Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison journeys with the UN World Food Programme to the country of Niger in the African Sahel to see an innovative land recovery project within the Great Green Wall of Africa that is harvesting rainwater, increasing food security, and rehabilitating the ecosystem.

Later this summer, a fluorescent reddish-pink spiral will bloom across the Wilkinson Basin in the Gulf of Maine, about 40 miles northeast of Cape Cod. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will release the nontoxic water tracer dye behind their research vessel, where it will unfurl into a half-mile wide temporary plume, bright enough to catch the attention of passing boats and even satellites.

As it spreads, the researchers will track its movement to monitor a tightly controlled, federally approved experiment testing whether the ocean can be engineered to absorb more carbon, and in turn, help combat the climate crisis.

As the world struggles to stay below the 1.5-degree Celsius global warming threshold—a goal set out in the Paris Agreement to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change—experts agree that reducing greenhouse gas emissions won’t be enough to avoid overshooting this target. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in 2023, emphasizes the urgent need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere, too.

Outrage over Trump team’s climate report spurs researchers to fight back Report authors welcome ‘serious’ scientific rebuttals to report that some say misrepresents decades of climate science. By Jeff Tollefson Twitter Facebook Email U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing. US energy secretary Chris Wright recruited the report’s five authors, who question the scientific consensus on climate change.Credit: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Dozens of scientists are scrambling to respond to a report released last week by the US Department of Energy (DoE), which concluded that global warming is “less damaging economically than commonly believed”. The researchers say that the report, written by a small group of scholars who question the scientific consensus on climate change, misrepresents decades of climate science in a bid to repeal a 2009 government ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public welfare. They are now trying to coordinate a unified response, knowing that their arguments could influence a legal battle that is likely to go to the US Supreme Court. “This little report is basically designed to suppress science, not to enhance it or encourage it,” says Joellen Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona. “It’s awful.” Related Trump gutted two landmark environmental reports — can researchers save them? “I’m gobsmacked,” says Benjamin Santer, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who spent three decades working at the DoE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “It’s a revision of science and a revision of history. We have to respond.” Some climate researchers are now writing short rebuttals to the scientific arguments made in the DoE report. “The alternative is to do nothing,” says Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who is helping to coordinate one effort. “I just don’t think I can do that.” The DoE declined to address criticisms of the science laid out in the report, but a spokesperson said that the document’s five authors were recruited by the US energy secretary Chris Wright — a former oil and gas executive — and that they “represent diverse viewpoints and political backgrounds and are all well-respected and highly credentialled individuals”. The report, the spokesperson adds, was reviewed internally at the agency, and the DoE is now opening it up to “wider peer review from the scientific community and the general public”, with the comment period ending on 2 September. The authors — John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville; Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; Steven Koonin, a physicist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in California; Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist at the University of Alabama — provided a written response to Nature. They say they are “committed to a transparent and fact-based dialogue on climate science and know from long experience that scientific criticism and rebuttal are essential to that process. But productive scientific disagreement must be centered on specifics, not generalities”. Scientists should submit their comments directly to the DoE “rather than filtering their concerns through the media”, they wrote, saying they will respond publicly “to all serious scientific comments” and modify the report as warranted. A contested report In 2007, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants, and ordered the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine whether emissions endanger the public — and should therefore be regulated. Under then-president Barack Obama, a Democrat who took office in 2009, the EPA issued the ‘endangerment finding’, which confirmed that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide threaten public health and welfare. The Obama administration then used this ruling as a basis to curb emissions from cars, power plants and more. Related Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ has prompted an outcry: here’s why The EPA — now under President Donald Trump, a Republican who has called climate change a hoax — is today taking the opposite stance, seeking to repeal the finding. Anticipating this move, Scott Saleska, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and a team of scientists published a commentary in the journal AGU Advances in June1, examining the role that science had in the 2007 Supreme Court decision and in the EPA’s subsequent endangerment finding. The science was compelling enough in 2009 for the EPA to determine that greenhouse gases “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare”, the authors wrote, and the evidence is “significantly stronger today than it was 16 years ago”. Saleska says that last week’s DoE report — in an attempt to bolster the EPA’s case for repealing the endangerment finding — exaggerates uncertainties in climate science in some places, and in others gives too much weight to genuine scientific debates that are “not really that consequential in the big picture of climate change”. For instance, the report emphasizes the fact that rising levels of carbon dioxide, which plants absorb and use in photosynthesis, can have a beneficial ‘fertilization’ effect. That effect is important to understand and get right, Saleska says, but it is nonethless small in the face of broader changes in the climate. When addressing subjects such as sea-level rise, ocean acidification and extreme weather, the report ignores entire bodies of evidence, some researchers say. In other places, the report cites the latest scientific literature, but misinterprets it, they argue. For example, Santer says that the assessment mischaracterizes a 2023 study of his documenting telltale atmospheric ‘fingerprints’ that can be used to affirm the connection between greenhouse gases and climate change2. “The DoE report cites our paper and says we didn’t find a fingerprint, when in fact we did,” he says. Legal outlook Michael Gerrard, the director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in New York City, says that the upcoming battle over the endangerment finding won’t come down just to scientific evidence. In anticipation that the repeal of the finding will be challenged and end up before the US Supreme Court, the EPA is mounting multiple legal arguments against it, he says. Related US environmental agency halts funding for its main science division For instance, the EPA is arguing that the Clean Air Act covers only air pollutants that endanger health through “local or regional exposure”. Greenhouse gases, by contrast, act at the global level, and thus do not fall under the law’s regulatory remit, the agency argues. “As a general matter, there is a point at which harm no longer has a sufficiently close connection to the relevant conduct to reasonably draw a causal link,” the EPA’s proposal to repeal the endangerment finding states. Gerrard declined to predict what the Supreme Court, made up of six conservative justices and three liberal ones, will eventually do, but says researchers are doing their part by seeking to clarify the scientific record. “The courts don’t like to decide which experts are right and wrong, but instead tend to focus on whether there is enough evidence in the record to support a given agency decision,” he says. In that regard, the DoE’s report will stand next to a vast record of science compiled by researchers around the world over decades, including the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, completed in 2023. Even so, Gerrard says there are no guarantees moving forward. “What scientists are doing is helpful and worthwhile,” he says, “but it’s not determinative.”

