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À partir d’avant-hierArs Technica

Some states are now trying to ban lab-grown meat

tanks for growing cell-cultivated chicken

Enlarge / Cell-cultivated chicken is made in the pictured tanks at the Eat Just office on July 27, 2023, in Alameda, Calif. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees—those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers, and meatpackers in each state.

State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a “war on our ranching” and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits.

Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane—a potent greenhouse gas that’s roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions.

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How melting Arctic ice leads to European drought and heatwaves

The Wamme river is seen at a low level during the European heatwave on Aug 10, 2022 in Rochefort, Belgium.

Enlarge / The Wamme river is seen at a low level during the European heatwave on Aug 10, 2022 in Rochefort, Belgium. (credit: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)

The Arctic Ocean is mostly enclosed by the coldest parts of the Northern Hemisphere’s continents, ringed in by Siberia, Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, with only a small opening to the Pacific through the Bering Strait, and some narrow channels through the labyrinth of Canada’s Arctic archipelago.

But east of Greenland, there’s a stretch of open water about 1,300 miles across where the Arctic can pour its icy heart out to the North Atlantic. Those flows include increasing surges of cold and fresh water from melted ice, and a new study in the journal Weather and Climate Dynamics shows how those pulses can set off a chain reaction from the ocean to the atmosphere that ends up causing summer heatwaves and droughts in Europe.

The large new inflows of fresh water from melting ice are a relatively new ingredient to the North Atlantic weather cauldron, and based on measurements from the new study, a currently emerging “freshwater anomaly” will likely trigger a drought and heatwave this summer in Southern Europe, said the study’s lead author, Marilena Oltmanns, an oceanographer with the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre.

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A big boost to Europe’s climate-change goals

Steelworker starting molten steel pour in steelworks facility.

Enlarge / Materials such as steel, cement, aluminum, electricity, fertilizer, hydrogen, and iron will soon be subject to greenhouse gas emissions fees when imported into Europe. (credit: Monty Rakusen/Getty)

The year 2023 was a big one for climate news, from record heat to world leaders finally calling for a transition away from fossil fuels. In a lesser-known milestone, it was also the year the European Union soft-launched an ambitious new initiative that could supercharge its climate policies.

Wrapped in arcane language studded with many a “thereof,” “whereas” and “having regard to” is a policy that could not only help fund the European Union’s pledge to become the world’s first carbon-neutral continent, but also push industries all over the world to cut their carbon emissions.

It’s the establishment of a carbon price that will force many heavy industries to pay for each ton of carbon dioxide, or equivalent emissions of other greenhouse gases, that they emit. But what makes this fee revolutionary is that it will apply to emissions that don’t happen on European soil. The EU already puts a price on many of the emissions created by European firms; now, through the new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, the bloc will charge companies that import the targeted products—cement, aluminum, electricity, fertilizer, hydrogen, iron, and steel—into the EU, no matter where in the world those products are made.

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Skyrocketing ocean temperatures have scientists scratching their heads

Par : WIRED
beach scene with thermometer

Enlarge (credit: jay_zynism via Getty)

For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world’s oceans. In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs and have stayed that way since.

You can see 2023 in the orange line below, the other gray lines being previous years. That solid black line is where we are so far in 2024—way, way above even 2023. While we’re nowhere near the Atlantic hurricane season yet—that runs from June 1 through the autumn—keep in mind that cyclones feed on warm ocean water, which could well stay anomalously hot in the coming months. Regardless, these surface temperature anomalies could be triggering major ecological problems already.

“In the tropical eastern Atlantic, it’s four months ahead of pace—it’s looking like it’s already June out there,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “It’s really getting to be strange that we’re just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long.”

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Half of migratory species face extinction due to human activities

a sea turtle

Enlarge / In the case of Great Barrier Reef green turtles, rising temperatures have been linked to changing sex-determination, with an increasing number of new hatchlings born female. (credit: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Humans are driving migratory animals—sea turtles, chimpanzees, lions, and penguins, among dozens of other species—towards extinction, according to the most comprehensive assessment of migratory species ever carried out.

The State of the World’s Migratory Species, a first of its kind report compiled by conservation scientists under the auspices of the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, found population decline, a precursor to extinction, in nearly half of the roughly 1,200 species listed under the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), a 1979 treaty aimed at conserving species that move across international borders.

