Popular Science
Greenhouse gases, sea level rise, and ocean acidification all broke records in 2021
2021 was a record-breaking year for signs of the climate crisis, according to the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization.
The WMO just released its latest State of the Global Climate 2021 report on Wednesday, which evaluates humanity’s global impact on climate across six domains: atmosphere, land, ocean, Earth’s frozen water called the cryosphere, extreme events, and risks and solutions. Four indicators of global warming—greenhouse gases, sea level rise, ocean heat, and ocean acidification—set new records last year.
Concentrations of carbon dioxide reached a new global high in 2020, at 413.2 parts per million, or 149 percent of the pre-industrial level. And data shows these levels continued to increase in 2021 and early 2022. Global mean sea level has been rising on average 4.5 millimeters per year, and in 2021 sea levels rose to the highest they’ve been in modern history. Warmth and heat have been penetrating deeper regions of the oceans, and the ocean’s pH levels are unprecedentedly low, meaning seawater is more acidic than ever.
The Conversation
Grim 2022 drought outlook for Western US offers warnings for the future as climate change brings a hotter, thirstier atmosphere
Much of the western U.S. has been in the grip of an unrelenting drought since early 2020. The dryness has coincided with record-breaking wildfires, intense and long-lasting heat waves, low stream flows and dwindling water supplies in reservoirs that millions of people across the region rely on.
Heading into summer, the outlook is pretty grim. The National Weather Service’s latest seasonal outlook, issued May 19, 2022, described drought persisting across most of the West and parts of the Great Plains.
One driver of the Western drought has been persistent La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific since the summer of 2020. During La Niña, cooler tropical Pacific waters help nudge the jet stream northward. That tends to bring fewer storms to the southern tier of the U.S. and produce pronounced drought impacts in the Southwest.
E&E Climate Wire
Climate change is drying out Australia’s tropical trees
The tropical forests of Australia’s northeast coast are some of the country’s natural wonders, rich with lush plants and rare animals, some of which are found nowhere else in the world. But like many of Australia’s other iconic ecosystems, from its bleaching Great Barrier Reef to its fire-swept brushlands, its future is threatened by climate change.
New research finds that the tropical trees of North Queensland have been dying at faster rates for nearly 40 years now. Since the mid-1980s, the average risk of tree death has approximately doubled.
The exact causes are difficult to pin down, the scientists say. But warming is likely to blame. The atmosphere has been growing drier in this part of Australia, which is a source of stress for trees — a drier atmosphere sucks more water out of plants and into the air. At the same time, the study finds that the risk of tree mortality is higher in drier spots.
Medical Xpress
Climate change likely to reduce the amount of sleep that people get per year
[...] In a study published May 20th in the journal One Earth, investigators report that increasing ambient temperatures negatively impact human sleep around the globe.
The team says their findings suggest that by the year 2099, suboptimal temperatures may erode 50 to 58 hours of sleep per person per year. In addition, they found that the temperature effect on sleep loss is substantially larger for residents from lower income countries as well as in older adults and females.
"Our results indicate that sleep—an essential restorative process integral for human health and productivity—may be degraded by warmer temperatures," says first author Kelton Minor of the University of Copenhagen. "In order to make informed climate policy decisions moving forward, we need to better account for the full spectrum of plausible future climate impacts extending from today's societal greenhouse gas emissions choices."
USA Today
Climate change means uncertain future for Northeast maple trees, syrup season
For centuries, the Abenaki people of the northeastern USA and Canada looked at maple sap as a gift from their creator, arriving just before spring when their ancestors' food reserves were low. The sweet, amber syrup and the people who produce it face an uncertain future. The continent's iconic sugar maple trees – revered for their sap and fall colors – can’t escape the changing climate.
Rising temperatures affect the maple trees, bringing more weather extremes, an earlier sap flow, shorter sugaring seasons and invasive insects. Some predict it may get too hot in parts of the northeastern USA for the sugar bushes, as the Abenaki call them, to remain where they’ve stood for centuries.
When you add drought and disease, “you’re throwing multiple threats at these tree species, and they’re dropping out of the forest and weakening entire ecosystems,” said Andy Finton, landscape conservation director for the Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts.
