https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/climate/jbs-ipo-nyse.html By Manuela Andreoni  and  Dionne Searcey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A giant Brazilian meatpacking company is facing persistent opposition to its plans for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange because of concerns about corruption settlements, accusations of Amazon deforestation and its growing market share in the United States. The proposed listing by JBS, the world’s biggest meatpacker, has brought together American beef producers, environmentalists and politicians from both major parties in a rare common cause. ...a dozen British lawmakers  urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to reject the share listing  to “send a clear message that the United States stands firm in its commitment to combating climate change.” ... Research suggests  about 80 percent of deforestation in the Amazon is connected to the beef industry. Global meat consumption  is expected to grow 14 percent by 2030  as the world’s population gro

https://www.science.org/content/article/world-1-3%C2%B0c-or-1-5%C2%B0c-warmer-historical-ship-logs-hold-answers By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: Last month’s announcement that 2023 was the  hottest year in history  was no surprise. But it came with one: No one knows exactly how much the world has warmed. One group of climate scientists found the planet has warmed 1.34°C over the 1850–1900 average, whereas  another found temperatures  had risen 1.54°C. ...the current disagreement is not over present temperatures, but rather the past. The warmth of the ocean in the late 19th century is a key part of the baseline against which the warming of the planet is measured—and figures are at odds. ...No estimate of global temperature is possible without including the oceans, which cover 70% of the planet’s surface. ...But ocean temperature records in the 19th century were few and far between. A global record  began in the 1850s  thanks to a controversial figure, Matthew Fontaine Maury, a superi

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/26/climate/panama-canal-drought-shipping.html By Mira Rojanasakul , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The lake that allows the Panama Canal to function recorded the lowest water level ever for the start of a dry season this year, which means that vastly fewer ships can pass through the canal. The extreme drought, exacerbated by an ongoing  El Niño  that is affecting Gatún Lake and the whole region appears likely to last into May. The Panama Canal Authority has reduced daily traffic through the narrow corridor by nearly 40 percent compared with last year. Many ships have already diverted to longer ocean routes, which increases both costs and carbon emissions, while the global shipping company Maersk recently announced they will shift  some of their cargo to rail . ...In previous droughts, weight restrictions were imposed because heavier boats risk running aground in the shallower water. The canal typically handles an estimated  5 percent of seabor

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj6233 By MEGAN HE et al, Science. Intro/summary: The Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada represent the world’s largest deposit of crude bitumen—a dense, extremely viscous form of petroleum. Extracting oil from these deposits generates harmful carbon emissions, which have a significant impact on air quality. Although companies are often required to monitor and report these emissions, new research suggests these reports contain major gaps—and that the true amount of pollution is much higher than previously thought. ...Using an aircraft belonging to the National Research Council of Canada, scientists directly measured carbon concentrations in the air above multiple facilities in the Athabasca oil sands. Their analyses suggested that the region emits more carbon than all the cars in Los Angeles each year—and the same amount as all other Canadian emission sources combined. Most notably, the aircraft-based measurements exceeded industry-repor

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-giant-water-batteries-could-make-green-power-reliable By ROBERT KUNZIG , Science.  Excerpt: The machines that turn Tennessee’s Raccoon Mountain into one of the world’s largest energy storage devices—in effect, a battery that can power a medium-size city—are hidden in a cathedral-size cavern deep inside the mountain. But what enables the mountain to store all that energy is plain in an aerial photo. The summit plateau is occupied by a large lake that hangs high above the Tennessee River.... At night, when demand for electricity is low but TVA’s nuclear reactors are still humming, TVA banks the excess, storing it as gravitational potential energy in the summit lake. The pumps draw water from the Tennessee and shoot it straight up the 10-meter-wide shaft at a rate that would fill an Olympic pool in less than 6 seconds. During the day, when demand for electricity peaks, water drains back down the shaft and spins the turbines, generating 1700 mega