The report’s findings dovetail with those of another authoritative UN assessment, the 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, that found around 1 million of Earth’s 8 million species are at risk of extinction due to human activity. Since the 1970s, global biodiversity, the variation of life on Earth, has declined by a whopping 70 percent.

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Over a decade later, climate scientist prevails in libel case

Image of a middle-aged male speaking into a microphone against a dark backdrop.

Enlarge / Climate scientist Michael Mann. (credit: Slaven Vlasic)

This is a story I had sporadically wondered whether I'd ever have the chance to write. Over a decade ago, I covered a lawsuit filed by climate scientist Michael Mann, who finally had enough of being dragged through the mud online. When two authors accused him of fraud and compared his academic position to that of a convicted child molester, he sued for defamation.

Mann was considered a public figure, which makes winning defamation cases extremely challenging. But his case was based on the fact that multiple institutions on two different continents had scrutinized his work and found no hint of scientific malpractice—thus, he argued, that anyone who accused him of fraud was acting with reckless disregard for the truth.

Over the ensuing decade, the case was narrowed, decisions were appealed, and long periods went by without any apparent movement. But recently, amazingly, the case finally went to trial, and a jury rendered a verdict yesterday: Mann is entitled to damages from the writers. Even if you don't care about the case, it's worth reflecting on how much has changed since it was first filed.

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NASA launches a billion-dollar Earth science mission Trump tried to cancel

NASA's PACE spacecraft last year at Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland.

Enlarge / NASA's PACE spacecraft last year at Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland. (credit: NASA)

NASA's latest mission dedicated to observing Earth's oceans and atmosphere from space rocketed into orbit from Florida early Thursday on a SpaceX launch vehicle.

This mission will study phytoplankton, microscopic plants fundamental to the marine food chain, and tiny particles called aerosols that play a key role in cloud formation. These two constituents in the ocean and the atmosphere are important to scientists' understanding of climate change. The mission's acronym, PACE, stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem.

Nestled in the nose cone of a Falcon 9 rocket, the PACE satellite took off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 1:33 am EST (06:33 UTC) Thursday after a two-day delay caused by poor weather.

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The right bacteria turn farms into carbon sinks

Image of a woman in a lab coat holding a bacterial culture plate

Some of the microbes that make carbon sequestration work. (credit: Andes Ag, Inc)

In 2022, humans emitted a staggering 36 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Along with reducing emissions, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a key climate mitigation strategy. But Gonzalo Fuenzalida wasn’t looking to help solve climate change when he co-founded the US company Andes.

“We started this company with the idea of using microbes to make the process of growing food more resilient,” says Fuenzalida. “We stumbled upon these microbes that have the ability to create minerals in the soil which contain carbon, and that intrigued us.”

Fuenzalida, alongside his co-founder Tania Timmermann-Aranis, had an unconventional notion: They could harness the power of microbes residing in plant roots within the soil to remove carbon from the atmosphere. These naturally occurring microbes can be applied to the soil by blending them with pesticides or other soil treatments—they will strategically position themselves within the root structure of corn, wheat, and soy plants.

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Air pollution from Canada’s tar sands is much worse than we thought

Aerial Views Of Oil Sands Operations

Enlarge / Aerial view of the Athabasca oil sands near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. (credit: Bloomberg Creative via Getty)

Canada’s tar sands have gained infamy for being one of the world’s most polluting sources of oil, thanks to the large amounts of energy and water use required for their extraction. A new study says the operations are also emitting far higher levels of a range of air pollutants than previously known, with implications for communities living nearby and far downwind.

The research, published Thursday in Science, took direct measurements of organic carbon emissions from aircraft flying above the tar sands, also called oil sands, and found levels that were 20 to 64 times higher than what companies were reporting. Total organic carbon includes a wide range of compounds, some of which can contribute directly to hazardous air pollution locally and others that can react in the atmosphere to form small particulate matter, or PM 2.5, a dangerous pollutant that can travel long distances and lodge deep in the lungs.

