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The Washington Post
As a year of surprising global warmth came to a close, a record high annual average temperature was already assured. Now, some scientists are already speculating: 2024 could be even hotter. […]
[El Niño] could be enough to, for the first time on an annual basis, push average planetary temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial, 19th century levels, according to Britain’s Met Office. The planet came closer than ever to that dreaded threshold in recent months, providing a first glimpse of a world where sustained levels of that heat would fuel new weather extremes. […]
“The fact that we are in uncharted territory, we don’t actually know what will happen next,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The New Republic
Ali Zaidi, the White House’s thirtysomething national climate adviser, stood before a lectern in a packed conference hall at the NYU School of Law wearing a crisp navy suit, a blue tie, and just enough stubble to look roguish and anti-establishment but not slovenly. It was September 18, day 2 of Climate Week NYC, and Zaidi was in town to tout the administration’s environmental accomplishments. He began by highlighting the critical role the nation’s youth, like the law students arrayed before him, were playing in the climate movement. “It’s really been the voices of young people who have organized and agitated for change—” he was saying when audience member Sim Bilal, 21, rose to his feet.
A member of the newly launched pressure group Climate Defiance, Bilal, an L.A.-based community organizer, wearing a black watch cap and an overstuffed backpack, had come to make his own voice heard. He was young. He was agitating.
“Will you publicly ask Biden to oppose the Willow project?” he demanded, referring to ConocoPhillips’s plan to drill for oil in a 499-acre patch of Alaskan tundra. “You guys have protected 13 million acres of the Arctic, but that’s not enough. So, yes or no?”
[…] Then another protester sprang from his seat. “Will you cancel Willow, yes or no?” he shouted. As half a dozen additional protesters popped up in the audience and unfurled a banner, a look of defeat crossed the official’s face. The chant rose up: “Hey Ali! Get off it! Put people over profit!”
The Guardian
Throughout 2023, the hottest year in recorded history, fossil fuel giants doubled down on their planet-heating business models.
Reuters
The oil and gas industry went on a $250 billion buying spree in 2023, taking advantage of companies' high stock prices to secure lower-cost reserves and prepare for the next upheaval in an industry likely to undergo more consolidation.
A surge in oil demand as world economies shook off the pandemic downturn has stoked acquirers' enthusiasm. Exxon Mobil, Chevron Corp and Occidental Petroleum made acquisitions worth a total of $135 billion in 2023. ConocoPhillips completed two big deals in the last two years.
The grand prize in this dealmaking is the largest U.S. shale-oil field, the Permian Basin in west Texas and New Mexico. The four companies are now positioned to control about 58% of future production there.
Each aims to pump at least 1 million barrels per day (bpd) from the oilfield, which is expected to produce 7 million bpd by the end of 2027.
The Guardian
The world’s five largest listed oil companies are expected to reward their investors with record payouts of more than $100bn (£79bn) for 2023 against a backdrop of growing public outrage at fossil fuel profits.
The five “super-majors” – BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies – showered shareholders with dividend payments and share buybacks worth $104bn in the 2022 calendar year, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
The bumper payouts followed a year of record profits for big oil and gas companies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended global energy markets, triggering a rise in the international price of Brent crude and record gas prices across Europe.
High Country News
In September, the United Auto Workers walked off the job and onto picket lines, not only in the Rust Belt, but across the West, from Reno to Rancho Cucamonga. “Who’s got the power?” Reno’s GM workers chanted. “We got the power! What kind of power? Union power!” Ultimately, more than 45,000 workers around the country joined the strike, the first time the union simultaneously challenged the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (owner of Jeep and Chrysler).