https://eos.org/articles/trump-haley-tell-voters-economic-prosperity-requires-fossil-fuels By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Both Republican front-runners promise a better economy via oil and gas production. But  crude and natural gas production reached record numbers  under the Biden administration, and ties between fossil fuel production and economic prosperity are less clear than the candidates make them seem, said energy policy experts.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/climate/geoexchange-climate-colleges-heat.html By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Princeton University ... is using the earth beneath its campus to create a new system that will keep buildings at comfortable temperatures without burning fossil fuels. The multimillion dollar project, using a process known as geoexchange, marks a significant shift in how Princeton gets its energy, and is key to the university’s plan to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2046. ...the more than 2,000 boreholes planned for the campus will be undetectable, despite performing an impressive sleight of hand. During hot months, heat drawn from Princeton’s buildings will be stored in thick pipes deep underground until winter, when heat will be drawn back up again. The change is significant. Since its founding in 1746, Princeton has heated its buildings by burning carbon-based fuels, in the form of firewood, then coal, then fuel oil, then natural ga

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-too-down-space-based-solar-power By DANIEL CLERY , Science.  Excerpt: This month, NASA cast a shadow on one of the most visionary prospects for freeing the world from fossil fuels: collecting solar energy in space and beaming it to Earth. An agency report found the scheme is feasible by 2050 but would cost between 12 and 80 times as much as ground-based renewable energy sources. Undaunted, many government agencies and companies are pushing ahead with demonstration plans. Some researchers say NASA’s analysis is too pessimistic.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/world/europe/switzerland-glaciers.html By  Catherine Porter , Photographs and Video by George Steinmetz, The New York Times.  Excerpt: For centuries, Swiss farmers have sent their cattle, goats and sheep up the mountains to graze in warmer months before bringing them back down at the start of autumn. Devised in the Middle Ages to save precious grass in the valleys for winter stock, the tradition of “summering” has so transformed the countryside into a patchwork of forests and pastures that maintaining its appearance was written into the Swiss Constitution as an essential role of agriculture. It has also knitted together essential threads of the country’s modern identity: alpine cheeses, hiking trails that crisscross summer pastures, cowbells echoing off the mountainsides. In December, the United Nations heritage agency UNESCO  added the Swiss tradition  to its exalted “intangible cultural heritage” list. But climate change threatens to scramble those

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-type-water-splitter-could-make-green-hydrogen-cheaper By ROBERT F. SERVICE , Science.  Excerpt: To wean itself off fossil fuels, the world needs cheaper ways to produce green hydrogen—a clean-burning fuel made by using renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Now researchers report a way to avoid the need for a costly membrane at the heart of the water-splitting devices, and to instead produce hydrogen and oxygen in completely separate chambers. As a lab-based proof of concept,  the new setup —reported this month in Nature Materials—is a long way from working at an industrial scale. But if successful, it could help heavy industries such as steelmaking and fertilizer production reduce their dependence on oil, coal, and natural gas. ...Any successes in eliminating electrolyzer membranes could be a boon to efforts to decarbonize parts of industry most dependent on fossil fuels, he says. “I can not overstate how big of an ad

https://www.science.org/content/article/dogged-climate-change-and-human-hunters-mammoth-s-life-written-her-tusks By MICHAEL PRICE , Science.  Excerpt: ...the 14,000-year-old woolly mammoth whose tusks were found in 2009 near Fairbanks, Alaska, ..., Elma (for short) needed a life story, which a detailed analysis of the tusks has now provided. Her travels are giving Combs and colleagues  a rare glimpse into the ways of her species at the end of the last ice age —and insight into how pressure from a changing climate as well as hunting by early humans may have helped spur mammoths’ extinction.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/climate/electric-vehicles-high-mileage-drivers.html By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A small share of motorists [who drive, on average, about 110 miles per day] burns about a third of America’s gasoline, a study found. If more of those drivers switched to electric vehicles from gasoline-powered models, it would make a major dent in greenhouse gases from transportation, which have so far been slow to decline, according to  a new analysis published on Wednesday  by Coltura, an environmental nonprofit group based in Seattle. While the average American driver travels about  13,400 miles per year , people who buy electric vehicles today  tend to drive them less than that , limiting the climate benefits of switching to a cleaner car. By contrast, the top 10 percent of motorists in the United States drive an average of about 40,200 miles per year and account for roughly one-third of the nation’s gasoline use. Persuading more of these “gasoline