The study found that tar sands operations were releasing as much of these pollutants as all other human-made sources in Canada combined. For certain classes of heavy organic compounds, which are more likely to form particulates downwind, the concentrations were higher than what’s generally found in large metropolises like Los Angeles.

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Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

Enlarge (credit: PM Images | DigitalVision)

Content creators have spent the past five years developing new tactics to evade YouTube's policies blocking monetization of videos making false claims about climate change, a report from a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), warned Tuesday.

What the CCDH found is that content creators who could no longer monetize videos spreading "old" forms of climate denial—including claims that "global warming is not happening" or "human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming"—have moved on.

Now they're increasingly pushing other claims that contradict climate science, which YouTube has not yet banned and may not ever ban. These include harmful claims that "impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless," "climate solutions won’t work," and "climate science and the climate movement are unreliable."

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NASA scientist on 2023 temperatures: “We’re frankly astonished”

A global projection map with warm areas shown in read, and color ones in blue. There is almost no blue.

Enlarge / Warming in 2023 was widespread. (credit: NOAA NCEI)

Earlier this week, the European Union's Earth science team came out with its analysis of 2023's global temperatures, finding it was the warmest year on record to date. In an era of global warming, that's not especially surprising. What was unusual was how 2023 set its record—every month from June on coming in far above any equivalent month in the past—and the size of the gap between 2023 and any previous year on record.

The Copernicus dataset used for that analysis isn't the only one of the sort, and on Friday, Berkeley Earth, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration all released equivalent reports. And all of them largely agree with the EU's: 2023 was a record, and an unusual one at that. So unusual that NASA's chief climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, introduced his look at 2023 by saying, "We're frankly astonished."

Despite the overlaps with the earlier analysis, each of the three new ones adds some details that flesh out what made last year so unusual.

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First results are in: 2023 temperatures were stunningly warm

Image of a lot of squiggly lines moving from left to right across a graph, with one line in red standing far above the rest.

Enlarge / Month by month, 2023 stood far above the rest. (credit: C3S/ECMWF)

The confused wiggles on the graph above have a simple message: Most years, even years with record-high temperatures, have some months that aren't especially unusual. Month to month, temperatures dip and rise, with the record years mostly being a matter of having fewer, shallower dips.

As the graph shows, last year was not at all like that. The first few months of the year were unusually warm. And then, starting in June, temperatures rose to record heights and simply stayed there. Every month after June set a new record for high temperatures for that month. So it's not surprising that 2023 will enter the record books as far and away the warmest year on record.

The EU makes it official

Several different organizations maintain global temperature records; while they use slightly different methods, they tend to produce very similar numbers. So, over the next few weeks, you can expect each of these organizations to announce record temperatures (NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will do so on Friday). On Tuesday, it was the European Union's turn, via its Copernicus Earth-observation program.

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How watching beavers from space can help drought-ridden areas bounce back

Par : WIRED
Beaver on a dam

Enlarge / Where beavers set up home, the dams they build profoundly change the landscape. (credit: Troy Harrison)

For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in the face of drought, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. In California, Castor canadensis is so prized that the state recently committed millions to its restoration.

While beavers’ benefits are indisputable, however, our knowledge remains riddled with gaps. We don’t know how many are out there, or which direction their populations are trending, or which watersheds most desperately need a beaver infusion. Few states have systematically surveyed them; moreover, many beaver ponds are tucked into remote streams far from human settlements, where they’re near-impossible to count. “There’s so much we don’t understand about beavers, in part because we don’t have a baseline of where they are,” says Emily Fairfax, a beaver researcher at the University of Minnesota.

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Saving the African penguin from climate change and overfishing

penguins

Enlarge / African penguins on a beach near Simon's Town in South Africa. (credit: spooh)

CAPE TOWN, South Africa—A weathered, green building stands at the edge of the cozy suburban Table View neighborhood in Cape Town, just a few blocks down from a Burger King and a community library. Upon stepping inside, visitors’ feet squelch on a mat submerged in antibacterial liquid—one of the first signs this isn’t just another shop on the street.

A few steps further down the main hallway, a cacophony of discordant brays and honks fill the air. A couple more strides reveal the source of these guttarall calls: African penguins.

Welcome to the nonprofit Southern African Foundation for the Conservation Of Coastal Birds’ hatchery and nursery, where hundreds of these birds are hand-reared after being injured or abandoned in the wild.