For six weeks, autoworkers walked picket lines in red shirts, waving signs that proclaimed: “UAW Stand Up: Record Profits Record Contracts.” The Big Three made a quarter-trillion in profits and CEO pay rose 40% from 2013-2022, but average real wages for auto workers have fallen almost 20% since 2008, according to the Economic Policy Institute. […]
Along with better wages and benefits, the autoworkers were fighting for their place in the transition to electric vehicles. UAW contract negotiations coincided with the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act, which will funnel billions of dollars into renewables and electric vehicle manufacturing. IRA tax credits include incentives for companies that pay good wages, but they don’t require union labor. Previous UAW contracts with the Big Three didn’t cover EV manufacturing facilities.
The Guardian
Morning is a construct in the Antarctic summer. It’s 7.30am and Nerilie Abram, a climate science professor at the Australian National University, is having breakfast at Casey station when she takes Guardian Australia’s call in late November. The sun barely kissed the horizon the night before, and won’t fall below it for weeks.
Constant daylight can be famously discombobulating for first-time visitors to Antarctica, but for experienced researchers such as Abram, it is just the backdrop to life at the end of the Earth. This year, though, something else is deeply strange.
When Abram was here a decade ago there was a mass of ice floating off the coast. It’s a vastly altered scene when she looks out the window now. “There’s no sea ice at all,” she says. “It’s a magnificent landscape. To think about what we’re doing to it and the changes that are happening here, it’s a punch in the guts.”
Wired
For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in the face of drought, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. In California, Castor canadensis is so prized that the state recently committed millions to its restoration.
While beavers’ benefits are indisputable, however, our knowledge remains riddled with gaps. We don’t know how many are out there, or which direction their populations are trending, or which watersheds most desperately need a beaver infusion. Few states have systematically surveyed them; moreover, many beaver ponds are tucked into remote streams far from human settlements, where they’re near-impossible to count. “There’s so much we don’t understand about beavers, in part because we don’t have a baseline of where they are,” says Emily Fairfax, a beaver researcher at the University of Minnesota.
But that’s starting to change. Over the past several years, a team of beaver scientists and Google engineers have been teaching an algorithm to spot the rodents’ infrastructure on satellite images. Their creation has the potential to transform our understanding of these paddle-tailed engineers—and help climate-stressed states like California aid their comeback. And while the model hasn’t yet gone public, researchers are already salivating over its potential. “All of our efforts in the state should be taking advantage of this powerful mapping tool,” says Kristen Wilson, the lead forest scientist at the conservation organization the Nature Conservancy. “It’s really exciting.”
EuroNews
Humans have wiped out around 1,400 bird species - double the amount previously thought - a recent study has found. This amounts to one in nine or 12 per cent of species being lost over modern human history, according to the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH).
Deforestation, overhunting and the introduction of invasive species are some of the main threats introduced by humans since the Late Pleistocene period around 130,000 years ago. […]
Climate change, intensive agriculture and pollution have added to this threat over the last century.
Oregon Public Broadcasting / Columbia Insights
As native trees in the Pacific Northwest die off due to climate changes, the U.S. Forest Service in Portland, Oregon, and citizen groups around Puget Sound, Washington, are turning to a deceptively simple climate adaptation strategy called “assisted migration.”
As the world’s climate warms, tree-growing ranges in the Northern Hemisphere are predicted to move farther north and higher in elevation.
Trees, of course, can’t get up and walk to their new climatic homes. This is where assisted migration is supposed to lend a hand.
The idea is that humans can help trees keep up with climate change by moving them to more favorable ecosystems faster than the trees could migrate on their own.
Yet not everyone agrees on what type of assisted migration the region needs — or that it’s always a good thing.
The New York Times
Canada has long promoted itself globally as a model for protecting one of the country’s most vital natural resources: the world’s largest swath of boreal forest, which is crucial to fighting climate change.
But a new study using nearly half a century of data from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec — two of the country’s main commercial logging regions — reveals that harvesting trees has inflicted severe damage on the boreal forest that will be difficult to reverse.
Researchers led by a group from Griffith University in Australia found that since 1976 logging in the two provinces has caused the removal of 35.4 million acres of boreal forest, an area roughly the size of New York State.
