My Climate Change News

Amazon said Tuesday it would invest US$9 billion in Singapore over the next four years to expand its cloud computing capabilities in the city.

The announcement comes after fellow tech titan Microsoft unveiled billions of dollars of investment in the same sectors in Southeast Asia last week as firms look to take advantage of growing demand in the region.

Amazon said the figure doubles its investment in the city-state and will help it meet growing demand for cloud services and adopt artificial intelligence.

"AWS (Amazon Web Services) is doubling down on its cloud infrastructure investments in Singapore from 2024 to 2028 to support customer demand, and help reinforce Singapore's status as an attractive regional innovation launchpad...," Priscilla Chong, Country Manager of Singapore for AWS, said.

Amazon said its investment will support some 12,000 jobs in Singaporean businesses each year.

It is also partnering with the Singapore government to help ...

At the same time, the researchers note that the shipping companies' investments in the much-discussed technology, where exhaust gases are "washed" and discharged into the sea, have already been recouped for most of the ships. This means that the industry is now making billions of euros by running its ships on cheap heavy fuel oil instead of cleaner fuel.

"We see a clear conflict of interest, where private economic interests come at the expense of the marine environment in one of the world's most sensitive seas," says Chalmers doctoral student Anna Lunde Hermansson, who is one of the authors of the new study, published in Nature Sustainability.

The study has been prompted by the ongoing discussion of a potential ban on scrubber water discharge—where large volumes of polluted water are produced and discharged from the ships' exhaust gas cleaning systems. The issue is on the agenda at multiple levels within the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and is ...

They’re delivering solar power after dark in California and helping to stabilize grids in other states. And the technology is expanding rapidly.

How California powered itself in April 2021 …

and in April 2024.

Peak demand

average daily generation, by fuel type

Peak demand

25k

megawatts

Imports

20k

15k

Gas

Solar power

Batteries

Solar power

10k

Wind

5k

Hydro

Nuclear

0

12a.m.

5a.m.

10a.m.

3p.m.

8p.m.

12a.m.

5a.m.

10a.m.

3p.m.

8p.m.

How California powered itself in April 2021 …

and in April 2024.

average daily generation, by fuel type

Peak demand

25k

megawatts

Imports

20k

15k

Gas

Solar power

Batteries

Solar ...

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio, a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

Hosted by Katrin Bennhold

Featuring David Gelles and Raymond Zhong

The rains may have abated, but floodwaters continued their assault on southern Brazil Monday, with hundreds of municipalities in ruins amid fears that food and drinking water may soon run out.

Since the unprecedented deluge started last week, at least 85 people have died and more than 150,000 were ejected from their homes by floods and mudslides in Rio Grande do Sul state, authorities said.

The disaster, which experts and the government have linked to climate change, has left the state resembling "a scene out of a war," the state's governor Eduardo Leite said Sunday.

In total, 385 cities, towns and villages have been hit, many of which remain cut off from the world - without access to drinking water or electricity or any means of calling for help.

In Porto Alegre, the state capital with 1.4 million inhabitants, many suburbs remained under water even as the sun shone Monday.

"Last night, the water came up to the corner and had stabilized. Today, we ...

"When we collate dietary, climate and environmental data, we discover a unique platform for change," says the leader of the NOR-Eden Project, Professor Lene Frost Andersen.

The study of these collated data shows that if we change our diet so that it is in line with current guidelines, this will result in about 15% lower greenhouse gas emissions than our present eating habits produce. It would also lead to improvements in several other environmental indicators.

This entails eating less red meat, dairy products, sugary drinks, sweets and snacks and more wholegrain products, nuts, fruit and vegetables.

"It is important to provide Norwegian evidence on the connection between diet and sustainability. Many other countries have carried out similar studies, but since there is so much variation in environmental data from country to country, it is beneficial to have Norwegian data.

"And our findings confirm that our Norwegian diet has a significant carbon ...

Singlet oxygen is an oxidant. These chemical compounds can be beneficial—ozone in the stratosphere is one example—but can also cause stress to our lungs, contributing to the development of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease in the long term.

Cooking foods can release brown carbon, molecules with the potential to create oxidants when they absorb light. In addition, exposure to cooking emissions has been linked to chronic diseases in chefs.

Historically, it was thought there wasn't enough light indoors to have much reactive chemistry, but there are many light sources in modern kitchens.

