My Climate Change News

Australia's famed Great Barrier Reef is suffering one of the most severe coral bleaching events on record, leaving scientists fearful for its survival as the impact of climate change worsens.

For 33 years marine biologist Anne Hoggett has lived and worked on Lizard Island, a small slice of tropical paradise off Australia's northeast tip.

She affectionately dubs it "Blizzard Island". The only relief from the wind and teeming showers is in the powder blue waters, where sea turtles and tiger sharks rove along the Great Barrier Reef.

As Hoggett snorkels, schools of fish swim gracefully, feeding on the coral or darting between it. Some are as small as her little finger, others the color of fire.

But thanks to climate change, it is becoming a watery graveyard of bleached reef.

"We don't know yet if they've already sustained too much damage to recover or not," said Hoggett.

The world is currently experiencing its second major coral bleaching event ...

The chart shows monthly numbers of carbon dioxide molecules per million molecules of dry air. Because of seasonal differences, levels are higher in May than in August.

Carbon dioxide acts like Earth’s thermostat: The more of it in the air, the more the planet warms.

In 2023, global levels of the greenhouse gas rose to 419 parts per million, around 50 percent more than before the Industrial Revolution. That means there are roughly 50 percent more carbon dioxide molecules in the air than there were in 1750.

As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, it traps heat and warms the planet.

The chart shows the change in global surface temperature relative to 1951–1980, versus global carbon dioxide levels. The dotted line shows the trend line.

Every additional amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to more warming, which is why climate scientists stress the need to get to zero emissions.

Currently, carbon dioxide levels are rising ...

A new report, released in time for global attention for Earth Day on April 22, highlights the impact of climate education on promoting behavior change in the next generation.

Despite people's deep connection to their local environment—whether it's blackouts in Toronto caused by raccoons, communities gearing up for a total solar eclipse lasting only minutes, chasing northern lights or hundreds of Manitoba kids excited about ice fishing—there remains inertia in climate action.

Sparking global momentum and energy in young people can go a long way to addressing climate change now and in the near future, says Bryce Coon, author of the report and Earth Day's director of education.

How knowledge becomes ingrained

Educators aspire to prepare learners for the global challenges of the times. Teachers have become increasingly concerned about best practices for supporting their charges as young people express anxiety about environmental ...

This could pave the way for entirely new organic solar modules. The fundamentals for conversion and storage using the molecule have now been published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Hopes remain high that solar energy will be a major driver of the energy transformation. However, as sunlight is a highly volatile source of energy, a solution must be found for storing energy efficiently.

"Until now, we have transferred electricity from solar modules that is not consumed immediately into a battery, where it can be used as and when required," explains Prof. Dr. Julien Bachmann, Chair of Chemistry of Thin Film Materials (CTFM) at FAU. "By repeatedly changing between chemical and electrical energy, at least 30% of the original converted energy is lost during this battery storage process."

Together with Michael Bosch, a doctoral candidate at the Chair CTFM, Bachmann hopes to coax a new property from a known material, making it either converting sunlight to ...

In 2023, NASA teamed up with IBM Research to create an AI geospatial foundation model. Trained on vast amounts of NASA's widely used Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) data, the model provides a base for a variety of AI-powered studies to tackle environmental challenges. In keeping with open science principles, the model is freely available for anyone to access.

Foundation models serve as a baseline from which scientists can develop a diverse set of applications, enabling powerful and efficient solutions. "Foundation models only know what things are represented in the data," explained Manil Maskey, the data science lead at NASA's Office of the Chief Science Data Officer (OCSDO). "It's like a Swiss Army Knife—it can be used for multiple different things."

Once a foundation model is created, it can be trained on a small amount of data to perform a specific task. To date, the Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concept Team (IMPACT) along with ...

As our climate systems become more erratic, clean sources of energy will become ever more precious; and scaling and diversifying sustainable ways to harness it will be key to our survival.

Climate change is affecting all of us in numerous ways. From the penguins of Antarctica to corporate executives in Tokyo, everyone is feeling the effects of our shifting climate system in one way or another.

Whether we accept it or not, the cumulative effects of human industrial activities are altering the atmosphere in a way that severe droughts and floods are becoming much more common; and this may only be the beginning of what’s to come.

The Amazon rainforest, until recently dubbed the “lungs of the planet,” now releases more C02 than it absorbs - the result of deforestation and a rapidly changing climate.

This changing landscape, on a local and global level, has led to a record-breaking drought that has expanded beyond the Amazon itself and into neighboring ...

Future oil and gas drilling will be limited across more than 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, the nation’s largest expanse of public land, under a sweeping Biden administration plan aimed at protecting sensitive ecosystems and wildlife.

