By Eric Niiler , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Earth is out of balance. That’s the message from a United Nations report released late Sunday that looked at how much energy from the sun is absorbed by the Earth or reflected back into space. Researchers found the gap between the two is the biggest since measurements began in 1960, meaning more of the sun’s heat energy is now staying on Earth. And that energy imbalance is heating up the oceans, atmosphere, and frozen regions of the world, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s  State of the Global Climate report . ...said Dr. Deoras, who was not associated with the report... “...all these greenhouse gases, they are just trapping more and more heat. The planet is just not getting a chance to cool down.”...  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/climate/energy-imbalance-un-report.html .  See also Inside Climate News article Report Shows Earth’s Climate is Out of Balance, as Indicators Hit Ne...

By Science Advisor.  Excerpt: By the 1990s, the world had achieved a striking victory: largely banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), compounds used as refrigerants but destructive to the ozone layer. Unfortunately, their replacements, while safer for ozone, are still potent greenhouse gases; they contribute a few percent to emissions globally. Alternatives to compressible liquid coolants have so far suffered from inefficient heat transfer and the inability to scale. In a typical refrigerator or air conditioner, cooling is achieved by transporting heat away from the system using a fluid that absorbs heat, evaporates into a gas, and gets condensed back into a liquid. Researchers probed a different way to cool down:  adding ions to water to improve its ability to absorb heat  , similar to how we spread salt on the roads to melt snow in the winter. The team ...determined that the cooling process was three times more efficient than conventional systems and could reduce electrici...

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: Less than 15 months into a scheduled 5-year mission, a pioneering satellite built to track rogue emissions of planet-warming methane has been lost. The demise of MethaneSAT  was announced today  by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the nonprofit behind the $88 million satellite. ...Methane is emitted by natural sources, such as wetlands, but also by leaky oil and gas infrastructure. Stanching those leaks  is an efficient way to slow global warming , many researchers argue, and MethaneSAT was developed specifically to identify them. ...Some existing satellites, such as the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5, can map methane on broader scales across hundreds of kilometers. Others can pinpoint large individual polluters such as a refinery. But MethaneSAT, funded with the help of a $100 million grant from Jeff Bezos’s Earth Fund, was unique in its ability to detect smaller emissions across entire oil and gas fields while also z...

By Sahas Mehra , Science.  Excerpt: In 2023, China embarked on the  largest coastal restoration project ever attempted . Threatened by an invasive, fast-growing weed known as smooth cordgrass ( Spartina alterniflora ), which was overrunning clam farms, bird habitats, and shipping channels, the country planned to remove the plant and replace it with environmentally friendly species, such as native reeds and mangrove trees. But  such efforts would have a huge downside, increasing methane emissions 10-fold , researchers report this month in  Geophysical Research Letters . The mangroves would eventually counter these effects, but it could take 5 decades for these native plants to absorb the increasing greenhouse emissions....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/china-s-massive-coastal-restoration-project-could-backfire . 

By Lauren Schneider , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Canada is home to more than 400,000 nonproducing oil and gas wells. These abandoned facilities still emit methane, which can contaminate water supplies and pollute the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. The scope of these emissions may be greater than previously understood, according to a new  study . In 2023, nonproducing wells may have leaked 230 kilotons of methane, about 7 times more than the official estimates published in the government’s annual  National Inventory Report  (NIR)....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/nonproducing-oil-wells-may-be-emitting-7-times-more-methane-than-we-thought .

By Elizabeth Leon-Palmero  et al, Science.  Abstract: Nitrous oxide (N 2 O) is a potent greenhouse gas and the main stratospheric ozone-depleting agent, yet its sources are not well resolved. In this work, we experimentally show a N 2 O production pathway not previously considered in greenhouse gas budgets, which we name photochemodenitrification. Sunlight induces substantial and consistent N 2 O production under oxic abiotic conditions in fresh and marine waters. We measured photochemical N 2 O production rates using isotope tracers and determined that nitrite is the main substrate and that nitrate can also contribute after being photoreduced to nitrite. Additionally, this N 2 O production was strongly correlated to the radiation dose. Photochemodenitrification exceeded biological N 2 O production in surface waters. Although previously overlooked, this process may contribute considerably to global N 2 O emissions through its occurrence in fresh and marine surface waters....

