https://eos.org/research-spotlights/when-the-aral-sea-dried-up-central-asia-became-dustier By  Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 1959, officials in the Soviet Union decided to divert river flows  feeding the Aral Sea  to the deserts of Central Asia, where the water irrigated farms supplying a  growing cotton industry . As the cotton blossomed, the lake’s level dropped. Today, only slivers remain of what was once the world’s fourth largest lake. As the Aral Sea has become a desert, known as the Aralkum, soil from the dry lake bed has added to the  dust that swirls above Central Asia . This dust carries hazards beyond those typically associated with natural particulate matter: It’s mixed with salt as well as residues from agricultural pesticides and fertilizers introduced into the sea. How much and where dust from the former Aral Sea spreads across the surrounding region are therefore important public health questions. In a new study,  Banks  ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/us/politics/electric-utilities-biden-climate-bill.html By  Eric Lipton , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Just two years ago, DTE Energy, a Michigan-based electric utility, was still enmeshed in a court fight with federal regulators over emissions from a coal-burning power plant on the western shore of Lake Erie that ranks as one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-changing air pollution. But in September, Gerard M. Anderson, who led DTE for the last decade, was on the South Lawn of the White House alongside hundreds of other supporters of President Biden, giving a standing ovation to the president for his success in pushing a climate change package through Congress — a law that will help accelerate the closure of the very same coal-burning behemoth, known as DTE Monroe, that his company had been fighting to protect. Mr. Anderson’s position reflects a fundamental shift among major electric utilities nationwide as they deploy their conside...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/big-polluters-given-almost-100bn-in-free-carbon-permits-by-eu By  Damian Carrington , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Big polluting industries have been given almost €100bn (£86bn) in free carbon permits by the EU in the last nine years, according to an analysis by the WWF [World Wildlife Fund]. The free allowances are “in direct contradiction with the polluter pays principle”, the group said. Free pollution permits worth €98.5bn were given to energy-intensive sectors including steel, cement, chemicals and aviation from 2013-21. This is more than the €88.5bn that the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) charged polluters, mostly coal and gas power stations, for their CO 2  emissions. Furthermore, the WWF said, the free permits did not come with climate conditions attached, such as increasing energy efficiency and some polluters were also able to make billions in windfall profits by selling the permits they did not use. The Europe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/business/scotland-wind-farms-offshore.html By  Stanley Reed , The New York Times.  Excerpt: It was a regular workday for these employees and contractors of a Scottish utility, SSE, and its partners, which operate the vast Beatrice wind farm off the northern tip of Great Britain. ...Mr. Larter also considers himself fortunate to have signed onto a business that is growing as Europe seeks to replace oil and gas, whose production has been a mainstay of this part of Scotland, with cleaner energy. ...These initiatives are attractive to investors and lawmakers because they produce enormous amounts of clean energy and can be placed far enough from shore that they are largely out of sight. Britain is already generating more than 10 percent of its electricity from wind at sea, and on some gusty days, like  Nov. 2 , wind produces more than half. As energy security becomes a critical issue in wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the country aspires to ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/record-heat-over-great-barrier-reef-raises-fears-of-second-summer-of-coral-bleaching By  Graham Readfearn , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Ocean temperatures over parts of the  Great Barrier Reef  have reached record levels this month, sparking fears of a second summer in a row of mass coral bleaching. Data from the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) shows sea surface temperatures over the northern parts of the reef have been the highest for any November on a record going back to 1985. With the peak period for accumulated heat over the reef not expected until February, cooler weather conditions and cyclone activity before then could stave off a mass bleaching event. ...Last summer’s mass bleaching,  declared by the Great BarrierReef Marine Park Authority  (GBRMPA), was the first outbreak during a La Niña – a climate pattern that historically has kept ocean temperatures cool eno...

