By Graham Readfearn , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Australia’s winter runs from June to August, but swathes of the country have felt like summer the past week with temperatures topping 40C and records tumbling....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/31/australia-heatwave-weather-sydney-melbourne-august-heat-record-temperatures . 

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics. The catalytic process, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, works equally well with the two dominant types of post-consumer plastic waste: polyethylene, the component of most single-use plastic bags; and polypropylene, the stuff of hard plastics, from microwavable dishes to luggage. It also efficiently degrades a mix of these types of plastics. The process, if scaled up, could help bring about a circular economy for many throwaway plastics, with the plastic waste converted back into the monomers used to make polymers, thereby reducing the fossil fuels used to make new plastics. ...“We have an enormous amount of polyethylene and polypropylene in everyday objects, from lunch bags to laundry soap bottles to milk jugs ...,” said  John Hartwig , a UC Berkeley professor o

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: ...the potential benefits and risks of a controversial idea: growing seaweed to fight climate change. The concept has generated enthusiasm among entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and some scientists. They envision vast seaweed farms floating in the open ocean, where plants such as kelp would be grown and then sunk thousands of meters to the ocean floor, entombing the carbon for centuries. ompanies looking to feed the growing market for carbon credits have hatched a variety of strategies. ...But the strategy faces daunting, unanswered questions about how much carbon it might actually sequester, potential ecological effects, and whether coastal seaweed can thrive in the open ocean. ...some ocean scientists have called for a  moratorium on the practice . It is unlikely to work as promised, they say, and threatens to upend ocean ecosystems....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/can-dumping-seaweed-sea-floor-cool-planet-some-scient

By Cecilia Seiter , Berkeleyside.  Excerpt: At the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, when restaurants survived off takeout and delivery and residential trash bins were brimming with discarded to-go containers, Dispatch Goods launched a reusable container restaurant service that, many hoped, would be the long-awaited elegant solution to the scourge of ballooning restaurant refuse. ...But customer confusion and complicated logistics proved to be stubborn problems, and the company sunset the program at the close of 2022.  Despite an alleged growing demand for the service, the blog post cited complicated logistics, challenging unit economics and low lifetime value of the products — all of which contributed to significant financial hurdles for the early-stage startup. ...container standardization is key to the viability of large-scale reusables rollouts. For now, large-scale reusable container standardization is still a work in progress, but many beverage containers are already quite standardiz

By Manuela Andreoni , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The wildfires that ravaged Canada’s boreal forests in 2023 produced more planet-warming carbon emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but three countries, research published on Wednesday has found. Only China, the United States and India produced more emissions from fossil fuels than the Canadian fires, according to the study, which was  published in the journal Nature . The wildfires last year call into question how much carbon the forests will absorb in the future, scientists said....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/climate/canada-wildfires-emissions-carbon.html . 

By Rodrigo Pérez Ortega , Science.  Excerpt: Increasingly common extreme temperatures are  a rising threat to many around the world , but humans are not the only ones imperiled. In a study out today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers show heat waves may severely jeopardize bumble bees’ ability to smell the flowers they feed on. The finding could foretell how climate change may affect the pollinators’ populations—and human industries that rely on them. ...if these bees cannot find their food effectively, the impact on the crops they pollinate can be disastrous. ...We have bumble bees to thank for many of the vegetables, fruits, nuts, and legumes that show up on our tables; bees pollinate crops that make up about  one-third of our food supply . Yet bee populations have been declining for years, and most researchers think there are two main reasons: habitat loss and climate change. ...Researchers have correlated some effects of climate change with bee decline. Droughts

By Erik Stokstad , Science.  Excerpt: Billions of snow crabs disappeared from the Bering Sea in 2021 after a marine heat wave cooked the area for several years. Alaskan fishing vessels returned to ports dismayed, and the next year state regulators closed down the lucrative fishery—which had regularly yielded an annual harvest worth $200 million or more—for the first time in history. Many hope the fishery will reopen in the coming years because the water has cooled and young crabs are becoming more plentiful. But the longer term outlook for the fishery is stormy, according to a  paper  published last week in Nature Climate Change. Snow crabs do worse in years when conditions more closely resemble a boreal, or subarctic, climate, rather than an arctic one. And those conditions are 200 times more likely to occur today than in the mid-1800s, the study indicates....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/alaskan-snow-crab-fishery-walloped-climate-change-may-never-fully-rec

