My Climate Change News

Kristy Dyer has a background in art and physics and consulted for Silicon Valley

We have not one but two crises on our hands: COVID and global warming.

The COVID crisis is immediate, it has killed 550,000 in North America alone. Global warming is coming slowly but inevitably, we are still headed for a 1.5 C tipping point. That tipping point will make COVID look like a mild flu season.

What happens if we reach this tipping point? We will lose the West Antarctic ice sheet, which will cause a rise in sea level of three metres. We lose the Greenland ice sheet which could add seven metres of additional sea level rise. The Amazon rainforest could dry out due to changes in rainfall and catch fire, releasing enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The permafrost here in Canada contains methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. When the permafrost melts, it releases that methane, a one-way process that will further accelerate ...

“The president has been clear to all of us - words matter, tone matters and civility matters,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.

WASHINGTON - Days after President Biden took office, the Bureau of Land Management put a scenic landscape of a winding river at the top of its website, which during the previous administration had featured a photograph of a huge wall of coal.

At the Department of Homeland Security, the phrase “illegal alien” is being replaced with “noncitizen.” The Interior Department now makes sure that mentions of its stakeholders include “Tribal” people (with a capital “T” as preferred by Native Americans, it said). The most unpopular two words in the Trump lexicon - “climate change” - are once again appearing on government websites and in documents; officials at the Environmental Protection Agency have even begun using the hashtag #climatecrisis on Twitter.

And across the government, L.G.B.T.Q. references are popping up ...

Over the past decade, Colombia has set increasingly ambitious renewable energy goals. In 2020 alone, the government pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 51 percent and install 4,000 megawatts of new, non-hydro, renewable electricity by 2030 - about 24 percent of the country’s projected electricity capacity.

These goals aren’t just promises - in 2019, the government took its first steps toward achieving these targets by launching a renewable energy auction for 1,374 MW of new wind and solar power generation. While this action is an important start, the country will need to significantly ramp up its efforts over the coming years.

Assuming the auction’s resources come online by 2022, Colombia still must install an average of 280 MW each year for the subsequent nine years in order to reach the government’s goal. This means adding about 55 percent more renewables capacity each year than the country had built in total prior to January 2020. In the Latin America ...

Edward Klump and Mike Lee, E&E News reporters

Widespread furor over last week's Texas blackouts showed no sign of subsiding yesterday as five grid directors announced plans to resign and new questions emerged about the grid, skyrocketing electricity bills and gas flaring.

Francis Chung/E&E News

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will question New Mexico Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland again this morning in her bid for Interior secretary. It may be her last chance to sway GOP lawmakers, some of whom were disappointed with her performance yesterday.

Mario Cantu/Cal Sport Media/Newscom

Widespread furor over last week's Texas blackouts showed no sign of subsiding yesterday as five grid directors announced plans to resign.

Francis Chung/E&E News

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will question New Mexico Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland again this morning in her bid for Interior secretary. It may be her last chance to ...

Biologically active compounds from the marine fungus Penicillium dimorphosporum protect cells from paraquat, the highly toxic herbicide with no remedy, and might enhance the action of some drugs. The fungus was isolated from soft coral collected in the South China Sea during an expedition on the Akademik Oparin research vessel. Scientists of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) and G. B. Elyakov Pacific Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry reported the results in Marine Drugs. Paraquat is an herbicide compound highly toxic for animals and humans. About 100 countries, including the United States, apply it for crop cultivation and weed control. Dozens of countries, including Russia, have banned the poisonous compound. The problem of paraquat harm to people is widely known in India. Farmers who work in the fields risk dying from a dangerous dose of the substance.

FEFU specialists, together with Russian and foreign colleagues, have found that compounds from the marine-derived ...

Developments in global border control technologies are providing innovative ways to address issues relating to migration, asylum-seeking and the introduction of illegal goods into countries. But while governments and national security can benefit from this, advanced surveillance technology creates risks for the misuse of personal data and the violation of human rights.

Technology at the border

One of US President Joe Biden's first actions was to introduce a bill that prioritizes "smart border controls," as part of a commitment to "restore humanity and American values to our immigration system."

These controls will supplement existing resources at the border with Mexico. They will include technology and infrastructure developed to enhance the screening of incoming asylum seekers and prevent the arrival of narcotics.

According to Biden, "cameras, sensors, large-scale X-ray machines and fixed towers" will all be used. This likely entails the use of ...

In Finland, stormy weather can happen at any time of year. This is an issue because Finland is heavily forested, and falling trees can knock out power lines and disable transformers, causing power blackouts for hundreds of thousands of people a year. Researchers at Aalto University and the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to try and predict when these weather-inflicted blackouts happen. Their new method can now predict these storms days in advance, allowing electricity companies to prepare their repair crews before the storm has even happened. "Our previous model looked at highly local thunderstorms with short lifespans. We've now made a new mode that looks at large low-pressure storms, which uses weather prediction data up to 10 days ahead," said Roope Tervo, Ph.D. candidate at Aalto University and software architect at FMI.