• Most tropical countries are experiencing record-high deforestation rates, but in Indonesia, forest loss is slowing.

• But nearly half of the forest cleared in 2024 can’t be linked to an identifiable driver, raising red flags about speculative land clearing, regulatory blind spots and delayed environmental harm.

• Land is often cleared but not immediately used; research shows that nearly half of deforested lands in Indonesia remain idle for more than five years.

• Experts say these trends signal regulatory failure, as the government issues permits widely and concession holders face few consequences for clearing forest and abandoning the land, creating a cycle of destruction without accountability.

EU grant money was used to fund a media workshop on plastic pollution that was run in partnership with a fossil fuel lobby group, DeSmog can reveal.

The event, held in May, came at a crucial time – just months before the start of the latest UN Global Plastics Treaty negotiations. The latest round, running from 5 to 14 August, hopes to create the world’s first legally binding agreement on plastic waste.

The oil industry has a powerful voice in plastics negotiations. Its lobbyists have flooded UN treaty negotiations in numbers that dwarf some national delegations, and have embedded themselves as official representatives within delegations from countries including China, Egypt, and Finland.

Meanwhile, environmental non-profits and indigenous groups have reported being systematically marginalised from discussions that will shape global plastics policy.

Big oil’s lobbying efforts have centred on opposing proposals to cap plastic production, instead advocating for a focus on waste management, which involves collecting and disposing of plastic materials.

Seawater intrusion into the delta, where the Indus River meets the Arabian Sea in the south of the country, has triggered the collapse of farming and fishing communities.

more than 1.2 million people have been displaced from the overall Indus delta region in the last two decades

The downstream flow of water into the delta has decreased by 80% since the 1950s as a result of irrigation canals, hydropower dams and the impacts of climate change on glacial and snow melt, according to a 2018 study

British colonial rulers were the first to alter the course of the Indus River with canals and dams, followed more recently by dozens of hydropower projects.

Earlier this year, several military-led canal projects on the Indus River were halted when farmers in the low-lying riverine areas of Sindh province protested.

• Indigenous peoples in Cambodia have traditionally stewarded — and relied on — millions of hectares of forestland for their sustenance.

