Maine bans toxic ‘forever chemicals’ under groundbreaking new law

Green Acre Park is an important stop along the creek’s journey and another example of how a community exists side by side with the natural resources that sustain it. For the residents that live near the park, and for the city of Gainesville as a whole, the protection and preservation of Hogtown Creek is vital to ensuring that future generations will have clean drinking water for years to come.

The San Onofre reactors are among dozens across the United States phasing out, but experts say they best represent the uncertain future of nuclear energy. “It’s a combination of failures, really,” said Gregory Jaczko, who chaired the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the top federal enforcer, between 2009 and 2012, of the situation at San Onofre.

On one side, proponents of nodule extraction claim it could save the world, while opponents warn it could unleash fresh ecological mayhem. For better or worse, these mineral spheres are going to play a critical role in determining our future – either by extricating us from our current ecological woes or by triggering even more calamitous outcomes.

In May, the Biden administration and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a plan to bring floating offshore wind to California. They have identified two sites: a nearly 400-square mile area north-west of Morro Bay, which could host 380 floating wind turbines, and another further north off Humboldt Bay. Together these projects could bring up to 4.6GW of clean energy to the grid, enough to power 1.6m homes.

Recent research has shown that small increases in air pollution are linked to significant rises in depression and anxiety. It has also linked dirty air to increased suicides and indicated that growing up in polluted places increases the risk of mental disorders. Other research has found that air pollution causes a “huge” reduction in intelligence and is linked to dementia. A global review in 2019 concluded that air pollution may be damaging every organ in the human body.

Congress enacted legislation in 2016 designed to tighten oversight of the toxic chemical approval process. Instead, career EPA managers have worked to sabotage the process by altering risk assessments, waging harassment campaigns against employees, internally accelerating the approval process and retaliating against staff who raise concerns, according to the four agency scientists.

But the most promising concrete technologies utilize very little energy to incorporate CO2. That’s because when CO2 is incorporated into concrete, it’s literally piped into the mix. The natural tumbling motion of churning concrete is all the energy that’s needed to transform the CO2 into a calcium carbonate, a substance that doesn’t just act as filler but also actively strengthens the concrete mix. All of this tough calcium carbonate means the concrete needs less cement in its mix, which is another environmental savings, since cement is the worst polluting component of concrete.

"We consider it most likely that it's due to females, mums, not laying eggs in these areas," he said. The lighting also disturbed their feeding behavior: when the team weighed the caterpillars, they found that those in the lighted areas were heavier.

We need to address the root of the problem, redesigning the system and tackling the throwaway society once and for all.” The government intends to make companies pay the full cost of recycling and disposing of their packaging and has consulted on introducing the scheme, called “extended producer responsibility” on a phased basis from 2023.

Meanwhile, the federal government is taking the first steps to vastly increase the size of the nation’s carbon dioxide pipeline network as a way of fighting climate change. Our investigation reveals that such pipelines pose threats that few are aware of and even fewer know how to handle.

“I am ‘report fatigued.’ We need action,” Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s atmospheric sciences program, wrote at Forbes this month. He called for more planning from local and federal governments for a transition to “a renewable energy economy,” and urged leaders to “address the disproportionate burden” of climate disasters on “vulnerable, poor, and marginalized populations.” The experts HuffPost spoke to all had the same antidote to climate dread: Take action. The climate crisis is urgent, the changes needed are at a massive scale, but it doesn’t mean individuals can’t make a difference.“We are now in an all-hands-on-deck moment,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s program on climate change communication. “We need everybody doing everything they can, at the individual level, community level, national government and business level. This is all of society.”

The string of U.S. floods comes about a month after catastrophic flooding in Germany and Belgium, which left a trail of destruction and killed nearly 200 people. Megadroughts and megafloods might seem like opposites, but they are in fact two sides of the same deadly coin. As human greenhouse gas emissions drive up global temperatures, the world can expect both extreme events to become more frequent and severe, warned a recent landmark report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.“There’s increasing evidence for an overintensification of the water cycle,” said Alex Ruane, a NASA scientist and a lead author of the IPCC report’s chapter on regional impacts. “Water is moving through the climate system faster than it used to. That means it is being evaporated into the air faster, it’s being moved around, and it’s raining down harder when it does rain. All of these things are actually connected to the same factor, which is that warmer air has a tendency to hold more moisture.”