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Banks use your deposits to loan money to fossil-fuel, emissions-heavy firms

Par : WIRED
High angle shot of female hand inserting her bank card into automatic cash machine in the city. Withdrawing money, paying bills, checking account balances and make a bank transfer. Privacy protection, internet and mobile banking security concept

Enlarge (credit: d3sign)

When you drop money in the bank, it looks like it’s just sitting there, ready for you to withdraw. In reality, your institution makes money on your money by lending it elsewhere, including to the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, as well as emissions-heavy industries like manufacturing.

So just by leaving money in a bank account, you’re unwittingly contributing to worsening catastrophes around the world. According to a new analysis, for every $1,000 dollars the average American keeps in savings, each year they indirectly create emissions equivalent to flying from New York to Seattle. “We don’t really take a look at how the banks are using the money we keep in our checking account on a daily basis, where that money is really circulating,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which published the analysis. “But when we look under the hood, we see that there's a lot of fossil fuels.”

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Back to reality: COP28 calls for getting fossil fuels out of energy

Image of a man wearing traditional clothing gesturing while speaking at a podium.

Enlarge / Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber defied expectations to deliver a document that explicitly calls for limits on fossil fuel use. (credit: Fadel Dawod)

On Wednesday, the UN's COP28 meeting wrapped up with a major success: Despite a bruising fight with OPEC nations, the closing agreement included a call for a transition away from fossil fuels. There's still plenty here for various parties to dislike, but this is the first agreement that makes the implications of the Paris Treaty explicit: We can't limit climate change and continue to burn fossil fuels at anything close to the rate we currently do.

Beyond that, however, the report has something to disappoint everyone. It catalogs strong signs of incremental progress toward the Paris goals while acknowledging we're running out of time for further increments. And the steps it calls for will likely keep changes on a similar trajectory.

Taking stock

The new document is called a "Global Stocktake" in reference to checking the world's progress toward the goals of the Paris Agreement: limit climate change to 2° C above preindustrial temperatures and try to keep it to 1.5° C. That agreement called for nations to make pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions; initial pledges were insufficient, but regular meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP) would allow the pledges to be updated, raising their aggressiveness until the world is on a trajectory toward meeting its goals.

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OPEC members keep climate accords from acknowledging reality

Image of a person standing in front of a doorway with

Enlarge / Saudi Arabia's presence at COP28 has reportedly been used to limit progress on fossil fuel cutbacks. (credit: Sean Gallup / Getty Images)

Oil-producing countries are apparently succeeding in their attempts to eliminate language from an international climate agreement that calls for countries to phase out the use of fossil fuels. Draft forms of the agreement had included text that called upon the countries that are part of the Paris Agreement to work toward "an orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels." Reports now indicate that this text has gone missing from the latest versions of the draft.

The agreement is being negotiated at the United Nations' COP28 climate change conference, taking place in the United Arab Emirates. The COP, or Conference of the Parties, meetings are annual events that attempt to bring together UN members to discuss ways to deal with climate change. They were central to the negotiations that brought about the Paris Agreement, which calls for participants to develop plans that should bring the world to net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.

Initial plans submitted by countries would lower the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but not by nearly enough to reach net zero. However, the agreement included mechanisms by which countries would continue to evaluate their progress and submit more stringent goals. So, additional COP meetings have included what's termed a "stocktake" to evaluate where countries stand, and statements are issued to encourage and direct future actions.

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The quest to turn basalt dust into a viable climate solution

Par : WIRED
The quest to turn basalt dust into a viable climate solution

Enlarge (credit: Lithos Carbon)

Mary Yap has spent the last year and a half trying to get farmers to fall in love with basalt. The volcanic rock is chock full of nutrients, captured as its crystal structure forms from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In that way it’s like limestone, which farmers often use to improve their soil. It’s a little more finicky to apply, and certainly less familiar. But basalt also comes with an important side benefit: It can naturally capture carbon from the atmosphere.

Yap’s pitch is part of a decades-long effort to scale up that natural weathering process and prove that it can lock carbon away for long enough to make a different to the climate. “The bottleneck is getting farmers to want to do this,” Yap says.

