By Isabelle Taft , Elisabeth Parker, Valerie Boey Ramsey, and  Patricia Mazzei , The New York Times.   Excerpt: A rash of Gulf storms in recent years, culminating with Hurricane Helene on Thursday, has given way to a new reality for the booming region’s residents: Hurricanes that remain hundreds of miles away are likely to wreak havoc on the Tampa Bay region, as are smaller storms. Helene, a Category 4 hurricane, made landfall near Perry, Fla., some 200 miles north of Tampa. It followed a path similar to  Hurricane Idalia  in August of last year and  Hurricane Debby  last month. All three storms put wide swaths of the Tampa Bay region underwater, though none more than Helene, which brought storm surge into neighborhoods that had not seen such flooding in decades — or ever. ...More residents are wrestling lately with how — or whether — to keep living in a beautiful place that has become vulnerable to more frequent and intense storms as well as rising sea levels. ...The storm surge broke

By Bhadra Sharma , The New York Times.  Excerpt: At least 104 people have died in Nepal, the authorities said, after three days of incessant monsoon rains unleashed flooding and landslides across the small Himalayan nation, which has been increasingly pummeled by the effects of climate change. ...Nepal, with a population of about 30 million, is the fourth-most-vulnerable country to climate change, according to UNICEF. In recent years, the frequency of disasters — including the bursting of glacial lakes as temperatures rise — has increased, claiming more lives....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/world/asia/nepal-floods.html .

By Jijo Malayil , Interesting Engineering.  Excerpt: Researchers have developed a sustainable method to efficiently extract lithium from seawater, addressing the growing demand for renewable energy. The Solar Transpiration-Powered Lithium Extraction and Storage (STLES) device harnesses sunlight to extract and store lithium from brine. ...According to researchers from Nanjing University and the University of California, Berkeley, the approach offers a cleaner alternative to traditional lithium mining, which often involves harmful chemical processes and significant land disruption. The work is similar to research  done  by a University of Chicago team using iron phosphate particles to efficiently extract lithium from seawater, groundwater, and flowback water. ...Long-term tests have shown the device’s stability, compatibility, and scalability. Operating passively without extra energy input, the system is both cost-effective and eco-friendly. It can also integrate with existing evaporatio

By Carolyn Gramling , Science News.  Excerpt: One of the widest hurricanes on record slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast on September 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm, inundating Florida’s coast with meters-high storm surge and sending tropical storm–force winds as far as 500 kilometers from its eye. ...Just three days earlier, it was a disorganized cluster of thunderstorms off the eastern coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. A mere “tropical disturbance,” it was dubbed PTC9 for tracking purposes. ...Within just 60 hours...PTC9 would intensify...from winds less than 35 knots (about 65 kilometers per hour) to hurricane-force winds of at least 100 knots (185 kilometers per hour). It was the fastest predicted spin-up from disturbance to major hurricane in the NHC’s history. ...Rapid intensification is becoming a new normal for hurricanes. NHC  defines rapid intensification  as when a storm’s maximum sustained winds jump by at least 56 kph (35 miles per hour) in less than a day.... Against

By Saima Sidik , Science.  Excerpt: The discovery of an eastern red cedar log, buried in eastern Canada for millennia and nearly perfectly preserved, illustrates the potential of a new kind of carbon storage scheme in the fight against climate change: wood “vaults.” The log shows how burying wood—rather than letting it decay on the surface—could keep billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) out of the atmosphere, advocates say. The unusual conditions that preserved the log,  described today  in a paper in Science ...they discovered a 78-centimeter-long piece of eastern red cedar. Using carbon-14 dating, they found it was 3775 years old; other lab tests revealed the log had retained some 95% of its carbon. The log was buried in an impermeable, water-logged layer of clay deposited by a sea that has since retreated. The clay, the researchers believe, prevented the delivery of any fresh, oxygen-rich water to the log and kept it from decomposing....  Full article at https:/