Microplastics are found in our clothes, cosmetics and cleaning products. One load of laundry can release an average of 700,000 microplastic fibres. Less than a millimetre in length, these fibres make their way into rivers and oceans, where they are eaten by fish and even corals. Because of their tiny size, microplastics are able to pass through filtration systems, making it very difficult to avoid them.

San Onofre is not the only place where waste is left stranded. As more nuclear sites shut down, communities across the country are stuck with the waste left behind. Spent fuel is stored at 76 reactor sites in 34 states, according to the Department of Energy. Handling those stockpiles has been an afterthought to the NRC, the federal enforcer, said Allison Macfarlane, another former commission chair.

In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

We weren’t sure whether to sit outside because of the surging Delta variant of Covid, or inside because stinging smoke from wildfires consuming northern and western California had spread into the Bay Area.

The destruction unfolded as other extreme weather events around the country stoke concerns that the changing climate is making natural disasters more frequent and more intense. The Northeast braced for an unrelated pummeling from Tropical Storm Henri, which was downgraded to a depression Sunday night after it made landfall; the West is battling wildfires; and flooding in North Carolina recently left several people dead.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III declared global warming an existential threat to U.S. national security at a White House climate summit earlier this year. Using language normally applied to conventional adversaries like China and Russia, Austin described the climate crisis as “a profoundly destabilizing force for our world,” generating widespread havoc and bloodshed. If we take his assessment at his word, the Department of Defense will have to mobilize its capabilities as if preparing for a major war — altering its priorities and operations and hardening its military bases against extreme climate effects.

Not only did village officials have to draw up a new town from scratch, they also had to persuade hundreds of residents who had lost their homes to the flood that moving would be worth it, and that this venture could replace a lost community. The principal challenge was unlocking funding to aid with the transition. Nearly two decades later, it’s an obstacle shared by many towns staring down their own growing environmental and climate concerns.

The removal of Endangered Species Act protections had been in the works for years and was the right thing to do when finalized in Trump’s last days, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Assistant Director for Ecological Services Gary Frazer told AP. On Friday, attorneys for the administration asked a federal judge in California to reject a lawsuit from wildlife advocate s that seeks to restore protections, signaling the conclusion of Biden’s promise on his first day in office to review the Trump move. But wolf management policies in place at the state level have shifted dramatically since protections were lifted, and Frazer suggested the federal government could take steps to restore protections if population declines put wolves back on the path to extinction.“Certainly some of the things we’re seeing are concerning,” he said.

Yet despite a universal desire to avoid more destruction, experts aren’t always in agreement about what should be done before a blaze ignites. Forest management has long been touted as essential to fighting wildfires, with one new set of studies led by the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Forest Service concluding that there is strong scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of thinning dense forests and reducing fuels through prescribed burns. But some ecologists say that logging, thinning and other tactics that may have worked in the past are no longer useful in an era of ever hotter, larger and more frequentwildfires.“The fact is that forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires,” said Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist and the president of the John Muir Project.

San Diego formally launched Friday the largest infrastructure project in city history, a sewage recycling system that will boost local water independence in the face of more severe droughts caused by climate change. Dubbed “Pure Water,” the multibillion-dollar project is the culmination of a lengthy process featuring thorny lawsuits, complex labor deals and an aggressive public education campaign to fight the derogatory early nickname “toilet to tap.” “Pure Water is a legacy project that promises to deliver a reliable source of clean water to our region for decades to come — that’s why I advocated for $50 million in this year’s state budget,” state Senator Toni Atkins said at Gloria’s Friday news conference. “With worsening drought conditions in our state, this project is needed now more than ever.”

Not only do these batteries require large amounts of raw materials, including lithium, nickel and cobalt – mining for which has climate, environmental and human rights impacts – they also threaten to leave a mountain of electronic waste as they reach the end of their lives.

It finds that virtually every child on the planet is exposed to at least one climate or environmental hazard right now. A staggering 850 million, about a third of all the world’s children, are exposed to four or more climate or environmental hazards, including heat waves, cyclones, air pollution, flooding or water scarcity. A billion children, nearly half the children in the world, live in “extremely high risk” countries, the UNICEF researchers report.This is the world being left to us. But there is still time to change our climate future.

The report is the first to combine high-resolution maps of climate and environmental impacts with maps of child vulnerability, such as poverty and access to clean water, healthcare and education. “It essentially [shows] the likelihood of a child’s ability to survive climate change,” said Nick Rees, one of the report’s authors.