https://eos.org/features/can-submerging-seaweed-cool-the-climate By Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Running Tide is one of many organizations asking whether submerging seaweed could be part of an effective strategy for mitigating climate change. When these algae photosynthesize, they turn carbon dioxide from the upper ocean into biomass.  In some parts  of the ocean, submerging that biomass below thousands of meters of water could lock its carbon away for hundreds or even thousands of years, drawing down levels of carbon in the atmosphere. ...But major questions remain. For example, if growing seaweed depletes the pool of nutrients available for other forms of ocean life, then will it actually increase the ocean’s net carbon storage? What happens to ocean bottom ecosystems if humanity creates giant, underwater seaweed landfills? And how will companies monitor the effects of sending tons of seaweed to a watery grave?.... 

https://eos.org/articles/scientists-astonished-at-2023-temperature-record By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: NASA’s and NOAA’s  analyses , as well as  a report  from climate research nonprofit Berkeley Earth, all released Friday, concur that 2023 was a scorcher. NASA and NOAA scientists found that average temperatures were 0.15°C–0.16°C (0.27°F–0.29°F) warmer than temperatures in 2016, the previous hottest year ever recorded. That’s a huge jump, because most records are set on the order of hundredths of degrees Celsius, said  Russell Vose , a climate scientist at NOAA and an author on the agency’s analysis, at a press conference. ...“We’re still continuing to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” Schmidt said. “As long as we continue to do that, temperatures will rise.”.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/11/nyregion/ny-wind-farm-south-fork.html By Patrick McGeehan, The New York Times.  Excerpt: More than 30 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, the first colossal steel turbines have started spinning at South Fork Wind, turning offshore breezes into electricity that lights homes on Long Island. The rest of the wind farm’s 12 towering turbines are set to be assembled and connected to New York’s power grid early this year. The arrival of this moment in the nation’s transition to renewable energy may seem sudden. But it has come after more than 20 years of contentious debates over its cost, appearance and effect on wildlife....

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/climate/global-drought-food-hunger.html By Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Olive groves have shriveled in Tunisia. The Brazilian Amazon faces its driest season in a century. Wheat fields have been decimated in Syria and Iraq, pushing millions more into hunger after years of conflict. The Panama Canal, a vital trade artery, doesn’t have enough water, which means fewer ships can pass through. And the fear of drought has prompted India, the world’s biggest rice exporter, to restrict the export of most rice varieties. The United Nations  estimates that 1.84 billion people worldwide , or nearly a quarter of humanity, were living under drought in 2022 and 2023, the vast majority in low- and middle-income countries. ...The many droughts around the world come at a time of record-high global temperatures and rising food-price inflation, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, involving two countries that are major producers of wheat, has thrown glo

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/10/oil-ads-lights-on-energy By Dharna Noor , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The American oil lobby has launched an eight-figure media campaign this week promoting the idea that fossil fuels are “vital” to global energy security, alarming climate experts. “US natural gas and oil play a key role in supplying the world with cleaner, more reliable energy,” the new initiative’s website says. The campaign comes amid  record fossil fuel extraction in the US , and as the industry is attempting to capitalize on the war in Gaza to escalate production even further, climate advocates say. Launched Tuesday by the nation’s top fossil fuel interest group, the  Lights on Energy campaign  will work to “dismantle policy threats” to the sector, the American Petroleum Institute (API) CEO, Mike Sommers,  told CNN in an interview  this week.... 

https://www.wired.com/story/why-humans-are-putting-a-bunch-of-coal-and-oil-back-in-the-ground/ By Matt Simon, Wired.  Excerpt: Startups are processing plant waste into concentrated carbon to be buried or injected underground. It’s like fossil fuels, but in reverse. In a roundabout way, coal is solar-powered. Millions of years ago, swamp plants soaked up the sun’s energy, eating carbon dioxide in the process. They died, accumulated, and transformed over geologic time into energy-dense rock. This solar-powered fuel, of course, is far from renewable, unlike solar panels: Burning coal has returned that carbon to the atmosphere, driving rapid climate change. But what if humans could reverse that process, creating their own version of coal from plant waste and burying it underground? That’s the idea behind a growing number of carbon projects: Using special heating chambers, engineers can transform agricultural and other waste biomass into solid, concentrated carbon. Like those ancient plants

