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From energy to resources, data centers have grown too greedy. In 2025, AI and climate change, two of the biggest societal disruptors we're facing, will collide. The summer of 2024 broke the record for Earth’s hottest day since data collection began, sparking widespread media coverage and public debate. This also happens to be the year that both Microsoft and Google, two of the leading big tech companies investing heavily in AI research and development, missed their climate targets. While this also made headlines and spurred indignation, AI’s environmental impacts are still far from being common knowledge. In reality, AI’s current “bigger is better” paradigm—epitomized by tech companies’ pursuit of ever bigger, more powerful large language models that are presented as the solution to every problem—comes with very significant costs to the environment. These range from generating colossal amounts of energy to power the data centers that run tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney to the millions of gallons of freshwater that are pumped through these data centers to make sure they don’t overheat and the tons of rare earth metals needed to build the hardware they contain. Data centers already use 2 percent of electricity globally. In countries like Ireland, that figure goes up to one-fifth of the electricity generated, which prompted the Irish government to declare an effective moratorium on new data centers until 2028. While a lot of the energy used for powering data centers is officially “carbon-neutral,” this relies on mechanisms such as renewable energy credits, which do technically offset the emissions incurred by generating this electricity, but don’t change the way in which it’s generated. Places like Data Center Alley' in Virginia are mostly powered by nonrenewable energy sources such as natural gas, and energy providers are delaying the retirement of coal power plants to keep up with the increased demands of technologies like AI. Data centers are slurping up huge amounts of freshwater from scarce aquifers, pitting local communities against data center providers in places ranging from Arizona to Spain. In Taiwan, the government chose to allocate precious water resources to chip manufacturing facilities to stay ahead of the rising demands instead of letting local farmers use it for watering their crops amid the worst drought the country has seen in more than a century. My latest research shows that switching from older standard AI models—trained to do a single task such as question-answering—to the new generative models can use up to 30 times more energy just for answering the exact same set of questions. The tech companies that are increasingly adding generative AI models to everything from search engines to text-processing software are also not disclosing the carbon cost of these changes—we still don't know how much energy is used during a conversation with ChatGPT or when generating an image with Google’s Gemini. Much of the discourse from Big Tech around AI’s environmental impacts has followed two trajectories: Either it’s not really an issue (according to Bill Gates), or an energy breakthrough will come along and magically fix things (according to Sam Altman). What we really need is more transparency around AI’s environmental impacts, by way of voluntary initiatives like the AI Energy Star project that I’m leading, which would help users compare the energy efficiency of AI models to make informed decisions. I predict that in 2025, voluntary initiatives like these will start being enforced via legislation, from national governments to intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations. In 2025, with more research, public awareness, and regulation, we will finally start to grasp AI’s environmental footprint and take the necessary actions to reduce it. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Trees make clouds by releasing small quantities of vapors called “sesquiterpenes.” Scientists are learning more—and it’s making climate models hazy. Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It's like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols that affect the climate. Clouds are the largest source of uncertainty in climate predictions. Depending on location, cloud cover can reflect sunlight away from land and ocean that would otherwise absorb its heat—a rare perk in the warming world. But clouds can also trap heat over Arctic and Antarctic ice. Scientists want to know more about what causes clouds to form, and if that effect is cooling or heating. And most of all, says Dada, “We want to know how we humans have changed clouds.” In the sky, aerosol particles attract water vapor or ice. When the tiny wet globs get large enough, they become seeds for clouds. Half of Earth’s cloud cover forms around stuff like sand, salt, soot, smoke, and dust. The other half nucleates around vapors released by living things or machines, like the sulfur dioxide that arises from burning fossil fuels. At CERN, scientists replicate that process by injecting the steel chamber with vapors that represent specific environments. (It’s called the CLOUD chamber, for Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets.) For example, they can mimic the gases found above cities. But Dada, who normally works at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, went to CERN to peer into the past. Her team of scientists from around the world wanted to recreate the air above forests, because a “pristine” atmosphere hints at what cloud formation was like before industrialization. “We need this comparison to the time when there were no human emissions,” she says, “so we can fix our climate models.” In a paper published this month in Science Advances, Dada’s team establishes a new heavy hitter in cloud creation: a kind of chemical released by trees. Trees emit natural volatiles like isoprene and monoterpenes, which can spark cloud-forming chemical reactions. Dada’s new work focuses on an overlooked class of less abundant volatiles called sesquiterpenes, which smell woody, earthy, citrusy, or spicy, depending on the molecule and type of plant or microbe that emits them. The team shows that sesquiterpenes are more effective than expected for seeding clouds. A mere 1-to-50 ratio of sesquiterpene to other volatiles doubled cloud formation. The role of trees in seeding clouds is important, because it suggests what the sky above some regions might be like if governments manage to tamp down sulfur emissions. In a world with less pollution, plants and trees will become more dominant drivers of cloud formation, an echo of the premodern world. This research could help refine estimates of what the atmosphere was like before industrialization. Maybe we’ve been undercounting the world’s aerosol population by overlooking a large portion of those that come from trees. If so, climate models will need retooling. “New particle formation is a pretty hot topic right now,” says Paquita Zuidema, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami who was not part of the study. “We’re coming to realize more and more that we don't really know exactly what a pristine atmosphere is like.” While anthropogenic emissions dominate cloud formation in populated areas, plant volatiles dominate over more pristine land elsewhere. Lab tools have only recently become sensitive enough to understand which ones contribute the most. Many discoveries about sesquiterpenes are relatively recent. In 2010, researchers detected them near the Amazon’s forest floor. Higher up in the canopy, sesquiterpenes were harder to track. This suggested that ozone was turning sesquiterpenes into cloud-seeding aerosols. Dada reported a similar system in Finnish forests and peatlands last year. “We are seeing more and more because our instruments are much better now,” she says. “They are not only in the Amazon.” When Dada and her colleagues started the new study, they aimed to test sesquiterpenes’ cloud-making abilities by mimicking the air in a forest that hasn't been corrupted by anthropogenic emissions. They began with a baseline—measuring what happens after ionizing an atmospheric mix of the most common “biogenic” volatiles: isoprene and α-pinene, a monoterpene. This combination seeded clouds, as expected. Then, the team did the same and mixed in a sesquiterpene called β-caryophyllene. It comes from pine and citrus trees and smells like cracked pepper. Dada hypothesized that β-caryophyllene should react chemically, forming aerosols and eventually a cloud. She and her team stood in the control room monitoring 15 screens displaying real-time readouts of data like aerosol sizes and concentrations. They would know she was right if a graph of particle sizes on one of the screens changed colour. It would grow and turn from blue to banana yellow as cloud seeds become more numerous. On the first run, the graph turned yellow. Dada was right. (“We were all screaming ‘Banana! Banana! Banana!’” she recalls.) Adding just 2 percent by volume of β-caryophyllene to the mix doubled cloud formation and caused particles to grow faster. It was the first experiment demonstrating how sesquiterpenes seed clouds. Dada says it showed that even though these are only a fraction of the compounds that trees exhale, “the contribution is huge.” “A little bit of sesquiterpene added has a very large effect,” says Jiwen Fan, an atmospheric scientist with Argonne National Lab not involved in the study. Even when sesquiterpenes create “ultrafine” aerosols that aren’t large enough to seed clouds, they can still affect weather. In 2018, Fan showed that when huge rainclouds “ingest” ultrafine aerosols, they form new droplets that invigorate thunderstorms. To Fan, the new data suggests that sesquiterpenes may help better account for the global flow of aerosols. Aerosols make clouds deflect more heat away from Earth—an effect known as “radiative forcing.” (That’s the idea behind plots to geoengineer the atmosphere with aerosols: Artificially seeding clouds that can cool the ground.) More aerosols mean more reflective clouds that look whiter, last longer, and rain less. But scientists have trouble simulating just how many aerosols should be accounted for in models. “It’s been a long-standing problem,” Fan says. “A lot of climate models overestimate anthropogenic aerosol forcing.” Perhaps that is because they are underestimating the prevalence of natural aerosols—from microbes, plants, and trees—before the industrial revolution. “Maybe what we're using as our reference point may actually not be as