Carrying out a new assessment, they said, would “ensure a full and significant environmental review that includes assessing the project’s real costs on environment, public health, and climate change and ensuring the public is aware of those costs.” The Army Corps conducted “almost no independent evaluation of the risk of oil spills at the crossings it authorized, despite the fact that the route for Line 3 crosses 227 lakes and rivers, including the headwaters of the Mississippi River and rivers that feed directly into Lake Superior,” the letter said.

American schools are the second-largest public infrastructure investment. But what most people don’t know is that they are also among the biggest energy consumers in the public sector. K-12 schools consume about 8% of all the energy used in commercial buildings. In turn, they emit as much carbon dioxide as 18 coal-powered power plants. This not only burdens the environment, but children themselves – students suffer from heatstroke, affected hormone and sleep cycles, as well as respiratory issues. Many schools have started redesigning their infrastructure with the climate crisis in mind. From installing more solar panels to replacing old heating, cooling and ventilation systems, or HVAC systems, with more sustainable ones, school districts are increasingly transitioning to cheaper and greener options. But old building habits and funding constraints can pose a challenge.

“Ending the use of chlorpyrifos on food will help to ensure children, farmworkers, and all people are protected from the potentially dangerous consequences of this pesticide,” he said in a statement. “After the delays and denials of the prior administration, EPA will follow the science and put health and safety first.” That science indicates the chemical can cause irreversible harm. Children exposed to organophosphate pesticides, including chlorpyrifos, have an increased risk for abnormal neurodevelopment, including persistent loss of intelligence and behavior problems, studies have shown. Even low-dose exposure, particularly in the womb, has been found to harm brain development, leading to higher risk of disorders such as autism.

The multibillion-dollar plan, known as Willow, by the oil giant ConocoPhillips had been approved by the Trump administration and legally backed by the Biden administration. Environmental groups sued, arguing that the federal government had failed to take into account the effects that drilling would have on wildlife and that the burning of the oil would have on global warming.

This is a horror story about a war against nature… the poisons used in agriculture seep into our food, water and air. And all to kill a plant that indigenous communities have relied on for centuries. -tr. The plant is native to the Southwest, and its leaves were once baked and eaten by people among the Cocopah and Pima tribes; the Navajo ground the seeds into meal. But as the pigweed spread eastward, the plants began competing with cotton in the South, emerging as a serious threat to the crops by the mid-1990s.

As the drought deepens, a number of small-scale farmers in California have found themselves in a similar position: scraping the barrel. Earlier this year, we reported that farmers in the state are coping with the drought by fallowing land, transitioning to less thirsty crops, and trucking in water. Since then, California Governor Gavin Newsom has expanded the emergency drought declaration to include more counties, as surface water has been curtailed and groundwater levels have dropped, but the state has yet to include relief earmarked for small farmers in the budget.

Globally, more than a million plants and animals face extinction due to habitat loss, climate change and other factors related to human activity, and this alarming loss of biodiversity is only accelerating. In California, conservationists and biologists have identified scores of species in potential peril, including many icons of the state’s beloved wildlands — chinook salmon, giant sequoias, Joshua trees, desert tortoises, California red-legged frogs, gray whales. Now, a hellish summer of extreme fire activity, drought and heat are again pushing some species to the brink of oblivion. Seized by a newfound urgency, state and federal biologists, research institutions, conservation organizations and zoos have been racing to save the most threatened species with a bold campaign of emergency translocations, captive breeding programs and seed banks. Some have likened the effort to a modern-day Noah’s Ark.

As drought worsens, there are few, if any, protections in place for California’s depleted groundwater. The new law gave local agencies at least 26 years — until 2040 — to stop the impacts of over-pumping. During the height of the state’s last drought, thousands of Californians in the Central Valley ran out of water as their wells went dry. So much water was pumped from underground, mostly by growers, that the earth collapsed, sinking up to two feet per year in parts of the San Joaquin Valley. Alarmed, the California Legislature in 2014 enacted a package of new laws that aimed to stop the over-pumping. But seven years later, little has changed for Californians relying on drinking water wells: Depletion of their groundwater continues. Pumping is largely unrestricted, and there are few, if any, protections in place.

Sitting Bull College (SBC) in Ft. Yates, North Dakota, has received a $3.5 million grant award to assist in its efforts to provide tribal communities in the Great Plains prairie region with pertinent information about their environment. The grant from the National Science Foundation, will expand the college’s research capacity, provide funding to hire additional research staff, provide funding for faculty and students to conduct advanced research, and establish a research center on the SBC college campus. A multidisciplinary team will contribute to advancing knowledge in a variety of fields, including soil science, water quality, genetics, wildlife and plant ecology, microbiology, and engineering.This project will have a direct impact on tribal communities in areas related to prairie ecosystem services, ecology, and restoration.