• Now, these communities are concerned about the long-term viability of their cultures and forest stewardship traditions since Cambodia’s parliament adopted a Code on Environment and Natural Resources, which excludes Indigenous peoples’ input and fails to recognize their rights in forest and natural resource management.

• “Without their voices and needs being considered, Indigenous peoples will continue to be victimized on their own land as their rights to access to nontimber forest products and traditional forests and land management have been excluded in the code. If these rights aren’t protected, Indigenous cultures and customs are at risk of disappearing, as their daily livelihoods and cultural practices are strongly intertwined with forests and natural resources,” the author argues.

• This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay or his employer.

Zoos aren't good places

Archive link

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/30970436

Seasons are more than just divisions of time – they are our connection with nature.

The drought in the Southwestern US is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO.

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a PhD student in geosciences at University of Texas at Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

It's funny to me that I've been in Austin long enough that someone from UT talking about the Colorado River inherently means the one that flows through town. Not sure why we have two of these, really.

Clear-cutting forests doesn’t just raise flood risk — it can supercharge it. UBC researchers found that in certain watersheds, floods became up to 18 times more frequent and over twice as severe after clear-cutting, with these effects lasting more than four decades. The surprise? Terrain details like which direction a slope faces played a huge role in flood behavior. Conventional models miss these dynamics, which could mean we've been underestimating the danger for decades — especially as climate change accelerates extreme weather.

When the government of Sri Lanka published the National Red List of threatened plants in 2020, my eyebrows shot up. We’ve all become accustomed, after all, to the grim news these reports periodically bring us. But here it was, in black and white: 128 species, not having been recorded in surveys conducted during the past century, were assessed as “possibly extinct,” while a further two each were assessed as “extinct” and “extinct in the wild.” This was good news indeed.

Just eight years earlier, the 2012 National Red List had assessed fully 177 species as possibly extinct, together with five extinct and two others extinct in the wild. Had 49 extinct species — species no one had recorded in more than a century — really been rediscovered since 2012? Clearly, someone had blundered. Not stopping to put the book down, I called up Siril Wijesundara at the National Institute of Fundamental Studies (NIFS) in Kandy and the chairman of the committee of experts who conducted the assessment.

“Siril,” I said, “there’s a mistake in the number of extinct flowering plants in the new Red List.”

He laughed. “I thought that would get your attention,” he said. “But there’s no mistake. Himesh has rediscovered three of the officially extinct ones as well.”

“What’s Himesh?” I asked, thinking it to be the acronym of the institution that had magically rediscovered these species, which, after all, all previous surveys had missed.

“Himesh is an amazing guy,” Wijesundara said. “He spends his life searching for plants.”

To date, [Himesh] Jayasinghe has rediscovered more than 100 of the 177 possibly extinct species as well as three of the five extinct species and both species previously considered extinct in the wild. And the good news doesn’t stop there. He has up to now found some 210 species that have never been reported from Sri Lanka. About 50 of these were already known from India, while a further 20, though named in the historical literature, can now be added to the national floral inventory because they are supported by hard evidence: newly collected specimens as well as photographs.

And then there are the 150 species that appear to be entirely new to science. All these records are supported by specimens Jayasinghe has deposited in the National Herbarium, as well as thousands of photographs. Returning to an interesting plant again and again until he finds it in flush, in fruit and in flower, he has accumulated a photo library representing some 2,600 of the 2,850 species of flowering plants then known from Sri Lanka, and that’s omitting the grasses and bamboos, which he hasn’t begun working on yet. The 210 new records will now get added to those tallies.

“Back then, the river was embarrassing. It was a conveyor belt of trash,” said Miller as he handed me a photograph showing a tributary choked with broken appliances, tires, plastic kiddie pools and even a rusted blue car.

Chief among the junk: tires. Each year, the United States discards nearly 300m tires. While most are reused or recycled, millions slip through the cracks.

When Miller paddled past a tree where a tire had speared itself “like an olive on a toothpick”, he realized that tire would be there forever, unless someone did something.

So, he did. That fall, Miller gathered hundreds of tires then recruited friends to corral them downstream. Lacking boats, he devised a way to fill old tires with empty milk jugs to make them buoyant.