Mongabay
9m deaths a year from pollution, the ‘largest existential threat’ to humans
Pollution is currently responsible for at least 9 million premature deaths a year worldwide, accounting for one in six deaths, according to a new report.
Published in Lancet Planetary Health, the report is an update to a 2017 finding that pollution contributed to the same number of deaths prior to 2019. The authors note that while there have been reductions in some pollution-related deaths since the last assessment, such as those associated with household pollution or water quality, a growing number of deaths are related to outdoor air pollution and toxic chemical pollution as society becomes increasingly industrialized. In fact, deaths related to industrialization and urbanization have risen by 7% since 2015 and 66% since 2000, the authors note.
“Not only are we seeing these alarming trends, but nobody’s really doing an awful lot about it yet,” Rachael Kupka, report co-author and executive director of the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, told Mongabay. “It’s been five years since we raised the alarm about pollution being the largest environmental cause of death on the planet, and we’re just not seeing the response in the development agenda yet that we would like to see. There’s been just a drop in the bucket in terms of funding that’s flowing to the worst-affected countries to be able to deal with these problems.”
Yes!
When You Can’t Read Anymore About Climate, Take Action
What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done? It might have been something reckless or impulsive, adventurous, or just plain stupid. Here’s mine: I joined a group that works on creating solutions to climate change. Nuts, right? Who does stuff like that when the headlines remind us daily of our impending doom? Well, I did, and I’m learning that it’s not so crazy after all. I admit that when I simply recycled toilet paper rolls and bought LED lights, life was easier. Joining an organization and showing up was definitely out of my comfort zone, let alone actually meeting with my congresswoman. But it seems that every summer where I live in Southern California, the thermometer tops 100 degrees for days on end, and I’m pretty uncomfortable then too.
Now, I’m doing something, along with thousands of others, and together, we’re making a difference. I see it in the laws proposed in Congress and in state legislatures as well. By getting involved, I’ve also met a range of people who haven’t given up, who are determined to take whatever action they can to meet this crisis.
Nature
Monkeypox goes global: why scientists are on alert
More than 120 confirmed or suspected cases of monkeypox, a rare viral disease seldom detected outside of Africa, have been reported in at least 11 non-African countries in the past week. The emergence of the virus in separate populations across the world where it doesn’t usually appear has alarmed scientists — and sent them racing for answers.
“It’s eye-opening to see this kind of spread,” says Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, who has studied monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for more than a decade. […]
But monkeypox is no SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, says Jay Hooper, a virologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. It doesn’t transmit from person to person as readily, and because it is related to the smallpox virus, there are already treatments and vaccines on hand for curbing its spread. So while scientists are concerned, because any new viral behaviour is worrying — they are not panicked.
Science
Microchips that mimic the human brain could make AI far more energy efficient
Artificial intelligence (AI) makes video games more realistic and helps your phone recognize your voice—but the power-hungry programs slurp up energy big time. However, the next generation of AI may be 1000 times more energy efficient, thanks to computer chips that work like the human brain. A new study shows such neuromorphic chips can run AI algorithms using just a fraction of the energy consumed by ordinary chips. […]
The setup in a neuromorphic chip handles memory and computation together, making it much more energy efficient: Our brains only require 20 watts of power, about the same as an energy-efficient light bulb. But to make use of this architecture, computer scientists need to reinvent how they carry out functions such as LSTM.
Penn State College of Engineering
Researchers find imperfections provide protection for system symmetry
An international research collaboration has discovered how to exploit certain defects to protect confined energy in acoustics systems. Their experimental approach provides a versatile platform to create at-will defects for further theoretical validation and to improve control of waves in other systems, such as light, according to principal investigator Yun Jing, associate professor of acoustics and of biomedical engineering at Penn State.
The team published their results in Physical Review Letters, the flagship publication of the American Physical Society. The research was selected as the “Editors’ Suggestion” and was also featured in a commentary article by APS.
The work relates to phonons, and potentially their optical equivalent, photons, which can navigate specific boundaries in so-called topological lattices without scattering. Such lattices were first discovered in condensed matter, in which materials consist of atoms repeating in precise patterns, held together through the force of their couplings — or how they are bound to one another in such a way that a change in one partner can influence the other. According to Jing, these materials are known to host topologically protected states, which remain unchanged even if the system contains certain imperfections.