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Complex, volatile coast makes preparing for tsunamis tough in Alaska

Tsunami damage

Enlarge / Damage from the 1964 earthquake and tsunami in Kodiak, Alaska. (credit: Education Images via Getty)

On an overcast day in September, Heidi Geagel negotiates familiar potholes on a gravel road in Seldovia, Alaska. Cresting a hill topped with a small chapel, her town spreads out below—in the bay, gently rocking fishing boats; onshore, the Linwood Bar & Grill, the Crab Pot Grocery, and a couple dozen homes on stilts.

Geagel, Seldovia’s city manager, turns around to three people sitting in the back seat, who partner with the United States’ National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program and have traveled in from Anchorage and Fairbanks for a meeting with community leaders about tsunami hazards. She points out how much of the landscape could be underwater if one of the giant, fast-moving waves were to hit: “Pretty much the entire map of Seldovia is in the inundation zone, except for this hill.”

Alaska is uniquely vulnerable to two types of tsunamis. The first, tectonic tsunamis, are linked to the long string of volcanic islands that curves like a tail from the state’s southern tip; these islands mark the northern edge of the Ring of Fire, a geologically active zone that generates approximately 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes. Tracing those islands, deep under water, is the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone, a trench where vast plates of hard rock overlap and friction slowly builds. Once or twice a year, the subduction zone generates earthquakes strong enough to trigger tsunami alerts; every 300 to 600 years or so, it ruptures in a megaquake that sends devastating tectonic tsunamis to Alaska’s shores.

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280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles

family on cargo e-bike

Enlarge (credit: RyanLJane via Getty)

We hop in the car to get groceries or drop kids at school. But while the car is convenient, these short trips add up in terms of emissions, pollution, and petrol cost.

Close to half (44 percent) of all Australian commuter trips are by car—and under 10 km. Of Perth’s 4.2 million daily car trips, 2.8 are for distances of less than 2 km.

This is common in wealthier countries. In the United States, a staggering 60 percent of all car trips cover less than 10km.

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2023 National Climate Assessment paints grim picture while offering hope

Climate change presents risks while action to limit warming and reduce risks presents opportunities for the US.

Enlarge / Climate change presents risks while action to limit warming and reduce risks presents opportunities for the US. (credit: 2023 National Climate Assessment)

In a sprawling, multimedia report that stresses it is not too late to act, the Biden administration on Tuesday delivered a sobering catalog of climate change’s impacts in every corner of the United States—from battered coasts to parched cornfields to blazing forests. It measures the human toll, including at least 700 people dying of heat-related illness each year, in a nation warming 60 percent more quickly than the world as a whole.

“The effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” the report says. But it adds that each increment of warming avoided through cutting carbon emissions will reduce the risks and harmful impacts.

“While there are still uncertainties about how the planet will react to rapid warming, the degree to which climate change will continue to worsen is largely in human hands,” the report says.

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Former head of NASA’s climate group issues dire warning on warming

Pollution and sunrise

Enlarge (credit: Alexandros Maragos / Getty Images)

During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods, and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off any time soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published Thursday in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.

But the research was controversial even before it was published, and it may widen the rifts in the climate science community and in the broader public conversation about the severity and imminence of climate impacts, with Hansen criticizing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for underestimating future warming, while other researchers, including IPCC authors, lambasted the new study.

The research suggests that an ongoing reduction of sulfuric air pollution particles called aerosols could send the global average annual temperature soaring beyond the targets of the Paris climate agreement much sooner than expected, which would sharply increase the challenges faced by countries working to limit harmful climate change under international agreements on an already treacherous geopolitical stage.

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Trying to make sense of why Otis exploded en route to Acapulco this week

Hurricane Otis on Tuesday, as it was strengthening before making landfall in Mexico.

Enlarge / Hurricane Otis on Tuesday, as it was strengthening before making landfall in Mexico. (credit: NOAA)

The word "unprecedented" gets tossed around a lot these days, but what happened with Hurricane Otis and its impact on Acapulco on Tuesday were truly without precedent. And it was with only slight precedent anywhere in terms of how quickly it intensified.