Sprouts + sunlight = oxidant

They investigated by cooking three meals representing breakfast, lunch and dinner: pancakes, Brussels sprouts, and vegetable stir fry, sampling the air and exposing it to three different types of light: UV, sunlight, and fluorescent.

They detected singlet oxygen at around the same concentration for all three dishes. However, ...

It is beloved by Big Sur road trippers and is vital for local businesses. But intense storms, slides and fires imperil this highway. What does the future hold?

BIG SUR, Calif. - Workers dangle from a crane, drilling into the vertical face of rock that holds up one of the most famous and picturesque stretches of road in the world. They’re performing a delicate surgery on fragile geology in hopes that a single lane of traffic can safely flow to Big Sur before summer arrives.

Democrats say they are way more likely than Republicans to buy electric cars. Could that change?

Electric cars have taken off across the United States. Even amid news of slowing sales, the country sold almost 1.2 million fully electric vehicles in 2023, more than quadruple the number in 2019. Grocery stores and rest stops are installing charging stations across the country; electric cars have moved beyond niche status and are being produced by Ford, GM, Hyundai and many others.

Stay in the know about climate impacts and solutions. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Yale Climate Connections

For people who cook on a gas stove, it may be hard to imagine frying an egg or searing a steak without those familiar blue flames.

But acclaimed chef Justin Lee says there’s an alternative worth considering: an electric induction stovetop.

Lee: “There is a learning curve, without question, because there’s no visible fire … but it’s not something you should be afraid of.”

Lee is co-owner of Fat Choy - a Chinese vegan restaurant in Englewood, New Jersey. He says he loves cooking with induction.

Unlike conventional electric stoves, induction cooktops use electromagnetic energy to heat the metal in a pot or pan - providing quick, consistent heat at precisely the temperature you need.

And Lee says it can provide even higher temperatures than gas, which can be useful for Chinese cooking.

Lee: “We’re always searching ...

This approach presents a sustainable method for reducing greenhouse gas emissions while offering an avenue to produce clean energy.

Scientists have long tried to find a way to chemically convert CO2 into fuels like methanol. Methanol could potentially be used to power vehicles in a more environmentally friendly way.

While the conversion of CO2 to methanol has been industrialized, achieving this transformation on a large scale through electrochemical processes has proven to be a significant challenge.

"Our approach is unique because we are able to bring and bridge all this knowledge that each field has on the same problem. We have scientists and engineers all within one team, brainstorming and gathering insights to design and understand the system in the best way possible," said co-primary author Kevin Rivera-Cruz, who recently received a doctorate in chemistry from U-M.

Cobalt phthalocyanine acts like a molecular hook for CO2 or CO molecules. The ...

Milk and cookies. Peanut butter and jelly. Macaroni and cheese. All delightfully perfect pairs. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) discovered another promising pair: marine energy and additive manufacturing.

Since February 2022, researchers at NREL and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been exploring how additive manufacturing could complement marine energy technologies. More commonly known as 3D printing, additive manufacturing is a process that uses thin layers of material (like polymers, metals, ceramics, or others) to create a physical object from a three-dimensional model. A model is created in a digital file, which transfers to the printer.

"In the very beginning, we quickly figured out that typical plastic additive manufacturing processes wouldn't produce strong enough components to handle ocean forces," said Paul Murdy, a mechanical engineer at NREL and principal investigator for the marine energy additive ...

A lot of them don’t work and some might even be harmful. But there are things you can do if you really have to fly.

Credit...Naomi Anderson-Subryan

In recent years, many airlines have phased out the little box encouraging you to “offset your flight’s emissions!” on their checkout pages. Perhaps because so few customers took advantage of them, or perhaps because research has shown that many offset projects are ineffective or worse.

But last we checked, people are still flying. A lot. And the planet is still warming. A lot. So you may still be wondering: Should I offset my air travel? If so, how?

A carbon offset is a credit that you can buy to make up for your emissions. So if you fly from New York to San Francisco, releasing around 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, you can purchase an offset, funding a project that will remove or store that same amount of carbon dioxide elsewhere, often by planting or preserving trees.

At least ...

The problem arises when one tries to simultaneously trace the nuclear and electronic motion, as their dynamics are hard to disentangle, and they occur at comparable ultrafast timescales. That is why, in the past few years, capturing the molecular dynamical evolution in real-time has turned into one of the most burning challenges shared by physicists and chemists.