The Guardian
New US lab to create versions of atoms never recorded on Earth
From carbon to uranium, oxygen to iron, chemical elements are the building blocks of the world around us and the wider universe. Now, physicists are hoping to gain an unprecedented glimpse into their origins, with the opening of a new facility that will create thousands of peculiar and unstable versions of atoms never before recorded on Earth.
By studying these versions, known as isotopes, they hope to gain new insights into the reactions that created the elements within exploding stars, as well as testing theories about the “strong force” – one of the four fundamental forces in nature, which binds protons and neutrons together in an atom’s nucleus. The facility could also yield new isotopes for medical use. […]
“There are 285 isotopes of elements that exist on Earth, but we think that there are potentially 10,000 isotopes for the elements up to uranium,” said Prof Bradley Sherrill, the scientific director of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University, which officially opened on 2 May. “The goal of FRIB is to provide as wide of an access to this vast landscape of other isotopes as technology allows.”
The Independent
New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says
The Hubble Space Telescope has reached a new milestone in its work to find out how quickly the universe is expanding – and it supports the idea that something strange is happening in our universe, Nasa says.
In recent years, astronomers have used telescopes like Hubble to understand exactly how quickly our universe is expanding.
But as those measures have become more precise, they have also shown something strange. There is a key difference between the rate of the expansion of the universe as it is around us, when compared with observations from right after the Big Bang.
Scientists are unable to explain that discrepancy. But it suggests there is “something weird” going in our universe, that could be the result of unknown, new physics, Nasa says.
Science Alert
These Videos From a Space Probe Flying Past The Sun Are Truly Out of This World
A spacecraft looping around the Sun has made its first close approach – and filmed the encounter in glorious detail.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter entered the close encounter, known as perihelion, on 26 March, coming in at a distance of around 48 million kilometers (30 million miles), inside the orbit of Mercury. […]
These new observations, taken with Solar Orbiter's 10 scientific instruments working together for the first time, should provide a wealth of data for teasing out the behavior of the Sun, including its wild magnetic fields, and the sometimes chaotic weather it blasts out into interplanetary space.
Space.com
This tiny space rock might be the 1st physical evidence of a rare supernova
A space rock discovered more than two decades ago may be the first physical evidence of a rare type of powerful stellar explosion called a Type Ia supernova, according to a new study.
In 1996, a researcher working in the Egyptian desert found a small pebble that scientists later determined was likely extraterrestrial in origin, as it comprised mysterious mineral compounds found nowhere else on Earth. In the new study, scientists at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa say they've found that this space rock — called the Hypatia stone after the ancient Greek philosopher and astronomer — might be the first physical evidence of a Type Ia supernova, one of the most energetic phenomena in the universe.
University of Cincinnati
Light pollution can disorient monarch butterflies
Biologists at the University of Cincinnati say nighttime light pollution can interfere with the remarkable navigational abilities of monarchs, which travel as far as Canada to Mexico and back during their multi-generational migration.
Researchers found that butterflies roosting at night near artificial illumination such as a porch or streetlight can become disoriented the next day because the light interferes with their circadian rhythms. Artificial light can impede the molecular processes responsible for the butterfly’s remarkable navigational ability and trigger the butterfly to take wing when it should be resting.
“We found that even with a single work light that you find at a construction site, monarch butterflies treat that like it’s the sun,” UC assistant professor Patrick Guerra said.
NPR News
Scientists discover an ancient forest inside a giant sinkhole in China
Cave explorers stumbled upon a prehistoric forest at the bottom of a giant sinkhole in South China earlier this month. Sinkholes such as these are also known in Chinese as Tiankeng, or "Heavenly pit."
At 630 feet deep, the sinkhole would hide the Washington Monument and then some. The bottom of the pit holds an ancient forest spanning nearly three football fields in length, with trees towering over 100 feet high. And according to the Chinese government, it is one of 30 enormous sinkholes in the county.
The sinkhole was discovered by cave explorers outside Ping'e village in Leye County, South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. A team of explorers descended into the pit on May 6, where they found ancient trees and other plant life, according to a Guangxi news release.