low-aerosol as we thought,” agrees Zuidema. By quantifying how trees make clouds, scientists could better predict the climate’s future—and past. Industrial emissions reduce some warming through radiative forcing, since sulfur aerosols can create reflective clouds. But if biogenic aerosols were more abundant than expected before industrialization, then the contributions from industry matter less. It’s hard to predict what this recalculation will tell us about global warming, because there are so many moving parts in a dynamic climate. For example, heat stress, extreme weather, and droughts cause plants to release more biogenic volatiles—which seed more clouds. Deforestation and heat stress are pushing treelines to migrate to higher altitudes and latitudes. That affects where clouds form. “It’s a feedback loop,” Dada says. “The climate is affecting the cloud formation, and the clouds are affecting the climate.” Better climate models will help scientists predict the best mitigations: “If we need more clouds, if we need less clouds,” Dada says. The catch, though, is that climate models are incredibly computationally demanding. It may not be easy to incorporate the physics of something as tiny as these tree aerosols. Dada is back at CERN this autumn for more tests. Her team now wants to see how anthropogenic emissions, like sulfur dioxide, affect the ability of plants to seed clouds. They might slow each other down—or speed each other up. Their goal is to broaden their conclusions to regions that aren’t as pristine as a forest, where there are many kinds of intermingled emissions. “We're trying to add anthropogenic factors, to have a more realistic view about almost everywhere around the world,” she says. Source

With natural snow becoming scarcer and artificial powder woefully unsustainable, Europe’s mountain resorts are starting to look at life beyond downhill skiing. IT’S LATE AUGUST, and Italy is in the middle of its third record-setting heat wave of the summer, but at the bottom of the slopes in Fai della Paganella, a small ski resort in the Dolomites, a queue is forming for the chairlift. Instead of ski jackets and bobble hats, the people waiting are dressed like 21st-century gladiators—with knees, chests, and elbows covered in plastic body armor. Instead of skis, their weapons of choice are downhill mountain bikes: elaborate machines that look like off-road motorcycles and often cost as much as a small car. Scenes like this are becoming increasingly common across Europe as ski resorts, feeling the impact of the climate crisis, look to diversify their appeal and tap into alternative sources of income. Paganella is remarkable in that it now attracts more bikers in summer than skiers in winter. “Sixty-five percent of our visitors now come outside of the ski season—between April and November,” says Luca d’Angelo, the resort’s destination manager. “The switch,” as d’Angelo calls it, “came in 2018 or 2019.” It wasn’t originally part of some master plan, he explains. When the resort first opened a lift for mountain bikers as an experiment in 2011, “my colleagues weren’t thinking necessarily about climate change as a theme,” he says. But as snowfall becomes less and less reliable, Paganella’s decision to invest in mountain-biking infrastructure looks increasingly prescient. A mountain biker riding the Paganella bike park.PHOTOGRAPH: ALFIE BACON The science around what the climate crisis means for ski resorts makes for grim reading. In a paper published in Nature Climate Change in August 2023, a team lead by Hugues François of the University of Grenoble projected the “snow supply risk” for 2,234 European ski resorts, based on global average temperature increases of 2 and 4 degrees Celsius. Under the 4-degree warming scenario, they found that 98 percent of the resorts would face “a very high risk” to their natural snow supply. Even if global temperature rises can be kept to 2 degrees (a threshold likely to be exceeded by the middle of this century), more than half of the places the team looked at would struggle for natural snow. Many ski resorts, of course, now rely on artificial snowmaking to make up for natural shortfalls: 90 percent of ski slopes in Italy, 70 percent in Austria, 53 percent in Switzerland, 37 percent in , and 25 percent in are now covered by snow cannons, according to data released by the the Swiss lift operators association, Seilbahnen, in 2021. But snowmaking is no silver bullet. For the purposes of the study, François’ team assumed that ski resorts could cover, on average, 50 percent of their slopes with cannons. They found that 71 percent would still face a snow supply risk under the 4-degrees warming scenario, and 27 percent under 2 degrees. Snowmaking also requires huge amounts of water and energy, ultimately contributing to the crisis it’s designed to solve. For Luca Albrisi, the whole idea that ski resorts could continue to operate as they currently do, plugging any gaps with artificial snow, is fundamentally flawed. An environmental activist and filmmaker from the Italian village of Pejo, Albrisi is the lead author of the Clean Outdoor Manifesto. This mission statement, cosigned by thousands of outdoor industry professionals since its launch in 2020, has subsequently coalesced into an influential activist group. To have a future, he believes mountain communities need to escape from “the current model of development,” which is dangerously dependent “on what’s essentially a tourism monoculture based on downhill skiing.” “Of course, we recognize that in the past, skiing allowed many valleys [across the Alps] to lift themselves out of poverty,” Albrisi says. “But it’s obvious that it’s a model that’s now obsolete.” He argues that ski resorts should preserve any untouched terrain they have left for low-impact activities like snowshoeing or ski touring (where participants climb the mountain under their own steam), instead of spending millions on new skiing infrastructure—clearing forests for new lifts and pistes and installing the artificial lakes and subterranean pipe-work for the snow cannons now needed to keep them operational. On March 12, 2023, this led to the counterintuitive sight of over a thousand people—including ski instructors, alpine guides, and other mountain professionals—coming together to protest against proposed new ski facilities at 11 sites in Italy. Organized by Outdoor Manifesto signatories, in collaboration with other groups, the demonstration’s slogan, “Reimagine Winter: No more new lifts,” has particular resonance in the peninsula, where, according to detailed research by Legambiente, Italy’s leading environmental NGO, there are now 249 ski lifts lying abandoned and unused because of climate change. The group also identified 138 more lifts that have been “temporarily” closed for at least one winter, and a further 84 which they classified as “partly open, partly closed”—all of which are at risk of permanent closure. The larger issue, according to Vanda Bonardo, lead author of the Legambiente report, is the misallocation of resources. “Several of those which are ‘partly open, partly closed’ are only still standing because of public money—our money,” she explains. “This spring, Italy’s tourism minister, Daniela Santanchè, allocated 210 million euros ($225 million) just to support this decaying industry, while other sectors which exist in the shadow of skiing receive just crumbs,” Bonardo says. “That’s not right, given that it’s our money, and that this model of skiing has no future.” As alternatives, Bonardo points to places like Panarotta 2002, a low-lying Italian ski resort that closed its lifts last winter, and the proposal to rebrand it as “Panarotta Skialp-Natur”—a destination dedicated to ski touring in winter and hiking in summer. A similar initiative has proved successful, albeit on a small scale, in the nearby ski resort of Gaver. The lifts there closed for the final time at the end of the 2013–14 season, and the skeletal pylons still strewn across the hillside have long since turned to rust. But thanks largely to the efforts of Stefano Marca, the enterprising local owner of the Blumonbreak Hotel, Gaver’s slopes now attract thousands of ski tourers on winter weekends. Ski touring at Gaver ski resort.PHOTOGRAPH: TRISTAN KENNEDY Gaver’s new business model still relies on there still being some snow (if not the consistent coverage needed to keep a lift operation economically viable). But there are now some “ski” resorts where skiing no longer features as part of the business plan at all. When Felix Saller met his partner, Christin Hellermann, at a mountain-bike event, the small ski hill her family owned near Dortmund, , hadn’t had enough snow to open for over a decade. “They opened for two weekends in 2017, when there was really a lot of snow,” Saller says, “but they hadn’t opened at all for five years before that, and it really stopped being a business around 2000 or 2001.” With his background in the bike industry, Saller realized the place had potential. In July 2022, three years after writing their first business plan, he and Hellermann reopened the resort as Green Hill Bike Park. Their total investment, Saller estimates, was just 2 million euros. Converting the main ski lift, he says, couldn’t have been easier. “There’s a simple hook system called EasyLoop, invented by a guy in Austria, which allows you to convert any drag lift [which tows skiers and snowboarders up the mountain] for bikes.” While the old family-run ski resort was very much a small-scale affair, the new bike park is anything but. “We obviously haven’t had a whole summer season yet,” Felix says, “but in the last half year we had 30,000 mountain bikers, so in a whole season it will be 50 or 60,000.” In August 2023, they hosted the Swatch Nines, one of the most prestigious international contests in the world of mountain biking—a huge coup for such a new business. “I don’t have the latest ticket sales summary, but by my estimate, around 7,000 people visited on three days that weekend,” Saller says. Unsurprisingly, this successful revival of a once-dead resort has turned heads within the industry. “We have a lot of requests from other ski resorts—in Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and also here in —asking us to bring our ideas there,” Saller says. “I would say the next years will be a boom for mountain bike parks, especially for all the ski areas under 1,500 meters.” In Fai della Paganella, where the lifts top out at 2,100 meters, Luca d’Angelo isn’t worried about the winter season disappearing completely just yet. “It’s still very important,” he says, pointing out that lift ticket sales are still worth 12 million euros in winter, compared to 2.5 million in summer. “But pay attention,” he says, explaining that when you factor in the expense of electricity needed for snowmaking, and the relative costs of preparing a mountain bike trail versus a ski piste, the profit margins even out—or even swing the other way. “It’s not an official calculation, but we estimate that every 1 euro a biker spends is worth six or seven times the euro spent by a skier,” he says. These days, Paganella markets itself less as a ski resort, and more as what d’Angelo calls “a year-round destination.” For the first time this year, he explains proudly, the transition between seasons was seamless. Paganella’s top lifts closed for skiing on April 9, and “that same day, we opened lifts lower down the valley for mountain biking.” The swish of skis on snow giving way to the whir of bike cassettes made it obvious where the future lies. Source