By Bluebird—press release.  Excerpt: MACON, Ga.  –  Blue Bird Corporation (Nasdaq: BLBD), the leader in electric and low-emission school buses, has delivered its 2,000 th  electric, zero-emission school bus marking an industry-leading milestone. Clark County School District (CCSD) in Nevada received Blue Bird’s 2,000 th  electric vehicle (EV) to help the nation’s fifth largest school district transition its school bus fleet to clean student transportation....  Full article at https://www.blue-bird.com/blue-bird-delivers-its-2000th-electric-school-bus/ . 

By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Big tech companies across the United States are struggling to find enough clean energy to power  all the data centers  they plan to build. Now, some firms are betting on a novel solution: harvesting the heat deep beneath the Earth’s surface to create emissions-free electricity, using drilling techniques from the oil and gas fracking boom. On Monday, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, announced an agreement with a start-up called  Sage Geosystems  to develop up to 150 megawatts of an advanced type of geothermal energy that would help power the tech giant’s expanding array of data centers. That is roughly enough electricity to power 70,000 homes. Sage will use fracking techniques similar to those that have helped extract vast amounts of oil and gas from shale rock. But rather than drill for fossil fuels, Sage plans to create fractures thousands of feet beneath the surface and pump water into them. The heat and pressure underground should

By Vivian La , Science.  Excerpt: More than  47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes  last year, the warmest on record globally, a study published this month found. The number was surpassed only by the 60,000 Europeans who died of heat-related causes in 2022. Another study this month found that the toll in Europe  could triple by the end of the century if Earth continues to warm to 3°C or 4°C degrees above preindustrial levels . The numbers, though shocking, almost certainly understate the toll of hot weather, worsened by global warming. But scientists aren’t sure how to do better. Some argue the best way to understand the impact of heat is to track how death rates vary with fluctuations in temperature, as the European studies did. But others say a truer measure is to rely on officially declared heat waves and count excess deaths—those above the expected number—each day. ...Proponents of using heat waves to measure how temperature increases those risks say these events are the d

By Ryan W. Clarke et al, Science.  Abstract: Wind energy is helping to decarbonize the electrical grid, but wind blades are not recyclable, and current end-of-life management strategies are not sustainable. To address the material recyclability challenges in sustainable energy infrastructure, we introduce scalable biomass-derivable polyester covalent adaptable networks and corresponding fiber-reinforced composites for recyclable wind blade fabrication. ...Overall, this report details the many facets of wind blade manufacture, encompassing chemistry, engineering, safety, mechanical analyses, weathering, and chemical recyclability, enabling a realistic path toward biomass-derivable, recyclable wind blades....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp5395 . 

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: On 15 January 2022, the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai erupted, unleashing a powerful  tsunami  that destroyed homes and caused four deaths throughout Tonga. Another lasting effect of this event—the  largest underwater explosion  ever recorded by modern scientific instruments—was the  huge amount of aerosol and water vapor  plumes it launched skyward.  Schoeberl et al.  examined how Hunga’s eruption affected climate in the Southern Hemisphere over the following 2 years. They found that in the year following the eruption, the cooling effect from the volcanic aerosols reflecting sunlight into outer space was stronger than the warming caused by water vapors trapping heat in the atmosphere. But most of the volcano’s effects had dissipated by the end of 2023....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-spotlights/atmospheric-effects-of-hunga-tonga-eruption-lingered-for-years . 