While nearly 56 million acres of well-established trees at least a century old remain in the region, logging has shattered this forest, leaving behind a patchwork of isolated stands of trees that has created a landscape less able to support wildlife, according to the study. And it has made the land more susceptible to wildfire, scientists say.
Nature / Scientific Reports (2020)
In this paper we afford a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of current world population growth in relation to the parallel deforestation process adopting a statistical point of view. We consider a simplified model based on a stochastic growth process driven by a continuous time random walk, which depicts the technological evolution of human kind, in conjunction with a deterministic generalised logistic model for humans-forest interaction and we evaluate the probability of avoiding the self-destruction of our civilisation. Based on the current resource consumption rates and best estimate of technological rate growth our study shows that we have very low probability, less than 10% in most optimistic estimate, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse. […]
Trees’ services to our planet range from carbon storage, oxygen production to soil conservation and water cycle regulation. They support natural and human food systems and provide homes for countless species, including us, through building materials. Trees and forests are our best atmosphere cleaners and, due to the key role they play in the terrestrial ecosystem, it is highly unlikely to imagine the survival of many species, including ours, on Earth without them. In this sense, the debate on climate change will be almost obsolete in case of a global deforestation of the planet. […]
In conclusion our model shows that a catastrophic collapse in human population, due to resource consumption, is the most likely scenario of the dynamical evolution based on current parameters. Adopting a combined deterministic and stochastic model we conclude from a statistical point of view that the probability that our civilisation survives itself is less than 10% in the most optimistic scenario. Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation… Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degradation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline. This consideration leads to an even shorter remaining time.
The Conversation
Another climate summit has come and gone. The 28th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28 to you and me) took stock of the world’s progress in limiting global heating to 1.5°C. This is the guardrail scientists have advised world leaders to make every effort to limit warming to, lest they trigger tipping points that send Earth hurtling into climate breakdown. […]
As we reported last week, the failure to include stronger language in the final text (including the promise of a definitive “phase-out” of fossil fuels) was condemned by climate and energy researchers. “Abated” burning of coal (the dirtiest fossil fuel) is permitted in the text, but with no guidance on how much of the emissions must be captured and stored to be considered abated, COP28 left a loophole wide enough to drive a coal train through.
Natural gas also snuck into the text as a protected “transitional fuel”. Research has indicated that leaks of methane (a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas) from oil and gas infrastructure can actually make natural gas worse for the climate than coal. […]
“Nonetheless, there really should be a timeline attached to the use of these transitional fuels,” they say. (Such a phase-out deadline was deemed “too controversial” to even discuss.)
Wired
As Hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea surface and deposit them when it made landfall. Larry was literally a perfect storm: Because it hadn’t touched land before reaching the island, anything it dropped would have been scavenged from the water or air, as opposed to, say, a highly populated city, where you’d expect to find lots of microplastics.
Mongabay
[…] Science is increasingly showing that plastics are making us sick. […]
“All plastics are toxic, and certainly some are worse than others,” says Michael Schade, director of consumer-focused campaigns at the U.S. nonprofit advocacy organization Toxic-Free Future. His organization has a long list of problematic plastics, including polycarbonate (a hard, clear plastic once used in baby bottles that often contains hormone-disrupting bisphenols like BPA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene.
But experts often point to two types of plastic that are so toxic to produce, use and dispose of, they shouldn’t even be on the market: polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polystyrene. Both should see an “immediate freeze and phase-down” of production, says the U.K.’s Environmental Investigation Agency, an NGO. More than 60 nations want an outright ban on “problematic plastics” by the global plastics treaty now being negotiated.
Grist
As mobile home owners fight rising housing costs, some of them have hit upon a solution that also helps in the fight against climate change — by banding together and buying the land underneath their homes.
This model of collective ownership, also called resident-owned cooperatives or ROCs, is on the rise. In 2000, there were little more than 200. Today, there are more than 15,000, according to a 2022 study from researchers at the University of California Berkeley, Cornell and MIT.