A new analysis forecasts the number of U.S. outdoor sector workdays and annual earnings that could be lost if the world fails to slow global warming.

ExxonMobil’s huge new Guyana project faces charges of a disregard for safety from experts who claim the company has failed to adequately prepare for possible disaster, the Guardian and Floodlight have found.

She worries about her younger siblings, a 12-year-old sister and an eight-year-old brother. “What’s it going to be like in the future?” she asks. She wonders how responsible it would be for her to have children. Bit is 17. Now, she and fellow student activists are working to break one big link in the fossil fuel chain that is driving climate change: gas stations. There are two proposed new gas stations in her town she wants scrapped. “We don’t need them,” she said.

The big challenge, he says, is mutual understanding: "What can photovoltaics do? What does agriculture need for successful integration?" Trommsdorff and his colleagues see huge potential for agrivoltaics worldwide. There are already some agrivoltaic plants in Europe, Mali, Gambia and Chile; but the vast majority so far are in Asia.

A historic drought across the U.S. West is taking a heavy toll on California's $6 billion almond industry, which produces roughly 80% of the world's almonds. More growers are expected to abandon their orchards as water becomes scarce and expensive. Almonds are California's top agricultural export. The industry ships about 70% of its almonds overseas, fueled by strong demand in India, East Asia and Europe, according to the board. "All of this increase in almonds and this increase in water demand, it's been done at a time when there's virtually no increase in water supply," said David Goldhamer, a water management specialist at the University of California, Davis. "The water embodied in the production of those almonds is being exported out of this country."

From the data on his devices, Angell calculated that the underground water table in Madera County, one of the most over-tapped in the West, had dropped an astounding 60 feet over late spring and summer. So many agricultural pumps were dipping their bowls into the same depleted resource that the aquifer was collapsing, a descent he had never witnessed. “I’m 62 years old. I’ve been doing this more than half my life, and I’ve never seen this. Not even close,” he said. “This is all brand new, and it’s shaken everything I believe in.” “Drought on top of drought. Climate change on top of drought. And our response is always the same,” Angell said. “Plant more almonds and pistachios. Plant more housing tracts on farmland. But the river isn’t the same. The aquifer isn’t the same.”

People are beginning to feel that “nature is hitting back”, wrote the Kenyan environmentalist Elizabeth Wathuti in a foreword to the report.“People in power seem to feel it is OK to fell old trees or destroy natural ecosystems for buildings or roads, or to dig up oil, so long as they then plant new trees. But this approach is not working, and the findings in this report show that many people no longer support such economic idiocy.”

Power use will become smarter and more automated, with technology helping spread energy use throughout the day to work in tandem with a grid powered by variable wind and solar, rather than cause big surges in demand that require the burning of gas or coal.

… weak zoning and land-use laws have encouraged a population explosion in the fire-prone wildland-urban interface, areas near forests and other vegetation. Likewise, federal flood-insurance subsidies have encouraged continued construction in coastal areas threatened by flooding.

With climate change and long-term drought continuing to take a toll on the Colorado River, the federal government on Monday for the first time declared a water shortage at Lake Mead, one of the river’s main reservoirs. The declaration triggers cuts in water supply that, for now, mostly will affect Arizona farmers. Beginning next year they will be cut off from much of the water they have relied on for decades. Much smaller reductions are mandated for Nevada and for Mexico across the southern border. But larger cuts, affecting far more of the 40 million people in the West who rely on the river for at least part of their water supply, are likely in coming years as a warming climate continues to reduce how much water flows into the Colorado from rain and melting snow.

Low water in the Colorado River’s largest reservoir triggered the first-ever federal declaration of a shortage on Monday, a bleak marker of the effects of climate change in the drought-stricken American West and the imperiled future of a critical water source for 40 million people in seven states.

A joint investigation by The Times and the news outlet Floodlight in partnership with the Guardian found that in 2017 at least 20 locals were organized by Method Campaign Services to push for “near-zero-emission” trucks at the ports. Their comments at public meetings and press conferences bolstered successful industry lobbying for trucks that run on natural gas, which is less polluting than diesel but still contributes to lung-damaging emissions and climate change. San Pedro resident Sholeh Bousheri, who was hired by Method to speak at public hearings, was one of several paid campaigners who said they only learned later that their work was part of a natural gas industry effort.

