Alberta’s recent energy grid woes have renewed concerns about how prepared Canada’s critical infrastructure systems are to weather the effects of climate change and extreme weather — and the potential security implications if they fail. On Monday, the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) issued renewed calls for people in the province to limit their energy … Read more
The fillet of flounder sitting on your plate comes with a severe environmental cost. To catch it, a ship running on fossil fuels spewed greenhouse gases as it dragged a trawl net across the seafloor, devastating the ecosystems in its path. Obvious enough. But new research shows that the consequences extend even further: Trawl nets … Read more
Davos: Be it conflicts in Gaza or Ukraine, climate change threats in Antarctica or Amazon, AI generating a monster like deepfake and its threat to elections, or debt crisis in emerging markets to developed world — problems are aplenty and all have suddenly reached this small ski resort town on the Alps. Once known for … Read more
The Canada Energy Regulator has given an 11th-hour green light to the over-budget, federally-owned Trans Mountain pipeline, currently under construction in Western Canada. In a ruling posted to its website late Friday, the regulator gave its blessing to the pipeline giant to change its routing methodology in a 2.3-kilometre stretch of construction in B.C.’s Fraser … Read more
.jpg "The Surprising Things That Helped Make 2023 the Hottest Year Ever")
In this graph, the orange line shows the global sea surface temperature throughout 2023. The other squiggles are previous years, with the uppermost dashed black line being the average between 1982 and 2011. The dark black line at upper left is where we’re starting out 2024. Notice it’s already at a sky-high level several months … Read more
Image: Marijan Murat (AP) Preliminary estimates for 2023 indicate that despite a 2.4 percent increase in United States gross domestic product, nationwide greenhouse gas emissions fell by 1.9 percent. Not only did U.S. emissions remain about six percent below pre-pandemic numbers, but are actually matching the numbers we saw back in 1991. The transportation sector — … Read more
.jpg "Why Humans Are Putting a Bunch of ‘Coal’ and ‘Oil’ Back in the Ground")
In addition to burying solid carbon or sprinkling it on fields, researchers are also turning waste biomass into liquid carbon—oil, essentially, that they pump back into the ground instead of pumping the fossil variety up. “What we do at the highest level is we make barbecue sauce—or liquid smoke for barbecue sauce—and then we inject … Read more
The year of 2023 was the hottest on record, with the increase in Earth’s surface temperature nearly crossing the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, EU climate monitors said Tuesday. Climate change intensified heatwaves, droughts and wildfires across the planet, and pushed the global thermometer 1.48 C above the preindustrial benchmark, the Copernicus Climate Change … Read more
Cars stranded in a flash flood caused by a monsoonal thunderstorm on Sept. 1, 2023, in Thermal, California. David Mcnew | Getty Images News | Getty Images Destructive thunderstorms in North America and Europe and a series of devastating earthquakes last year cost the world around $250 billion in damages, according to a new report … Read more
.jpg "How Your Body Adapts to Extreme Cold")
Metabolic details matter to predict health in the modern world, Ocobock says. The same genetic programming that arose to protect someone in the Arctic—like high BMI and faster metabolism—could become liabilities. Many of Ocobock’s study subjects have been overweight and obese with normal cholesterol and blood sugar. Being “fat but fit,” which has been beneficial … Read more