Canada’s worst wildfire season ever has put unprecedented strain on the country’s firefighters. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced, with millions more choking on toxic wildfire smoke. Next summer could be far worse. CANADIAN FIREFIGHTER SCOTT Rennick knew this summer would be bad. It was May 2023 and Rennick was commanding one of British Columbia’s six incident management teams, or IMTs, specialized crews tasked with managing the most complex fires. His 18-person crew had just arrived in the northeast city of Fort Saint John to fight an aggressive bushfire. The province’s wildfire service was still in the midst of hiring, training, and recruiting when the human-caused fire was discovered on Saturday, May 13. By Sunday, flames had spread over 7,000 acres. By Monday morning, it had multiplied fivefold and now covered an area roughly the size of Staten Island. But the worst was yet to come. Drought had already rendered the land hot and dry. The third ingredient for a natural-disaster-level fire was wind. That came Monday afternoon as a cold front pushed directly into its path, creating gusty 25 mph winds. In a few hours, the blaze spread 9 miles in various directions, approaching Fort Saint John, British Columbia’s oil and gas capital with a population of 21,000. Rennick says the terrifying glory of a firestorm—ferocious fires fueled by powerful winds drawn into the flames—never ceases to amaze, even after 30 years on the job. It sounded and moved like a freight train, sucking up tens of thousands of pounds of oxygen as it swallowed everything in sight. For 18 straight hours, Rennick and his crew fought alongside dozens of firefighters and heavy equipment operators to create firebreaks wide enough to catch flying embers. Then, exhausted, they rested. At the ad hoc incident command post, Rennick looked up the three-month forecast on his laptop. Western Canada was covered by a deep red blob—low precipitation, warm temperatures. Later, as the commander relayed the weather report to his crew, someone asked him how many deployments he predicted that season. A typical summer is four. Rennick held up six fingers. “Hopefully I’m wrong,” he added. As of this week, Rennick’s crew were returning home from their fifth deployment, tackling one of 1,050 active wildfires in Canada—fires becoming bigger, hotter, longer lasting, and more frequent than ever before. He’s already gearing up for his sixth deployment, and with up to six weeks left in the wildfire season, a seventh is likely. Rennick, who grew up in the city of Vernon in British Columbia, has battled fires most of his life—as did his father and grandfather. “This is just a very different environment we find ourselves in now,” he says. “People who don’t believe in climate change can come talk to me.” At the time of writing, British Columbia is in the midst of a province-wide state of emergency. Up to 200 buildings are estimated to have been destroyed by wildfires in the Okanagan region. And the fires are still burning. “In that kind of extreme situation, it’s no different than trying to put your hand in front of a tsunami or a hurricane and say, ‘Stop,’” says Rennick. Two years ago, during a record-breaking heat wave, he watched a grassfire engulf the town of Lytton, annihilating it in 23 minutes. And yet the intensity and frequency of this summer has exceeded anything Rennick thought possible. An aerial view shows charred remains on the side of the road beside the highway in Enterprise, Northwest Territories, Canada, on August 20, 2023. Enterprise and Hay River were put on evacuation orders prior to the city of Yellowknife.PHOTOGRAPH: ANDREJ IVANOV/GETTY IMAGES In June, Rennick’s second deployment of summer 2023 took him to the town of Edson in Alberta, where his IMT joined hundreds of firefighters from as far afield as Australia in a battle against a campaign fire. This type of inferno, once rare but now alarmingly common, is so large and so powerful that it can take months of aerial and ground operations to contain. Campaign fires can even survive a Canadian winter, smoldering under the snow as temperatures fall to minus 60 degrees Celsius before bursting back to life as zombie fires in the spring. At one point, smoke from the fire near Edson formed pyrocumulonimbus clouds that injected a plume of soot 31 miles up into the stratosphere, which then traveled around the globe. Formed by only the extreme wildfire conditions, pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs, are a firefighting nightmare. They can generate lightning, thus igniting more fires; they create windstorms that spread the blaze; and, though rarely, they can create “firenados,” pyrogenic vortex columns that can reach heights of 3,000 feet and speeds up to 140 mph. Like campaign fires, pyroCbs were a once novel phenomena more often associated with volcanic eruptions. The US Naval Research Laboratory only started tracking them a decade ago. A typical year sees 40 or 50 worldwide. The previous record, set in 2021, was 100. By August of 2023, Canada alone had generated 133 of 153 pyroCbs observed by the NRL. “This,” says Rennick, “is the most unprecedented season in the history of the country.” Unprecedented doesn’t even begin to describe what Canada is up against. Close to 6,000 fires have scorched 34 million acres, an area the size of New York State, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. That’s three times bigger than anything ever recorded in the US, and 10 times the 10-year average for Canada, which, historically speaking, was already well above average. Over 150,000 Canadians are currently displaced, including two-thirds of the population of Northwest Territories and, at the time of writing, 35,000 people in British Columbia. The speed of change is being driven by a warming world. A warmer world means more moisture is sucked from the ground, resulting in drier fuels. The drier the fuel, the easier it is for a fire to start and spread and burn with greater intensity. That moisture being sucked from the ground also creates more thunderstorms. With this comes more lightning, which is responsible for starting half of Canada’s wildfires. These fires, due to their remoteness, account for 90 percent of the area burned in Canada. Many of these fires aren’t just hard to reach—they’re hard to even detect. This gives them more time to spread, with many fires in remote areas of Canada monitored rather than extinguished. So much of Canada is burning, and so quickly, that the seed banks needed for forest regeneration work could be stripped bare within years. But disappearing forests won’t mean fewer wildfires, as repeatedly scorched land will become fire-prone grasslands and shrublands. If this summer becomes the norm, rather than the exception, the ecosystems that humans depend on for clean water, pollinators, and food will be altered—with unknown consequences. “We don't really know where it’s going, and that is very frightening,” says Daniel Perrakis, a fire research scientist with Natural Resources Canada. People sit in Bryant Park amid a smoky haze from wildfires in Canada on June 7, 2023 in New York City.PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID DEE DELGADO/GETTY IMAGES WITH FIRE COMES smoke. As wildfires have torn through Canada, much of North America has choked under a cloud of noxious air. To date, Canada’s fires this summer have emitted 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, a quarter of total global fire-carbon emissions so far this year. This has made Canada, a country of 40 million people, the world’s fourth biggest polluter. In 2022, Canada ranked 10th on that list. That smoke affects the health and well-being of the whole planet. But it poses a particular risk to those living in some of North America’s most populous cities, who have experienced unprecedented levels of air pollution in recent months. As a result, Canada’s firefighting competence is being scrutinized as nations deploy hundreds of their own firefighters to the country, while also pressuring Ottawa to get a grip on the crisis. In June, the east coast of North America struggled through days of dense smoke pushed south from Quebec. Toronto’s CN Tower vanished, and Manhattan was painted a dense, Blade Runner-esque orange. The smog was so thick that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey limited driving speeds on bridges. The smoke, which originated from fires burning 750 to the miles north, soon covered an area of North America home to more than 145 million people. Across much of the Northeast of the US and southeastern Canada, the Air Quality Index, which government agencies use to measure pollutant levels and health risks, shot from between 50 and 70, a healthy to normal range, to over 400—on a scale that maxes out at 500. Emergency health warnings persuaded many people to stay indoors. Stock prices at air filtration manufacturers rose by as much as 15 percent. The wildfire smoke from Quebec sat in the atmosphere for weeks, spanning the Atlantic Ocean and dimming skies as far away as Portugal. For many on the east coast of North America, the orange skies of June were a wake-up call. For more than a decade, increasingly severe wildfires had ravaged North America’s West, from California in the south to Alaska in the north. Now, the age of flames had arrived in the east. When it comes to wildfire smoke, the biggest danger is PM 2.5, the fine particulate matter that gives the sky a haunting orange hue. “When you breathe these very small particles, they can make it deep into the lungs, right down to the alveolar oxygen exchange region,” says Sarah