By Raymond Zhong , The New York Times.  Excerpt: For almost a decade, climate scientists have been trying to get their heads around a particularly disastrous scenario for how West Antarctica’s gigantic ice sheet might break apart, bringing catastrophe to the world’s coasts. ...Once enough of the ice sheet’s floating edges melt away, what remains are immense, sheer cliffs of ice facing the sea. ...Great chunks of ice start breaking away from them, exposing even taller, even more-unstable cliffs. Soon, these start crumbling too, and before long you have runaway collapse. As all this ice tumbles into the ocean, and assuming that nations’ emissions of heat-trapping gases climb to extremely high levels, Antarctica could contribute more than a foot to worldwide sea-level rise before the end of the century. This calamitous chain of events is still hypothetical, yet scientists have taken it seriously enough to include it as a “low-likelihood, high-impact” possibility in  the United Nations’ la

By Ivan Penn , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The past and the future of electricity in America are perhaps most visible in a Minnesota town surrounded by potato farms and cornfields. Towering over Becker, a community of a little more than 5,000 people northwest of Minneapolis, is one of the nation’s largest coal power plants. It is being replaced — to the dismay of some residents — with thousands of acres of solar panels and a test of long-duration batteries. Becker is one of the first of a group of seven Minnesota municipal areas, called the Coalition of Utility Cities, making the change from a fossil-fuel-based economy to clean energy. ...When the Sherburne County Generating Station, known as Sherco, completes its renewable project on adjacent land, it will stand as the largest solar farm in the Upper Midwest — replacing three coal units in Becker with three solar sites on the town’s outskirts along the Mississippi River. ...Becker crystallizes part of the legacy of the administratio

By Michael E. Webber , Opinion piece for The New York Times.  Excerpt: One year after the deadly wildfires on Maui and a few weeks after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to millions of Houston-area residents, it has become abundantly clear that our electricity grid is dangerously vulnerable. ...wildfires and sustained blackouts may be a preview of how an aging grid could falter spectacularly as weather becomes more extreme and demand for electricity continues to rise. ...This past spring, a decayed utility pole  broke  in high winds in the Texas Panhandle, causing power wires to fall on dry grass and igniting the largest fire in the state’s history. Two people died and more than one million acres burned. The Maui wildfire that killed more than 100 people and destroyed the historic town of Lahaina last year began after winds knocked down power lines, also igniting dry grass. The 2018 Paradise fire in California  started  when a live wire broke free of a tower that was a quarter-century

By Minho Kim , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Wind turbines generated more electricity than coal-burning power plants across the United States in March and April, outstripping the dirtiest fuel for two consecutive months for the first time, according to the Energy Information Administration. The crossover in wind and coal generation is the latest milestone in the country’s energy transition as renewables rise and coal declines. In recent years, breakthroughs in technology have lowered the cost of building new wind turbines, solar panels and battery storage,  helping renewable energy replace coal as the cheapest power source  in many places. Renewable energy has also gotten a boost from  tax credits awarded under the Inflation Reduction Act , the climate law Congress passed in 2022. And states have passed regulations mandating that utilities transition away from fossil fuels, particularly coal. More than 20 states — including Minnesota, North Carolina and Nebraska — have enacted  legisla

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The Amazon rainforest is home to a diverse cast of plants and animals. This vital, verdant landscape also plays a crucial role in managing the effects of  climate change  by storing significant amounts of carbon and helping regulate temperatures and rainfall both regionally and globally. But as  drought conditions , extreme weather, and deforestation in the Amazon increase, trees, which absorb carbon via photosynthesis when they are living, are dying—and releasing carbon into the atmosphere as they decay. These drought-induced tree deaths may turn the rainforest from a carbon sink  to a carbon source . Using models that predict tree mortality and the subsequent changes in carbon balance,  Yao et al.   suggest in a new study that certain regions of the Amazon rainforest may pass a  tipping point  by the middle of the 21st century....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-spotlights/tree-mortality-may-lead-to-carbon-tipping-point-in-the-amazon-by-

=By Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The continued burning of fossil fuels is closing schools around the world for days, sometimes weeks at a time, and threatening to undermine one of the greatest global gains of recent decades: children’s education. It’s a glimpse into one of the starkest divides of climate change. Children today are living through many more abnormally hot days in their lifetimes than their grandparents, according to  data released Wednesday  by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund. Consider the scale of some recent school closures. Pakistan closed schools for half its students, that’s 26 million children, for a full week in May, when temperatures were projected to soar to more than 40 degrees Celsius.  Bangladesh shuttered schools for half its students  during an April heat wave, affecting 33 million children. So too  South Sudan  in April. The  Philippines ordered school closures for two days , when heat reached what the country’s meteorological

