My Climate Change News

The disaster, intensified by El Niño, is devastating communities across several countries, killing crops and livestock and sending food prices soaring.

An estimated 20 million people in southern Africa are facing what the United Nations calls “acute hunger” as one of the worst droughts in more than four decades shrivels crops, decimates livestock and, after years of rising food prices brought on by pandemic and war, spikes the price of corn, the region’s staple crop.

Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe have all declared national emergencies.

It is a bitter foretaste of what a warming climate is projected to bring to a region that’s likely to be acutely affected by climate change, though scientists said on Thursday that the current drought is more driven by the natural weather cycle known as El Niño than by global warming.

Its effects are all the more punishing because in the past few years the region had been hit by cyclones, unusually heavy rains and a ...

A drought that pushed millions of people into hunger across southern Africa has been driven mostly by the El Niño weather pattern - not climate change, scientists said on Thursday.

Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi have declared a national disaster over the severe dry spell that started in January and has devastated the agricultural sector, decimating crops and pastures.

Appealing for almost $900 million in aid this week, Zambia's President Hakainde Hichilema linked the lack of rains to climate change.

But scientists at the World Weather Attribution (WWA) research group found global warming had little to do with it.

"Over the past year, attribution studies have shown that many extreme weather events have been driven by a combination of both climate change and El Niño," said Joyce Kimutai, of Imperial College London.

"The southern Africa drought appears to be a rarer example of an event fueled primarily by El Niño."

In a study focusing on Zimbabwe, ...

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is experiencing one of its worst bleaching events since monitoring began nearly four decades ago, authorities say, with much of the famed reef showing signs of damage as warming ocean temperatures blight reefs worldwide.

Bleaching occurs when heat-stressed coral turn white after expelling symbiotic algae that provide food and color. It’s a result of abnormal ocean temperatures in the past year that scientists worry could represent a major change to Earth systems.

In the Great Barrier Reef marine park, 73 percent of the reefs surveyed have prevalent bleaching - which means that more than 10 percent of the coral cover is bleached, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which manages the area, said Wednesday. Very high and extreme bleaching was observed across nearly 40 percent of the reef system.

“Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, and coral reefs globally,” said Roger Beeden, the authority’s ...

Cloud seeding, although decades old, is still controversial in the weather community, mostly because it has been hard to prove that it does very much. No one reports the type of flooding that on Tuesday doused the UAE, which often deploys the technology in an attempt to squeeze every drop of moisture from a sky that usually gives less than 4 or 5 inches (10 to 13 centimeters) of rain a year.

"It's most certainly not cloud seeding," said private meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "If that occurred with cloud seeding, they'd have water all the time. You can't create rain out of thin air per se and get 6 inches of water. That's akin to perpetual motion technology."

Meteorologists and climate scientists said the extreme rainfall is akin to what the world expects with human-caused climate change, and one way to know for certain that it was not caused by tinkering with clouds is that it was ...

4 possible outcomes of the proposed flexibility on carbon credits.

At the heart of the debate lies a fundamental question about how to advance global decarbonization. Source: metamorworks via Shutterstock

On April 9, the board of trustees of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) announced forthcoming updates to its net zero standard, proposing to allow the use of some environmental attribute certificates (EACs), including carbon credits, towards Scope 3 abatement. Since then, climate watchdogs both within and beyond SBTi have hotly debated whether the new flexibility will maintain best practices in corporate climate action. At the heart of the debate is the role of carbon credits in corporate net zero plans, and whether they accelerate or delay global decarbonization.

The announcement comes as companies are falling 1.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) short of their current annual Scope 3 emission reduction targets under the existing SBTi net zero ...

China is bolstering its space capabilities and is using its civilian program to mask its military objectives, the head of the US space agency NASA said Wednesday, warning that Washington must remain vigilant.

"China has made extraordinary strides especially in the last 10 years, but they are very, very secretive," NASA administrator Bill Nelson told lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"We believe that a lot of their so-called civilian space program is a military program. And I think, in effect, we are in a race," Nelson added.

He said he hoped Beijing would "come to its senses and understand that civilian space is for peaceful uses," but added, "We have not seen that demonstrated by China."

Nelson's comment came as he testified before the House appropriations committee on NASA's budget for fiscal 2025.

He said the United States should land on the moon again before China does, as both nations pursue lunar missions, but he expressed concern that were Beijing ...

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is experiencing one of the most extensive and serious coral bleaching events in recorded history after a summer of extreme temperatures and oceanic heat effectively cooked the delicate corals that make up the iconic structure.