Henderson, the science director for the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health in Canada, who’s been studying the health effects of wildfire smoke for more than 20 years. “Then we get inflammation that can affect all organ systems in the body.” There are still many unknowns about the long-term consequences of inhaling wildfire particles, Henderson says, in part because sustained exposure is a relatively new phenomenon. A 2022 Lancet article examining Canadian data over 20 years linked wildfire exposure to slightly higher rates of lung cancer and brain tumors; however, the researchers said more data was needed. Still, there’s reason to believe that even occasional exposure can have repercussions that last a lifetime, especially in children. By examining the long-term effects of other sources of air pollution, Henderson says there’s reason to believe that wildfire smoke might affect respiratory, neurological, and prenatal health. A Stanford Medicine study of children from Fresno, California, who were exposed to smoke from two large wildfires in 2014 found negative effects on immunity-related blood cells and genes. “We have to go into every wildfire season with the idea that it might be the worst season we've ever seen—and that includes both wildfire risk and smoke,” says Henderson. “That is the reality of the changing climate and the wildfire regime in Canada.” To that end, she thinks officials may need to consider rewriting building codes to insulate against indoor smoke penetration. Homes sit on Kalamalka Lake in smoke while wildfires continue to burn in Lake County, British Columbia, and surrounding regions on August 20, 2023.PHOTOGRAPH: PAIGE TAYLOR WHITE/GETTY IMAGES Mike Flannigan, science director of the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science and a professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, calls this summer a “wake-up year” for Canada, which has struggled to curb its wildfire crisis due to a lack of a nationwide strategy, funding, and political willpower. “We're going into uncharted territory. And we're going faster than I would have thought possible,” he says. As a result, Canada needs firefighters—lots of them. With 5,500 wildland firefighters, about 5.5 per fire at the moment, Canada has called in international fire crews from the southern hemisphere and the Pacific Northwest of the US to help. But even with the assistance of thousands of foreign firefighters, Canada has struggled to procure enough air tankers to water-bomb new fires in the critical first few hours. And so the officials tasked with fighting Canada’s wildfires have been forced to choose, allowing many fires to spread unless they pose an immediate threat to human life or critical infrastructure. This week the Globe and Mail reported that Canada’s foreign workforce was 680 firefighters, down from 1,754 in July. That fall has been attributed to contracts expiring, but also to firefighters needing to return home to fight fires raging in their own countries. Flannigan believes Canada needs to hire 2,500 more wildland firefighters within its borders to meet current needs. But this is an industry plagued by high attrition rates, due to mental burnout and a predominantly seasonal and volunteer workforce. A 2016 report from Ontario FireRanger, the province’s wildland firefighters, found that the organization was “stuck in a cycle of continuously reiterating basic training” due to high turnover. Things haven’t improved much since. On top of working 12 to 16 hour days for weeks on end, this year Canadian firefighters have faced extraordinary danger. On-site fatalities are almost unheard of in Canada, but four firefighters have died this summer, including two young men in British Columbia. Rennick says the unrelenting season has made it difficult for his colleagues to process the emotional toil. “Once myself and my colleagues stop and they go back to their regular jobs or part-time jobs, the full gravity of the season will hit us,” he says. In a normal year, Rennick would expect a staff turnover of 20 percent, but next year will certainly be higher. To that end, Natural Resources Canada recently allocated CA$37.9 million ($27.9million) to recruiting, training, and retaining firefighters in high-risk zones. But several experts and politicians, including Flannigan, want federal officials to go further and are calling for the creation of a national firefighting service. At present, there’s no single national strategy guiding wildfire management in Canada. A patchwork of provincial, territorial, and national park units instead share resources via the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. But the center, founded in 1982, has been overwhelmed by the scale of the current crisis. Historically, Canada’s wildfires were staggered across both time and geography. Now, huge fires are occuring well out of season and in regions previously less affected, including the Maritime Provinces and Northern Quebec and Ontario, all while the country struggles to increase and update its fleet of aging water bombers. “We're going into uncharted territory. And we're going faster than I would have thought possible.” MIKE FLANNIGAN, SCIENCE DIRECTOR OF THE CANADIAN PARTNERSHIP FOR WILDLAND FIRE SCIENCE Coordination between woodland and urban firefighters is another challenge. In 2016, a fire at Fort McMurray in Alberta showed what happens when communication breaks down. The Beast, as it came to be known, took locals by surprise, resulting in a last-minute evacuation of 88,000 people on a single highway through flames and embers. An inquiry into the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history reported that local and provincial authorities weren’t even sharing the same radio frequencies. “This was particularly problematic when it came to air attack,” the report found. “Alberta Forestry aircraft had no way to forward a direct message to municipal firefighters.” When the fire did reach the city, local emergency management learned about it from social media. Such catastrophes, combined with this record-breaking summer, have also led Canada to consider the creation of a bureau similar to America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In June, Bill Blair, then Canada’s emergency preparedness minister, told the CBC that his government had begun discussions with the head of FEMA about creating a Canadian equivalent, as well as a joint agency similar to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, to manage cross-border emergencies—including wildfires. Public Safety Canada, the country’s closest equivalent to FEMA, struggles to address large-scale events because of its broad focus, of which only a small part is dedicated to emergency management. The agency spends just $4.70 per Canadian for national emergencies, compared to FEMA’s budget of $87.87 per American. Public Safety Canada’s primary role this summer has been to deploy the armed forces to assist in building fire breaks and assist in evacuations. Wildfires have long been a part of the Canadian landscape, but urban development over the past 70 years, especially in the west, have created a new problem. Today, more people than ever are living right next to nature, with forests butting right up against new urban developments. The staggering destruction and death toll of fires in Paradise, California, in 2018, and this month’s tragedy on Maui, were partly attributed to the intermingling of urban development and vegetative fuels. Despite its vast size, Canada faces similar problems. “We’re reaching a point where creation of some agency like FEMA has become a necessity,” says Ali Asgard, a disaster and emergency management professor at York University in Toronto. He adds that Public Safety Canada, or perhaps a future emergency management agency, also needs to do more to prepare communities for managing hazardous pollution levels. As smoke and flames cross the southern border, pressure is mounting on Canadian officials to ensure there isn’t a repeat of this summer—or worse. Like the climate crisis itself, managing the wildfire crisis is politically complex. Though fire suppression tactics have changed over the past two generations, Canada is currently dealing with a fire deficit of 100 to 150 years. This has created an oversupply of tinder that should have been cleared long ago by healthier fire cycles. Fire plays an important ecological role in the dense, carbon-packed boreal forests that cover more than half of Canada and 14 percent of the world, something many Indigenous people have long understood. Fires can help reduce pest infestations, open water channels, and improve soil health. But Canada’s woodlands changed with industrial techniques that extinguished fires with full force, resulting in more overgrown, homogenous, and flammable landscapes. Some of the most effective prevention techniques are also highly unpopular, such as preemptive fire bans and forest closures during high-risk periods, because they interfere with camping, hunting, and other recreational activities. Even more controversial is the tactic of prescribed fires—literally fighting fire with fire, by ridding forests of flammable underbrush during low-risk times, or back-burning during active fires to prevent wildfires from spreading. Controlled burns can be politically challenging, especially during an active firefight, when the public is sick of breathing smoke or concerned about prescribed fires going rogue. But, explains Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Metis scientist and Parks Canada’s Indigenous fire specialist, controlled burns are one of our best tools, because they essentially replace fires of chance with fires of choice. A resident collects supplies after a supply drop during a wildfire in the evacuated town of Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, on Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023.PHOTOGRAPH: COLE BURSTON/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES Cardinal Christianson’s role at Parks Canada, the federal agency charged with protecting the country’s natural and cultural heritage, is to work on partnering with Indigenous communities to apply burning practices that have been suppressed by colonization. “Indigenous people have always been trying to push to be more involved in fire management in Canada and especially in having cultural fire on the landscape,” says Cardinal Christianson. Such practices are often family-oriented, involving children and elders, and range from burning the underbrush while there’s still snow on the ground to burning an