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Global Warming Made Hurricane Melissa More Damaging, Researchers Say

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By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Hurricane Melissa’s path through the Caribbean last month was made more violent by climate change, according to a scientific analysis released Thursday. Researchers from the group World Weather Attribution found that the storm had 7 percent stronger wind speeds than a similar one in a world that has not been warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. They also found the rate of rainfall inside the eyewall of the storm was 16 percent more intense. Melissa made landfall as a Category 5 storm in Jamaica on Oct. 28 with wind speeds of 185 miles per hour, collapsing buildings and knocking out internet to most of the island. It continued on to Cuba as a Category 3 storm, forcing hundreds to evacuate, and pummeled Haiti with catastrophic flooding. Dozens of people in hard-hit areas have died. Even a small increase in wind speed can cause substantial damage, said Friederike Otto, one of the group’s founders and a climatologist at Imperia...
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Forests are migrating up mountain peaks

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By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: It’s a hallmark prediction of climate change: As the world warms, trees will migrate not just toward the poles, but also up the slopes of mountains, eating away at fragile alpine ecosystems. Although advancing tree lines have been tracked at individual mountains, a new large-scale study  has found something surprising : Over a span of 4 decades, the largest upward movement of these forests has come not near the poles, as one might expect, but instead in the tropics, where monitoring has been far more limited....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/forests-are-migrating-mountain-peaks .
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Antarctic glacier shows fastest retreat in modern history

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By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: In 2022, something shocking happened to the Hektoria Glacier, a small river of ice that slips into the sea near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Over 16 months, it retreated by 25 kilometers, and it lost a whopping 8 kilometers in just two of those months—the fastest glacial retreat in the modern record. Now, after  a forensic analysis of the event reported today in  Nature Geoscience , researchers say they have identified the worrisome mechanisms behind it: a combination of glacial earthquakes and a swath of thinned ice popping afloat and breaking apart in a geological instant. If the same processes were to occur at larger Antarctic glaciers, they could rapidly accelerate the retreat of ice sheets and raise global sea levels, says Jeremy Bassis, a glaciologist at the University of Michigan. The study is “telling us that those worst-case scenarios are maybe not as implausible as some people might have thought.” ...[Jeremy] Bassis ...
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Chemical additive slashes carbon emissions when creating synthetic fuels

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By Robert F. Service , Science.  Excerpt: Despite the growing adoption of solar power and other renewables, fossil fuels still rule our energy world. That makes steps to make them cleaner all the more vital. Chemists report today in  Science  the discovery of an additive that  sharply cuts carbon emissions  from an industrial process that can convert coal, natural gas, or agricultural biomass to liquid fuels such as diesel or gasoline. ...Fischer-Tropsch process ...was used by Germany in the 1930s to fuel the Nazi war machine and by South Africa during apartheid to produce fuels from the nation’s abundant coal reserves. Although relatively expensive, the approach is still used today to satisfy strategic fuel security needs or in places with abundant feedstocks such as coal or natural gas. The chemistry is highly polluting, however. ...one-third of all the carbon contained in syngas ends up as CO 2  vented into the atmosphere. ...Ding Ma, a chemist at Peking...
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Tree rings from ancient coffins offer clues to Earth’s past

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By Taylor Mitchell Brown , Science.  Excerpt: About 2200 years ago, a wealthy Han soldier was entombed in a hillside grave on the frontier of the expanding Han Dynasty, in what is now western China. His tomb was filled with gold coins and emblazoned with ornate calligraphy. But what most interested Bao Yang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and head of its Tree-Ring Laboratory was the wood of his coffin. For dendrochronologists like Yang, coffin wood can be a critical source of tree rings, which can help scientists date sites—sometimes to precise calendar years—and offer details about the region’s environment and climate during the tree’s lifetime. The thickness of rings from the Han soldier’s pine coffin and hundreds of others like it, for example,  revealed that from 270 B.C.E. to 77 C.E. average humidity levels were 18% to 34% higher than today’s, which may have allowed the western Han to expand westward  into what before—and is again today—a barren desert. That...
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Renewable energy and EVs have grown so much faster than experts predicted 10 years ago

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By Adele Peters , FastCompany.  Excerpt: Most climate reports are bleak. Temperatures are soaring. Sea levels are rising. Companies are missing—or abandoning—their emissions targets. But a  new report  from the nonprofit Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) looks at the surprising amount of progress that’s happened since the Paris climate agreement 10 years ago. Renewable energy has grown faster than every major forecast predicted in 2015. There’s now four times as much solar power as the International Energy Agency (IEA) expected 10 years ago. Last year alone, the world installed  553 gigawatts  of solar power...which is 1,500% more than the IEA had projected. Investors are now pouring twice as much into renewables as into fossil fuels. More than 1 in 5 new cars sold worldwide today is  an EV ; a decade ago, that number was fewer than 1 in 100. ...the world is on track to reach 100 million  EVs  by 2028. Dozens of countries have net-zero...
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Exxon Sues California Over New Climate Disclosure Laws

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By Karen Zraick , The New York Times.   Excerpt: Exxon Mobil sued California late Friday claiming that two new state laws that aim to fight climate change would violate the oil company’s free speech rights. The two laws, passed in 2023 and known as the California Climate Accountability Package, would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas emissions created by the use of their products, along with the business risks that climate change represents for the companies. ...In the past, climate regulations have generally required companies to report their own corporate emissions, but not emissions caused by people using the products that they manufacture and sell. For oil companies like Exxon, the new rules, which begin to take effect in 2026, mean calculating and then reporting the emissions caused by activities like the use of gas or diesel in cars and trucks. ... Exxon’s lawsuit , filed in the United States Distr...
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