Otis was the textbook definition of rapid intensification, going from a 50 mph tropical storm on Monday evening to a 165 mph Category 5 hurricane last night. Through about mid-morning on Tuesday, everything was going basically as you'd expect for a modest hurricane with Otis. It may have been tracking toward a Category 2 type landfall, or even a Category 3 type landfall in the worst case, if you assumed the general rules of rapid intensification in this region. But Otis did not follow the rules.

Much like an onion, there are layers to this story that are important. First, take it from one of the more seasoned NOAA hurricane hunters—this was not what they expected when they flew their mission on Tuesday. Meteorologist Jeremy DeHart wrote on the site formerly known as Twitter, "I have arrived to a storm & been surprised by the intensity, but nothing like this. Expected a marginal hurricane, found a Cat 3! Reminiscent of the stories I've heard about flying into Patricia ('05), in the same part of the world."

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A new hybrid subspecies of puffin is likely the result of climate change

A puffin

Enlarge / Atlantic puffin, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Islands, Norway. (credit: Sergio Pitamitz/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The brisk increase in warming rates in the Arctic is bringing rapid shifts in range for plants and animals across the region’s tree of life. Researchers say those changes can lead species that normally wouldn’t encounter each other to interbreed, creating new hybrid populations.

Now, scientists have presented the first evidence of large-scale hybridization that appears to have been driven by climate change. In a paper published this month in the journal Science Advances, researchers report that a hybrid Atlantic puffin population on the remote Norwegian island of Bjornoya seems to have emerged in a period coinciding with the onset of a faster pace of global warming.

The hybrid puffins likely arose from the breeding between two subspecies within the past 100 or so years, coinciding with the onset of the 20th-century warming pattern, the study concludes. Strikingly, the hybridization occurred after a subspecies migrated southward, not poleward toward cooler temperatures, as might have been expected, a finding that highlights the complexity of the changes underway in the Arctic ecosystem.

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Apple’s “carbon neutral” claims are facing increased scrutiny

Apple watch with

Enlarge / Apple last month put its "environmentally friendly" credentials at the center of its biggest annual product launch. (credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Apple faces scrutiny from European environmental and consumer groups over its claims that its latest devices are “carbon neutral,” a term that Brussels proposes to ban in corporate marketing because it is “misleading.”

The iPhone maker last month put its “environmentally friendly” credentials at the center of its biggest annual product launch. It called some Apple Watch models its “first-ever carbon neutral products,” part of a drive to extend the classification across all its devices by the end of the decade.

But the US tech giant’s decision to rely on credits to cancel out the 7-12 kg of greenhouse gas emissions behind each new Watch prompted a sharp reaction from consumer groups in the wake of a long-trailed clampdown by the EU on “greenwashing.”

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Carbon capture pipeline nixed after widespread opposition

protest sign

Enlarge / A sign against a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline outside a home in New Liberty, Iowa, on June 4, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners.

Navigator CO2 on Friday said developing its carbon capture and storage (CCS) project called Heartland Greenway had been “challenging” because of the unpredictable nature of regulatory and government processes in South Dakota and Iowa.

Navigator’s decision to scrap its flagship $3.1 billion project—one of the biggest of its kind in the US—is a blow for a fledgling industry that is an important part of President Joe Biden’s climate strategy. CCS projects attempt to lock carbon underground for decades, preventing it from adding to heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere.

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Report: US needs much more than the IRA to get to net zero by 2050

Wind turbines on brown hills against a sunset.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Paget)

On Tuesday, the US National Academies of Science released a report entitled "Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States." The report follows up on a 2021 analysis entitled, "Accelerating Decarbonization in the US Energy System." When the earlier report was prepared, the US didn't have a decarbonization policy, although the growth of natural gas and renewables was dropping the emissions involved in producing electricity. Within the following year, the US passed an infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), all of which contained provisions intended to help cut the US's emissions in half by 2030. The Environmental Protection Agency has also formulated policies that should radically reduce the emissions from generating electricity.

In other words, shortly after the report's release, the US formulated a plan to accelerate decarbonization and a target of a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030.

Rather than pat themselves on the back, however, the experts who prepared the original report recognized that the US's climate goals require it to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, and that will require lots of policy changes beyond the ones already in place. The new report is largely a call for people to start thinking of what we need to implement to ensure emissions keep dropping after 2030.