Photographer Bob Wick is retiring from the Bureau of Land Management after 30 years documenting public lands across the western United States. This selection shows the diverse beauty of the landscapes, and the work of the BLM in protecting the wildlife and people that inhabit them.

Touting natural gas and biomass fuel as renewable doesn't fly. - tr* "Our community needs to step up efforts to cut carbon emissions, but do so in a way that gets widespread support and spreads costs equitably. The world's countries have little hope of working together to combat climate change if Gainesville can’t even figure it out."

Experts studying the issue agree that sea level rise in coming decades could pose an enormous threat to San Francisco Bay’s shoreline. So perhaps it’s no surprise that there’s now talk of looking into an equally enormous response. Why not build a barrier to keep rising tides outside the Golden Gate? Researchers in the past have dismissed this seemingly straightforward concept on environmental grounds. Engineers are skeptical, too. But the enormity of the challenge has some Bay Area leaders saying it should at least be studied.Tom Kendall, who heads planning for the corps’ San Francisco district, says a study of this scale would need to be requested at a regional level before funding could be sought. If nothing else, the exercise could help get local activists and decision-makers thinking in terms of the overall bay.

“As a boy, my main interest in nature was finding the tallest tree to climb,” says the British photographer Levon Biss. However, after travelling the world, his curiosity shifted to nature’s most minuscule structures.

Democrats say the tools exist now to stave off a hotter planet: rapidly expand wind and solar energy, beef up energy storage and the electric grid, electrify transportation, and make buildings energy efficient. Many of those elements are tucked into a $3.5 trillion budget package that Democrats hope to pass in the fall.

“In this case, first place is the worst place to be,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a statement. “July is typically the world’s warmest month of the year, but July 2021 outdid itself as the hottest July and month ever recorded.” He said the record “adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe.”

The release of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report showed the magnitude of the challenge of addressing climate change in time to stop its worst impacts, and the failure of leaders to adequately respond to decades of warnings. In covering the clean energy economy, I get a close-up view of some of the potential alternatives to the continued burning of fossil fuels and get to talk to the people who do research and build businesses that support those projects. Some of the most exciting developments have been in alternatives to lithium-ion batteries for grid storage, with researchers seeking low-cost ways to store electricity from wind farms and solar arrays. The combination of batteries and renewable energy holds the promise of providing electricity around the clock and replacing fossil fuel power plants.

The contamination presents an “extremely troubling” health threat in the nation’s largest estuary, said Scott Faber, EWG’s senior vice president for government affairs.

Russia is fighting more than 170 forest fires in Siberia that have closed airports and roads, forced widespread evacuations and sent a pall of smoke across the North Pole. But it has abandoned dozens more fires covering thousands of square miles, with no effort to fight them.

While the IPCC opus doesn’t drill down into emissions from food production per se, it does contain rich information about its impacts. Carbon dioxide, now prevalent in the atmosphere at it highest rate in 2 million years, gets most of the ink, but two other heat-trapping gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also contribute mightily to the greenhouse effect. These gases now waft about at their highest levels in 800,000 years, the report states—and are spewed in large quantities by industrial-scale farms, mostly related to the mass production of meat. Overall, a 2021 report from the United Nations Environment Program and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition found, fossil fuel production accounts for 35 percent of global methane emissions, vs. 32 percent for agriculture.

Problems at a Los Angeles sewage treatment plant that caused a massive spill into Santa Monica Bay last month have severely reduced the region’s water recycling ability, forcing officials to divert millions of gallons of clean drinking water at a time of worsening drought conditions, The Times has learned. Even as California Gov. Gavin Newsom urges a voluntary 15% reduction in water usage, the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant‘s inability to fully treat sewage has forced local officials to divert drinking water to uses normally served by recycled water. Among those is an effort to protect coastal aquifers from seawater contamination, as well as the irrigation of parks, cemeteries and golf courses across southwest Los Angeles County.

Wildfires typically earn attention when they encroach on human settlements, and communities suffer the trauma of sudden evacuations and homes reduced to ash. But a study published in Environmental Research Letters last month suggests that wildfires burn more frequently and at a slightly higher level of severity in remote, roadless areas, like that where the Tamarack fire began. The study analyzed 30 years of wildfire on U.S. Forest Service Land.The findings speak to a longstanding debate over firefighting tactics that has grown fiercer this summer as the fire season has erupted into major conflagrations.“When we suppress fire, we aren’t preventing fire,” said James Johnston, a research associate at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry and the lead author on the study. “We’re just deferring fire.”