The model categorizes storms into three categories: No damage; low damage (1 - 140 ...

Using the radial velocity (RV) technique, astronomers have discovered a new super-Earth alien world as part of the HADES and CARMENES programs. The newfound exoplanet, designated GJ 740 b, orbits a bright star some 36 light-years away and is at least three times more massive than the Earth. The finding is reported in a paper published February 18 on the arXiv pre-print server. Thanks to the radial velocity (RV) technique, over 600 exoplanets have been detected so far and 116 of them have been found around M dwarfs. The HArps-n red Dwarf Exoplanet Survey (HADES) and Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Echelle Spectrographs (CARMENES) projects have been crucial in the search for new alien worlds orbiting these most common stars in our galaxy.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Borja Toledo-Padrón of the University of La Laguna, Spain, reports the detection of another exoworld around a nearby M dwarf known as GJ 740. ...

Free market can be overruled if necessary to create post-Covid growth, ex-PM advises former rival

Boris Johnson must be “muscular” in reshaping the economy to bring about a green recovery from the coronavirus crisis, former prime minister David Cameron has said, calling for an active policy of industrial intervention.

Cameron, who as prime minister from 2010 to 2016 oversaw the UK’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, said the lessons from that recession were clear. “My advice would be, from what I learnt, is that as well as the framework [of climate and economic policy], you have to roll up your sleeves and be quite muscular in your interventionism,” he told the Guardian in an interview.

“The government has got a strong framework for green energy policy and in green investment, much of which we put in place, but it needs to combine that with active assistance and helping with key green investments that can make a difference,” he said. “There’s every ...

BlackRock is stepping up its engagement on climate issues with companies.//Image courtesy of BusinessGreen.

BlackRock has told 1,000 of the biggest polluters in its portfolio to publicly disclose emissions across their core businesses and wider value chain alongside "rigorous" decarbonization targets, or risk the asset manager voting against them at shareholder meetings.

The world's biggest asset manager, which looks after around $8.67 trillion of investments worldwide, last Wednesday unveiled further details of its approach for engaging with companies on their climate efforts in 2021 and beyond, in a bid to provide "greater specificity" around its expectations for management teams.

Companies should as standard disclose their Scope 1 and 2 emissions - covering their core business activities and energy use - in addition to setting "rigorous" short, medium and long-term greenhouse gas reduction targets, BlackRock said. It added that companies in carbon ...

Organic molecules that capture photons and convert these into electricity have important applications for producing green energy. Light-harvesting complexes need two semiconductors, an electron donor and an acceptor. How well they work is measured by their quantum efficiency, the rate by which photons are converted into electron-hole pairs. Quantum efficiency is lower than optimal if there is "self-quenching", where one molecule excited by an incoming photon donates some of its energy to an identical non-excited molecule, yielding two molecules at an intermediate energy state too low to produce an electron-hole pair. But if electron donors and acceptors are better spaced out, self-quenching is limited, so that quantum efficiency improves.

In a new paper in Frontiers in Chemistry, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) synthesize a novel type of organic light-harvesting supramolecule based on DNA. The double helix of DNA acts as a scaffold to arrange ...

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison plan to coordinate their efforts to make tech giants pay media outlets for their content, Ottawa said Tuesday after a conversation between the two leaders. "The prime ministers noted the growing cooperation between Canada and Australia on the regulation of online platforms," a statement from the Canadian prime minister's office said.

"They agreed to continue coordinating efforts to address online harm and ensure the revenues of web giants are shared more fairly with creators and media."

Their conversation, which took place Monday, came after Facebook blocked Australian users from accessing news content on its platform in response to a regulatory bill being considered in the country's Parliament.

The US social media giant announced Tuesday, however, it would remove the news ban after the move sparked outrage in Australia and internationally.

The Australian bill, the ...

Levies on flying, imports and other high-carbon services could raise £27bn a year by 2030, says Zero Carbon Campaign

Taxing carbon dioxide emissions would be popular with voters, polling suggests, as the government moots ways to put a price on carbon that could help tackle the climate crisis and fund a green recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

Carbon taxes could be levied on energy suppliers, transport including flying, food, imports and other high-carbon goods and services. At present, the UK levies implicit taxes on carbon, for instance through duties on petrol and diesel, and some heavy industries pay an effective price on carbon. But there are no taxes for consumers that are explicitly geared to the carbon emissions created by the goods and services that they buy.

Two-thirds of people said a carbon tax was a fair way to raise money, and that the proceeds should be spent to benefit the country, according to a poll of 2,000 people carried out by Opinium ...

China says its Tianwen-1 spacecraft has entered a temporary parking orbit around Mars in anticipation of landing a rover on the red planet in the coming months. The China National Space Administration said the spacecraft executed a maneuver to adjust its orbit early Wednesday morning Beijing time and will remain in the new orbit for about the next three months before attempting to land. During that time, it will be mapping the surface of Mars and using its cameras and other sensors to collect further data, particularly about its prospective landing site.

