By Michela Mariani et al, Science.  Summary: Anthropogenic climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires in many regions of the world, with devastating consequences. Mariani  et al . suggest that another human activity, colonization, has contributed to increasing high-intensity fires in Australia. The authors used multiple paleoecological proxy datasets to compare vegetation structure between time periods reaching back to the last interglacial (over 100,000 years ago). Shrub cover, which fuels fires and spreads them into the forest canopy, was lower during the Middle to Late Holocene, when indigenous Australians were managing the landscape with burning, than it was during other time periods. Shrub cover has increased substantially since British colonization and the forced removal of indigenous burning practices that came with it. Restoring cultural burning may thus help to prevent megafires. —Bianca Lopez.  Full article at https://www.science...

By Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Consistently implementing zoning, permitting, and building regulations, all commonplace municipal tools, helped most New Jersey towns avoid floodplain development. New Jersey is one of the most flood-prone U.S. states, and climate change is increasing the hazard by raising sea levels and supercharging severe storms like Hurricane Sandy. The state also faces pressure to develop new housing and infrastructure, often in low-lying inland and coastal areas that are the most vulnerable to flooding. Despite this pressure, a recent analysis of new floodplain development found that 85% of New Jersey towns built relatively little in floodplains over the past 2 decades. Towns achieved this by applying routine land use management tools consistently over time, a slow but steady approach to climate adaptation. ...The most effective way to avoid  flood  damage to homes and infrastructure is to avoid building in a floodplain. ...Instead,...

By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: One year after world leaders made a landmark promise to move away from fossil fuels, countries have essentially made no progress in cutting emissions and tackling global warming, according to a  United Nations report issued on Thursday ....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/climate/un-climate-change-global-emissions-report.html .

By Jennifer K. Balch et al, Science.  Abstract: The most destructive and deadly wildfires in US history were also fast. Using satellite data, we analyzed the daily growth rates of more than 60,000 fires from 2001 to 2020 across the contiguous US. Nearly half of the ecoregions experienced destructive fast fires that grew more than 1620 hectares in 1 day. These fires accounted for 78% of structures destroyed and 61% of suppression costs ($18.9 billion). From 2001 to 2020, the average peak daily growth rate for these fires more than doubled (+249% relative to 2001) in the Western US. Nearly 3 million structures were within 4 kilometers of a fast fire during this period across the US. Given recent devastating wildfires, understanding fast fires is crucial for improving firefighting strategies and community preparedness....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk5737 .

By Robert English, TCD—The Cool Down.  Excerpt: Heliene, a  solar panel  manufacturer based in Ontario, is making big strides in the solar energy industry by using  recycled   solar panel  materials in its new ones, according to  Electrek . Partnering with  solar panel   recycling  company  Solarcycle , Heliene will use  recycled  solar glass in its solar panels manufactured in its two factories, in Ontario and Minnesota. Over the next four years, Solarcycle plans to deliver approximately 20 million square meters (about 215 million square feet) of recycled glass to Heliene for use in its products....  Full article at https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/recycled-solar-panel-materials-manufacturer-heliene/ .  See also Heliene will make solar panels using SOLARCYCLE’s recycled glass and it’s a big deal and New report finds one major energy source breaking records worldwide: 'Growing faster than people expected' ...

By Emily Conover , Science News.  Excerpt: Last week, both Google and Amazon announced agreements with companies that are developing small modular reactors. Last week, both Google and Amazon announced agreements with companies that are developing small modular reactors. ...Commercial reactors in the United States typically produce around a billion watts of electrical power. Small modular reactors would produce less than a third of that. ...Commercial reactors in the United States typically produce around a billion watts of electrical power. Small modular reactors would produce less than a third of that....  Full article at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/small-modular-nuclear-reactors-amazon .  See also Youtube video The Canadian Reactors that can Burn Nuclear Waste and The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste . 

By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Research News.  Excerpt: ...direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO 2  levels, which have reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won’t reach humanity’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preexisting global averages. A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions. The porous material — a covalent organic framework (COF) — captures CO 2  from ambient air without degradation by water or other contaminants, one of the limitations of existing DAC technologies. “We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO 2 . Everythin...

By Rory Smith , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In September, a  month’s rain fell in a single day  in some parts of England. The 18 months to March 2024 were England’s  wettest in recorded history . Even on an island that has built at least part of its identity around tolerating inclement weather, it has been impossible to ignore the deluge.  Flooding  has submerged  fields ,  ruined homes , and at times,  cut off whole villages . As sea levels rise and extreme weather becomes more common, experts say that Britain’s traditional defenses — sea walls, tidal barriers and sandbanks — will be insufficient to  meet the threat . It is not alone: in September,  deadly floods in Central Europe  led to the deaths of at least 23 people. ...But on a tendril of land curling out from the coast of Somerset, in southwestern England, a team of scientists, engineers and conservationists have embraced a radical solution. ...In a project costing 20...

