The 2010s were the hottest decade ever measured on Earth, and 2019 was the second-hottest year ever measured, scientists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today. From a report: After a year of flash droughts, rampant wildfires, and searing heatwaves that set all-time records across Europe and turned parts of Greenland’s ice sheet into slush, the finding…
Tag: greenhouse
Australia’s Wildfires Have Created More Emissions Than 116 Nations
“The wildfires raging along Australia’s eastern coast have already pumped around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” reports MIT’s Technology Review, “further fueling the climate change that’s already intensifying the nation’s fires.” That’s more than the total combined annual emissions of the 116 lowest-emitting countries, and nine times the amount produced during California’s record-setting 2018 fire season….
Finnish Scientists Produce a Protein Made ‘From Thin Air’
New submitter SysEngineer shares a report from HuffPost: A new protein made from air, water and renewable electricity could revolutionize our food system within the next decade. Developed by the Finnish company Solar Foods in a lab just outside Helsinki, the protein — called Solein — is made using living microbes that are then grown in a fermenter in a process…
Energy Consumption at Data Centers Will Become ‘Unsustainable’, Researcher Predicts
“The gigabytes of data we’re using — although invisible — come at a significant cost to the environment,” argues the CBC’s senior technology reporter. “Some experts say it rivals that of the airline industry.” And as more smart devices rely on data to operate (think internet-connected refrigerators or self-driving cars), their electricity demands are set to skyrocket. “We are using an…
Wild Swings in Extreme Weather Are Rising
As the world warms, scientists say that abrupt shifts in weather patterns, like droughts followed by severe floods, are intensifying. From a report: From 2011 to 2016, California experienced five years of extreme drought, during which numerous high temperature records were broken. These hot, dry years were followed by the extremely wet winter of 2016-2017, when, from October to March, an…
The US Government Has Approved Funds for Geoengineering Research
The US government has for the first time authorized funding to research geoengineering, the idea that we could counteract climate change by reflecting more of the sun’s heat away from the planet. An anonymous reader writes: The $1.4 trillion spending bills that Congress passed last week included a little-noticed provision setting aside at least $4 million for the National Oceanic and…
Bushfires Release Over Half Australia’s Annual Carbon Emissions
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The unprecedented bushfires devastating swathes of Australia have already pumped out more than half of the country’s annual carbon dioxide emissions in another setback to the fight against climate change. Fires blighting New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a combined 306 million tons of carbon dioxide since Aug. 1, which is more…
Two Top Scientists Warn That The Amazon, and Earth, Have Reached a Tipping Point
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: “The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances….
Australia’s Bushfires Have Emitted 250m Tonnes of CO2, Almost Half of Country’s Annual Emissions
Bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a massive pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere since August that is equivalent to almost half of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, Guardian Australia can reveal. From a report: Analysis by Nasa shows the NSW fires have emitted about 195m tonnes of CO2 since 1 August, with Queensland’s fires adding a further…
Apple May Use Carbon-Free Aluminum In New iPhones
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple is taking delivery this month of the first batch of carbon-free aluminum produced by a Montreal-based venture, helping move the iPhone maker closer to its greenhouse-gas reduction goal. Elysis, a joint venture between Rio Tinto Group and Alcoa Corp. backed by Apple, uses new technology that emits pure oxygen when producing aluminum….