By Peter S. Goodman The New York Times.  Excerpt: In the wake of a drought that hampered shipping, the Panama Canal’s overseers are eager to expand water storage. Climate change leaves them no choice. ...Last year, a drought dropped the lake to critical levels, prompting canal authorities to  limit traffic . At the worst point, in December, only 22 ships a day were allowed to pass through the canal, down from the usual 36 to 38. More than 160 ships were stuck at anchor at both ends. Rains that began in May have allowed the lifting of most restrictions, and 35 ships a day on average have made the journey in recent weeks. But canal authorities know that this is merely a respite in a new era influenced by  climate change and frequent periods of El Niño , when ocean temperatures rise and rainfall decreases. They are consumed with expanding water storage....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/business/panama-canal-drought.html . 

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: Geoengineering study that would disperse alkaline chemicals off Cape Cod draws environmental opposition. Adam Subhas ...has spent much of his career as a chemical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), quietly studying how seawater can naturally offset global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). Now, Subhas has been thrust into a heated public debate. Next month he and his colleagues want to dump tons of caustic chemicals off the coast of Massachusetts to see whether they can boost the ocean’s uptake of CO 2 . They’re seeking what would be the first-ever regulatory approval for such a study from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But some nearby residents and environmental groups, worried about safety, have pressed EPA to delay or halt the study. “It’s been a new journey to interact with reporters and the public and everyone at this level and at this intensity,” Subhas says. ...The natural alkalinity of

By Stanley Reed  and Rachel Chaundler , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...tourists filled the cafes and hotel rooms along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, including in Torrevieja, a small city of tightly stacked apartment blocks running along a curved beach. ...low-slung structures house a vast network of pipes, pumps and tanks in a plant that performs a kind of alchemy crucial to the economy of this part of Spain: drawing huge volumes of water from the sea, removing the salt and creating more than 60 million gallons of fresh water a day. Acciona, a Spanish company that built the plant, says the facility can supply water for 1.6 million people through the process known as desalination. For much of the year, though, the output is largely used to nurture oranges, lemons and other crops for consumers in Northern Europe. The Torrevieja plant is the largest of its kind in Europe, and similar plants dot the Spanish coastline. ...With nearly 100 big plants, Spain is the largest user of desalinatio

By Ronda Kaysen  and  Aatish Bhatia , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Each year, heat  kills far more Americans  than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or the cold. When it’s hot, our hearts work hard to cool us, redirecting blood to the surface of our skin. But when  nights  are hot, our hearts don’t get a break, working on overdrive and depriving other organs of blood. In July, Las Vegas recorded its hottest ever temperature at 120 degrees. Even more alarming: For three straight nights, the mercury never dipped below 94 degrees. “Everybody looks at the high temperatures, but the overnight lows kind of sneak up on you,” said Matt Woods, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Las Vegas. This June and July, nights in Las Vegas stayed above 79 degrees for all but seven days. ...hot nights are something more people are experiencing: No American major metro area has grown as much as Las Vegas has over the last three decades. ...That growth has translated to more roads, more cars, mo

By Raymond Zhong  and  Mira Rojanasakul , The New York Times.  Excerpt: For the past two decades, scientists have been raising alarms about great systems in the natural world that warming, caused by carbon emissions, might be pushing toward collapse. These systems are so vast that they can stay somewhat in balance even as temperatures rise. But only to a point. Once we warm the planet beyond certain levels, this balance might be lost, scientists say. The effects would be sweeping and hard to reverse. Not like the turning of a dial, but the flipping of a switch. One that wouldn’t be easily flipped back. ...Mass Death of Coral Reefs. ...Abrupt Thawing of Permafrost. ...Collapse of Greenland Ice. ...Breakup of West Antarctic Ice. ...Sudden Shift in the West African Monsoon. ...Loss of Amazon Rainforest. ...Shutdown of Atlantic Currents....  \Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/11/climate/earth-warming-climate-tipping-points.html .   

By Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Across 100,000 acres in the vast agricultural heartland of Australia, an unusual approach is taking root to slow down the wrecking ball of climate change. Farmers are trying to tap the superpowers of tiny subterranean tendrils of fungus to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and stash it underground. It’s part of a big bet that entrepreneurs and investors around the world are making on whether dirt can clean up climate pollution. They are using a variety of technologies on farmland not just to grow food but to also eat the excess carbon dioxide produced by more than a century of fossil fuel burning and intensive agriculture. Why fungus? Because fungi act as nature’s carbon traders. As they sow their crops, farmers are adding a pulverized dust of fungal spores. The fungus latches on to the crop roots, takes carbon that is absorbed by the plants from the air and locks it away in subterranean storage in a form that may keep it underground

By Emily Dieckman , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: On a recent spring afternoon, I joined a group of people to tour Jack’s Solar Garden, an agrivoltaics farm in Longmont, Colorado. Agrivoltaics describes the colocation of solar panels and agricultural land. The solar panels can provide shade to crops, the crops’ transpiration can help keep the solar panels cool, and the idea is for it to be a win-win situation. Allison Jackson , the education and policy manager at the  Colorado Agrivoltaic Learning Center ...touched on something called ecovoltaics. Ecovoltaics is less focused on agriculture and more concerned with coprioritizing energy production and ecosystem services. This could be providing shady space for animals to graze, offering habitats for pollinators, or—according to some research—even increasing the amount of carbon stored in soil. ...Jackson spoke about an experiment at the garden that was focused on how simply growing perennial grasses under solar panel arrays can affect carbon soil

By Abhishek Bhardwaj , Interesting Engineering.  Excerpt: Two firms, Energy Vault, and Carbosulcis, have announced a collaboration to build a 100-megawatt hybrid gravity energy storage project to accelerate the carbon-free technology hub at Italy’s largest former coal mining site in Sardinia. ...The collaboration is to develop a 100MW Hybrid Gravity Energy Storage System, a solution designed by Energy Vault for underground mines, pairing their modular gravity storage and batteries. According to a press release by Energy Vault, the energy storage solution will be deployed 1640 feet (500 meters) deep mine shafts. ...According to the press release by Energy Vault, the project is essential for the Sardinia government’s targeted conversion of the coal mine to a carbon free technology hub. ...The solution’s design will be optimized to fully benefit from the mine shaft’s area and location, especially the 1640 feet depth at which it is planned to be constructed....  Full article at https://int

By Raymond Zhong , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Tropical Storm Debby’s time back at sea on Wednesday was helping it recharge somewhat before it was expected to drift back onto the South Carolina shore overnight, according to the National Hurricane Center. The ocean provides storms like Debby with two key ingredients they need to pack a wallop: warm water and moist air. There’s plenty of moisture in the air off the Southeastern coast right now because both the seawater and the air above it have been unusually warm. The warmer the water, the more it evaporates, sending moisture into the air. And the warmer this air is, the more moisture it can take up. Bottom line: Warm seas and warm air help make for stronger storms. ...Worldwide, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere has increased by about 2 percent per decade since the early 1990s, according to  a study published  in May....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/climate/warm-air-oceans-power-storms.html . 

By Michael Shank , Fast Company.  Excerpt: Fossil fuel enthusiasts, when defending their carbon emitting industry, love saying that the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. ...They frame it as an obstacle to the green transition and a reason to not fully rely on renewable energy.  Anyone working in the transition, however, knows full well that we can store that wind and solar power for later use. ...Now, cities around the world are getting into the storage game, rolling out batteries across neighborhoods and communities. Batteries that charge during the day, when renewable energy is shining and blowing, and then release that stored energy when and where it’s needed most. Melbourne, Australia, is approaching this process collaboratively with the community, as both a teaching tool and a way to ensure that any battery designs, locations, and uses have neighborhood buy-in. It’s all part of a campaign called  Power Melbourne  that’s helping to aid in the city’s transi

