colossal reactors cost $35 billion, more than double the original estimates, and arrived seven years behind schedule. That’s why no one else is planning to build large reactors in the United States. Instead, the great hope for the future of nuclear power is to go small. Nearly a dozen companies are developing reactors that are a fraction of the size of those at Vogtle, betting tha

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi4123 By XIAO WU et al, Science.  Excerpt: The increasing frequency of severe wildfires demands a shift in landscape management to mitigate their consequences. The role of managed, low-intensity fire as a driver of beneficial fuel treatment in fire-adapted ecosystems has drawn interest in both scientific and policy venues. Using a synthetic control approach to analyze 20 years of satellite-based fire activity data across 124,186 square kilometers of forests in California, we provide evidence that low-intensity fires substantially reduce the risk of future high-intensity fires. ...These findings support a policy transition from fire suppression to restoration, through increased use of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire, of a presuppression and precolonial fire regime in California.... 

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk7118 By JUDSON BOOMHOWER , Science.  Excerpt: Wildfire-threatened communities are on the front lines of climate change. From 2013 to 2022, the share of global disaster losses caused by wildfires more than doubled compared with losses in previous decades ( 1 ). ...Radeloff  et al.  ( 2 ) draw on a 30-year time series of housing counts and vegetation to show how housing expansion, area burned, and vegetative fuels contribute to wildfire losses and the increasing number of homes at risk in the United States. With tens of millions of US homes now confronting a growing risk of destruction by wildfires, adaptation is an urgent policy and research challenge. Success will require scaling up cost-effective investments in physical protection to reduce wildfire losses, ensuring well-functioning insurance markets to absorb risk that cannot be cost-effectively mitigated away, and addressing disparities in protection and postfire recovery for socially v

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk9614 By DONGLIANG ZHAO  AND  HUAJIE TANG , Science.  Excerpt: Terrestrial surfaces exposed to sunlight absorb solar heat and shed heat back to outer space as infrared radiation. If the radiated heat is greater than the solar energy absorbed, then daytime radiative cooling is achieved passively, without any energy input. However, this approach requires materials that strongly reflect sunlight and simultaneously emit long-wavelength infrared light—the wavelength needed to escape Earth’s atmosphere and not be reflected back. Ceramics composed mainly of silica (SiO 2 ) and alumina (Al 2 O 3 ), and that permit long-wavelength infrared emission, can meet these requirements. ...Zhao  et al.  ( 1 ) and Lin  et al.  ( 2 ), respectively, describe microporous materials— a glass-based ceramic coating and a ceramic composite—that exhibit passive daytime radiative cooling and resistance to harsh environments. These advances may lead to more environmenta

https://eos.org/articles/how-llama-poop-is-helping-an-andean-community-adapt-to-melting-glaciers By Sofia Moutinho , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Ecologist  Anaïs Zimmer  was walking in the Peruvian Andes one day, explaining to community members how hard it is for vegetation and soil to establish itself in deglacierized areas, or areas where glacier ice is retreating. That was when locals suggested an unconventional solution: bringing in llamas to fertilize the soil with their poop. Zimmer, then at the University of Texas at Austin, had been studying the consequences of  glacier loss in the Andes  for the past decade. Peru, which is home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers, has lost  more than half of them in the past 50 years because of climate change , according to the country’s ministry of agriculture. When the ice disappears, it uncovers metallic, rocky soil that had been covered for millennia. ...But an ancient practice might offer a solution to these problems. The introduction of llama

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/climate/climate-change-drought-fertile-crescent.html By Manuela Andreoni , The New York Times. Excerpt: Syria, Iraq and Iran were parched by high temperatures that would have been “virtually impossible” without the effects of global warming, scientists said....

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf3326 By MICHAEL V. WESTBURY et al, Science Advances.  Excerpt: The Arctic is among the most climatically sensitive environments on Earth, and the disappearance of multiyear sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is predicted within decades. As apex predators, polar bears are sentinel species for addressing the impact of environmental variability on Arctic marine ecosystems. ...we investigate how Holocene environmental changes affected polar bears around Greenland. We uncover reductions in effective population size coinciding with increases in annual mean sea surface temperature, reduction in sea ice cover, declines in suitable habitat, and shifts in suitable habitat northward. ...[over the past 11,000 years...Whenever temperatures rise, polar bear populations crash. For example, about 4500 years ago, sea surface temperatures climbed by 0.2°C, sea ice cover shrank by about 3%, and polar bear populations dropped by about 20%. Several thousand years bef

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42198-2 By R. Millan et al, Nature Communications.  Abstract: The glaciers of North Greenland are hosting enough ice to raise sea level by 2.1 m, and have long considered to be stable. ...Here, we show that since 1978, ice shelves in North Greenland have lost more than 35% of their total volume, three of them collapsing completely. For the floating ice shelves that remain we observe a widespread increase in ice shelf mass losses, that are dominated by enhanced basal melting rates. Between 2000 and 2020, there was a widespread increase in basal melt rates that closely follows a rise in the ocean temperature. ...These results suggest that, under future projections of ocean thermal forcing, basal melting rates will continue to rise or remain at high level, which may have dramatic consequences for the stability of Greenlandic glaciers.... See also Greenland-wide accelerated retreat of peripheral glaciers in the twenty-first century by L. J. Laro

https://www.science.org/content/article/algal-outbreaks-around-world-are-crowding-out-corals By ELIZABETH PENNISI , Science.  Excerpt: Edmunds and colleagues  report today in Current Biology  that these algae are spreading rapidly in the Caribbean Sea and elsewhere, killing existing corals and crowding out new ones. The authors don’t have a solid explanation for the algae expansion, although warming waters or another aspect of climate change may be a driver. But they and others worry this new menace will hasten the demise of ecosystems already decimated in many places by multiple bleaching events, many also linked to climate change. ...These latest coral killers are a group of more than 140 hard to distinguish red algal species belonging to the Peyssonneliaceae family. Some scientists mistake them for coralline algae, which also form crusts on reefs but help promote growth of the living structures. Whereas coralline algae form thin, hard crusts that are pink or whitish, peyssonnelid al