overgrown bush to protect a berry patch. Since colonization, government regulators have suppressed much of this knowledge, but many First Nations have never stopped treating the land with fire—they just went underground. Today, many of Canada’s Indigenous people are frustrated with governments’ “two-tiered system,” which often prohibits cultural burning while appropriating Indigenous fire knowledge for use on massive prescribed fires. “There’s a lot of concern that agencies will come and extract the knowledge that they want and put it into their agency practices, but then Indigenous people still won’t be at the table,” says Cardinal Christianson. The frustration among Indigenous Canadians is amplified by the disproportionate impact of wildfires on their communities. A recent study by Cardinal Christianson and her colleagues examined Canadian evacuations from all causes spanning 1980 to 2021. The researchers found that 37 percent of people on First Nations reserves have already survived at least one wildfire evacuation. Moreover, Indigenous communities comprised nearly half of all fire evacuations in Canada, and nearly all smoke evacuations, since 1980. Across North America, many people are only now beginning to understand the threats from fire and smoke that people in the other half of the continent have faced for centuries, but with increasing and intensifying regularity. The prognosis is grim. More land will burn, more people will be displaced, many more again will breathe toxic air. But, beyond that, says Flannigan, if fires on this scale continue, the forest they are burning through will soon vanish entirely. Yet the fires that have burned across Canada this summer, and continue to burn, won’t become the “new normal,” says Flannigan. Instead, he says, things will only get worse. “I often use Dante’s circles of hell,” he says. “I’m not sure what circle we're on—three, four?—but there's more circles below us, and that's where we're going.” This summer has made the urgency of the situation unavoidably clear: Canada, and the world, needs a plan—and fast. Source

Study finds ‘direct evidence’ of polar amplification on continent as scientists warn of implications of ice loss Antarctica is likely warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the world and faster than climate change models are predicting, with potentially far-reaching implications for global sea level rise, according to a scientific study. Scientists analysed 78 Antarctic ice cores to recreate temperatures going back 1,000 years and found the warming across the continent was outside what could be expected from natural swings. In West Antarctica, a region considered particularly vulnerable to warming with an ice sheet that could push up global sea levels by several metres if it collapsed, the study found warming at twice the rate suggested by climate models. Climate scientists have long expected that polar regions would warm faster than the rest of the planet – a phenomenon known as polar amplification – and this has been seen in the Arctic. Dr Mathieu Casado, of the Laboratoire des Science du Climat et de l’Environnement in and lead author of the study, said they had found “direct evidence” that Antarctica was also now undergoing polar amplification. “It is extremely concerning to see such significant warming in Antarctica, beyond natural variability,” he said. Antarctica is the size of the continental US and Mexico combined, but has only 23 permanent weather stations and only three of these are away from the coast. Casado and colleagues examined 78 Antarctic ice cores that hold a record of temperature and then compared those temperatures to climate models and observations. The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found Antarctica was warming at a rate of between 0.22C and 0.32C per decade, compared to 0.18C per decade predicted by climate models. Part of the warming in Antarctica is likely being masked by a change in a pattern of winds – also thought to be linked to global heating and the loss of ozone over the continent – that has tended to reduce temperatures. Dr Sarah Jackson, an ice core expert at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study, said the findings were “deeply concerning”. “All our projections for future sea level rise use these low rates of warming. Our models might be underestimating the loss of ice that we might get,” she said. Dr Danielle Udy, a climate scientist and ice core expert at the University of Tasmania, who was not involved in the paper, said the research was timely “given the extreme events we have been seeing in Antarctica”. Scientists are scrambling to understand why Antarctic sea ice has been at record low levels over the last two years, with some suggesting global heating could now be affecting the region. Thousands of emperor penguin chicks likely died in late 2022 after the usually stable sea ice supporting colonies in West Antarctica melted. Dr Kyle Clem, a scientist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, has studied recent record high temperatures at one weather station at the south pole. Clem said Antarctica’s climate was subject to large natural swings, but Casado’s study had shown “a detectable change in Antarctic climate and an emergence of anthropogenic polar amplification”. He said the results would be crucial for understanding the future of the continent “as greenhouse gases continue to increase”. “The implications of this study are of particular importance for considering future changes in Antarctic sea ice, terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and potentially even sea level rise,” Clem said. “If anthropogenic polar amplification is already occurring in the Antarctic that exceeds that simulated by climate models, then future warming will likely be greater than that currently projected by climate models.” A warming Antarctic, he said, would also likely lead to further losses of sea ice that would have implications for “ocean warming, global ocean circulation, and marine ecosystems”. “As far as sea level rise, ocean warming is already melting protective ice shelves in West Antarctica and causing the West Antarctic ice sheet to retreat.” Greater warming could also lead to more melting of coastal ice shelves that protect glaciers. “This has already been seen on the Antarctic peninsula in recent decades, and it could become a more widespread occurrence around Antarctica sooner than anticipated in a more strongly warming Antarctic climate,” he said. Source

Wind and snow don't always bring about the coldest winters in the Arctic. When snow is blown across sea ice, an international team of researchers has found it can indirectly contribute to regional warming. That happens because snow in the Arctic contains tiny particles of sea salt. If these aerosols are whipped up into the atmosphere, new findings suggest they can enhance cloud formation by up to tenfold. Clouds in the Arctic are a two-edged sword when it comes to regional warming. Their presence can reflect sunlight, but they can also impede heat from the surface of the Earth escaping into the atmosphere at night. The trapped heat ultimately has a warming effect on the ground below. Today, climate scientists agree that the Arctic has warmed many times faster than the rest of the world in the past half-century, but how many times faster is still up for debate. Climate models don't always match up with each other or the realities at hand. The paradoxical interaction between Arctic wind and snow could be one of many overlooked factors. Human-made air pollutants that are blown into the Arctic's atmosphere are known to trigger regional fog, called Arctic haze, which can have a warming effect, too. But sea salt particles from the region were not thought to end up in the atmosphere in the same way. "Sea salt particles in the Arctic atmosphere aren't surprising, since there are ocean waves breaking that will generate sea salt aerosols. But we expect those particles from the ocean to be pretty large and not very abundant," explains atmospheric scientist Jian Wang from Washington University in St. Louis. "We found sea salt particles that were much smaller and in higher concentration than expected when there was blowing snow under strong wind conditions." Using data from an expedition that drifted in the Arctic for over a year, Wang and colleagues observed snow blowing more than 20 percent of the time between November and April. Data from an aerosol-observing system allowed the team to then compare three blowing events to the makeup of clouds overhead. Their models estimate that sea salt aerosols from blowing snow contribute to more than a quarter of the particles in Arctic clouds. "Considering the absence of sunlight in the winter and spring Arctic, these clouds have the capacity to trap surface long-wave radiation, thereby significantly warming the Arctic surface," says first author Xianda Gong, a former postdoctoral researcher in Wang's lab. The observational evidence fits nicely with other recent studies, which merely hint at the possibility of sea salt aerosols from snow flying up into the atmosphere on the wings of the wind. "Model simulations that don't include fine sea salt aerosols from blowing snow underestimate aerosol population in the Arctic," says Wang. "Blowing snow happens regardless of human warming, but we need to include it in our models to better reproduce the current aerosol populations in the Arctic and to project future Arctic aerosol and climate conditions." The study was published in Nature Geoscience. Source