We know that soil feeds plants, but do we know how it got there in the first place? Soil forms via the interaction of five factors: parent material, climate, living beings, a land’s topography, and a “cooking” time that occurs on a geologic scale. Variations in these 5 factors make the world’s soils unique and extremely diverse. Soil acts as a carbon sink in the global carbon cycle because it locks away decomposed organic matter. But deforestation, various agricultural practices, and a changing climate are releasing it back into the atmosphere and oceans as carbon dioxide, resulting in an imbalance in global carbon budgets.

About 96,000 farmed salmon are believed to have died when a leak in a nearby tank sent about 4,000 gallons of chlorine into a fjord in Arctic Norway.

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we discuss what seashells can tell us about the state of the world’s oceans, and we hear about the challenges facing the Philippines’ marine protected area system. Environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett joins us to discuss her newly released book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. She tells us about the many ways humans have prized seashells for years, using them as money, jewelry, and art, and how seashells can help us examine the challenges marine environments are facing today. We’re also joined by Mongabay staff writer Leilani Chavez, who tells us about the incredible marine biodiversity found in Philippines waters and why there’s a movement amongst scientists and conservationists to expand marine conservation efforts beyond the Philippines’ extensive coral reef systems.

Only rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gases in this decade can prevent such climate breakdown, with every fraction of a degree of further heating likely to compound the accelerating effects, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science.

If it wasn’t time to listen before (it was) it is time to listen now (yes it is).

The fish kills are occurring in one of the most sensitive and productive marine habitats in the state, which is home to several threatened and endangered species: Bishop Harbor, which is part of the Terra Ceia Aquatic Buffer Preserve.

This reminds me of The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness Honeybees count landmarks when navigating toward sources of nectar. Lionesses tally the number of roars they hear from an intruding pride before deciding whether to attack or retreat. Some ants keep track of their steps; some spiders keep track of how many prey are caught in their web. But rigorous experiments during the past two decades have shown that even animals with very small brains can perform incredible feats of numerical cognition.

Floating in the bottom of the Grand Canyon last spring, I was traveling back in time in more ways than one. In a narrow section, where the Colorado River runs deep and quiet, Vishnu schist offers a window onto the world as it was here 1.7 billion years ago, give or take a couple of hundred million years. Little about the redrock walls seems different from when I first marveled at the scenery as I rafted past many years ago. But for the water that carries travelers through the national park, the changes have been dramatic even though they’ve occurred over just 31 years and barely amount to a tick in geologic time. It used to be that the big problem was managing so much water on the Colorado.

According to the UN, the world needs to rewild and restore an area the size of China to meet commitments on nature and the climate – but not everyone applauds Ireland’s pioneering effort. “You’d be surprised when you live in a castle how many times people think you’re an idiot,” says Plunkett, the 21stbaron of Dunsany.

The fertilizer pollution has caused an estimated $2.4bn in damage to fisheries and marine habitat every year since 1980, the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a study released last summer.

Leading climate scientists will give their starkest warning yet – that we are rushing to the brink of climate catastrophe – in a landmark report on Monday. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will publish its sixth assessment report, a comprehensive review of the world’s knowledge of the climate crisis and how human actions are altering the planet. It will show in detail how close the world is to irreversible change.That means the immediate effect of cutting coal use could be to increase warming, although protecting the Earth in the medium and long term. Zaelke said cutting methane could offset that. “Defossilisation will not lead to cooling until about 2050. Sulphur falling out of the atmosphere will unmask warming that is already in the system,” he said.

I hope they don’t contaminate all the amaranth with their relentless war on weeds! -tr. As a complete protein with all nine essential amino acids, amaranth is a highly nutritious source of manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, iron and antioxidants that may improve brain function and reduce inflammation.“This is a plant that could feed the world,” said Tsosie-Peña.

Starting in December 2018, this magnificent migration took a fatal turn. The bodies of California gray whales began washing up along the protected inlets of Baja, where gray whales come every spring to nurse their young and mate. Researchers, however, agree on one key point: It is essential that science identify the key cause. Gray whales are a conservation success story — having survived commercial whaling and rebounded from near extinction with the help of wildlife protection laws. Their ups and downs are important indicators for the health of the oceans.