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/gently-down-the-stream-carbons-journey-from-land-to-sea-and-beyond By Nathaniel Scharping , Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Movement of carbon from land to ocean and atmosphere plays an important, but understudied, role in the global carbon cycle. Rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs occupy just 1% of Earth’s surface, but they provide a route for large amounts of terrestrial carbon to reach the ocean. Along the journey, carbon dioxide is also released into the atmosphere in a process known as evasion. But much about the land-to-ocean carbon cycle is not yet understood. ... Tian et al.  present a global quantification of carbon export and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) evasion from before the industrial era to the present. Their research indicates that inland waters move nearly half of the carbon absorbed by the land to the atmosphere and oceans. It also reveals significant anthropogenic perturbations to this land-to-ocean carbon cycle. Their work is the first global qu

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231106857589/en/ By BusinessWire.  Excerpt: LOS ANGELES ...Avnos, Inc. (Avnos), the Los Angeles-based company developing the novel Hybrid Direct Air Capture (HDAC™) technology for carbon dioxide removal, today began its first operational commercial pilot project in Bakersfield, California. ...the HDAC pilot delivers the world’s first water-positive Direct Air Capture (DAC) solution. In launching this system, Avnos has inverted the water paradigm in DAC – producing 5 tons of liquid distilled water per ton of CO 2 captured, as compared to 5-10 tons of water consumption per ton of CO 2 captured in other DAC approaches. As a result, Avnos opens the geographic and climatic operating range for DAC to many more regions around the globe. The Bakersfield pilot will capture approximately 30 tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide and produce 150 tons of water per year. ...Capturing water from the atmosphere allows Avnos to leverage a first-of-a-kind moisture

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/business/electric-planes-beta-technologies.html By Niraj Chokshi , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Over ...16 days, [Chris Caputo] and his colleagues flew the plane, a CX300 built by their employer, Beta Technologies, down the East Coast. They would make nearly two dozen stops to rest and recharge, flying through congested airspace in Boston, New York, Washington and other cities. When the journey came to an end in Florida, Beta handed the plane over to the Air Force, which will experiment with it over the next few months. The trip offered a vision of what aviation could look like years from now — one in which the skies are filled with aircraft that do not emit the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming up the Earth. ...the CX300, a sleek, futuristic plane with a 50-foot wingspan, large curved windows and a rear propeller ...is designed to carry about 1,250 pounds of cargo and will be followed soon after by the A250, which shares about 80 perc

https://www.science.org/content/article/peru-20-year-study-charted-amazon-forests-revealed-warming-changed By BARBARA FRASER , Science.  Excerpt: PILLCOPATA, PERU— Twenty years ago, a dozen Peruvian biology undergraduates armed with machetes and tape measures laboriously cleared a trail down the steep eastern flank of the Andes Mountains near this sleepy Amazonian town. They staked out eight study plots along a 15-kilometer-long transect that stretched from the grasslands found near the relatively cool, treeless top of a 4020-meter-high mountain known as Apu Kañajhuay down the fog-shrouded Kosñipata Valley to the warmer forests below, which are soaked by as much as 5 meters of rain a year. Along the transect lies some of the world’s richest biodiversity. Now, those 1-hectare plots in and near Manu National Park and Biosphere Reserve are the centerpiece of one of the longest running field studies of how an Amazon forest is responding to climate change. The effort, known as the  Andes Bi

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/energy-environment/offshore-wind-farm-new-jersey.html By Stanley Reed  and  Tracey Tully , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Plans to build two wind farms off the coast of New Jersey were scrapped, the company behind them said on Wednesday, a blow to the state’s efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the latest shakeout in the U.S. wind industry. ...Offshore wind and other parts of the  renewable industry have hit some snags  in Europe, especially in Britain. But Mr. Nipper said the problems were more acute in the United States because early contracts lacked protection from inflation and developers incurred high costs because of delays in approvals during the Trump administration. ...In its announcement, Orsted said it would move forward with a $4 billion project called Revolution Wind intended to supply power to consumers in Rhode Island. And other developers have projects under construction,  like Vineyard Wind , which will eventually have

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-canal-drought-shipping.html By Peter Eavis , The New York Times. Excerpt: For over a century, the Panama Canal has provided a convenient way for ships to move between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, helping to speed up international trade. But a drought has left the canal without enough water, which is used to raise and lower ships, forcing officials to slash the number of vessels they allow through. That has created expensive headaches for shipping companies and raised difficult questions about water use in Panama. The passage of one ship is estimated to consume as much water as half a million Panamanians use in one day. ...The problems at the Panama Canal, an engineering marvel that opened in 1914 and handles an  estimated 5 percent  of seaborne trade, is the latest example of how crucial parts of global supply chains can suddenly seize up....