By Sebastian Bonilla , Associate Professor of Materials, University of Oxford.  Excerpt: ...surge in solar is fuelled by two key developments. First, scientists, engineers and those in industry are learning how to make solar panels by the billions. Every fabrication step is meticulously optimised to produce them very cheaply. The second and most significant is the relentless increase in the panels’ power conversion efficiency – a measure of how much sunlight can be transformed into electricity. The higher the  efficiency of solar panels , the cheaper the electricity. This might make you wonder: just how efficient can we expect solar energy to become? And will it make a dent in our energy bills? Current commercially available solar panels convert about 20-22% of sunlight into electrical power. However,  new research published in Nature  has shown that future solar panels could reach efficiencies as high as 34% by exploiting a new technology called tandem solar cells. The research demons

By Bryn Stole , The Atlantic.  Excerpt: In the United States, home heat pumps have been gaining traction (and government subsidies) as highly energy-efficient replacements for gas-fired boilers and furnaces. They vary in size, but most of the units being hyped by environmentalists and installed nationwide measure just a few square feet. In Stockholm’s Hammarbyverket plant, which is by some measures the world’s largest heat-pump plant, each of the seven electric-powered heat pumps is the size of a two-story house....  Full article at https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/09/europes-heat-pumps-district-heating/680007/ . 

By Mathew Burciaga, Berkeley Rausser College of Natural Resources.  Excerpt: Utility companies in the United States could double electric transmission capacity by 2035 by replacing existing transmission lines with those made from advanced materials, according to a  new study published today  in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . ...the first-of-its-kind study details a faster and more cost-effective way to expand the grid and connect the more than 1,200 gigawatts of renewable energy projects awaiting approval....  Full article at https://nature.berkeley.edu/news/2024/09/advanced-conductors-provide-path-grid-expansion . 

By Brad Plumer  and  Raymond Zhong . The New York Times.  Excerpt: In a quiet patch of forest in Nova Scotia, a company is building a machine designed to help slow global warming by transforming Earth’s rivers and oceans into giant sponges that absorb carbon dioxide from the air. When switched on later this year, the machine will grind up limestone inside a tall green silo and release the powder into the nearby West River Pictou, creating a chalky plume that should dissolve within minutes. ...adding limestone converts some of that carbon dioxide into a stable molecule that instead stays underwater and washes into the sea, where it should remain trapped for thousands of years. ...Toying with ocean chemistry also carries unknown risks. Some environmental groups worry that even early experiments with these techniques could threaten fish and other aquatic life. ...In the 1970s and ’80s, industrial pollution made rainfall more acidic, which poisoned lakes and streams around the world. Some

By Richard Luscombe , The Guardian.  Excerpt: A nuclear reactor at the notorious Three Mile Island site in  Pennsylvania  is to be activated for the first time in five years after its owners, Constellation Energy, struck a deal to provide power to Microsoft’s proliferating artificial intelligence operations. The plant was the location of the  most serious nuclear meltdown  and radiation leak in US history, in March 1979 when the loss of water coolant through a faulty valve caused the Unit 2 reactor to overheat. More than four decades later, the reactor is still in a decommissioning phase. Constellation closed the adjacent but unconnected Unit 1 reactor in 2019 for economic reasons, but will bring it back to life after signing a 20-year power purchase agreement to supply Microsoft’s energy-hungry data centers, the company  announced on Friday . The restart, the first time a nuclear reactor in the US has been recommissioned after closure, will send an additional 835 megawatts of power to

By Helena Smith , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Cyprus has outstripped all other EU member states in embracing hot-water solar systems, with an estimated 93.5 % of households exploiting the alternative energy form for domestic needs. EU figures show the eastern Mediterranean island exceeding renewable energy targets set in the heating and cooling of buildings thanks to the widespread use of the solar thermal technology. ...Increasingly, the country’s vibrant tourist industry has also resorted to the green solution with solar-powered hot water systems deployed in, they say, close to 100% of hotels....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/20/cyprus-solar-thermal-heating-water-rooftop-renewable-energy-climate . 