I feel like we can far surpass this goal. What say ye, car makers of the world? I’m hoping that President Biden will set forth tax credit incentives to help us all invest in electric vehicles. Should that become available, I’ll be looking for the lowest cost, lowest emission, most fuel efficient fast and sporty ev that I can find… this is a Huge Sustainable Solution! —tr*

Don’t buy it… fortunately, people are better informed now. They won’t fall for lies anymore. - tr*

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level off eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

Shells of houses and cars left gutted by flames. Stretches of forest reduced to ash. Tourists evacuated by boat from once idyllic beaches where the skies are thick with smoke. As southern Europe grapples with one of its worst heat waves in decades, deadly forest fires have engulfed stretches of the region, bringing a newly reopened tourism industry to a halt and forcing mass evacuations.

A new report makes the case that the oil and gas industry is trying to sell you a story — one that casts these companies as paragons of sustainability and seeks to delay policies that would address climate change. Last year, the oil and gas industry spent at least $9.6 million on ads on Facebook’s U.S. platform, according to an analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap. Just over half of this spending came from one company, ExxonMobil. “The oil and gas industry is engaging in this really strategic campaign using social media and the tools available, particularly these targeting tools on Facebook, to reach a really broad audience pretty easily,” said Faye Holder, program manager at InfluenceMap.

In Bring Your Own Brigade, British film-maker Lucy Walker takes us back to the California tragedies of 2018 and a crisis that continues to rage on.

The emissions created by the digestive systems of New Zealand’s 6.3m cows are among New Zealand’s biggest environmental problems. Agriculture is one of the country’s biggest producers of the greenhouse gases that cause global heating and the climate crisis.

Finn’s nagging fear that Gold Hill is living on borrowed time is replicated across western states ravaged by some of the most intense wildfires in modern American history. But angst about the immediate threat is accompanied by increasingly urgent questions for communities on the frontline of the climate crisis about the long-term financial cost of survival – who should foot the bill? Boulder county estimates it will cost taxpayers $100m over the next three decades just to adapt transport and drainage systems to the climate crisis, and reduce the risk from wildfires.

In a land of beach volleyball, umbrellas and picnics on the sand, it’s easy to forget the beach itself used to be a wild place. Coastal dunes once unfurled along the shore, their crests and curves teeming with plants, birds and more bugs than you could imagine. California, in fact, once boasted some of the most biodiverse beaches in the world. But for almost a century, these sandy hills have been flattened and paved over — erased to make room for ever more people seeking to live and play by the sea. Now, with the looming threat of sea level rise and a state desperate for solutions, conservationists and a growing movement of researchers say restoring these dunes could provide a much-needed buffer from the water. These overlooked features of the coast could help buy communities a bit more time — before the ocean pushes inland and reclaims the land.

Longboat Key is a few miles from the site of a breach at the abandoned Piney Point fertilizer plant in April that saw tens of millions of gallons of toxic discharge pumped into Tampa Bay. It is not known what impact the discharge might have had on the red tide outbreak. Heithaus said the distressed sharks highlighted a need for action.“Seeing these kinds of things happen just shows how out of balance things are in the ecosystem right now,” he said.

Regions with lots of wildland-urban interface are “often some of the most beautiful places in our state — the places that you dream of having a little cabin in the woods, surrounded by big trees,” said Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, whose research led to The Chronicle’s analysis. But there’s a trade-off: People moving to high-WUI areas are more likely to experience wildfires directly. High-WUI areas burn more easily than populated areas with less vegetation, so fires often begin and spread rapidly in these areas. Additionally, because high-WUI regions have fewer accessible roads and more spread-out buildings than urban areas, firefighters often have a harder time containing blazes and protecting people and property.

The Bootleg Fire has consumed a wide swath of southern Oregon forest — 413,000 acres, an area the size of Portland, Seattle, Sacramento and New York City combined. It has burned since July 6 and remains only 53 percent contained. The fire, the third-largest blaze in Oregon since 1900, has mostly burned in a remote, sparsely populated area in and near the Fremont-Winema National Forest. Only 161 homes have been destroyed, a low number for a wildfire that immense.

The Defense Department has hired eight climate change experts from the Army Corps of Engineers; Mr. Biden’s budget calls for 17 more. “The impacts of climate change on the department’s mission are clear and growing,” Richard Kidd, deputy assistant secretary of defense for energy, environment and resilience, said in a statement. “We need a work force that reflects that fact.”

This investigation follows Riverview’s rapid expansion in two of the five states it operates in, linking the environmental and economic consequences — and the lives of those who are impacted.The people we spoke with in Minnesota and Arizona are 1,500 miles apart, connected only by the ever-growing presence and power of Riverview. But their communities have much in common: The local industry and resources have been monopolized by a deep-pocketed entity. The groundwater is being depleted and polluted. Incessant traffic, dust, lights and the stench of livestock cause home values to plummet and strain the emotional ties locals have to the places they call home.