The Australian Institute of Marine Science recently completed an intensive, large-scale survey of the reef, which is a system of about 3,000 individual reefs that stretches nearly 1,500 miles along the coastline. For the first time, extreme levels of bleaching have been seen along all regions of the Great Barrier and around 75% of the reefs surveyed showed signs of prevalent bleaching.

Aerial photos released Wednesday show the widespread devastation underway after some areas of the reef were hit by record levels of heat.

Glacial isostatic adjustment reduces past and future Arctic subsea permafrost, Creel et al., Nature Communications:

Sea-level rise submerges terrestrial permafrost in the Arctic, turning it into subsea permafrost. Subsea permafrost underlies ~ 1.8 million km2 of Arctic continental shelf, with thicknesses in places exceeding 700 m. Sea-level variations over glacial-interglacial cycles control subsea permafrost distribution and thickness, yet no permafrost model has accounted for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), which deviates local sea level from the global mean due to changes in ice and ocean loading. Here we incorporate GIA into a pan-Arctic model of subsea permafrost over the last 400,000 years. Including GIA significantly reduces present-day subsea permafrost thickness, chiefly because of hydro-isostatic effects as well as deformation related to Northern Hemisphere ice sheets. Additionally, we extend the simulation 1000 years into the future for ...

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is set to visit India as his businesses seek new markets in the world's most populous nation, with electric carmaker Tesla - suffering a sales downturn in the United States - reportedly scouting factory locations.

Another Musk-owned business, satellite internet operator Starlink, is set to receive initial approvals to operate in India, a government source told AFP.

Also likely to be on the agenda for the self-described "free speech absolutist" is the large number of content takedown orders India's government imposes on X, the social media platform he took over in 2022.

"Looking forward to meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India!" Musk wrote on X last week without giving a date for the visit.

Indian media reports suggest the trip will begin as soon as Sunday and last two days, coming after months of aggressive courtship between the billionaire and Modi.

The two met last June in New York, after which Musk said ...

Atomic-scale analysis of local environments for the hydroxyl species is essential for revealing the intrinsic catalytic activity of zeolites and guiding the design of high-performance catalysts. However, many unfavorable factors prohibit the elucidation of their fine structures such as low quantity, meta-stable property, structural similarity, hydrogen-bonding environment, and long-range disordered nature.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Hou Guangjin and Prof. Chen Kuizhi from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) unraveled the precise structure of complex hydroxyl groups in zeolites with a comprehensive set of self-developed coupling-edited 1H-17O solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods. The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The 17O solid-state NMR would be a candidate to improve the analytical precision of zeolites if it could overcome the technical ...

If evolution was originally depicted as a tree, with different species branching off as new blooms, then new research shows how the branches may actually be more entangled. In "Hybrid speciation driven by multilocus introgression of ecological traits," published in Nature, Harvard researchers show that hybrids between species of butterflies can produce new species that are genetically distinct from both parent species and their earlier forebears.

Writing to Charles Darwin in 1861, naturalist Henry Walter Bates described brightly colored Heliconius butterflies of the Amazon as "a glimpse into the laboratory where Nature manufactures her new species." More than 160 years later, an international team of researchers led by biologists Neil Rosser, Fernando Seixas, James Mallet, and Kanchon Dasmahapatra also focused on Heliconius to document the evolution of a new species.

Using whole-genome sequencing, the researchers have shown that a hybridization event some 180,000 ...

Amazon wants the public and - especially other businesses - to know it's not giving up on its Just Walk Out technology.

Although the company is ditching the cashier-less checkout system at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores, it plans to sell the technology to more than 120 third-party businesses by the end of the year. Reaching that goal would double the number of non-Amazon enterprises that use Just Walk Out compared to last year.

"For us, really making sure that we can service that third-party market is the most important thing," Jon Jenkins, the vice president of Just Walk Out at Amazon, said in an interview. "We've definitely been reassuring people that we are in this for the long haul."

Just Walk Out uses cameras, artificial intelligence and sensor trackers to determine what's taken off of shelves, enabling customers to grab what they want and leave if they insert a credit card or another payment method at a store's entry gate.

The retailer first ...

Mining, oil and gas production, water wells, and other human activities involve extracting various fluids from or injecting them into the ground. Much attention has been paid to the toll these processes take on shallow groundwater and the water cycle. But less is known about how these activities affect the deep subsurface (500 meters to several kilometers deep), much of which was previously isolated for very long periods of geologic time.

In a new study in Earth's Future, Ferguson and colleagues illustrate how deep subsurface fluid flow rates associated with human activities such as oil and gas production most likely already exceed natural fluxes at these depths on a global scale. If such activities expand as expected, this rate will increase substantially, meaning anthropogenic fluid flow will likely leave a lasting imprint on the geologic record.