By William E. Parker et al, Nature Sustainability.  Abstract: Anthropogenic contributions of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere have been observed to cause cooling and contraction in the thermosphere, which is projected to continue for many decades. This contraction results in a secular reduction in atmospheric mass density where most satellites operate in low Earth orbit. Decreasing density reduces drag on debris objects and extends their lifetime in orbit, posing a persistent collision hazard to other satellites and risking the cascading generation of more debris. This work uses projected CO 2  emissions from the shared socio-economic pathways to investigate the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the satellite carrying capacity of low Earth orbit. The instantaneous Kessler capacity is introduced to compute the maximum number and optimal distribution of characteristic satellites that keep debris populations in stable equilibrium. Modelled CO 2  emissions scenario...

By Li Cohen , CBS News.  Excerpt: Carbon dioxide , the gas that  accounts for the majority of global warming  caused by human activities, is accumulating "faster than ever," scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego found. ...The researchers measured carbon dioxide, or CO 2 , levels at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory. They found that atmospheric levels of the gas hit a seasonal peak of just under 427 parts per million in May ...50% higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution. ..."Not only is CO 2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever," Ralph Keeling, director of Scripps' CO 2 program, said in the release. "Each year achieves a higher maximum due to fossil-fuel burning, which releases pollution in the form of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel pollution just keeps building up, much like trash in a landfill." .....

By DIANA GITIG , Ars Technica.  Excerpt: Microbes in soil convert nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide, and the more nitrogen fertilizer they have to work with, the more nitrous oxide they make. Agriculture also leaks plenty of the excess nitrogen into waterways in the form of nitrate, generating algal blooms that create low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ where no marine life can live. One way to reduce nitrogen emissions from farms would be to simply use fertilizer more efficiently. But—as we’ve seen with fossil fuels (and antibiotics and plastics)—when humans have a miraculous substance on our hands, we just can’t seem to use it at levels that minimize its impact. ...But even if we were to start using less fertilizer now, we are past time to choose a single technique to curb greenhouse gas emissions; we need to put them all into action. ...instead of trying to promote the growth of any denitrifying bacteria that might happen to already be in soil, researchers decided to grow them external...

By Michael B. Mahon et al, Nature.  Abstract: Anthropogenic change is contributing to the rise in emerging infectious diseases, which are significantly correlated with socioeconomic, environmental and ecological factors. Studies have shown that infectious disease risk is modified by changes to biodiversity, climate change, chemical pollution, landscape transformations and species introductions. However, it remains unclear which global change drivers most increase disease and under what contexts. Here we amassed a dataset from the literature that contains 2,938 observations of infectious disease responses to global change drivers across 1,497 host–parasite combinations, including plant, animal and human hosts. ...reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing ecosystem health, and preventing biological invasions and biodiversity loss could help to reduce the burden of plant, animal and human diseases, especially when coupled with improvements to social and economic determinants o...

By Elise Cutts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...Researchers already knew separately that drought can enhance soil cracking, that soil cracks can enhance greenhouse gas emissions, and that climate change is predicted to make drought more intense and frequent in many arid parts of the world. “What this paper does is put all that together,” said soil scientist  Kelly Caylor  of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the new study. It shows how drought-driven changes to the physical structure of soils—in this case, cracking—could contribute to climate change, too, he added. ...Soils are the planet’s greatest stockpile of terrestrial carbon. ...Vahedifard and his colleagues published their study in  Environmental Research Letters . ...  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/cracking-soils-could-accelerate-climate-change . 

https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/04/03/california-leads-us-emissions-of-little-known-greenhouse-gas/ By Hannah Robbins, Johns Hopkins University.  Excerpt: California, a state known for its aggressive greenhouse gas reduction policies, is ironically the nation's greatest emitter of one: sulfuryl fluoride. As much as 17% of global emissions of this gas, a common pesticide for treating termites and other wood-infesting insects, stem from the United States. The majority of those emissions trace back to just a few counties in California, according to a new study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. ...60-85% of sulfuryl fluoride emissions in the U.S. come from California, primarily Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties.... First approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for use as a pesticide in 1959, sulfuryl fluoride gained popularity after countries around the world agreed to phase out more reactive fumigants that were depleting the ozone layer, the researchers s...