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/science/rocket-pollution-spacex-satellites.html By Shannon Hall , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In the past few years, the number of rocket launches has spiked as commercial companies — especially SpaceX...and government agencies have lofted thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit. ...Satellites could eventually total  one million , requiring an even greater number of space launches that could yield escalating levels of emissions. ...scientists worry that more launches will scatter more pollutants in pristine layers of Earth’s atmosphere. ...Already, studies show that the higher reaches of the atmosphere are laced with metals from spacecraft that disintegrate as they fall back to Earth. ...By the time a rocket curves into orbit, it will have dumped in the middle and upper layers of the atmosphere as much as two-thirds of its exhaust, which scientists predict will rain down and collect in the lower layer of the middle atmosphere, the stratosphere.

https://www.science.org/content/article/even-warmer-expected-2023-was-hottest-year-record By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: ...2023 was the hottest year in human history. Average surface temperatures rose nearly 0.2°C above the previous record, set in 2016, to 1.48°C over preindustrial levels, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service  reported today . ...Humanity’s unabated burning of fossil fuels is the dominant driver of the long-term trend, but it is insufficient to explain 2023’s sudden spike, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University. ...One exacerbating factor was the end of a La Niña climate pattern, which from 2020 to 2022 stirred up an increased amount of deep cold water in the eastern Pacific Ocean that absorbed heat and suppressed global temperatures. In 2023, the pattern flipped into an El Niño event, which blanketed the equatorial Pacific with warm waters and began to boost global temperatures. ...But the flip is not enough

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/08/us-school-buses-diesel-electric By Aliya Uteuova , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The US has announced nearly $1bn in grants to replace diesel-powered school buses with electric and lower-emitting vehicles. The Environmental Protection Agency will disburse funds to 280 school districts serving 7 million children across the country in an effort to curb harmful air pollution and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. ...Diesel emissions have been  linked  to higher rates of asthma, cancer and school absenteeism. Communities of color and people living in low-income neighborhoods are more likely to suffer from higher rates of  air pollution . Eighty-six per cent of grant recipients are in school districts that serve low-income, rural and tribal communities, according to the EPA. The new funds mean so far nearly $2bn has been awarded to add about 5,000 clean buses to schools across the country. The program draws from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/researchers-develop-mexicos-first-comprehensive-greenhouse-gas-budget By Rachel Fritts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Mexico’s greenhouse gas emissions are the second highest among Latin American countries, trailing only Brazil  according to the World Bank . But until now, no one had leveraged the full spectrum of available scientific data to make an estimate of sources (such as fossil fuel burning and agriculture) and sinks (such as healthy forests and soils) of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Calculating the country’s  greenhouse gas budget  could help policymakers develop effective emissions reduction strategies. Murray-Tortarolo et al.  calculate Mexico’s first comprehensive greenhouse gas budget based on estimates from multiple data sources of greenhouse gas fluxes in the country between 2000 and 2019. ...different sources of data broadly told the same story about anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from sources including fossil fuel burnin

https://www.science.org/content/article/strong-monsoons-may-have-carved-path-early-humans-out-africa By BRIDGET ALEX , Science.  Excerpt: More than 140,000 years ago, East Asia was a much colder, drier place than today—a landscape that likely deterred many African creatures, humans among them, from venturing into the region. Then, some 100,000 years ago, roving members of our species may have reached East Asia and found a rain-soaked, verdant landscape. What changed? According to  a new study published today  in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a strengthening monsoon—and the lushness it lent—helped attract the region’s first  Homo sapiens . ...Evidence from fossils, artifacts, and DNA has established that  H. sapiens  evolved in Africa by roughly 300,000 years ago. About 60,000 years ago, the lineage that led to people alive today began to disperse across all of Earth’s habitable lands. ...One climatic phenomenon that would have impacted early migrants is  the Asia