By Gwyneth K. Shaw and Judith Katz, Berkeley Law News.  Excerpt: A satellite launched in August by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has close ties to Berkeley Law’s  Center for Law, Energy & the Environment  (CLEE) from the project’s origin to groundbreaking methane emissions research for years to come. The Tanager-1 satellite is part of the broader Carbon Mapper initiative, which aims to detect and quantify methane emissions with unprecedented accuracy. In tandem with MethaneSAT, launched by the Environmental Defense Fund, it can detect both large area methane emissions and leaks within a few meters of their source. ...Methane — a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for about a third of global warming — has been difficult to track. ...Importantly, Carbon Mapper and the Environmental Defense Fund will make the methane data publicly available, allowing nongovernmental organizations, governments, and the general public to access the information — ideally enhan...

By Matthew W. Jones et al, Science.  Editor's Summary: Anthropogenic climate change has made wildfires bigger, hotter, and more common. Jones  et al . used a machine learning approach to break down the “why” and “where” of the observed increases. The authors identified different forest ecoregions, grouped them into 12 global forest pyromes, and described their differing sensitivities to climate, humans, and vegetation. Their analysis shows how forest fire carbon emissions have increased in extratropical pyromes [global regions of fire with similar fire characteristics], where climate is the major control, overtaking emissions from the tropical pyromes, where human influence is most important. It also illustrates the increasing vulnerability of forests to fire disturbance under climate change. —Jesse Smith.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl5889 . 

By Veronique Greenwood , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The ocean is filled with microscopic creatures that thrive in the sunshine. These bacteria and plankton periodically clump up with detritus, like waste produced by fish, and then drift softly downward, transforming into what scientists call  marine snow . In the inky depths of the ocean that the sun can’t reach, other creatures depend on the relentless fall of marine snow for food. Those of us living on land depend on it, too: Marine snow is thought to store vast amounts of carbon in the ocean rather than letting it heat Earth’s atmosphere. Once those particles of marine snow arrive at the ocean bottom, their carbon stays down there for untold eons. ...Researchers ...found that gooey, transparent parachutes considerably slow the snow’s descent.... These findings are described in a paper published last week in the journal Science. ...The bigger the mucus gob, the scientists found, the slower the particle’s fall. ...“We alre...

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: ...proposals to cool the planet through “geoengineering” tend to be controversial. ...In a modeling study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that  shooting 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6ºC —enough to stave off the worst consequences of global warming. The scheme wouldn’t be cheap, however: experts estimate it would cost nearly $200 trillion over the remainder of this century—far more than traditional proposals to use sulfur particles....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/are-diamonds-earth-s-best-friend-gem-dust-could-cool-planet-and-cost-trillions .

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Just a spoonful of ocean water is home to millions of microbes—tiny, single-celled organisms that play crucial roles in the ocean’s biogeochemical processes. A new study in  Science   illuminates which organic particles these microbes prefer to munch on, aiding scientists’ understanding of how carbon moves through the ocean on a larger scale. ...The movement of carbon from the surface of the ocean to depth, known as the biological carbon pump, helps control the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Microbes are key to this system, as they degrade organic particles as they consume them. That process releases carbon. ...The study investigated how microbes break down lipids—carbon-containing molecules that make up around 20% of organic particles in the ocean. Scientists know that some lipids reach the deep ocean, whereas others are degraded along the way. The team wanted to learn what factors might influence lipids’ fate. ...T...

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Every few years, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation ( ENSO ), a seasonal climate phenomenon, disrupts global weather for periods of 9–12 months at a time. During an ENSO event, trade winds die down, allowing warmer water to circulate through the Pacific Ocean and creating unpredictable, extreme weather patterns around the world. While some locations experience heavy rainfall, others experience extreme drought and heat waves. ...About  252 million years ago , however, El Niño–like conditions may have persisted for decades at a time, a new  study  suggests. The volatile climate and extended ocean warming associated with this climate pattern may be pieces of the puzzle of what caused the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as the “ Great Dying .” During this period, it would have been impossible for plants and animals to endure decades-long swings in climate conditions. Most lif...

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 Pieter Sanczuk , et al, Science.  Abstract: Climate change is commonly assumed to induce species’ range shifts toward the poles. Yet, other environmental changes may affect the geographical distribution of species in unexpected ways. Here, we quantify multidecadal shifts in the distribution of European forest plants and link these shifts to key drivers of forest biodiversity change: climate change, atmospheric deposition (nitrogen and sulfur), and forest canopy dynamics. Surprisingly, westward distribution shifts were 2.6 times more likely than northward ones. Not climate change, but nitrogen-mediated colonization events, possibly facilitated by the recovery from past acidifying deposition, best explain westward movements. Biodiversity redistribution patterns appear complex and are more likely driven by the interplay among several environmental changes than due to the exclusive effects of climate change alone.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc...

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 ...

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 ...

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....  Ful...

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...

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 agre...

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 app...

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 month...

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 wro...

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-increa...