By Benjamin J. W. Mills , Science.  Excerpt: What was Earth’s temperature tens to hundreds of millions of years ago? The planet has gone through different periods, some with extensive polar ice caps and others being completely ice-free. ...there have been major disagreements about whether there has been an overall decline in Earth’s temperature over time. ...Judd  et al.  [in A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature ] report a new reconstruction of Earth’s temperature over the last 485 million years by combining climate models with geological data. ...Earlier studies using only tropical oxygen isotope ratios predicted a long-term decline in temperature over the last 500 million years, proposing that earlier greenhouse periods were warmer than more recent ones.... The new reconstruction of Judd  et al . disagrees and instead predicts that greenhouse periods had similar temperature ranges. ...Direct comparison of a possible future greenhouse climate to the past ones rema

 By Nathaniel Scharping , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Wildfire activity in central Siberia, Russia, has doubled in the past 2 decades, scorching vast areas of forest and releasing carbon stored in the rich soils and permafrost underneath. The Arctic is  warming faster  than the rest of the world, and scientists already know that the effects of climate change can exacerbate wildfires. ...In new research,  Huang et al.  demonstrate that the rise in Siberian wildfires is related to drought, drying soils, and decreased rainfall caused by Arctic warming. In addition, they identify a potential  feedback  loop in which wildfires suppress precipitation in the region, further drying soils and making fires even more likely. Water vapor in the atmosphere typically condenses around aerosol particles to form droplets, which come together as clouds and can fall as rain. But droplets formed around aerosols in wildfire smoke are smaller—often too small to form raindrops....  Full article at https://eos.org/res

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier isn’t called the Doomsday Glacier for nothing. Were the Florida-size ice sheet to melt away, it could raise global sea levels by 65 centimeters. And because it is a keystone that holds back other ice sheets from flowing into the ocean, its disappearance could unlock a total of more than 3 meters of global sea level rise. In 2018, U.S. and U.K. funders created the 100-person International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) to probe the ice—and its future.... ...one conclusion is that some of the worst-case scenarios—such as the runaway collapse of the iceberg-calving front of the glacier, which juts into the ocean as an ice shelf—are unlikely this century, says Robert Larter, a BAS marine geophysicist and co-lead of the project. That worry, he says, “is not the huge monster it might have been 10 years ago.” ...preliminary results from one of ITGC’s modeling groups suggest that in coming decades Thwaites will steadily r

By Lydia DePillis, Manuela Andreoni and Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...our grocery bills would be considerably more expensive if environmental costs were included, researchers say. ...For years, economists have been developing a system of “true cost accounting” based on a growing body of evidence about the environmental damage caused by different types of agriculture. Now, emerging research aims to translate this damage to the planet into dollar figures. By displaying these so-called true prices, sometimes next to retail prices, researchers hope to nudge consumers, businesses, farmers and regulators to factor in the environmental toll of food. The proponents of true cost accounting don’t propose raising food prices across the board, but they say that increased awareness of the hidden environmental cost of food could change behavior. We asked  True Price , a Dutch nonprofit group ...to provide a window into some of their research. They came up with a data set that comp

By Nicolás Rivero , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Norway is the first country in the world with more  electric vehicles  than gas-powered cars on the road, according to  vehicle registration data  the Norwegian road federation, known as OFV, released Tuesday. Of the 2.8 million passenger cars registered in the country, 26.3 percent are fully electric, just edging out the share of gas vehicles. Diesel remains the most common vehicle type, making up more than a third of Norwegian vehicle registrations. ...OFV Director Oyvind Solberg Thorsen ... predicted EVs will outnumber diesel cars by 2026....  Full article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/09/17/norway-electric-vehicles-exceed-gasoline/ . 

