All posts tagged: climate

The world made historic pledge to transition away from fossil fuels – one year on, has it? | Science, Climate & Tech News

The world made historic pledge to transition away from fossil fuels – one year on, has it? | Science, Climate & Tech News

It’s 13 December 2023. Excited reports of a “landmark” global climate agreement reverberate around the world from the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. At around 11am, weary diplomats with circles under their eyes from fierce, all-night negotiations cheer, cry and hug. The US’s climate envoy John Kerry throws his arms around German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. There’s a round of applause for Tina Stege, a fierce representative from the Marshall Islands who had fought among the hardest for the pledge. They and more than 190 other countries have just agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” – the culmination of a fraught two weeks of talks at the UN conference. This may not sound very “historic”, given burning fossil fuels is the number one cause of climate change, and these annual talks had been going on for almost 30 years. Image: German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock congratulates a tearful Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands. Pic: AP Image: COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber and UN climate chief Simon Stiell applaud the final outcome. …

How CRISPR will help the world cope with climate change

How CRISPR will help the world cope with climate change

“The exciting thing with CRISPR for gene editing is you can make changes exactly where you want them,” says Emma Kovak, senior food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. “It’s absolutely huge in terms of saving time and money.” As powerful and precise as CRISPR is, however, it still takes considerable work to target the right part of the genome, to evaluate whether any changes provide the hoped-for benefits—and, crucially, to ensure that any edits don’t come at the cost of overall plant health or food safety. But improved gene-editing tools have also helped to revive and accelerate research to better understand the complex genomes of plants, which are often several times longer than the human genome. This work is helping scientists identify the genes responsible for relevant traits and the changes that could deliver improvements. Doudna says we’ll see many more crops altered to bolster resilience to climate change as the research in this field progresses. “In the future, as we uncover more and more of those fundamental genetics of traits, then CRISPR …

Why flooding in Spain has been so deadly – and why it could happen again | Science, Climate & Tech News

Why flooding in Spain has been so deadly – and why it could happen again | Science, Climate & Tech News

More than 200 people have died in Spain after nearly a year’s worth of rain fell in a matter of hours. On Friday, there were at least 205 confirmed deaths in Valencia, two in Castilla La Mancha, and one in Andalusia. Local authorities issued warnings late on Tuesday, but many say this gave them next-to-no time to prepare for the conditions that had killed dozens by Wednesday. Follow Spain flooding latest Here we look at what caused the flooding – and why they could happen again. How quickly did the floods hit? Heavy rain had already begun in parts of southern Spain on Monday. In contrast to areas like Malaga, where residents told Sky News it had been “chucking it down for two days”, the rain did not start in the worst-hit region of Valencia until around 7pm on Tuesday. At 8pm, people in Valencia received smartphone alerts warning them not to leave their homes. But by then, many were already trapped in dangerous conditions, particularly in the south of the city where a major …

Three ways for schools to make climate education inclusive for all children

Three ways for schools to make climate education inclusive for all children

All young people need to have access to high-quality climate education because, when not overwhelming, emotional engagement with the climate crisis can motivate action. We recently surveyed more than 2,400 school students aged 11-14 in England about their views on climate change and sustainability education. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds were less likely to experience negative emotions related to climate change. Children from more advantaged backgrounds were more likely to want to learn about climate change and sustainability, to want to do more to look after the environment and to believe that adults are doing enough to look after the planet. The variation in climate literacy and educational opportunities demonstrated through our survey is highly concerning. These inequalities are particularly concerning as children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. But these children’s limited capacity to engage with climate issues is also understandable considering the state of child poverty in the UK and the more immediate challenges they are probably facing. Much has been written about young people’s fears about the …

Trump’s Dark Climate Fairy Tales | Jonathan Mingle

Trump’s Dark Climate Fairy Tales | Jonathan Mingle

On October 21, with two weeks before election day, Donald Trump made a campaign stop near Asheville, North Carolina, where residents were still reeling from the devastation left by Hurricane Helene. He wasn’t there to comfort them but rather to exhort them to make their way through the wreckage to vote. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) had no money left to help them, he claimed. “It’s all gone. They’ve spent it on illegal migrants.” If peddling conspiracy theories is the closing argument of his campaign, it’s also a signal of how he intends to govern if returned to office: by lying to undermine public trust in the federal workforce while it tries to respond to the spiraling threats of a fast-warming world. Trump’s war on what he calls the “deep state”—that is, civil servants—and his broader war on the authority of verifiable facts themselves are neatly aligned.   Two weeks after Helene rampaged from the Gulf Coast through the Blue Ridge Mountains, Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida’s west coast. These two catastrophes have thrown the …