The Interior Department’s final rule represents one of President Biden’s most significant steps to curb fossil fuel development on federal lands. It could help the president’s reelection campaign court young voters, a key Democratic constituency, after many youth climate activists criticized the administration’s approval of a massive drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope last year.

In a separate move, Interior announced Friday that it will block a controversial road crucial to operating a planned copper and zinc mine in northern Alaska, saying it would threaten Indigenous communities and fragment wildlife habitat. Together, the two decisions are aimed at safeguarding some of Alaska’s last wild places ...

The administration has blocked a proposed industrial road needed to mine copper in the middle of the state, and has banned oil drilling on 13 million acres in the North Slope.

The Biden administration expanded federal protections across millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness on Friday, blocking oil, gas and mining operations in some of the most unspoiled land in the country.

The Interior Department said it would deny a permit for an industrial road that the state of Alaska had wanted to build through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in order to reach a large copper deposit with an estimated value of $7.5 billion. It also announced it would ban drilling in more than half of the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an ecologically sensitive expanse north of the Arctic Circle.

Together, the two moves amount to one of biggest efforts in history to shield Alaskan land from drilling and mining. They are expected to face challenges ...

President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday safeguarded millions of acres in Alaska from fossil fuel drilling and mining - the latest in a frenzy of environmental actions in recent weeks that have drawn praise from green groups and condemnation from industry and Republican lawmakers.

The Interior Department finalized a rule that bars oil and gas development across more than 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve on Alaska’s North Slope. Established in 1923, the 23 million-acre reserve is the largest tract of federal land in the country and home to vast oil and gas deposits.

Interior also moved to block construction of the Ambler Road, a proposed 211-mile mining road that would have cut through a portion of Alaska’s pristine Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve to access billions of dollars’ worth of copper deposits.

Both actions ultimately reverse decisions from Donald Trump’s presidency.

“Today’s announcements underscore our ...

The decision by a Massachusetts solar company to abandon plans to build a $1.4 billion U.S. factory highlights the risks amid a flood of Chinese clean energy exports.

Reporting from Washington

Less than a year ago, CubicPV, which manufactures components for solar panels, announced that it had secured more than $100 million in financing to build a $1.4 billion factory in the United States. The company planned to produce silicon wafers, a critical part of the technology that allows solar panels to turn sunlight into electrical energy.

The Massachusetts-based company called the investment a “direct result of the long-term industrial policy contained within the Inflation Reduction Act,” the 2022 law that directed billions of dollars to develop America’s domestic clean energy sectors. CubicPV was considering locations in Texas, where it would employ about 1,000 workers.

But a surge of cheap solar panels from China upended that project. In February, CubicPV ...

Climate change will increase the future value of residential rooftop solar panels across the United States by up to 19% by the end of the century, according to a new University of Michigan-led study.

The study defines the value of solar, or VOS, as household-level financial benefits from electricity bill savings plus revenues from selling excess electricity to the grid - minus the initial installation costs.

For many U.S. households, increased earnings from residential rooftop solar could total up to hundreds of dollars annually by the end of the century, say the authors of the study, which is scheduled for publication April 19 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Given the average 25-year lifespan of a rooftop solar installation, a system built today will nearly experience 2050 weather," said study senior author Michael Craig, assistant professor of energy systems at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability and of industrial and operations ...

Earth's magnetic field protects us from the dangerous radiation of space, but it is not as permanent as we might believe. Scientists at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly present new information about an 'excursion' 41,000 years ago where our planet's magnetic field waned, and harmful space rays bombarded the planet.

Earth's magnetic field cocoons our planet from the onslaught of cosmic radiation streaming through space while also shielding us from charged particles hurled outward by the sun. But the geomagnetic field is not stationary. Not only does magnetic north wobble, straying from true north (a geographically defined location), but occasionally, it flips. During these reversals, north becomes south, south becomes north, and in the process, the intensity of the magnetic field wanes.

But there's also something called magnetic field excursions, brief periods in which the intensity of the magnetic field wanes and the dipole (or two magnetic poles) ...

Earth Day each year marks an opportunity to reflect on how far we have come as a society. Personally, I find it an exhilarating time to be part of the U.S. environmental movement that birthed Earth Day out of outrage over rampant use of toxic chemicals.

To address the global environmental and equity crisis of our generation, in the past three years Congress has passed two significant pieces of legislation advanced by the Biden administration that contain the most climate funding in the nation’s history: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). However, Congress has stubbornly refused to pass legislation that slashes carbon emissions directly. Instead, they have left much of that work to the discretion of the administration, which can only do so much without the say-so of Congress (aka statutory authority).