https://www.science.org/content/article/dramatic-shift-ice-age-rhythm-pinned-carbon-dioxide By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: Roughly 1.5 million years ago, Earth went through a radical climatic shift. The planet had already been slipping in and out of ice ages every 40,000 years, provoked by wobbles in its orbit. But then, something flipped. The ice ages began to grow stronger and longer, with durations of 100,000 years, and overall, the planet grew cooler. And nothing about Earth’s orbit could explain it. The cause of this Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), as it’s known, has been a major mystery for decades. A new compilation of global temperatures covering the past 4.5 million years, published this week in Science,  points a finger at a familiar molecule : carbon dioxide. It suggests that a strengthening of an ocean pump in the waters around Antarctica sucked carbon dioxide out of the air and sent it plunging to the abyss, cooling the planet and intensifying the ice ...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/researchers-develop-mexicos-first-comprehensive-greenhouse-gas-budget By Rachel Fritts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Mexico’s greenhouse gas emissions are the second highest among Latin American countries, trailing only Brazil  according to the World Bank . But until now, no one had leveraged the full spectrum of available scientific data to make an estimate of sources (such as fossil fuel burning and agriculture) and sinks (such as healthy forests and soils) of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Calculating the country’s  greenhouse gas budget  could help policymakers develop effective emissions reduction strategies. Murray-Tortarolo et al.  calculate Mexico’s first comprehensive greenhouse gas budget based on estimates from multiple data sources of greenhouse gas fluxes in the country between 2000 and 2019. ...different sources of data broadly told the same story about anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from sources incl...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/climate/natural-gas-leaks-coal-climate-change.html By Hiroko Tabuchi , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Natural gas, long seen as a cleaner alternative to coal and an important tool in the fight to slow global warming, can be just as harmful to the climate, a new study has concluded, unless companies can all but eliminate the leaks that plague its use. It takes as little as 0.2 percent of gas to leak to make natural gas as big a driver of climate change as coal, the study found. That’s a tiny margin of error for a gas that is notorious for leaking from drill sites, processing plants and the pipes that transport it into power stations or homes and kitchens. ...The peer-reviewed study, which also involved researchers from Harvard and Duke Universities and NASA and is set to be published next week  in the journal Environmental Research Letters , adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable t...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/the-greenhouse-gas-burden-of-inland-waters By  Aaron Sidder , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In a new pair of studies, a global team of scientists reassessed greenhouse gas emissions stemming from rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs. ...The study authors found that inland waters contribute 5.5  petagrams  of CO 2  per year, of which one third emanates from South American rivers. Meanwhile, inland waters emit 82–135 teragrams of CH 4  annually, one third of which comes from North American and Russian lakes. N 2 O emissions were comparatively small at 248–590 gigagrams N 2 O per year, and a quarter of N 2 O emissions stem from North American inland waters. ...Inland waters could represent approximately 20% of the total global  CH 4  emissions , the authors found. In contrast, the contributions of inland waters to the global CO 2  and N 2 O budgets are relatively minor....

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

https://eos.org/features/setting-the-stage-for-climate-action-under-the-montreal-protocol By  Stephen O. Andersen ,   Marco Gonzalez  and   Nancy J. Sherman , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt:  Twelve papers formed the scientific basis for fast action to strengthen the treaty, which was already safeguarding stratospheric ozone, so it also protects the climate by reducing super pollutants.  ...Joseph Farman and colleagues provided observational evidence of a stratospheric “ ozone hole ” over the Antarctic potentially linked to rising CFC concentrations [ Farman et al. , 1985], which ultimately led to international agreement on the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, better known simply as the Montreal Protocol. Twenty years later, every United Nations (UN) member state had become a party to the Montreal Protocol, ...and the ozone layer was well on the way to recovery [ WorldMeteorological Organization  ( WMO ), 2018; ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/climate/gas-flaring-climate-methane.html By  Henry Fountain , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The oil industry practice of burning unwanted methane is less effective than previously assumed, scientists said Thursday, resulting in new estimates for releases of the greenhouse gas in the United States that are about five times as high as earlier ones. In a study of the three largest oil and gas basins in the United States, the researchers found that the practice, known as flaring, often doesn’t completely burn the methane, a potent heat-trapping gas that is often a byproduct of oil production. And in many cases, they discovered, flares are extinguished and not reignited, so all the methane escapes into the atmosphere. Improving efficiency and ensuring that all flares remain lit would result in annual emissions reductions in the United States equal to taking nearly 3 million cars off the road each year, the scientists said. ...said one of the resea...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/climate/hydrofluorocarbons-hfcs-kigali-amendment.html By  Lisa Friedman  and  Coral Davenport , The New york Times.  Excerpt: WASHINGTON — The Senate voted on Wednesday to approve an international climate treaty for the first time in 30 years, agreeing in a rare bipartisan deal to phase out of the use of planet-warming industrial chemicals commonly found in refrigerators and air-conditioners. By a vote of 69 to 27 the United States joined the  2016 Kigali Amendment , along with  137 other nations  that have agreed to  sharply reduce the production and use of hydrofluorocarbons , or HFCs. The chemicals are potent greenhouse gases, warming the planet with 1,000 times the heat-trapping strength of carbon dioxide.…