By Eromo Egbejule  and agencies , The Guardian.  Excerpt: More than year’s worth of rain fell in two days in south-east Morocco, filling up lake that had been dry for decades. Dramatic pictures have emerged of the first floods in the Sahara in half a century. ...flooding in Morocco  killed 18 people  last month....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/11/dramatic-images-show-the-first-floods-in-the-sahara-in-half-a-century . 

By Sarah Shemkus, Energy News Network .  Excerpt: More than seven years after New Hampshire regulators first approved the idea of using community solar to create savings for low-income households, electric bill discounts are finally on the horizon for the first batch of participants. ...Community solar is widely considered an important strategy for extending the benefits of renewable energy to people unable to take advantage of rooftop solar. Nationally, some two-thirds of households can’t install solar panels, generally because they don’t own their home, don’t have a suitable roof, or can’t afford the cost of the array, said Kate Daniel, Northeast regional director for the Coalition for Community Solar Access....  Full article at https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2024/10/11/new-hampshires-low-income-community-solar-program-is-finally-nearing-the-starting-line/ .

By Stephanie E. Hampton , et al, Science.  Editor's Summary: More than half a billion people live near lakes that freeze over in the winter. However, lakes are rapidly losing winter ice cover in response to warming, and the rate of loss has accelerated over the past 25 years. Hampton  et al . reviewed the state of seasonal ice cover on lakes and discuss some of the consequences of its disappearance. Ice loss will affect culture, economy, water quality, fisheries, and biodiversity, as well as weather and climate. —Jesse Smith.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl3211 . 

By Alisha McDarris, Adventure.com.  Excerpt: ...transforming Freiburg into the sustainable beacon it is—with its passive homes (homes designed to make the most of natural light and heat), solar plants, and emphasis on public transportation—has been very intentional.... it’s been a destination driven toward innovation, from championing renewable energies like solar and wind, to reducing vehicular traffic with functional public transit and encouraging cycling—Radstation near the central transit station houses hundreds of bikes in an automated storage center—all of which has earned it the nickname, ‘Green City’. ...In Freiburg, the public transit system, consisting of trams and buses, is designed so that no residence is more than 400 meters from any public transport stop—it makes the car I drove into town feel utterly irrelevant. Indeed, I didn’t use it again until it was time to leave the city and return home. And that’s the point. ...there are incentives which encourage citizens to make

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: For the past year, alarm bells have been going off in climate science: Last year’s average global temperature was so high, shooting up nearly 0.3°C above the previous year to set a new record, that human-driven global warming and natural short-term climate swings  seemingly couldn’t explain it . ...Now, a new series of studies suggests most of the 2023 jump can be explained instead by a familiar climate driver: the shifting waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean. The combination of a 3-year-long La Niña, which suppressed global temperatures from 2020 to 2022, followed by a strong El Niño could account for the unexpected temperature jump, the work suggests....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/el-ni%C3%B1o-fingered-likely-culprit-record-2023-temperatures . 

By Richard Luscombe , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Most left when they were told to. But some chose to stay, even though officials warned  Hurricane Milton  would turn their  homes into coffins. ...most people were heeding the warning. This time around people noticed the intensity and started taking it seriously when they saw 180mph winds being talked about. It opened their eyes.”....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/09/hurricane-milton-florida-stay-evacuate . [GSS note: this reminds us of the song, The Preacher & The Flood by Joel Mabus.]  See also the Guardian article Trump continues to deny climate crisis as he visits hurricane-ravaged Georgia . 

By Darren Orf , Popular Mechanics.  Excerpt: ...a new electrode produced by the U.S. company Equatic can safely extract oxygen and hydrogen from seawater while leaving the salt, which usually produces deadly chlorine gas. As a bonus, this method uses direct air capture to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And the anodes are recyclable—they only need a recoating of catalysts (made from abundant materials) every three years. ...Producing hydrogen via seawater electrolysis has the nasty habit of also producing toxic chlorine gas, so current hydrogen production relies on pure water—a resource that’s becoming more and more precious as the world warms. Now, the carbon removal company Equatic—thanks to funding support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)—has successfully developed “oxygen-selective anodes” (OSAs) that will hopefully help scale up hydrogen production via seawater  electrolysis . ...The process does produce acidic and alkaline

By Stanley Reed , The New York Times.  Excerpt: As Mr. Houg toured the site, workers were fine-tuning equipment that held chemicals designed to absorb vast quantities of the carbon dioxide emitted through cement production. More than half a ton of the gas arises from every ton of cement that a plant like this turns out. ...Early next year, carbon dioxide from the facility will be chilled to a liquid, loaded onto ships and carried to a terminal near the city of Bergen, farther up the Norwegian coast. From there, it will be pumped about 70 miles offshore into rocks a mile and a half below the bottom of the North Sea. ...It helps that the Norwegian government is underwriting 85 percent of the up to 400-million-euro cost of what will be the first large, commercial-scale effort to strip carbon dioxide from cement and bury it. ...Cement production, which accounts for nearly 7 percent of energy-related emissions, presents one of the knottiest problems for emissions reduction....  Full article

By Ana Ionova , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The world’s largest river is parched. The Amazon River, battered by back-to-back droughts fueled by climate change, is drying up, with some stretches of the mighty waterway dwindling to shallow pools only a few feet deep. Water levels along several sections of the Amazon River, which winds nearly 4,000 miles across South America, fell last month to their lowest level on record, according to  figures  from the Brazilian Geological Service. In one stretch in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, the river was 25 feet below the average for this time of year, according to the agency, which began collecting data in 1967. ...Starting this month, the country plans to begin dredging sections of the river with the aim of ensuring that, even in times of drought, people and goods can keep moving through the rainforest. ...The remarkable drop in water levels has left boats struggling to shuttle children to school, rush the sick to hospitals or deliver medic

