Tonight’s news awaits your comments. Everyone is encouraged to share their 2¢ or articles, stories, and tweets. Old school formatting for the OND tonight. This is an open thread.
- Washington Post: Earth posts warmest February and ninth straight record-setting month — “The Earth just observed its warmest February, setting a monthly record for the ninth time in a row, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Wednesday. The unrelenting and exceptional global warmth — fueled by a combination of human-caused warming and the El Niño climate pattern…”
- BBC News: More climate records fall in world's warmest February— “Each month since June 2023 has seen new temperature highs for the time of year. The world's sea surface is at its hottest on record, while Antarctic sea-ice has again reached extreme lows.”
- Reuters: Biden's scaled-back power rule raises doubts over US climate target— “The Biden administration’s decision to exclude the existing U.S. fleet of natural gas power plants from upcoming carbon emissions regulations raises questions over the nation's ability to meet its climate goals, according to researchers… The EPA has said it plans to write a separate rule to cover CO2 emissions from existing gas plants as well as other hazardous air pollutants after it finalizes the rest of the regulation later this spring, but did not give a specific timeline.”
- New Republic: Inside Big Oil’s Plot to Keep Their Emissions Confidential— “The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday voted 3–2 to finalize a rule on what companies disclose about their greenhouse gas emissions and how climate change stands to impact their business… The SEC rule … was considerably weaker than the version that was first proposed in March 2022. It lacked the strongest part of the original proposal: that companies be required to disclose what are known as Scope 3 emissions. Those are the emissions linked to products it purchases from third parties, activities like business travel, and the use of its products by consumers.”
- Wired: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat— “Extreme heat waves are already here, and they are killing tens of thousands of people. Blasting through 2 degrees Celsius of warming means they’ll happen many times more frequently.”
- Science Alert: Pivotal Moment For Humanity as Disasters Threaten to Converge— “Humanity is heading for disaster, unless significant steps are taken to change that course.” According to the new report, consequences will be “trillions of US dollars in climate-related damage, billions of people pushed into hardship around the world, and millions of lives lost as a result of a rapidly warming planet.”
- The Conversation: Climate change is warping the seasons— “Climate change won’t simply usher in seasons where everything happens either a month earlier or later. Some species will delay hibernation and emerge in spring sooner, but others will stick to their original schedule, taking their cues from day length rather than temperature. The result will be chaos,” according to Charlie Gardner, a lecturer in conservation biology at the University of Kent.
- New York Times: Weirdly Warm Winter Has Climate Fingerprints All Over It, Study Says— “Winter was weirdly warm for half the world’s population, driven in many places by the burning of fossil fuels, according to an analysis of temperature data from hundreds of locations worldwide… analysis, conducted by Climate Central… found that in several cities in North America, Europe and Asia, not only was winter unusually warm, but climate change played a distinctly recognizable role.”
- CNN: Where sinking cities are pushing sea level rise into overdrive — “Dozens of cities along the US coastline are sinking at alarming rates, leaving them far more exposed to devastating flooding from sea level rise than previously thought, scientists reported… in the journal Nature.”
- University of Colorado: The Arctic could become ‘ice-free’ within a decade— “The Arctic could see summer days with practically no sea ice as early as the next couple of years, according to a new study out of CU Boulder… By mid-century, the Arctic is likely to see an entire month without floating ice during September… At the end of the century, the ice-free season could last several months a year…”
- New York Times: As ‘Zombie Fires’ Smolder, Canada Braces for Another Season of Flames— “Canada’s emergency preparedness minister is warning that this year’s wildfire season will be worse than the record-breaking season of 2023, when thousands of fires burned tens of millions of acres and set off massive plumes of smoke that enveloped major U.S. cities...”
- Grist: How climate change primed Texas to burn— “The dry, dusty rangeland of the Texas Panhandle could not have been more perfectly suited to burn. Temperatures were 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. The air was dry, with humidity below 20 percent. And wind speeds were as high as 60 mph…. The high plains of Texas now experience 32 more days with hot, dry, and windy weather conditions than in the 1970s, according to an analysis by Climate Central, a nonprofit tracking climate effects.”
- CNN: How a warming climate is setting the stage for fast-spreading, destructive wildfires — The Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas “adds to an ever-lengthening list of rapidly spreading, destructive wildfires in the US and elsewhere. As humans continue to heat up the world with fossil fuel pollution, scientists warn these kinds of fires will only become more common… global warming is loading the dice in favor of more intense and severe blazes.”
- Guardian: Financial toll of climate crisis hitting women harder, UN says— “Households headed by women in rural areas lost about 8% more of their income to heat stress than male-headed households, and their reduction in income when floods struck was about 3% greater than the loss to men, according to data released by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Tuesday.”
- Mongabay: Biological field stations deliver high return on investment for conservation, study finds— “Field stations provide many overlooked benefits and a significant return on investment for conservation, according to a new study authored by 173 conservation researchers.”
- High Country News: Underground seed banks hold promise for ecological restoration — “Many plants store future generations just a few inches belowground in seed banks, where seeds, roots, buds and bulbs remain dormant. Some seeds can survive for decades — even centuries, or longer. Seed banks are “biodiversity reservoirs,” as one recent study described and are found in ecosystems globally. Across the West, they’re present from wetlands to deserts, sand dunes and sagebrush steppes. The plants wait until conditions are just right to reappear.”
- Bloomberg: Spanish Power Is Almost Free With Renewables Set for Record— “Electricity prices in Spain have slumped to almost nothing as the nation’s wind and solar parks are churning out more power than ever… The plunge in the Spanish market this week has been extreme, but there is a clear downward trend in both power and gas prices across Europe after the energy crisis. That is hurting utility earnings...”
- Washington Post: Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power— “Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid…. A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is … artificial intelligence… The proliferation of crypto-mining... is also driving data center growth.”
- E&E News: States eye rescue of retiring coal plants— “Republican lawmakers in almost a dozen states want to prop up coal plants that face closure amid a boom in renewable energy and a federal crackdown on power plant pollution.”
- New Republic: The Scariest Part About Artificial Intelligence — “The amount of water that A.I. uses is unconscionable… A.I. uses this much water because of the computing power it requires, which necessitates chilled water to cool down equipment—some of which then evaporates in the cooling process, meaning that it cannot be reused… Then there’s A.I.’s energy use, which could double by 2026, according to aJanuary report by the International Energy Association. That’s the equivalent of adding a new heavily industrialized country, like Sweden or Germany, to the planet.”
- Los Angeles Times: Microplastics may be new risk factor for cardiovascular disease, researchers say— “In a study released Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, an international team of physicians and researchers showed that surgical patients who had a build-up of micro and nanoplastics in their arterial plaque had a 2.1 times greater risk of nonfatal heart attack, nonfatal stroke or death from any cause in the three years post surgery than those who did not.”
- NPR: A new satellite will track climate-warming pollution— “MethaneSAT – led by the Environmental Defense Fund – will have a targeted focus: to spot methane from the oil and gas industry, which leaks at various parts of the fossil fuel production process. Sometimes oil companies deliberately burn methane gas if they can't pipe it somewhere.”
- Mongabay: Male dominance isn’t the default in primate societies, new study shows— “The study found that while a majority of species (58%) exhibited male-biased power structures, female- or co-dominant structures were identified in every major primate group. The pattern held true for apes as well; all five gibbon species studied were classified as non-male-dominant, as were bonobos among the great apes.”