A set of vertical stripes progressing from shades of blue to red and purple has become a symbol of Earth’s changing climate. Emblazoned on items ranging from the sleeves of soccer jerseys in England and beer cans in Arizona to a climate handbook and knitted scarves, climate stripes are a widespread phenomenon that has engaged people in conversations about the warming world. The stripes’ creator, Ed Hawkins, is a climate scientist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. An astrophysicist turned climate expert, Hawkins realized he wanted to become a scientist in his teenage years. “I used to read lots of popular science books and magazines and became fascinated by the stories of people and the discoveries they were making,” he said. In the mid-1990s, Hawkins earned a master’s degree in astrophysics and then moved on to a Ph.D. at the University of Nottingham. “I felt I needed something that could be more directly useful to people.” “I loved astrophysics, and I still do,” Hawkins said. “But at the same time, I felt I needed something that could be more directly useful to people.” Hawkins isn’t sure what made him realize that studying climate was a viable option, but he decided to pursue another master’s degree, this time in climate science at the University of Reading. It wasn’t hard to find common ground between astrophysics and climate change. “They are both observational sciences, as you can’t do controlled experiments,” he said. “Just like we have models for the weather and climate, there are models for the universe in astrophysics.” These similarities, he recalled, smoothed what could otherwise have been a bumpy transition. These stripes, representing average global temperatures for the period 1850–2022, change from mainly blue to mainly red in recent years, illustrating the rise in average temperatures. Credit: Ed Hawkins, University of Reading, CC BY 4.0 “I think it is very helpful to bring people from outside the [climate] field to provide fresh perspectives and bring in new techniques and insights,” he said. One of Hawkins’s fresh perspectives translated into a success story in climate communication. Climate stripes sprang from a collaboration with children’s author and poet Nicola Davies at the 2018 Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in Wales. The stripes evolved from a spiral representation that Hawkins had already been using since 2016 to convey the climate urgency message and had already gone big; the visual had been displayed at the opening of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. “I’m really glad about the stripes’ power to start conversations about climate change.” Being a visual learner helped Hawkins think about how to communicate climate data. “When I started, I had to learn very fast about climate science [to advance] in my new role, so making visuals was always something interesting to me,” he shared. Hawkins’s work has given him wide recognition, including the Royal Meteorological Society’s Climate Science Communication Award in 2017 and a Member of the Order of the British Empire appointment in 2020. “I’m really glad about the stripes’ power to start conversations about climate change,” Hawkins said. —Meghie Rodrigues (@meghier), Science Writer Source

The heatwaves battering Europe and the US in July would have been "virtually impossible" without human-induced climate change, a scientific study says. Global warming from burning fossil fuels also made the heatwave affecting parts of China 50 times more likely. Climate change meant the heatwave in southern Europe was 2.5C hotter, the study finds. Almost all societies remain unprepared for deadly extreme heat, experts warn. The study's authors say its findings highlight the importance of the world adapting to higher temperatures because they are no longer "rare". "Heat is among the deadliest types of disaster," says Julie Arrighi from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and also one of the authors. Countries must build heat-resistant homes, create "cool centres" for people to find shelter, and find ways to cool cities including planting more trees, she says. In July, temperature records were broken in parts of China, the southern US and Spain. Millions of people spent days under red alerts for extreme heat. Experts say extreme heat can be a very serious threat to life, especially among the elderly. According to one study, more than 61,000 people were estimated to have died from heat-related causes during last year's heatwaves in Europe. "This study confirms what we knew before. It shows again just how much climate change plays a role in what we are currently experiencing," said Friederike Otto from Imperial College London. Climate scientists say decades of humans pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are causing global temperatures to rise. But not all extreme weather events can immediately be linked directly to climate change because natural weather patterns can also play a part. Scientists in the UK, US and Netherlands in the World Weather Attribution group studied the recent heatwaves to identify the fingerprint of climate change. Using computer models, they simulated a world without the effects of emissions pumped into the atmosphere to the real-world temperatures seen during the heatwaves. The North American heatwave was 2°C (3.6°F) hotter and the heatwave in China was 1°C hotter because of climate change, the scientists concluded. The world has warmed 1.1C compared to the pre-industrial period before humans began burning fossil fuels. If temperature rise reaches 2C, which many experts warn is very likely as countries fail to reduce their emissions quickly enough, these events will occur every two to five years, the scientists say. The study also considered the role of El Niño, a naturally occurring powerful climate fluctuation that began in June. It leads to higher global temperatures as warm waters rise to the surface in the tropical Pacific ocean and push heat into the air. The study concluded that El Niño probably played a small part but that increased temperatures from burning fossil fuels was the main driver in the more intense heatwaves. A run of climate records have fallen in recent weeks, including global average temperatures and sea surface temperatures particularly in the North Atlantic. Experts say the speed and timing is "unprecedented" and warn that more records could tumble in the coming weeks and months. Dangerous wildfires in Greece forced thousands of people to evacuate hotels at the weekend. Experts say that the hot and dry weather created favourable conditions for fire to spread more easily. Source

It’s winter in Antarctica, when sea ice cover typically grows. But this year’s sea ice is way behind, reaching record lows with implications for the planet. It’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere, when ice typically forms around Antarctica. But this year, that growth has been stunted, hitting a record low by a wide margin. The sharp drop in sea ice is alarming scientists and raising concerns about its vital role in regulating ocean and air temperatures, circulating ocean water and maintaining an ecosystem crucial for everything from microscopic plankton to the continent’s iconic penguins. “This year is really different,” said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and an Antarctica expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It’s a very sudden change.” A continued decline in Antarctic sea ice would have global consequences by exposing more of the continent’s ice sheet to the open ocean, allowing it to melt and break off more easily, contributing to rising sea levels that affect coastal populations around the world. Less ice also means less protection from solar rays, which can raise the water temperature, making it harder for ice to form. At the end of June, ice covered 4.5 million square miles, or 11.7 million square kilometers, of ocean around the continent, according to NSIDC data. That’s nearly a million square miles less than the expected average from approximately 40 years of satellite observations. The clear departure from previous years is startling, since sea ice around Antarctica has been slower to respond to climate change than ice in the Arctic Ocean. Antarctic sea ice also set a record low in 2022, but this year’s ice cover is almost half a million square miles smaller. “The Antarctic sea ice extent low in 2023 is unprecedented in the satellite record,” Liping Zhang, a project scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, wrote in an email. The record low might signal a shift in the sea ice system to a new, unstable state where extremes become more common, but Dr. Zhang cautioned that scientists are still investigating this question. Sea ice around Antarctica typically freezes from February to August and then melts until the next Southern Hemisphere winter. Several ocean and atmosphere patterns influence how much ice grows or shrinks, and the overlapping interactions between these forces are complicated. On top of these natural, short-term patterns is the long-term influence of humans burning fossil fuels that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Some researchers suspect that we are finally seeing the effects of this slow burn on Antarctica’s previously resilient sea ice. This year’s change, within the context of several years in a row with less sea ice, is “very, very concerning,” said Marilyn Raphael, a geography professor and director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at University of California, Los Angeles. “That is not within natural variability,” she said. Dr. Raphael has been working to extend the historical record of Antarctic sea ice past the 1970s, when satellite observations began. She and her colleagues recently published a new data set going back to 1905, using weather observations to reconstruct the extent of sea ice during earlier years. While it’s still limited data, the longer record captures more cycles of natural variability. Dr. Raphael and other experts think that the ocean, which warms up more slowly than the atmosphere and has absorbed much of the heat from the burning of fossil fuels, may have reached a point where that heat is affecting Antarctic sea ice. Melting icebergs near Horseshoe Island along the Antarctic Peninsula during the Antarctic summer in February.Credit...Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images Sea surface temperatures have broken records this year, and there are currently three patches of unusually warm water around Antarctica. While other factors are also at play, these hot spots line up with the areas on the coast where sea ice has been unusually slow to form, said Dr. Scambos. The sea ice’s decline is causing real consequences both locally and globally. Both of Antarctica’s native penguin species rely on sea ice. In some parts of the continent, Adélie penguins eat exclusively krill, a tiny crustacean that thrives in icy water. Less sea ice means less krill and less food for Adélies. Larger emperor penguins, recently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, depend even more directly on sea ice: they lay their eggs and raise their young on these floating habitats. When sea ice melts earlier in the season, before emperor penguin chicks develop waterproof adult feathers, the chicks can drown. Sea ice also serves as a protective, frozen moat around Antarctica — shielding the continental ice sheet and its glaciers, which have already been destabilized by climate change, from the warmer ocean and the eroding force of wind and waves. If this shield disappears, more land ice could flow or fall into the ocean, though some of this loss could be counterbalanced by more snow falling onto the continent. The amount of ice Antarctica loses to the ocean is one of the biggest factors in determining sea level rise. Even when Antarctic sea ice reaches its maximum extent around September, it could remain at a record low for that time of year, said Xiaojun Yuan, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who maintains a seasonal forecast of Antarctic sea ice. Dr. Yuan’s forecast shows less sea ice than usual around most of Antarctica at least through early 2024. Source