University of California, Riverside
PFAS chemicals do not last forever
Once dubbed “forever chemicals,” per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, might be in the market for a new nickname.
That’s because adding iodide to a water treatment reactor that uses ultraviolet (UV) light and sulfite destroys up to 90% of carbon-fluorine atoms in PFAS forever chemicals in just a few hours, reports a new study led by environmental engineering researchers at UC Riverside. The addition of iodide accelerates the speed of the reaction up to four times, saving energy and chemicals.
“Iodide is really doing some substantial work,” said corresponding author Jinyong Liu, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering. “Not only does it speed up the reaction but it also allows the treatment of a ten times higher concentrations of PFAS, even some very recalcitrant structures.”
Liu’s lab has been working on ways to destroy PFAS through photochemical reactions since 2017. The new method has already attracted interest from industry and Liu’s group is partnering with companies to conduct pilot tests.
The New York Times
Scientists Found an Animal That Walks on Three Limbs. It’s a Parrot.
Lovebirds, small parrots with vibrant rainbow plumage and cheeky personalities, are popular pets. They swing from ropes, cuddle with companions and race for treats in a waddling gait with all the urgency of toddlers who spot a cookie. But, along with other parrots, they also do something strange: They use their faces to climb walls.
Give these birds a vertical surface to clamber up, and they cycle between left foot, right foot and beak as if their mouths were another limb. In fact, a new analysis of the forces climbing lovebirds exert reveals that this is precisely what they are doing. Somehow, a team of scientists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Wednesday, the birds and perhaps other parrot species have repurposed the muscles in their necks and heads so they can walk on their beaks, using them the way rock climbers use their arms.
Climbing with a beak as a third limb is peculiar because third limbs generally are not something life on Earth is capable of producing, said Michael Granatosky, an assistant professor of anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology and an author of the new paper.
Discover
Why Washington's Rainier is One of the Most Dangerous Volcanoes in the United States
[…] The US Geological Survey publishes a "Threat Assessment" for US volcanoes, the last one in 2018. Using their rankings, Hawaii's Kīlauea is considered the most hazardous thanks to a mix of people living near the volcano and how frequently it erupts. Mount St. Helens comes in second because it is the only Cascade volcano to have erupted over the past 100 years.
But at number 3 is the volcano about which I feel the most concerned: Rainier. Located near the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia area, it is the largest Cascade volcano and one that we have proof can cause a major impact to this metropolitan area. Sure, Rainier hasn't had a confirmed eruption since ~1450 CE, although there may have been small, unconfirmed puffs during the 1800s. Yet, the danger of Rainier exists whether it is erupting or not.
That's because Rainier is known for causing volcanic mudflows, also known as lahars. These flows are a mix of volcanic material, water, debris from the surroundings and pretty much anything else they pick it. They are a slurry of all this stuff, making a lahar more like a river of flowing cement than water.
Natural History Museum, London
'Ghost' fossils reveal how oceans could be affected by climate change
Plankton which help feed the ocean, lock away carbon dioxide and even influence the weather may not be as vulnerable to climate change as feared.
Despite their fossils having been dissolved away by acidic sediment waters, new research has found that the organisms themselves were thriving during the Jurassic, providing hope that they can still act as a carbon sink in modern global warming.
Though measuring smaller than the width of a human hair, the 'ghost' fossils of Jurassic plankton can help us understand how their modern relatives will respond to an increasingly acidic ocean. […]
Prof Richard Twitchett, a Research Leader at the Museum and co-author of the paper, says, 'The "ghost" fossils show that nannoplankton were abundant, diverse and thriving during past warming events in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, where previous records have assumed that plankton collapsed due to ocean acidification.
Ars Technica
New study estimates how long mined metals circulate before being lost
Almost every aspect of modern society relies on materials of limited quantity on Earth. In order to live within the limits set by our planet, we have to figure out how to make the most of what we extract and reuse whatever we have extracted. A new study released this week looks into how close we are to reaching that ideal for 61 different metals.
Along the way, its authors figure out how long different metals stay in circulation before they're lost and identify the stage at which those losses take place. While a lack of recycling is a major roadblock on the way to a circular economy, it's far from the only one. For many metals, including some critically important ones, we discard huge amounts that are present in the ores that we mine for different elements.