https://www.science.org/content/article/reforestation-means-just-planting-trees By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: The world is set to get a lot greener over the next 10 years. The United Nations has designated 2021–30 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and many countries, with help from donors, have launched ambitious programs to restore forests in places where they were chopped down or degraded. At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Egypt last week, the European Union and 26 nations  pledged $16 billion  in support of forests, banking on trees’ ability to slow climate change by storing carbon. A significant chunk will be spent on reforestation. ...Between 2000 and 2020, the amount of forest  increased by 1.3 million square kilometers , an area larger than Peru, according to the World Resources Institute, with China and India leading the way. But  about 45%  of those new forests are plantations, dense aggregations dominated by a single ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/24/over-20000-died-western-europe-heatwaves-figures-climate-crisis By Sandra Laville , The Guardian.  Excerpt: More than 20,000 people died across western  Europe  in this summer’s heatwaves.... ...During the summer heatwaves temperatures  exceeded 40C  (104F) in London, areas in south-west France  reached 42C  and Seville and Córdoba  in Spain  set records of 44C.  Analysis  from the World Weather Attribution group of scientists found that such high temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis. ...The summer of 2022 was the  hottest on record , according to the EU’s Copernicus climate change service....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/climate/un-climate-cop27-loss-damage.html By Brad Plumer ,  Max Bearak ,  Lisa Friedman  and  Jenny Gross , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Diplomats from nearly 200 countries concluded two weeks of climate talks on Sunday by agreeing to establish a fund that would help poor, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the greenhouse gases from wealthy nations. ...For more than three decades, developing nations have pressed rich, industrialized countries  to provide compensation  for the costs of destructive storms, heat waves and droughts linked to rising temperatures. ...While the  new climate agreement  dealt with the damages from global warming, it did far less to address the greenhouse gas emissions that are the root cause of the crisis.... See also The New York Times articles Inside the Saudi Strategy to Keep the World Hooked on Oil and In a First, Rich Countries Agree to Pay for Clim...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/business/where-to-retire-climate-change.html By  Susan B. Garland , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...A small but growing number of older people ...are taking climate change into account when choosing a retirement destination, real estate agents and other experts say. Armed with climate studies, many retirees are looking for communities that are less likely to experience extreme weather events, such as wildfires, drought and flooding.... 

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/nov/18/lab-grown-meat-safe-eat-fda-upside-foods By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The US government has cleared the way for Americans to be able to eat lab-grown meat, after authorities deemed a meat product derived from animal cells to be safe for human consumption. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  will allow  a California company called Upside Foods to take living cells from chickens and then grow them in a controlled laboratory environment to produce a meat product that doesn’t involve the actual slaughter of any animals. The FDA said it was ready to approve the sale of other lab-grown meat, stating that it was “engaged in discussions with multiple firms” to do the same, including companies that want to grow seafood from the cells of marine life. ...Making food more sustainable is a major focus of the Cop27 climate talks, shortly finishing in Egypt. The global production of food is responsible for  a third o...

https://www.science.org/content/article/shelter-storm-can-giant-flood-barrier-protect-texas-cities-hurricanes By Warren Cornwall, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: A plan to wall off Houston and nearby industry from flooding caused by hurricanes will cost tens of billions of dollars. Will it be enough? ...In September 2008, Bill Merrell, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University, Galveston, ...trapped with his wife, daughter, grandson, ...by Hurricane Ike ...sat in his office and sketched plans for a project he hoped would put an end to the storm-driven flooding that had repeatedly devastated this part of Texas. It was an ambitious vision: Seventy kilometers of seawalls rising 5 meters above sea level would stretch the length of Galveston Island and beyond. Enormous gates would span the 3-kilometer-wide channel through which ships pass in and out of Galveston Bay. ...Today, that first brainstorm has morphed into a $31 billion plan from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the nation...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/india-faces-deepening-demographic-divide-as-it-prepares-to-overtake-china-as-the-worlds-most-populous-country By Hannah Ellis-Petersen , The Guardian.  Excerpt: India is currently home to more than 1.39 billion people – four times that of the US and more than 20 times the UK – while 1.41bn live in China. But with 86,000 babies born in India every day, and 49,400 in China, India is on course to take the lead in 2023 and hit 1.65 billion people by 2060. ...On 15 November the world’s population will reach a total of 8 billion people. Between now and 2050, over half of the projected increase in the global population will happen in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United Republic of Tanzania – and India....