Government claims legislation is needed to fight climate change, but conservationists say it could accelerate deforestation Conservation scientists fear more than one-quarter of forests in India could lose legal protection under controversial legislation that the nation’s Parliament could approve as early as this week. The legislation amends India’s flagship 1980 Forest Conservation Act. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi says it will help India meet its commitments to combat climate change by planting trees, and “eliminate ambiguities” in rules that govern how officials legally define forests and regulate their use. But researchers and others worry the measure—which has triggered nationwide protests—will irrevocably transform India’s landscape. They say the amendments will open forests to development, harm biodiversity, and weaken the rights of Indigenous people. The legislation “is ecocide,” says conservation biologist Ravi Chellam, CEO of the Metastring Foundation, which makes policy relevant data publicly available. “People are gobsmacked by the brazenness of it all.” Since Modi’s government first floated the legislation in 2021, it has attracted widespread criticism. Conservationists oppose provisions that would remove protection from vast swaths of forest that have not been officially recognized in government documents. They say the proposal would also make it easier to mine in protected areas, and build infrastructure related to ecotourism, including zoos and resorts. Human rights activists have decried language that would reduce the need for developers to consult with or gain prior consent from forest-dependent communities, including Indigenous groups. Advocates also raised alarm about provisions allowing the government to waive reviews of projects that are within 100 kilometers of India’s border and deemed critical to national security. In some border states with high biodiversity, that exception would cover nearly all forested land. “One could argue this is not just an Amendment but an entirely new Act,” more than 400 ecologists wrote last month to India’s environment minister after the government moved to present an unchanged version of the bill to Parliament. They asked the minister to delay any vote pending consultation with experts. On 26 July, however, Parliament’s lower house took less than 20 minutes to pass the bill after almost no debate. As Science went to press, Parliament’s upper house was expected to follow suit. The legislative rush has left many conservationists demoralized. “Things are already very bad with Indian forests,” says Ghazala Shahabuddin of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. Now, “whatever little we have remaining is under threat.” Analysts estimate nearly 200,000 square kilometers of forest will lose legal protection under the bill. At particular risk, Shahabuddin and others say, are forests managed by local communities, which rarely enjoy formal recognition. The law will “ride roughshod” over the rights of people who live in and use these forests, the ecologists who signed last month’s letter forecast. For example, it “does not provide any clarity” about how officials should consider existing land rights claims filed by Indigenous groups, says Pranav Menon, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Minnesota and legal adviser to the Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sangathan, a youth-led Indigenous group. The law continues a legislative trend of “reducing people to just rubber stamps,” Shahabuddin says, noting that Parliament has taken other steps to weaken public participation in environmental decisions. India’s environment ministry argues the regulatory changes will support efforts to plant new forests and use trees, which absorb and store carbon, to fight climate change. And it asserts any loss of existing forests will be made up by creating new plantations elsewhere. But, “The devil is in the details,” 
Chellam says, noting that if single-species plantations replace more diverse forests both biodiversity and the climate could suffer. “Functional, dynamic ecosystems will do a far better job of carbon sequestration than species-poor tree plantations,” he says. Once finalized, the new law will likely face legal challenges. “The Supreme Court will be flooded” by lawsuits questioning the law’s constitutionality, predicts Debadityo Sinha, a climate and ecosystems specialist at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. One advocacy organization, the Environmental Support Group, is already arguing that the measure was “proposed in fundamental violation” of rules requiring coordination with India’s Ministry of Tribal Affairs. In the meantime, researchers and conservationists are bracing for the worst. The policy changes are “so short-sighted,” Chellam 
says. “Everyone is aghast, not just about their lives, but about the lives of future generations of Indians.” Source

At least 11 people have died and 13 others are missing in torrential rains in Beijing as China braces for the third typhoon in as many weeks. The remnants of last week's super storm Doksuri flooded Beijing for the fourth straight day on Tuesday even as another typhoon approached the eastern coast. More than 50,000 people in the city have been evacuated so far, according to state media. The flooding has hit several districts, disrupting train services and traffic. At least a dozen people were killed in the Philippines and Taiwan as Doksuri passed through at the end of last week on its way to China. Heavy rains are likely to persist this week, and flooding could worsen in northern regions around Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province, the emergency management ministry has warned. At least nine people have died in Hebei, officials say. Relentless rain over the weekend broke daily precipitation records at 14 weather stations in Beijing and the northern provinces of Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong. Chinese authorities have not announced an official toll of victims or reported how many are missing outside the capital city. Military helicopters were deployed in the early hours of Tuesday to deliver emergency food supplies and ponchos to people stranded in and around a train station in the hard-hit Mentougou district in western Beijing, CCTV reports. Around 150,000 households in the district are reported to be without running water. Nearly 400 flights on Tuesday were cancelled and hundreds delayed at Beijing's two airports, according to flight tracker app Flight Master. Footage shared online by residents in the surrounding Hebei province show swathes of land engulfed by floods. Residents in several neighbourhoods in Hebei's Zhouzhou county have reportedly been trapped, some for almost 24 hours, as rescue workers are unable to reach them. On Monday, state television published a clip of the dramatic rescue of a man clinging to an overturned car caught in raging floodwaters in Wu'an city, also in Hebei. The man and his car were pinwheeling down a flooded river before he was lifted to safety by a helicopter. Like many parts of the world, China has been seeing extreme heat and rain in recent weeks, which some scientists have linked to climate change. Doksuri made landfall in China's south-east Fujian province on Friday, triggering landslides and floods before moving north towards the capital. Hundreds of thousands of Fujian residents were evacuated. Doksuri, which came a week after typhoon Talim, also led to mass closures of schools and workplaces across the province. China's Meteorological Bureau said Beijing saw a deluge of about 170.9mm (6.7in) between Saturday night and noon on Monday, the equivalent of the average rainfall for the entire month of July. There is little relief with typhoon Khanun on the horizon. It is expected to enter the East China Sea on Wednesday before moving to China's coastal provinces, Zhejiang and Fujian. Source

CLIMATEWIRE | Millions of young birds die from extreme heat in farm fields across America in what researchers say is a growing threat from climate change that could affect avian populations. The nestlings and chicks often perish from dehydration and the affects of thermoregulation, especially when they fledge in "open cup" nests and bird boxes located in unshaded fields, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis. Their survival also depends on the ability of mating adults to forage for food and support the nest, both of which can be impeded by extreme temperatures. “We know that habitat conversion [for agriculture] is already affecting biodiversity and species health on farms,” Katherine Lauck, co-lead author of the paper and a Ph.D. candidate in ecology at UC Davis, said in an interview. “When you combine that with extreme heat associated with climate change, it’s creating some unique conditions that birds did not evolve with,” Lauck added. "Fundamentally, this is about whether nestlings survive or not. The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, add to a growing body of research about the effects of climate change on birds that scientists say are indicators of ecological decline. In 2019, experts from seven major ornithological institutions and nonprofits estimated that North America’s breeding adult birds had declined by 30 percent since 1970, a loss of nearly 3 billion birds. While the declines were caused by a variety of factors — including habitat loss, predation, food scarcity and building collisions — nestlings are increasingly jeopardized by climate change, the UC Davis researchers found. They determined that in unshaded farm fields — where temperatures can be 10 degrees Celsius higher than in nearby forests — mating adults have “significantly diminish[ed] reproductive success” compared to those living in forest areas. Scientists define reproduction success as having at least one fledgling emerge from a nest per breeding season. While heat stress affects birds across all habitat types, the