By Stephen Proctor, The Cool Down (TCD).  Excerpt: Two innovative companies, Solarwatt and Stiebel Eltron U.K., have collaborated on a first-of-its-kind home in the United Kingdom. According to  Solarwatt , the companies unveiled their fully integrated solar energy and  heat pump  system at a home in North Wales....  Full article at https://www.thecooldown.com/green-home/solarwatt-stiebel-eltron-uk-home-energy/ . 

By Lisa Friedman , The New York Times.  Excerpt: During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump gathered oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago estate and promised them a powerful return on their investment if they raised $1 billion to help him retake the White House. The industry never ponied up quite that much, but nevertheless, six months into Mr. Trump’s presidency, oil and gas companies are poised to reap multibillion-dollar windfalls from the administration’s actions so far. A sweeping domestic policy bill that Mr. Trump signed into law this month includes about $18 billion in new and expanded tax incentives for the oil and gas industry.... It also includes billions of dollars in tax breaks that aren’t specific to oil and gas but were top oil industry priorities as the law was being negotiated. It reduces the amount of money that energy companies must pay the federal government for the oil and gas they extract on public lands and waters, a change valued at about $6 billion,...

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: ...University of Alaska Fairbanks ecologist Ken Tape walked across the tundra on the outskirts of Nome, Alaska, to a site where a shallow stream just a few meters wide had flowed 2 years before. In its place he found an enormous pond, created by a dam made of branches bearing the distinctive marks of beaver incisors. It was a vivid illustration of how beavers are transforming the Arctic. ...Soon, the land-altering power of beavers could be felt in a region currently beyond their reach: the farthest northern parts of the Alaskan Arctic. In a 30 July paper in  Environmental Research Letters , Tape and James Speed of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology forecast that  as a warming climate eases Arctic temperatures, beaver populations will march northward , sweeping across Alaska’s North Slope this century. Their arrival could bring dramatic change...upending ecosystems in places such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge...

By Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Africa is a source of uncertainty in carbon cycle calculations. By some estimates, the continent’s landscapes emit 2.1 billion tons more carbon dioxide than they take up each year—about equal to 1.5 times the annual emissions from  coal-fired power plants . But other estimates are almost the complete opposite, suggesting that the continent’s copious plant matter takes up 2.0 billion more tons of carbon dioxide per year than it releases. This uncertainty exists in part because the amount of carbon Africa takes up and emits  varies greatly  from year to year and partly because there is a dearth of available surface observations across the continent.  Yun et al.   investigated the reason for these fluctuations by applying a suite of atmospheric transport models to data from the  Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2  (OCO-2).... By filling a critical observational gap over Africa, the OCO-...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: The  last assessment  of the state of climate science from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in its final form 2 years ago, was a monumental effort, with  721 volunteer scientists  synthesizing all available published research. Yesterday, the Department of Energy (DOE)  released  its own climate assessment, as part of a campaign by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to overturn its landmark endangerment finding from 2009, which found that burning fossil fuels endangers public health and established carbon dioxide as a pollutant EPA could regulate. But the DOE  report —called  A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate —had fewer authors than IPCC’s: just five. ...Climate researchers say the authors cherry-picked evidence and highlighted uncertainties to achieve the net effect of downplaying the impacts of climate ch...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: The National Science Foundation (NSF) plans to abruptly end operation of the  RV Nathaniel B. Palmer , the sole U.S. research ship capable of braving the farthest reaches of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. The move...is alarming polar scientists: Today, more than 170 researchers sent NSF leaders and Congress a  letter  asking the agency to reconsider. ...For nearly 60 years...the United States has continuously operated science-dedicated icebreakers in the Southern Ocean. They have gathered foundational data illuminating how these frigid waters  ferry carbon  and heat to the abyss below and how warm currents within them  drive the melt  of the continent’s vast ice sheet. ...The  Palmer , in operation since 1992, was the latest flag bearer in this long line. Capable of hosting two helicopters and up to 45 researchers, the  Palmer  was best known recently for its daring visits to the Thwaites Glac...

By Ferris Jabr, The New York Times.  Excerpt: On a hot February morning, that ship and two smaller companion barges — nicknamed Big Daddy and the Twins — roamed a bay within the Palm Islands cluster, off the northeastern coast of Australia. Each pumped seawater aboard, pressurized it and sprayed it into the air through hundreds of tiny nozzles arrayed on metal frames. Dense plumes of fog billowed from all three vessels, forming long white strands that eventually converged into a seamless cloak. ...Since 2016, Harrison and his colleagues have been investigating whether it is possible to reduce coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef by altering the weather above it. ...Theoretically, machine-generated fog and artificially brightened clouds can shade and cool the water in which corals live, sparing them much of that stress. ...The failure to prevent the planet’s average temperature from reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial base line, and the progressively obvious an...