At least 881 manatees have died in Florida since January, far exceeding the annual average of 578 deaths between 2015 and 2020. Ground zero for the sudden uptick in deaths is the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile-long estuary that serves as a seasonal habitat for thousands of manatees. Decades of water pollution from farming and real estate development has pushed the ecosystem to the brink, causing the manatees to perish from an almost entirely manmade disaster: famine.

Flooding and landslides have left thousands of refugees cut off from food supplies in Ituango, the conflict-strewn municipality in north-western Colombia.

After spending 22 years and $100 million navigating a thicket of state regulations and environmentalists' challenges, Poseidon Water is down to one major regulatory hurdle - the California Coastal Commission. The company feels confident enough to talk of breaking ground by the end of next year on the $1.4 billion plant that would produce some 50 million gallons of drinking water daily. Andrea Leon-Grossmann, director of climate action for the ocean conservation group Azul, says better alternatives include conservation, repairing leaky pipes, capturing storm water runoff and committing to more recycled water.

First, a loophole let fossil fuels eat up funding meant for community solar. Now proposed new fire codes pose new challenges for rooftop panels.

Dozens of environmental groups expect to spend tens of millions of dollars in August building support for climate legislation.

After the hottest June in recorded history obliterated temperature records not only in Death Valley (130 degrees) but also in usually mild locales like Seattle (108) and British Columbia (121), supercharged rainstorms created massive flooding in central Europe and China, turning streets into raging rivers and killing hundreds. Forest fires are now ravaging Siberia (Siberia!), Canada, and the Pacific Northwest, where Oregon's historic Bootleg Fire has so far consumed a staggering 400,000 acres of woodland, in a blaze so intense it has its own weather system — including lightning storms that start more fires. The inferno has also created a continent-wide plume of smoke now reddening sunsets and making it hard to breathe as far away as New York.

The scale of disappearing ice is so large that the losses on Tuesday alone created enough meltwater to drownthe entire US state of Florida in two inches, or 5cm, of water. Ice that melts away in Greenland flows as water into the ocean, where it adds to the ongoing increase in global sea level caused by human-induced climate change.

At least four people were killed by blazes that swept through the tourist regions of Antalya and Muğla, forcing thousands of holidaymakers to be evacuated from their hotels by a flotilla of boats.

There’s the Goodmans in Wisconsin who run an organic dairy farm and advocate for sustainable farming, but their son flatly denies the realities of climate change saying: “It’s in the Lord’s hands.”

Two species of the bottom-feeding sucker fish that inhabit the Upper Klamath Lake and nearby rivers are struggling to survive after a century of water management in the Klamath Basin has all but drained the wetlands ecosystem where these fish once thrived.“Historically, these fish were really incredibly abundant — we’re talking tens of millions of individuals,” said Alex Gonyaw, senior fisheries biologist for Klamath Tribes. The tribes once relied heavily on the fish for subsistence and income. Now, the suckers are on the brink of extinction. During the past century, wetlands surrounding Upper Klamath Lake were converted to farmland, while waters from the basin were allocated to irrigators. The lake currently is used to store snowmelt water in the spring and that can be released to farmers during the summer months. But with the wetlands gone, algae in the lake blooms and dies off each year in a cycle that makes the water too toxic for the juvenile fish to survive.

A discussion with Trish Riley, Founding Director of the Cinema Verde Film and Arts Festival in Gainesville, Florida. Trish explains the important and growing roles of film, festivals, and the arts in environmental stewardship.

Embarking on an 800-mile walk across the state of Florida, Nicholas Vazquez is a 23-year-old climate activist using unconventional tactics to raise awareness for climate change.

Adding a further 4m metric tons above last year’s level, produced by the average US coal plant, will cost 904 lives worldwide by the end of the century, the research found. On a grander scale, eliminating planet-heating emissions by 2050 would save an expected 74 million lives around the world this century.

This is the moment a house fell into the sea in the resort town of Mar del Tuyú in Argentina. The footage, captured by a neighbour on 28 July, shows waves crashing against the property as part of it breaks away and falls into the water.

Climate scientists have long predicted that human-caused climate disruption would lead to more flooding, heatwaves, droughts, storms and other forms of extreme weather, but even they have been shocked by the scale of these scenes.