https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/business/artificial-intelligence-data-centers-green-power.html By Patrick Sisson , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Artificial intelligence’s booming growth is radically reshaping an already red-hot data center market, raising questions about whether these sites can be operated sustainably. ...The carbon footprint from the construction of the [data] centers and the racks of expensive computer equipment is substantial in itself, and their power needs have grown considerably. ...Just a decade ago, data centers drew 10 megawatts of power, but 100 megawatts is common today. The Uptime Institute, an industry advisory group, has identified 10 supersize cloud computing campuses across North America with an average size of 621 megawatts. ...The data center industry has embraced more sustainable solutions in recent years, becoming a significant investor in renewable power at the corporate level. Sites that leased wind and solar capacity  jumped 50 percen...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/climate/plant-based-treaty-climate.html By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Amsterdam ... Los Angeles ...are signatories to the  Plant Based Treaty,  which was launched in 2021 with the aim of calling attention to the role played by greenhouse gases that are generated by food production. ...Anita Krajnc ...and other activists modeled the Plant Based Treaty after the  Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty , which calls on governments to stop new oil, gas and coal projects. ...The first municipality to sign on was Boynton Beach, Fla., in September 2021.... Twenty-five other municipalities have since joined, including Los Angeles, Amsterdam and more than a dozen cities in India. ...Globally, food systems make up a third of planet-heating greenhouse gasses, with the environmental toll of the meat and dairy industries being particularly high. Livestock accounts for  about a third  of methane emissions, which have 80 ...

https://apnews.com/article/electric-school-buses-diesel-exhaust-environmental-justice-4263455c7d55e34acd6f35dceb6db7c0 By ALEXA ST. JOHN , Associated Press.  Excerpt: Areli Sanchez’s daughter, Aida, used to be one of 20 million American kids who ride a  diesel bus  to school each day. Aida has asthma. When she was little, she complained about the  smell and cloud of fumes  on her twice-daily trip. “When she would come home from school or be on the bus, she got headaches and sick to her stomach. ...Research shows diesel exhaust exposure can cause students to  miss school  and affect learning. ...Diesel  exhaust  from school buses potentially affects one-third of U.S. students... according to federal data. It’s a known  carcinogen  plus it contains harmful nitrogen oxides, volatile gases and particles that  exacerbate lung issues . It also contributes to global warming. ...A few years after her daughter started having problems, S...

https://eos.org/articles/el-nino-may-have-kicked-off-thwaites-glacier-retreat By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is currently losing significant mass, contributing to around 4% of all global sea level rise. Now, new research suggests that the start of Thwaites’s current retreat aligns with that of the nearby Pine Island Glacier, which is also losing mass rapidly. The findings, published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , indicate that the mass loss was more likely spurred by regional conditions, such as an  El Niño  event, .... Scientists have observed accelerating ice loss from Thwaites since the 1970s, mostly via satellite data. ...Thwaites likely began to retreat around the 1940s, coinciding with the beginning of a retreat phase at neighboring Pine Island Glacier that had been  determined by previous research . ...a prolonged El Niño that occurred from 1939 to 1942...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/vegas-sphere-energy-efficiency.html By Ed Conway , The New York Times guest essay.  Excerpt: In the 1990s, when multicolor LED lights were invented by Japanese scientists after decades of research, the hope was that they would help to avert climate catastrophe by greatly reducing the amount of electricity we use. It seemed perfectly intuitive. After all, LED lights use 90 percent less energy and last around 18 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the  same  today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is ...Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights, .... As technology has advanced, we’ve only grown more wasteful. ...There’s an economic term for this: the Jevons Paradox, n...

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://e360.yale.edu/digest/eastern-us-reforestation-climate-change By YaleEnvironment360.  Excerpt: Over the 20th century, the U.S. as a whole warmed by 1.2 degrees F (0.7 degrees C), but across much the East, temperatures dropped by 0.5 degrees F (0.3 degrees C). A new study posits that the restoration of lost forest countered warming, keeping the region cool. “This widespread history of reforestation, a huge shift in land cover, hasn’t been widely studied for how it could’ve contributed to the anomalous lack of warming in the eastern U.S., which climate scientists call a ‘warming hole,’”  said lead author Mallory Barnes , of Indiana University. “That’s why we initially set out to do this work.”....