Much of this future expansion in human activity will be in the form of mining lithium from deep subsurface brines, ...

Using the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), astronomers have performed high-resolution observations of a recently detected extreme helium star designated EC 19529–4430. It turned out that EC 19529–4430 is the most metal deficient among the population of known extreme helium stars. The finding was reported in a research paper published April 5 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Extreme helium (EHe) stars are supergiants much larger and hotter than the sun, but less massive. They are almost devoid of hydrogen, which is unusual, as hydrogen is the most abundant chemical element in the universe.

EHes are characterized by relatively sharp and strong lines of neutral helium, which indicates low surface gravities and atmospheres dominated by helium. Besides helium, these stars also have significant amounts of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. The First EHe star was detected in 1942.

EC 19529-4430 is a recently discovered EHe in the Galactic halo, located ...

The U.S. Department of the Interior is expected to issue an environmental report that recommends denying a permit needed to build a 200-mile access road to the Ambler mining district, according to national news reports on April 16.

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority applied for the permit to develop the road to access the mining district in Northwest Alaska. The Trump administration had approved the right-of-way permit in 2020.

Conservation groups and Alaska tribal entities, including the Tanana Chiefs Conference, sued to overturn the decision. The Biden administration also said it identified legal flaws in the process related to subsistence impacts and tribal consultation. The new look at the project led to the suspension of the permit and the supplemental environmental review that's now underway.

Interior's decision was reported in Politico and the New York Times on Tuesday, both citing anonymous sources. Officials with the Interior ...

Now, a study from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, has an explanation for how this collective phenomenon forms: the storks are choosing to fly together. With data on lifetime migrations of 158 storks, the study provides the first evidence of the social preference of storks during migration.

In a paper, appearing in Current Biology, the researchers show that storks chose routes that were heavily trafficked by other storks. Yet, young storks tuned their routes to social hot-spots more than adults did.

"It's exciting to see the first clues that storks are actually choosing to fly with others," says Hester Brønnvik, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and first author on the study. "But as they gain migration experience, they also gain the independence to ignore social influences."

The results have unlocked the first answers to an old question about the world's most iconic migrant.

"We ...

And until recently, our knowledge of microorganisms in Antarctica was non-existent, where the effects of climate change are arguably the most profound. But a paper published recently in Conservation Biology provides a new snapshot of the changing composition of microorganisms in Antarctica.

Professor Belinda Ferrari with UNSW Sydney's School of Biotech & Biomolecular Science and colleagues visited Casey Station in Eastern Antarctica in 2019 to see whether projections made on soils sampled 14 years earlier about the disappearance of microbes thriving solely on chemicals in the atmosphere were correct.

They were saddened to find that they were.

"These bacteria are really rare," says Prof. Ferrari.

"They're the ones that live on trace gases in the atmosphere, but in Antarctica they're actually the dominant microbes."

The modeling on soils sampled 14 years earlier used a statistical method never before used with microbes, called Gradient Forest, ...

The work could guide the development of heavily doped Bi active fibers, which exhibit great potential for application in the next-generation optical amplifiers.

Bi-dopants exhibit multi-chemical states and can transform into a deactivated state when the bulk is drawn into the fiber at high temperature, which limits the development of high-performance Bi-active fibers.

"From the viewpoint of thermodynamics, the deactivation of Bi dopants cannot be prevented during the fiber drawing process, since the Bi-active center is not the thermodynamics stable at such temperatures," said Shifeng Zhou, corresponding author on the paper and professor at the South China University of Technology.

"Thus, a kinetics strategy must be considered to suppress the transformation of the Bi-active center to an inactive state during the fiber drawing process. Controlling the temperature-dependent viscosity of the materials might be one of the effective kinetic approaches to suppress ...

Sponsored: The challenge of decarbonizing heavy industry is significant. But “hard-to-abate” can be conquered with the right mix of approaches - and mindset.

Steel coils at U. S. Steel’s Big River Steel facility in Osceoloa, Arkansas. Image courtesy of U. S. Steel.

This article is sponsored by U. S. Steel.

When I worked at Dell, I often felt I was on the front line of making an essential industry more sustainable. During my tenure of over a decade, we collaborated across functions to increase the percentage of recycled materials in our products, boost our recovery of used electronics and transition our production capability to rely more on renewable energy. But when I started at U. S. Steel, I was humbled by the new challenge. Leading sustainability for a "hard-to-abate" industry is unlike anything I’ve seen in my career.

I joined U. S. Steel because I appreciated how this over 120-year-old company was taking real steps to move forward. It’s an ...