By Mike Colias , The Wall Street Journal.  Excerpt: What the Ford Motor chief executive [Jim Farley] found during the May visit made him anxious: The local automakers were pulling away in the electric-vehicle race. ...The Chinese carmakers are moving at light speed, he told Thornton, a former Goldman Sachs executive who spent years as a senior banker in China. They are using artificial intelligence and other tech in cars that is unlike anything available in the U.S. These Chinese EV makers are using a low-cost supply base to undercut the competition on price, offering slick digital features and aggressively expanding to overseas markets. ... Chinese brands have so far been kept out of the U.S. by steep tariffs, geopolitical tensions and regulatory hurdles. But some have established a toehold in Mexico, where China-built vehicles—both EVs and combustion-engine vehicles—now account for about 20% of sales....  Full article at https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ford-china-ev-competition-f

By Sandi Schwartz , bob villa.  Excerpt: As more people experience extreme weather events that knock out power, the demand for home backup generators is booming. Homeowners experienced 16 percent more power disruptions in 2022 than in 2013, according to the  most recent data  from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And those power outages can last  more than a day  at a time, putting a strain on daily living. While backup generators provide convenience and peace of mind, the problem with more generators running, especially during periods of record heat and lengthy power outages, is the pollution they create. Various factors are driving the increase in demand for more sustainable options to muscle through a power outage, particularly  solar backup generators . ...Although buying a solar backup generator might require more up-front investment than a traditional generator costs, over time you are likely to save money compared to using other  types of generators . As for other adv

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Some 250 million years ago, more than 80% of marine species and two-thirds of those on land died off in the end-Permian mass extinction—the closest life ever came to annihilation. Most scientists think massive volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia triggered the event by spewing carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and warming the planet. But  according to a modeling study  published this week in  Science , the Great Dying was primed by a mega–El Niño pattern in the global ocean of the time, leading to weather extremes that killed off forests and kicked off the extinctions. ...Geological evidence suggests that before the eruptions, atmospheric CO 2  levels were likely about 400 parts per million (ppm), similar to the present day. As they began to tick up, the model showed profound El Niño events began to occur, says Alexander Farnsworth, a study co-author and paleoclimate modeler at the University of Bristol. ...Chaotic weather would have been unleashed worldwi

By Rosie Frost , EuroNews.  Excerpt: Renewables have broken electricity-generating records in the EU this year, according to the European Commission. Newly published data has revealed that in the first six months of 2024, half of the bloc’s electricity came from renewable sources, outperforming fossil fuels. ...It says that wind power has now overtaken gas as the EU’s second-largest source of electricity behind nuclear power for the first time. The EU also set another record with 56 GW of new solar energy installed in 2023, beating the previous record of 40 GW from 2022....  Full article at https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/09/12/wind-and-solar-have-risen-to-new-highs-in-the-eu-overtaking-fossil-fuels-for-the-first-tim . 

By Michael J. Williamson et al, Science.  Abstract: Coral reef ecosystems are highly threatened and can be extremely sensitive to the effects of climate change. Multiple shark species rely on coral reefs as important habitat and, as such, play a number of significant ecological roles in these ecosystems. ...on average ...increased stress on the reefs significantly reduces grey reef shark residency, promoting more diffuse space use and increasing time away from shallow forereefs. Importantly, this impact has a lagged effect for up to 16 months. This may have important physiological and conservation consequences for reef sharks, as well as broader implications for reef ecosystem functioning. As climate change is predicted to increase environmental stress on coral reef ecosystems, understanding how site-attached predators respond to stress will be crucial for forecasting the functional significance of altering predator behavior and the potential impacts on conservation for both reef shar

By Erik Gunn , Wisconsin Examiner.  Excerpt: On Thursday afternoon, President Joe Biden stood in front of a solar panel array on the grounds of Vernon Electric Cooperative in Vernon County to announce $7.3 billion that will go to expand clean power sources for rural electric co-ops across the country. It was ...just a slice of what has been a major economic priority for Biden since he took office in January 2021: pushing the U.S. toward more clean and renewable sources of energy. Provisions in two of the Biden administration’s signature pieces of legislation have sought to address climate change on several fronts, but with an emphasis on hastening the country’s conversion to solar, wind and other forms of power that advocates hope can supplant the fossil fuels blamed for accelerating climate change. ...Biden’s announcement Thursday focused on just  one clean energy avenue  — power generation in rural America. Wisconsin-based Dairyland Power Cooperative will receive $573 million, a gran