https://eos.org/articles/the-bottom-of-the-arctic-is-blooming By  Fanni Daniella Szakal , Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Every year in the spring, the Arctic Ocean blooms ...with microscopic algae. After the bloom has exhausted the nutrients on the surface, these plankton sink to the seafloor and, without light, die or remain in a stable state. At least, that was what we thought. A new  study in  Global Change Biology , however, uncovered that in the summer, phytoplankton could bloom at the bottom of the Arctic. ... Takuhei Shiozaki , coauthor of the study ...and his colleagues found that instead of being in a stable state with low productivity, algae in water samples from the seafloor showed high primary production, indicating a bloom. ...The effects of climate change are especially severe in the Arctic, causing the region to warm at a rate  nearly 4 times as fast  as the rest of the planet. Many marine areas that used to be covered by ice year-round are now ice-free in the...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/13/business/electric-vehicles-buyers-mainstream.html By Jack Ewing  and  Peter Eavis , The New York Times.  Excerpt: While sales are still skewed toward affluent buyers, more people are choosing electric vehicles to save money. ...Electric vehicles are starting to go mainstream in the United States after making earlier inroads into the mass markets in China and Europe. ...Battery-powered cars now make up the fastest-growing segment of the auto market, with sales jumping 70 percent in the first nine months of the year from the same period in 2021, according to  data from Cox Automotive, a research and consulting firm. Sales of conventional cars and trucks fell 15 percent in the same period....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/climate/imf-world-bank-climate-cop27.html By  David Gelles  and  Max Bearak , The New York Times.  Excerpt: SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created 80 years ago to rebuild countries devastated by World War II and to stabilize the global economy. But an expanding group of world leaders now say the two powerful institutions need a 21st century overhaul to handle a new destructive force: global warming. There is growing momentum behind a set of ideas that would fundamentally overhaul the two powerful financial institutions, which frequently loan or grant money from rich, industrialized nations to developing countries. The proposals are rapidly gaining traction among heads of state, finance ministers and even leaders of the bank and the fund, who are all meeting now at the  United Nations climate summit known as COP27 . The current global financial system was designed to try to allev...

https://eos.org/articles/10-science-insights-for-cop27 By Meghie Rodrigues , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A new report aims to add further scientific backing to the vast academic literature supporting policy discussion at this year’s Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( COP27 ). The report, “ 10 New Insights in Climate Science ,” was released by Future Earth, The Earth League, and the World Climate Research Programme. It complements the scientific reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).... ... 1.  The idea of “endless adaptation” is a myth.  ... 2.  Vulnerability hot spots abound in regions at risk.  ... 3.  The climate-health nexus will face new threats.  ... 4.  Climate-induced migration will increase.  ... 5.  Human security requires climate security.  ... 6.  Sustainable land use is essential to meeting climate targets.  ... 7.  Financial in...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/world/europe/germany-climate-change-rhine-river.html By  Christopher F. Schuetze , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Europe’s most ambitious and expensive experiments in climate adaptation, a 180 million euro effort to save the Rhine’s historical role as a vital transport link for Germany’s economy from the adverse effects of climate change. ...For Germany, ...higher temperatures and longer droughts have taken an increasing toll on its economy by making already difficult natural bottlenecks on the Rhine practically unnavigable more often and for longer stretches of time. ...The challenge of the riverbed “optimization” project, as it is known, is to deepen the river at those critical points — without causing unwanted side effects. ...Floods and droughts have long been part of the Rhine’s history, demonstrated by the “hunger stones” — engravings from the Middle Ages far below the water’s surface that marked historically low levels. They have eme...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/climate/carbon-dioxide-emissions-global-warming.html By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Global fossil fuel emissions will most likely reach record highs in 2022 and do not yet show signs of declining, researchers said Thursday, a trend that puts countries further away from their goal of stopping global warming. This year, nations are projected to emit roughly 36.6 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide by burning coal, natural gas and oil for energy, according to  new data from the Global Carbon Project . That’s 1 percent more than the world emitted in 2021 and slightly more than the previous record in 2019, which came before the coronavirus pandemic caused  a temporary drop  in global energy use and emissions. The findings were released at the United Nations climate change summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, where world leaders  have gathered to discuss  how to avert catastrophic levels of warming. Scient...