researchers found that “common generalist” species like western bluebirds and tree swallows were particularly vulnerable to heat in rural America, with “significant declines in nesting success when temperatures spiked in agricultural areas.” They also found that birds living in unshaded open-cup nests and bird boxes were more vulnerable to heat waves than those nesting in tree holes and more shaded areas. The trends were observed across every farming region of the country. “This suggests that species already in decline may have an even greater difficulty rearing young in the future as heat waves become more common and more land is converted to agriculture,” Daniel Karp, an associate professor of biology at UC Davis who led the data collection effort, said in a statement. The findings are based on an analysis of 152,000 nesting records collected by NestWatch, a program by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in which local volunteers monitor nests and report signs of bird health and behavior using an online app. Data includes things like the number of eggs laid, adult nesting behaviors and the activities of baby birds. The approach allowed researchers to assess 58 bird species in habitats such as farms, forests, grasslands and developed areas. The data spanned a 23-year period beginning in 1998. Conor Taff, a research associate at the Cornell lab, said the UC Davis study is notable for its nationwide scale and provides a large data source for researchers who have traditionally focused on distinct regions. He also said the paper provides a foundation upon which scientists can study more species and the effects climate change is having on their habitats. Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2023. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals. Source

Temperatures are skyrocketing. Extinctions are accelerating. Groundwater is being depleted. Humanity can limit damage, but it will take collective global action CLIMATEWIRE | Human activities are sending the planet hurtling toward a series of dangerous tipping points, scientists warn. The world is approaching thresholds of no return as temperatures rise, water resources shrink, plants and animals go extinct and humanmade materials accumulate in natural systems. These tipping points could reshape life on Earth if human societies don’t swiftly and radically transform. Natural systems could collapse, food and water supplies could plummet, and human health and well-being could dramatically decline. That’s the message of a stark United Nations University report, released Wednesday morning. The report warns of six impending global tipping points, each driven by rampant human pollution and extraction of natural resources. Extinctions are accelerating. Groundwater resources are depleting. Mountain glaciers, with their valuable freshwater supplies, are melting and shrinking. The skies are filling up with space debris, threatening humanity's ability to launch satellites and monitor global warming and other changing conditions on Earth. That's not all. Temperatures are skyrocketing, raising the risks of unsurvivable heat. And worsening climate disasters, including floods, wildfires and hurricanes, are driving insurance costs beyond affordable limits. Past a certain threshold, each of these tipping points could have disastrous consequences for human life on Earth. And the consequences of any one tipping point is inextricably connected to all the others, the report suggests. "The report also shows that risk tipping points are not isolated cases — they’re also interconnected,” said Jack O’Connor, a lead author of the report and a senior scientist at United Nations University's Institute for Environment and Human Security, at a press briefing announcing the findings Wednesday morning. “So passing a risk tipping point in one system can have cascading impacts that can put risk up in other systems.” Shrinking water resources threaten agriculture and jeopardize both human survival and the health of natural ecosystems. Accelerating extinctions can cause entire natural systems to collapse, another threat to human supplies of food and resources. The rising risk of unbearable heat can also threaten agriculture, water supplies and natural ecosystems, and it poses another major threat to human survival in the hottest parts of the world. It can trigger mass climate-driven migrations, too, which can spark conflict across the world. Even space debris carries serious global implications. Earth's orbit is swiftly filling up with broken satellites, discarded rocket parts and other scraps. This “space junk” poses a growing risk of collision with active satellites. And past a certain threshold, the report warns, “existing space infrastructure would eventually be destroyed and future activities in space could become impossible.” That’s a big problem. Humans use satellites for countless services. That includes communications, as well as observing global temperatures and monitoring the progression of climate change on Earth. That means space pollution also threatens humanity's ability to keep tabs on all the other tipping points on the list. Meanwhile, rising insurance costs threaten the stability of human communities in the face of worsening climate disasters. The report notes that insurance costs in some areas have risen by as much as 57 percent since 2015, and insurance companies in certain at-risk areas have opted to limit coverage options or even leave the market entirely. One recent estimate found that around 520,940 homes in flood-prone Australia are predicted to be uninsurable by 2030. Inaccessible insurance can lead to catastrophic financial losses for people living in disaster-prone areas, the report warns. And it can worsen issues of inequality in communities around the globe. Wealthier people may have the option to move to less vulnerable areas, while lower-income people may be forced to stay and face the risks of living in disaster zones without insurance coverage. Authors of the report likened the impending tipping points to a car speeding past warning signs to the edge of a cliff. “What we see is that often not only are we failing to slow the car down, but often we are pressing our foot down further on the accelerator,” O’Connor said. A GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION The new report is the latest installment in an annual series on interconnected disasters, first published in 2021. The previous two reports have focused on specific examples of disasters around the world, including extreme weather and climate events, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, extinction events and even the ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut in 2020. Each of these disasters is part of an interconnected web of human activities and natural systems, the reports argued. That’s true even for disasters that don’t have obvious roots in natural systems, such as the Beirut explosion. That event was worsened by insufficient disaster response efforts in Lebanon, an issue with the potential to exacerbate a variety of other disasters and extreme weather events, the authors argued. The event also caused Covid-19 cases in Lebanon to skyrocket, as overwhelmed hospitals lowered their testing and isolating standards and displaced people were forced to shelter in large groups together. The new report broadens its scope beyond recent individual disasters, focusing instead on the risk of broader global tipping points. Yet it makes a similar argument about the interconnected nature of these issues — none of them occur in isolation, and each tipping point has cascading effects on human and natural systems all over the world. While the report paints a dire picture of the risks, it emphasizes that human societies still have agency over their future. Avoiding catastrophic tipping points is possible if human systems undergo a dramatic global transformation. “Our report is not saying that we are doomed to cross these risk tipping points, but rather it’s supposed to empower us to see the paths ahead of us and to take steps toward a better future,” O’Connor said. “We are still driving the car, and we still have a choice.” The solutions fall into two main categories, the report suggests. Human systems must avoid activities that raise the risk of crossing disastrous thresholds. And they must adapt to the damage they’ve already caused and the consequences of tipping points that can’t be entirely avoided. Extreme heat is rising around the world, for instance. And mountain glaciers are swiftly melting, too, meaning some communities are now confronting the loss of their freshwater supplies. These are impacts that have already arrived, can’t be avoided and require immediate adaptation efforts. Both avoidance and adaptation efforts have two main categories of future action, the report says. Communities must work to delay their progression toward catastrophic tipping points. And they must also move to fundamentally transform human systems, making them safe and sustainable for the future. That means entirely reimagining the way daily life and human communities operate. It could involve strategies such as redesigning cities with more green spaces, efficient buildings, sustainable energy and transportation systems and equal accessibility to vital services to simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cope with rising heat and reduce socioeconomic inequalities. Many of the actions pursued by human societies today emphasize delay tactics, rather than transformation, said Zita Sebesvari, a lead author of the report and deputy director of United Nations University's Institute for Environment and Human Security, adding that they’re “clearly not enough to actually steer away society from those dangerous tipping points.” “The report emphasizes that the real actions we have to look into are the so-called ‘transform’ actions,” she said. “Getting back to the car analogy, this would mean to get out together from the car and question why are we speeding toward that dangerous cliff.” Such solutions must address the underlying problems that led to these tipping points in the first place, the report warns. And that requires collective global concern and collaboration. “Changing established systems and behaviors is never easy, but this is the choice we must make if we want to avoid risk tipping points,” the authors state. “The question we face is simple, yet profound — what kind of future do we want?” Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2023. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals. Source