Is this recent progress significant? Absolutely. Recent executive action taken by the administration, alongside ...

The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket - chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.

With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.

The historic heat wave that besieged Mali and other parts of West Africa this month - which scientists say would have been “virtually impossible” in a world without human-caused climate change - is just the ...

Note: this blog post has been put together over the course of the week I followed the happenings at the conference virtually. Should recordings of the Great Debates and possibly Union Symposia mentioned below, be released sometime after the conference ends, I'll include links to the ones I participated in.

This year's General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) started on Monday April 15 both on premise in Vienna and online as a fully hybrid conference. This year, I decided to join virtually for the whole week, picking and chosing sessions I was interested in. At the time of publication this blog post was still an evolving compilation - a kind of personal diary - of the happenings from my perspective.

As this post will get fairly large, you can jump to the different days, via these links (bolded days have been added already):

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday

The already published prolog blog post contains general ...

What is the mass of a neutrino at rest? This is one of the big unanswered questions in physics. Neutrinos play a central role in nature. A team led by Klaus Blaum, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, has now made an important contribution in "weighing" neutrinos as part of the international ECHo collaboration. Their findings are published in Nature Physics.

Using a Penning trap, it has measured the change in mass of a holmium-163 isotope with extreme precision when its nucleus captures an electron and turns into dysprosium-163. From this, it was able to determine the Q value 50 times more accurately than before. Using a more precise Q-value, possible systematic errors in the determination of the neutrino mass can be revealed.

In the 1930s, it turned out that neither the energy nor the momentum balance is correct in the radioactive beta decay of an atomic nucleus. This led to the postulate of "ghost particles" that "secretly" ...

Brazil and France want the G20 to get behind a global minimum tax on billionaires’ wealth, also backed by IMF chief, but Germany rejects the idea

French Minister for Economy, Finance, Industry and Digital Security Bruno Le Maire (L) and Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad arrive at a joint press briefing on taxation during IMF/World Bank Sprint meeting in Washington on April 17, 2024. Photo by Yuri Gripas/ABACAPRESS.COMNo

The finance ministers of Brazil and France pushed this week for a tax on US-dollar billionaires of at least 2% of their wealth each year, with the $250 billion it could raise going to tackle poverty, hunger and climate change.

Brazil’s Fernando Haddad and France’s Bruno Le Maire promoted their proposal at the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, alongside IMF head Kristalina Georgieva and Kenyan finance minister Njuguna Ndung’u.

“In a world where ...

Led by Professor Sung-Yeon Jang and Professor Ji-Wook Jang from the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with Professor Thomas F. Jaramillo from Stanford University, the team has developed an eco-friendly perovskite-based photoelectrode system for NH3 production that has surpassed the commercialization standard of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) by an impressive 1.7 times, setting a new world record in ammonia production efficiency.

The work is published in the journal Nature Catalysis.

The system operates on the principle of reducing nitrate (NO3-) in water to produce NH3 using solar energy. This method not only offers a more environmentally friendly alternative to the conventional Haber-Bosch process, which heavily relies on fossil fuels, but also opens up opportunities for the synthesis of high-value compounds used in various industries such as fertilizers, food, and pharmaceuticals.

Key to the success of this technology ...

A study published in the journal Potato Research presents results on the response of spring and summer potatoes to climate change in South Korea. The study, conducted by scientists from the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus, investigates the effects of global warming on the potato crop and presents adaptation strategies.

"Our results show that the CO2 fertilization effect can offset the negative effects of rising temperatures and increase yields of spring potatoes by up to 60% if planting times are adjusted," explains Dr. Yean-Uk Kim, main author of the study and scientist at ZALF. The CO2 fertilization effect describes the phenomenon that higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere can improve the photosynthetic performance of plants, leading to faster growth and higher yields.

"Our results are important for developing long-term food security strategies and sustainable agricultural ...

But that's changing. Now we get flash floods much further inland, such as Broken Hill in 2012 and 2022 and Cobar, Bourke and Nyngan in 2022. Flash floods are those beginning between one and six hours after rainfall, while riverine floods take longer to build.

Why? Global warming is amplifying the climate drivers affecting where flash floods occur and how often. All around the world, we're seeing intense dumps of rain in a short period, triggering flooding—just as we saw in Dubai this week.

This means these systems, which usually bring most of the east coast's rain during cooler months, are now dumping more rain out at sea. Instead, we're seeing warm, moist air pushed down from the Coral Sea, leading to thunderstorms and floods much further inland.

This month, a coastal trough along the Queensland and New South Wales coasts and an inland trough resulted in unusually widespread flooding, triggering flooding in Sydney as well as inland.

What's changing?