https://www.science.org/content/article/ultrathin-organic-solar-cells-could-turn-buildings-power-generators By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: In November 2021, while the municipal utility in Marburg, Germany, was performing scheduled maintenance on a hot water storage facility, engineers glued 18 solar panels to the outside of the main 10-meter-high cylindrical tank. It’s not the typical home for solar panels, most of which are flat, rigid silicon and glass rectangles arrayed on rooftops or in solar parks. The Marburg facility’s panels, by contrast, are ultrathin organic films made by Heliatek, a German solar company. In the past few years, Heliatek has mounted its flexible panels on the sides of office towers, the curved roofs of bus stops, and even the cylindrical shaft of an 80-meter-tall windmill. The goal: expanding solar power’s reach beyond flat land. “There is a huge market where classical photovoltaics do not work,” says Jan Birnstock, Heliatek’s chief tech...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/09/oil-and-gas-greenhouse-emissions-three-times-higher-than-producers-claim By Fiona Harvey , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas facilities around the world are about three times higher than their producers claim, new data has shown. Climate Trace, a project to measure at source the true levels of carbon dioxide and other global heating gases, published a  new report on Wednesday  showing that half of the 50 largest sources of greenhouse gases in the world were oil and gas fields and production facilities. Many are underreporting their emissions, and there are few means of calling them to account. Oil and gas production can leak methane, and the gas is also frequently flared intentionally, ostensibly for safety reasons but sometimes for convenience. Atmospheric levels of  methane, a greenhouse gas  about 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, have been rising strongly in recent ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/world/middleeast/jordan-water-cop-27.html By  Karen Zraick , The New York Times.  Excerpt: AMMAN, Jordan — Residents of Jordan, one of the driest countries in the world, have long been accustomed to a household water supply of only about 36 hours a week. But recently, even that meager flow has been curtailed by the debilitating combination of a warming planet and swelling demand. ...household taps ran dry this summer for as long as three weeks in parts of this small, dehydrated Middle Eastern nation. By early summer, when her taps did not spring to life on schedule, Ms. al-Bawabiji said she feared more outages were coming. ...Population growth, diminished water supplies and climate change have all taken their toll, while damaged and inefficient infrastructure and the considerable challenges posed by Jordan’s geography and topography have only made things worse. The resulting shortages serve as a warning of what the future might hold for the r...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/10/worlds-biggest-carmakers-to-build-400m-more-vehicles-than-15c-climate-target-will-allow By  Royce Kurmelovs , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the University of Applied Sciences of the Industry in Bergisch Gladbach and Greenpeace Germany compared the rate at which the world needed to embrace zero-emissions vehicles with the rate at which major car companies were planning to produce various models.  The report , which focused on 12 carmakers globally, showed some of Australia’s most popular brands – Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai/Kia – were on track to make far more petrol and diesel cars than is sustainable if the world is to limit global heating to the Paris climate agreement target of 1.5C.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/climate/climate-change-emissions-satellites.html By  Raymond Zhong , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...a sprawling factory complex in eastern China is churning out tens of millions of tons of steel a year — and immense quantities of planet-warming gases. The plant’s owner has not disclosed how much the site emits. Now, though, researchers say that by peering down from space, they have found that the factory’s emissions are likely higher than those of any other steel plant on Earth. ...a new global compendium of emissions released on Wednesday by  Climate TRACE , a nonprofit coalition of environmental groups, technology companies and academic scientists ...catalogs steel and cement factories, power plants, oil and gas fields, cargo ships, cattle feedlots — 72,612 emitters and counting, a hyperlocal atlas of the human activities that are altering the planet’s chemistry.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/climate/loss-and-damage-cop27-climate.html By  David Gelles , The New York Times.  Excerpt: SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — For 30 years, developing nations have been calling for industrialized countries to provide compensation for the costs of devastating storms and droughts caused by climate change. For just as long, rich nations that have generated the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet have resisted those calls. At the United Nations climate summit last year, only Scotland, the host country, committed $2.2 million for what’s known as “loss and damage.” But this week, the dam may have begun to break. On Sunday, negotiators from developing countries succeeded in placing the matter  on the formal agenda  of this year’s climate summit, known as COP27, or the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties. ...By the end of the third day of the conference, several European countries had pledged cash for a new loss and damage fun...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/08/how-to-move-a-country-fiji-radical-plan-escape-rising-seas-climate-crisis By  Kate Lyons , The Guardian.  Excerpt: For the   past four years, a special government taskforce in  Fiji  has been trying to work out how to move the country. The plan it has come up with runs to 130 pages of dense text, interspersed with intricate spider graphs and detailed timelines. ...it is the most thorough plan ever devised to tackle one of the most urgent consequences of the climate crisis: how to relocate communities whose homes will soon be, or already are, underwater. The task is huge. Fiji, which lies in the south Pacific, 1,800 miles east of Australia, has more than 300 islands and a population of just under 1 million. Like most of the Pacific, it is starkly susceptible to the impacts of the climate crisis. Surface temperatures and ocean heat in parts of the south-west Pacific are increasing  three times faster  t...