By Dharna Noor , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Fossil fuel companies’ funding of universities’ climate-focused efforts is delaying the green transition, according to the most extensive peer-reviewed study to date of the industry’s influence on academia. For the study, published in the journal WIREs Climate Change   on Thursday, six researchers pored over thousands of academic articles on industries’ funding of research from the past two decades. ...During the past two decades, non-profits, campus organizers and a small group of scholars have sounded the alarm about oil companies’ influence in academia, drawing parallels to  tobacco ,  pharmaceuticals  and  food  producers who have also funded scholarship. In the  new study , researchers found that out of roughly 14,000 peer-reviewed articles about conflicts of interest, bias and research funding across all industries from 2003 to 2023, only seven mentioned fossil fuels. ...“We find that universities are an established yet under-researched ve

By MacKenzie Elmer , Voice of San Diego.  Excerpt: After a couple of fires at renewable energy battery storage sites in San Diego, a growing number of leaders in the county want to suspend the building of new ones.  But that would undermine the county’s soon-to-be and legally binding commitment to run on 100 percent renewable energy by 2045 via a new Climate Action Plan. ...batteries are key to keeping the lights and A/C on when the sun goes down. The County Board of Supervisors will decide on Sept. 11 whether to ban building battery storage until stricter fire safety restrictions are in place. Such a moratorium ...makes it harder for the county to transition away from fossil fuels because batteries store the sun and wind’s energy at night when it’s in high demand. ...Two large battery projects caught fire recently elsewhere in the region: One at Gateway Energy Storage in Otay Mesa earlier this year, and another in September of 2023 at the Valley Center Energy Storage Facility operated

By Catrin Einhorn , The New York Times.  Excerpt: As solar projects unfurl across the United States, sites like this one in Ramsey, Minn., stand out because they offer a way to fight climate change while also tackling another ecological crisis: a global biodiversity collapse, driven in large part by habitat loss. ...Solar farms could blanket millions of acres in the United States over the coming decades. So developers, operators, biologists and environmentalists are teaming up with an innovative strategy. “We have to address both challenges at the same exact time,” said Rebecca Hernandez, a professor of ecology at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on how to do just that. Insects, those small animals that play a mighty role in supporting life on Earth,  are facing alarming declines . Solar farms can offer them food and shelter by providing a diverse mix of native plants. Such plants can also decrease erosion, nourish the soil and store planet-warming carbon. Th

By Austyn Gaffney , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...as temperatures increase, the recession and disappearance of glaciers has popularized a new form of adventure travel called “last chance tourism.” As more people rush to see glaciers before they melt, places like Iceland have benefited from a booming tourism economy. Half a million people now visit Iceland for glacier tours every year, according to Elin Sigurveig Sigurdardottir, chief of operations for Icelandic Mountain Guides, an agency that leads trips on a separate glacier within Vatnajokull National Park....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/climate/climate-change-iceland-glacier-tourism.html . 

By Montague H. C. Neate-Clegg ,  Benjamin A. Tonelli  &  Morgan W. Tingley , Nature, Ecology & Evolution.   Abstract: Terrestrial species can respond to a warming climate in multiple ways, including shifting in space (via latitude or elevation) and time (via phenology). ...we used two continental-scale monitoring databases to estimate trends in the breeding latitude (311 species), elevation (251 species) and phenology (111 species) of North American landbirds over 27 years, with a shared pool of 102 species. ...Species shifted poleward (1.1 km per year, mean shift ratio 11%) and to higher elevations (1.2 m per year, mean shift ratio 17%), while also shifting their breeding phenology earlier (0.08 days per year, mean shift ratio 28%). These general trends belied substantial variation among species, with some species shifting faster than climate, whereas others shifted more slowly or in the opposite direction. Across the three dimensions ( n  = 102), birds cumulatively tracked te