However, in a recent Nature Photonics publication, ICFO researchers Dr. Stefano Severino, Dr. Maurizio Reduzzi, Dr. Adam Summers, Hung-Wei Sun, Ying-Hao Chien led by the ICREA Prof. at ICFO Jens Biegert, together with theory support by Dr. Karl Michael Ziems and Prof. Stefanie Gräfe from the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, have presented a powerful tool based on attosecond core-level spectroscopy to investigate molecular dynamics in real-time, which is capable of overcoming the aforementioned challenges.

They have benchmarked their method tracing the evolution of gas-phase furan, an organic ...

But a paradigm shift is under way, as the world's environmental crisis intensifies and regulations become stringent. Financial viability alone is no longer enough. Projects are facing increasing scrutiny, based on their carbon footprint.

So is the construction industry ready to build beyond financial budgets and embrace a new era of carbon-conscious construction?

While Victoria's regulations, incentives and certifications are nudging the construction industry towards sustainable construction practices, there remains a significant gap between ambition and action.

Despite the ambition to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, buildings are yet to be designed and delivered according to a project-level carbon budget. While there are ambitious targets, the building sector still has a long way to go to bridge the gap between this ambition and action.

What exactly is a carbon budget?

Unlike a project's financial budget, a carbon budget sets a limit on the ...

In a study published recently in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers measured body mass, local climate and pathogen intensity to assess how these factors influence heat tolerance and its population-level variation among individuals of the species Xenoglossa pruinosa, commonly known as the hoary squash bee. They found that variation in heat tolerance was influenced by size, sex and infection status of the bees.

"Small-bodied, ectothermic—or cold-blooded—insects are considered to be highly vulnerable to changing climate because their ability to maintain proper body temperature depends on external conditions," said study author Laura Jones, who led the research as a doctoral candidate in ecology at Penn State and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Understanding how organisms tolerate temperature extremes is critical for assessing the threat climate change poses to species' distribution and persistence."

Jones noted ...

A bill sitting on Gov. Ron DeSantis' desk would end the state's support of renewable and clean energy and keep Florida reliant on fossil fuels, critics say.

If signed, the law would reverse 16 years of state policy, finishing the work started by former Gov. Rick Scott and undoing Gov. Charlie Crist's signature piece of environmental legislation.

Most troubling to environmentalists, it would eliminate any mention of climate change, even though mostly flat Florida is extremely vulnerable to global warming, as already seen with rising waters in the Keys, Miami Beach and Tampa Bay.

The bill (HB 1645) would ban offshore wind power while encouraging exploring emerging technologies in nuclear energy, a frightening prospect to those who remember nuclear plants at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Crystal River.

"I think it really forces us to back away from the progress we've been trying to make," said state Rep. Lindsay Cross, D-St. Petersburg, an environmental ...

Authorities in southern Brazil scrambled Sunday to rescue people from raging floods and mudslides in what has become the region's largest ever climate catastrophe, with at least 78 dead and 115,000 forced from their homes.

Entire cities were underwater, with thousands of people cut off from the world by the floodwater, brought by days of torrential rains.

In Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state, residents stood on rooftops hoping to be rescued as others in canoes or small boats navigated streets that have become rivers.

After what one climatologist called "a disastrous cocktail" of climate change and the El Niño effect, more than 3,000 soldiers, firefighters and other rescuers were trying to reach residents, who were in many cases trapped without basic supplies such as running water or electricity.

Civil defense officials said at least 105 people were missing in the latest of a string of catastrophic weather events to hit the South ...

A coordinated, multiagency effort is essential to save Southern California's coastal rail corridor from sea-level rise and erosion, state Sen. Catherine Blakespear warned last week.

"The data is clear and the message more urgent than ever that our coastline near the rail line is at critical risk of failure," said Blakespear, D-Encinitas, at a hearing held by the Subcommittee on LOSSAN Rail Corridor Resiliency that she chairs in Sacramento.

Seven different state and regional administrators updated the subcommittee Monday on the status of problem areas along the 351-mile-long Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo rail corridor, focusing primarily on trouble spots in San Diego County and San Clemente in neighboring Orange County. The route is San Diego's only passenger and freight train connection to Los Angeles and the rest of the United States.

Sections of the railroad in Del Mar and San Clemente are especially vulnerable.

About 1.7 miles of the track in ...