The Climate Election: Fighting for a Greener Future | Bill McKibben

The Climate Election: Fighting for a Greener Future | Bill McKibben

On Wednesday October 16, 2024, environmentalist and award-winning contributor Bill McKibben and renowned political scientist and author Rhiana Gunn-Wright met for an online discussion about climate, truth, and disaster in the next presidential administration. The conversation was moderated by Willa Glickman. This was the second in our series of online events in the run-up to the 2024 election. You may view all available recordings in this series on this page. Source link

Global climate action plans ‘falling miles short’, warns UN | Science, Climate & Tech News

Global climate action plans ‘falling miles short’, warns UN | Science, Climate & Tech News

Global climate action plans are “falling miles short” of what is needed to stop climate change from “crippling” economies, the United Nations has warned. Current national climate plans submitted to the UN should be enough to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 2.6% from 2019 to 2030, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said in its annual assessment. This marks only “marginal progress” since the same annual “Synthesis” report last year, when 2030 emissions were forecast to be 2.0% lower than in 2019. And it is “only a fraction” of what is “urgently needed”, the UNFCCC said, given emissions should plummet 43% by 2030 in order to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, as per the advice from UN climate scientists. The UNFCCC Simon Stiell said: “Current national climate plans fall miles short of what’s needed to stop global heating from crippling every economy, and wrecking billions of lives and livelihoods across every country. “Much bolder new national climate plans cannot only avert climate chaos,” he said, but can also …

Why is the government betting big on a technology that promises much, but has so far delivered little? | Science, Climate & Tech News

Why is the government betting big on a technology that promises much, but has so far delivered little? | Science, Climate & Tech News

Amid the hum of cooling fans and squelch of vacuum pumps, a new home for 12 quantum computers has opened in Oxfordshire, as part of a bid to put the UK ahead in a global race to harness the technology. Quantum computers promise to solve problems too hard for even the most powerful supercomputers – like those requiring vast numbers of parallel computations like complex weather simulations, the binding of drugs to their targets, or the vagaries of financial markets. While prototypes have proven that the weird world of quantum matter can be used to perform calculations – none are yet large or stable enough to be of much use. “With its focus on making quantum computers practically useable at scale, this centre will help them solve some of the biggest challenges we face,” said science minister Lord Vallance. Quantum computers exploit the strangeness of quantum physics to replace the “bits” – zeros and ones – that encode information in classical computers with something fundamentally different. Image: Quantum computers replace ‘bits’ into quantum bits – …

Plants and Forests Absorbed Almost No Carbon Last Year, Shocking Climate Scientists

Plants and Forests Absorbed Almost No Carbon Last Year, Shocking Climate Scientists

“We are lulled into a comfort zone — we cannot really see the crisis.” Sink Collapse The Earth’s natural defenses against carbon emissions could be breaking down. Our planet has historically been home to natural “carbon sinks,” or sites like forests and oceans that naturally remove potentially atmosphere-damaging carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But as The Guardian reports, preliminary data from an international team of researchers shows that 2023 — the hottest year on record — saw an alarming lapse in the Earth’s innate ability to swallow and neutralize carbon, with trees, soil, and plants together absorbing next to no carbon. In other words: in 2023, it seems that some of Earth’s natural carbon sinks stopped working. As The Guardian notes, the study’s findings echo other research, such as a 2023 study on zooplankton, which found that fast-melting ocean glaciers could hinder the ocean’s ability to capture and repurpose carbon. Humankind’s still-overwhelming reliance on fossil fuels has put a huge amount of stress on natural carbon sinks to clean up after us. And while the …

A Natural Gas Company Just Became the First to Be Sued Over Climate Change

A Natural Gas Company Just Became the First to Be Sued Over Climate Change

Gas utilities “continue to deceptively market methane gas as a climate solution.” Rapacious Conspiracy For the first time ever, a natural gas company is being sued by a local government for misleading customers about fossil fuels and the dangers they pose to the environment. As the New York Times reports, Oregon’s Multnomah County has added the gas utility NW Natural to its lawsuit that includes Shell, Exxon, McKinsey, and dozens of other companies for allegedly hiding or obfuscating their roles in climate degradation. In the suit, which also named the Koch and big oil-funded nonprofit Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, the county alleges that NW Natural and other entities conspired “rapaciously” to sell their services and products while covering up their own parts in climate change. This “scheme,” the suit alleges, resulted in the Pacific Northwest’s deadly “heat dome” temperatures in 2021 that killed at least 69 people in Multnomah County alone. “More people died from the June 2021 heat wave in Multnomah County than died from heat in the entire state of Oregon …