That follows the landing of the U.S. Perseverance rover last Thursday near an ancient river delta in Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient microscopic life.

A successful bid to land Tianwen-1 would make China only the second country after the U.S. to place a spacecraft on Mars. China's solar-powered vehicle, about the size of a golf cart, will collect data on underground water and look for evidence that the ...

Ernst and Young says results reflect pressure from investors to make sustainability a priority in decision making

Australian bosses say the climate crisis is the biggest challenge facing their businesses – in contrast to their overseas counterparts, who have ranked recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic their top concern.

“Climate change impacts” were rated the No 1 concern by 18% of 155 Australian executives surveyed by accounting firm Ernst & Young, followed by technological disruption (17%) and “the continuing Covid-19 pandemic” (15%).

Globally, the positions of climate change and the pandemic were reversed, with the pandemic considered the biggest challenge by 18%, the economy second with 12% and global heating a distant third at just 9%.

“We think this reflects both the fact that locally the pandemic has been handled comparatively well and also our C-suite consider Covid’s impacts to be short term,” EY’s managing director of strategy and ...

Climate change represents perhaps the biggest challenge facing humanity, therefore education has an important role to play in teaching students about how we might mitigate the problems but also how to cope with what might be termed eco-anxiety. A team from Canada writing in the International Journal of Higher Education and Sustainability, suggests that part of a well-rounded university education must provide students with the tools with which to address the challenges presented by the environmental crisis we all face. Part of this education should show them how to be responsible eco-citizens but also give them the skills to become creative, solution-oriented thinkers. With such people entering adulthood and becoming the innovators and leaders of the future humanity might be able to cope with the acute problems and address the chronic problems facing climate and the environment.

Laura Sims and Marie-Élaine Desmarais of the Université de St. Boniface and Rhéa Rocque of the ...

Photochromic materials can reversibly change their color and optical properties when irradiated with ultraviolet or visible light. However, they are made from organic compounds that are expensive to synthesize. Fortunately, for the first time, scientists from Ritsumeikan University, Japan, have discovered fast-switching photochromism in an inexpensive inorganic material: copper-doped zinc sulfide nanocrystals. Their results pave the way for a plethora of potential applications ranging from smart adaptive windows and sunglasses to anti-counterfeiting agents. Isn't it convenient when office building windows adaptively darken according to the intensity of sunlight? Or when standard glasses turn into sunglasses under the sun and switch back as you enter a building? Such feats are possible thanks to photochromic materials, whose optical (and other) properties change radically when irradiated by visible or ultraviolet light.

Today, virtually all fast-switching photochromic ...

The need for snappy data exchange is clear, especially in an era of remote work. "There's an explosion in the amount of information being shared between computer chips - cloud computing, the internet, big data. And a lot of this happens over conventional copper wire," says Holloway. But copper wires, like those found in USB or HDMI cables, are power-hungry - especially when dealing with heavy data loads. "There's a fundamental tradeoff between the amount of energy burned and the rate of information exchanged." Despite a growing demand for fast data transmission (beyond 100 gigabits per second) through conduits longer than a meter, Holloway says the typical solution has been "increasingly bulky and costly" copper cables.

One alternative to copper wire is fiber-optic cable, though that has its own problems. Whereas copper wires use electrical signaling, fiber-optics use photons. That allows fiber-optics to transmit data quickly and with little energy dissipation. But ...

Emma Dumain, E&E News reporter

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will question New Mexico Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland again this morning in her bid for Interior secretary. It may be her last chance to sway GOP lawmakers, some of whom were disappointed with her performance yesterday.

Francis Chung/E&E News

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will question New Mexico Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland again this morning in her bid for Interior secretary. It may be her last chance to sway GOP lawmakers, some of whom were disappointed with her performance yesterday.

Mario Cantu/Cal Sport Media/Newscom

Widespread furor over last week's Texas blackouts showed no sign of subsiding yesterday as five grid directors announced plans to resign.

Francis Chung/E&E News

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will question New Mexico Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland again this morning in her bid for Interior secretary. It ...

Following the selection of three Earth Explorer candidate missions to enter a first feasibility study in September 2018, ESA has chosen one of the candidates, Harmony, to move to the next phase of development. Harmony is envisaged as a mission with two satellites that orbit in formation with one of the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites to address key scientific questions related to ocean, ice and land dynamics. Earth Explorers are research missions applying new observation techniques to respond to the needs of the scientific community in their quest to understand different aspects of the Earth system and the interactions that bind the system as a whole. Advancing science and technology, they address questions that have direct bearings on societal issues such as the availability of food, water, energy and resources, public health and climate change.

Three concepts, Daedalus, Harmony (formerly called Stereoid) and Hydroterra (formerly called G-Class), have spent the last ...