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Hydro dams are struggling to handle the world’s intensifying weather

Par : WIRED
The Hemenway Harbor Marina at Lake Mead.

Enlarge / The Hemenway Harbor Marina at Lake Mead, the country's largest man-made water reservoir, formed by Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States, as viewed from Boulder Beach on August 14, 2023. The Lake Mead, a national recreation area, located within the states of Nevada and Arizona 24 miles east of the Las Vegas Strip, serves water to the states of Arizona, California, Utah, Colorado, and Nevada, as well as parts of Mexico, providing fresh water to nearly 20 million people and large swaths of farmland. (credit: George Rose/Getty Images)

It’s been one of the wettest years in California since records began. From October 2022 to March 2023, the state was blasted by 31 atmospheric rivers—colossal bands of water vapor that form above the Pacific and become firehoses when they reach the West Coast. What surprised climate scientists wasn’t the number of storms, but their strength and rat-a-tat frequency. The downpours shocked a water system that had just experienced the driest three years in recorded state history, causing floods, mass evacuations, and at least 22 deaths.

Swinging between wet and dry extremes is typical for California, but last winter’s rain, potentially intensified by climate change, was almost unmanageable. Add to that the arrival of El Niño, and more extreme weather looks likely for the state. This is going to make life very difficult for the dam operators tasked with capturing and controlling much of the state’s water.

Like most of the world’s 58,700 large dams, those in California were built for yesterday’s more stable climate patterns. But as climate change taxes the world’s water systems—affecting rainfall, snowmelt, and evaporation—it’s getting tough to predict how much water gets to a dam, and when. Dams are increasingly either water-starved, unable to maintain supplies of power and water for their communities, or overwhelmed and forced to release more water than desired—risking flooding downstream.

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Bizarre year for sea ice notches another record

chart of daily antarctic sea ice extent for each year

Enlarge / 2023 has been a remarkable year for Antarctic sea ice. (credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center)

Sometimes, data points deemed to be “outliers” are met with suspicion—possibly the result of an error in the measuring process, for example. But outliers can also represent a puzzling thing that really happened. This year’s floating sea ice cover around Antarctica falls into that latter category.

On September 25, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published preliminary dates and numbers for the annual maximum sea ice coverage in the Antarctic and minimum coverage in the Arctic. With the last few days of September in the books, NSIDC noted Wednesday that those determinations have held.

Arctic sea ice

Arctic sea ice coverage hit its end-of-summer low point on September 19, the sixth lowest in the satellite record that started in 1979. The average across all of September was fifth lowest. The record is still held by an unusual 2012 season, but sea ice is steadily declining over time.

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September’s record-setting temps were “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas”

Par : WIRED
figured silhouetted against the setting sun

Enlarge (credit: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

The global temperature numbers for September are in, and they are not good. “This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist—absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather posted Tuesday on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, read that post yesterday. “I've been sitting at my desk trying to think of a better way to describe that, but I can't,” Dahl says. “It's just shocking.”

“Concerning, worrying, wild—whatever superlative you want to use,” says Kate Marvel, senior scientist at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that fights climate change. “That's what it is.”

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Potential source of ancient methane eruption identified

Par : Howard Lee
A colored, 3D diagram of the ocean floor showing a large series of craters.

Enlarge / 3D seismic image showing the crater of the Modgunn Vent and others like it. The cratered surface labelled "BVU" is the seabed of 56 million years ago, with the modern seabed shown at top left. White lines are boreholes into the vent. (credit: Berndt et al, Nature Geoscience 2023)

Fifty-six million years ago, trillions of tons of carbon found its way into the atmosphere, acidifying oceans and causing the already-warm global climate to heat up by another 5º C (9º F)—an episode known as the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” or “PETM.”

Like today, the warming climate affected the environment on land and in the sea, with extreme downpours and heat-stressed plankton at the base of the food web. Land animals had a high rate of extinction and replacement by smaller species, and there was a mass extinction of tiny shell-making creatures that lived on the sea bed. The hotter climate supported alligators and swamp-cypress forests, like those in today’s southeastern United States, in Arctic latitudes that are covered by ice and tundra today.

Where did all that carbon come from?

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