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/magazine/glacier-engineering-sea-level-rise.html By on Gertner , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...a glacier on Greenland’s west coast...referred to by its Danish name, Jakobshavn...situated on the edge of Greenland’s massive ice sheet, that moves 30 billion to 50 billion tons of icebergs off the island every year. ...Glaciologists have identified it as one of the fastest-deteriorating glaciers in the world. ...Jakobshavn alone was responsible for 4 percent of the rise in global sea levels during the 20th century. It probably contains enough ice to ultimately push sea levels up at least another foot. ...at the bottom of the bay’s entrance...the warm water flows over a sill, a ridge rising several hundred feet above the ocean floor ...akin to a threshold that crosses the floor of a doorway between two rooms. [British glaciologist John Moore] and his colleague Michael Wolovick published an article that proposed looking into building  a sea wall 100 meter

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/01/05/why-are-france-germany-and-england-flooded-and-is-climate-change-to-blame By Angela Symons  with  AP .  Excerpt: El Nino, sea level rise and outdated defences have exposed European communities to devastating flooding. Heavy rains have pummelled Germany, France and the Netherlands over the last two weeks, causing persistent flooding and even one death in France. ...Above-average  ocean temperatures  - partly due to the  El Nino  weather pattern - are causing evaporation and therefore more rain in low-lying regions. And sea level rise is causing rivers to burst their banks more frequently. In recent days, low-lying communities in northern France have faced power cuts, flooded streets and evacuations due to heavy rainfall. Rising sea levels have likely contributed to this: between 1957 and 2017,  sea levels  at Dunkirk rose by 9 cm. From 1966 to 2018, Calais saw a 4.4 cm rise.... 

https://grist.org/energy/in-juneau-alaska-a-carbon-offset-project-thats-actually-working/ By Taylor Kate Brown , Grist.  Excerpt: When Kira Roberts moved to Juneau, Alaska, last summer, she immediately noticed how the town of 31,000 changes when the cruise ships dock each morning. Thousands of people pour in, only to vanish by evening. As the season winds down in fall, the parade of buses driving through her neighborhood slows, and the trails near her home and the vast Mendenhall Glacier no longer teem with tourists. ...But Mendenhall is shrinking quickly: The 13-mile-long glacier has retreated  about a mile in the past 40 years . Getting all those tourists to Juneau — some 1.5 million this summer by cruise ship alone — requires burning the very thing contributing to its retreat: fossil fuels. ...In an effort to mitigate a portion of that CO2, some of those going whale watching or visiting the glacier are asked to pay a few dollars to counter their emissions. The money goes to the Alas

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/world/canada/canada-boreal-forest-logging.html By Ian Austen  and  Vjosa Isai , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Canada has long promoted itself globally as a model for protecting one of the country’s most vital natural resources: the world’s largest swath of boreal forest, which is crucial to fighting climate change. But a new  study  using nearly half a century of data from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec — two of the country’s main commercial logging regions — reveals that harvesting trees has inflicted severe damage on the boreal forest that will be difficult to reverse. Researchers led by a group from Griffith University in Australia found that since 1976 logging in the two provinces has caused the removal of 35.4 million acres of boreal forest, an area roughly the size of New York State. While nearly 56 million acres of well-established trees at least a century old remain in the region, logging has shattered this forest, leaving behind a patchw

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/03/human-activity-is-powering-a-new-industrial-revolution-at-sea-say-experts By Karen McVeigh , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Researchers using AI and satellite imagery find 75% of industrial fishing is not being publicly tracked, while wind turbines now outnumber oil platforms. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/business/byd-2023-sales.html By Claire Fu  and Rich Barbieri , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Chinese corporate giant BYD said Monday that it sold three million   battery-powered cars in 2023, its most ever, capping a turbulent year for China’s electric vehicle industry. ...BYD last year sold 1.6 million fully electric vehicles and another 1.4 million hybrids, which are powered by both batteries and gasoline. Together that is a 62 percent increase over 2022. BYD is also making money, tripling its profit to $1.5 billion in the first half of last year. ...the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers... said it expected sales in 2024 to rise again, to 11.5 million. ...companies are pouring money into factories and research, often fueled by  loans from state-owned banks  and assistance from municipalities....