By Amy Gunia, CNN.  Excerpt: One of the biggest hurdles to a power grid dominated by clean energy is the intermittency of some renewable sources. Sometimes clouds roll in when solar energy is needed, or the wind stops blowing, and turbines can’t generate power. Other times, the sun and wind produce more electricity than is required. ...Enter battery skyscrapers. At  the end of May , Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the architecture and engineering firm behind some of the world’s tallest buildings, announced a partnership with the energy storage company Energy Vault to develop new gravity energy storage solutions. That includes a design for a skyscraper that would use a motor powered by electricity from the grid to elevate giant blocks when energy demand is low. These blocks would store the electricity as “potential” energy. When there is demand, the blocks   would be lowered, releasing the energy, which would be converted into electricity. ...SOM and Energy Vault’s superstructure

By Meghan Bartels , Scientific American.  Excerpt: Infrastructure across the U.S. is struggling under the climate crisis. Dramatic examples include  torrential rains turning New York City’s  subway entrances into waterfalls, record  cold temperatures shutting down Texas’s power grid  and the rising Pacific Ocean eating away at coastal highways. Extreme heat is leaving its own, more subtle mark on the built environment. Roads, power lines, transportation systems and hospitals are being harmed. For some types of infrastructure, researchers are just beginning to understand what heat is doing. ...roads across the U.S. are made with several different asphalt recipes, depending on climate conditions. No matter the recipe, when a road faces hotter temperatures than it can handle, the asphalt softens. Heavy vehicles can then push down into the asphalt as if it were mud, leaving behind ruts;  overheated asphalt can also crack . ...Overheated train rails can kink and bridges can buckle or lose t

By Helen Davidson , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Halfway through the peak flood season,  China  has already experienced the highest number of significant floods since record keeping began in 1998, and the hottest July since 1961, authorities said on Friday. This year so far it has recorded 25 “numbered” events, which the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources defined as having water levels that prompt an official warning.... At a press conference this week, authorities said 3,683 river flood warnings and 81 mountain flood disaster warnings had been issued, state media reported. Almost 5,000 reservoirs had been put into operation diverting 99bn litres of floodwater to prevent the relocation of more than 6.5 million people. China has been hit by wild weather this summer, including heatwaves, drought, an early start to the annual flood season, .... Dozens of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have been forced to evacuate after floods and landslides across several provinces. Thousan

By Verity Bowman , The Telegraph.  Excerpt: The continent’s tremendous potential could soon be unlocked by a widespread shift to renewable energy. ...Making perishable harvests last is the key to surviving periods of hardship, but without access to electricity it can be extremely difficult. An unassuming white shipping container adorned with solar panels may be the solution. These solar-powered mobile cold-stores are popping up across Africa, from Kenya to Ghana and Nigeria, allowing farmers to protect their harvests from the elements and stave off hunger. ...With access to electricity soaring and the cost of solar panels falling rapidly, experts say the continent is on the brink of an energy revolution similar to the one that transformed the Gulf States in the 1970s. ...Last year, a record number of solar panels were installed in Africa, and in April the World Bank and African Development Bank launched an initiative to expand electricity access to 300 million more people by 2030. It’s

By Nadja Popovich , The New York Times.  Excerpt: America isn’t making electricity the way it did two decades ago. How the United States made electricity from 2001 to 2023 [state by state].  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/02/climate/electricity-generation-us-states.html . 

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Glaciers are retreating around the world as the planet warms, but scientists have debated how severe the shrinkage is compared to periodic glacial advances and retreats since the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. A new study of four glaciers dotting the high Andes in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia shows that, at least in the tropics, the retreat is unprecedented. The glaciers are smaller than they have been in more than 11,700 years, the beginning of a warm interglacial period geologists refer to as the Holocene. According to Andrew Gorin, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student and first author of the study,  published today  (Aug. 1) in  Science , this likely means that the glaciers are smaller than they have been in the past 125,000 years, before the most recent glacial era began 120,000 years ago. The data, however, aren’t precise enough to allow extrapolation that far into the past....  Full article at https://new