By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative, according to a major new research paper that challenges the controversial yet rapid expansion of gas exports from the US to Europe and Asia. ...amid  a glut of new  liquefied natural gas (or LNG) terminals, primarily in the US. ...the research, which itself has become enmeshed in a political argument in the US, has concluded that LNG is 33% worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal. ...Howarth’s paper finds that as much as 3.5% of the gas delivered to customers leaks to the atmosphere unburned, much more than previously assumed. Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even though it persists for less time in the atmosphere, and scientists have warned that  rising global methane emissions  risk blowing apart agreed-upon climate goals...

By Roberto González , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Rapid intensification of hurricanes is 50% more likely to occur during marine heat waves in the Gulf of Mexico and northwestern Caribbean Sea ...according to a  study  published in August in  Communications Earth and Environment . These types of hurricanes are more dangerous as they make landfall because their intensity is harder to predict....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/marine-heat-waves-make-tropical-storm-intensification-more-likely .  See also other Eos articles on heat waves - https://eos.org/tag/heat-waves . 

By Ephrat Livni , The New York Times.  Excerpt: There’s long been one mantra in mainstream economics: Growth is good. Gross domestic product — the monetary value of a country’s goods and services — is used to measure the economic health of a country or region, and a line that slants upward and to the right is typically what national leaders want to see. But recently, an alternative term has begun taking root in popular culture and policy: “degrowth.” Degrowth challenges the capitalist pursuit of growth at all costs and “focuses on what is necessary to fulfill everyone’s basic needs,” said Kohei Saito, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and author of “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.” ...Societies should be striving to create “a different kind of abundance,” he says, offering free education, medical care and transportation instead of continuously making more goods for consumption. ...Mr. Saito believes part of the reason degrowth has had increasing appeal

By Sascha Pare , LiveScience.  Excerpt: A new physical model suggests meltwater from thawing permafrost on Russia's Yamal Peninsula can unlock methane sources at depth, triggering explosions that open enormous craters at the surface. ...craters measure 160 feet (50 meters) deep and up to 230 feet (70 m) across, and first appeared on Russia's northern Yamal and Gydan peninsulas in 2014. Chunks of rock and ice strewn across the landscape around the craters indicated they were caused by giant explosions. These strange craters have never been found elsewhere in the Arctic. ...the explosions could trigger a climate feedback loop leading to huge releases of the powerful greenhouse gas methane....  Full article at https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/we-re-one-step-closer-to-finding-out-why-siberia-is-riddled-with-exploding-craters . 

By George Sakellaris , Fortune.  Excerpt: Clean energy currently employs 3.3 million Americans, or one in 50 workers nationwide, according to a  report from E2 . That’s more than the total number of nurses, cashiers, elementary and middle school teachers, and waiters or waitresses. Jobs in the renewable energy industry also grew by 10% from 2021 to 2023, faster than the growth rate for overall U.S. employment. However, if you’ve taken a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) latest jobs report, you would be excused for not knowing about the massive opportunity and growth the clean energy sector represents. While we’ve seen a host of renewable energy and climate-friendly legislation come out of Washington over the last two years, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), which have been widely and rightfully applauded, the monthly jobs report is one area of the federal government’s output that seems to be lagging. Although monthly jo

By Reuters.  Excerpt: India's Adani Group will supply clean energy to power Google's  cloud services and operations in India, the ports-to- power conglomerate said on Thursday. The group, owned by billionaire Gautam Adani, will supply energy from a new solar-wind hybrid project located at its 30 gigawatt (GW) Khavda renewable energy park in the western state of Gujarat.... The solar-wind hybrid project will start commercial operations in the third quarter of 2025. Google powers most of its cloud operations and services with electricity from the grid and plans to run them entirely through clean energy by 2030....  Full article at https://www.reuters.com/world/india/adani-group-supply-clean-energy-googles-india-cloud-operations-2024-10-03/ . 

By Andrea Thompson , Scientific American.  Excerpt: More than 160 people have lost their lives to the ferocious winds and  catastrophic flooding wrought by Hurricane Helene . But the true death toll will take years—likely more than a decade—to unfold. A new study published on Wednesday in  Nature  found that the average  tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths  (those beyond what would typically be expected), compared with the average of 24 direct deaths reported in official statistics. The study’s authors estimated that, between 1950 and 2015, tropical storms and hurricanes caused between 3.6 million and 5.2 million excess deaths—more than those caused by traffic deaths or infectious diseases. And such storm-related deaths involve people from some groups more than others, marking an “important and understudied contributor to health in the United States, particularly for young or Black populations,” the authors wrote. ...The biggest risk was f

By Riley Bunch , The Atlantic Journal-Constitution.  Excerpt: Tens of thousands of Atlantans lost power last week when Hurricane Helene swept through the south, causing heavy flooding in parts of the city and devastation throughout other areas of the state. ...Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens...announced a massive chunk of federal money, $156 million, coming to Georgia to help increase access to solar power for Atlanta’s low-income residents. Atlanta is one of three cities in the state that will benefit from the funds doled out through a renewable energy initiative tucked within the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022. In total, the Environmental Protection Division announced $7 billion in “Solar for All” grants to 60 applications across the country, as part of a $27 billion pot aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions....  Full article at https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/georgia-program-gets-156m-from-feds-to-increase-access