  https://eos.org/articles/did-a-chaotic-climate-drive-human-evolution By  Elise Cutts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt:  A new 620,000-year climate record from East Africa reveals dramatic swings between wet and dry conditions that may have influenced human evolution.  We owe much of our understanding of the human family tree to decades of fossil finds in East Africa. But whereas researchers know quite a lot about hominin bones, the environments our ancestors and evolutionary cousins inhabited are a different story—despite East Africa’s anthropological significance, climate records for the region have remained stubbornly sparse. Now, researchers have produced what they say is one of the first-ever continuous climate records from a proven habitat of ancient  Homo sapiens . The new 620,000-year history of hydroclimate at Chew Bahir, a playa lake in southern Ethiopia, showed that the local climate swung dramatically between wet and dry extremes. Shifts in the intensity an...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/world/americas/belize-coral-reef-preservation.html By Anatoly Kurmanaev , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Under the blue bonds deal, the Nature Conservancy, a Virginia-based nonprofit, lent Belize more than $350 million to enable the Central American nation to buy back international bonds worth more than half a billion dollars. ...The deal freed up more than $200 million, or nearly a tenth of Belize’s annual economic output, to be spent in other areas. In exchange, Belize agreed to designate 30 percent of its waters as protected, limiting the extent of activities such as fishing and construction. It also committed to spending $4.2 million a year on preserving these areas’ biodiversity. Proponents of the deal hope the financial and climate incentives  will help small or poor nations escape the interrelated challenges  of excessive debt and environmental degradation, opening a path to sustainable growth.…

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/06/climate/cop27-climate-change-loss-damage.html By Elena Shao, The New York Times.  Excerpt: When world leaders gather in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, this week for the annual United Nations climate summit, the debate over who bears financial responsibility for climate change  will be center stage . Poor nations, which have contributed the least to climate change but are among the most vulnerable to its effects today, are seeking more financial commitments from rich countries, many of which have grown their economies by burning fossil fuels.… [COP = Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC] [UNFCCC = United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] See also   The World Is Falling Short of Its Climate Goals. Four Big Emitters Show Why . and " US falling $32bn short on ‘fair share’ of $100bn climate-finance goal"  [ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-us-falling-32bn-short-on-fair-share-of-100bn-climate-finance-goal ] By Jo...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/opinion/climate-warming-peatlands.html By  Daniel Zarin , executive director of forests and climate change at the Wildlife Conservation Society—opinion piece in The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...wetlands make up only 3 percent of the earth’s land area but store  twice as much carbon  as all of the trees on the planet. Yet for all their importance, these landscapes have been largely forgotten in the global effort to address the climate crisis. This oversight has been hugely consequential and looms ever more so. Peatlands are filled with deep accumulations of slowly decomposing plants and other organic material known as peat. They are carbon sinks, absorbing more carbon than they release into the atmosphere, and have been crucial in slowing planetary warming. They also absorb, filter and release rainwater slowly, helping to ease droughts and floods that have increased in severity with changes to the climate. But increasingly, these lan...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/05/20-climate-photographs-that-changed-the-world By  Gabrielle Schwarz , The Guardian.  Excerpt: They are the images that made us sit up and take notice. As world leaders gather for Cop27, these pictures prove that global heating isn’t a distant possibility – it’s already here... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/climate/gabon-logging-oil-economy.html By  Dionne Searcey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: LOANGO NATIONAL PARK, Gabon — Evening and the rainforest. A riverbank packed with elephants. Treetops so dense they obscure all but a chimpanzee’s hairy arm. And, as the sun sets, a twinkle on the horizon: an offshore oil platform. The nation of Gabon is so lush with forests and wildlife its nickname is Africa’s Eden. It’s also one of the continent’s major oil producers. Gabon for decades has relied on petroleum to drive its economy. But officials know their oil won’t last forever. So they’ve turned to Gabon’s other abundant resource — a huge Congo Basin rainforest, full of valuable trees — to help make up the difference once the oil is gone. Gabon is engaging in activities that have become dirty words in the world of climate activism: It  allows palm-oil plantations  in certain areas and is turning rainforest into plywood. However, unlike Braz...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/us/politics/climate-natural-gas-hydrogen-new-mexico.html By Eric Lipton , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Blackstone, the New York-based asset manager with nearly $1 trillion of investor funds, is moving rapidly into the clean-energy revolution, driven in part by  federal tax incentives .... But one of its larger projects — through a subsidiary called Tallgrass Energy — is drawing protests from environmentalists who argue that Blackstone’s effort in New Mexico will not do enough to combat climate change.... Tallgrass intends to spend $600 million to rebuild a defunct coal-burning power plant in northwest New Mexico into one that uses natural gas converted into hydrogen to create electricity that will be sent to households and businesses in four states in the region. The project would be eligible for a generous tax break — generating about $30 million a year in federal subsidies for its electricity generation — because the climate-change-causin...