When residents own the land, they can move more quickly to upgrade infrastructure. That’s where climate change comes in. Renewables — especially solar — work uniquely well with these types of places, according to Kevin Jones, director at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
“There’s nothing more perfect than these resident-owned communities because they already have a cooperative structure and, generally, commonly own the piece of land,” said Jones. “[They] are just kind of natural communities to be able to bring the benefits of solar to more low to moderate-income people.”
The Atlantic
When a natural disaster strikes, renters are in trouble. In addition to damaged infrastructure, flooding, and trauma following a severe storm, tenants can face the looming threat of unaffordable rent—and even eviction. New research suggests that renters, who make up roughly one-third of the population in the United States, are hit hard by and struggle to recover from hurricanes.
Kelsea Best at Ohio State University and Qian He at New Jersey’s Rowan University, who both study climate resilience, recently led two studies analyzing how hurricanes affect rental housing. […]
Immediately after the most powerful hurricanes, median rents go up, Best says, and they stay high throughout the following calendar year. These severe storms bring flooding and strong winds and can leave behind a trail of damaged buildings. Evacuated or displaced tenants are suddenly looking for shelter. Meanwhile, landlords need time to make repairs—or will choose not to rebuild at all. In the short term, storm damage squeezes a city’s already limited supply of rental housing, driving up prices. […]
As climate change continues to fuel stronger and more frequent storms, communities in the United States will face worsening disasters that exacerbate inequality among residents. The challenges of climate change and housing are linked, Best explains, and should be addressed simultaneously. “We need to be thinking about safe, affordable housing for all people in this country,” she says.
MIT Technology Review
The world is building and making things as never before, from roads and hospitals to vehicles and furniture. That’s good news for people who benefit from new goods and infrastructure, but it’s also made industries like manufacturing and construction absolutely ravenous for raw materials.
Since 1971, steel demand has tripled, aluminum demand has increased by six, and cement demand has increased nearly seven times.
All this is a growing climate concern, because making, using, and disposing of certain materials can generate massive amounts of emissions. Adding it all up, global material production accounts for something like a quarter of global greenhouse-gas emissions today.
CNN
Over half a century ago, India’s then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi talked about the staggering challenge for developing nations: to industrialize without harming the environment.
“On the one hand the rich look askance at our continuing poverty — on the other, they warn us against their own methods,” she told a United Nations event in Stockholm in 1972, the first global conference to make the environment a major issue.
“We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people,” she added.
Her words have never been more relevant. The tension between economic growth and environmental protection is at the heart of global discussions about how to tackle the ever accelerating climate crisis.
Addressing the opening session of the COP28 climate talks …, India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, said all developing countries must be given “a fair share in the global carbon budget” — the amount of planet-warming carbon pollution the world can emit and still avoid climate catastrophe.
Nature
The global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. This dynamic is driving climate change and ecological breakdown. High-income economies, and the corporations and wealthy classes that dominate them, are mainly responsible for this problem and consume energy and materials at unsustainable rates.
Yet many industrialized countries are now struggling to grow their economies, given economic convulsions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resource scarcities and stagnating productivity improvements. Governments face a difficult situation. Their attempts to stimulate growth clash with objectives to improve human well-being and reduce environmental damage.
Researchers in ecological economics call for a different approach — degrowth. Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being. This approach, which has gained traction in recent years, can enable rapid decarbonization and stop ecological breakdown while improving social outcomes2. It frees up energy and materials for low- and middle-income countries in which growth might still be needed for development. Degrowth is a purposeful strategy to stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals, unlike recession, which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth-dependent economies fail to grow.
The Atlantic
Finding a vole on Alaska’s North Slope takes practice. The open plain pulls the eye upward, toward grand things: the horizon line, the distant shimmer of snow in the mountains. The nearest tree is more than 50 miles away. The low shrubs and sedges toss and wave in the wind. It’s a place where a 600-pound musk ox can look dog-size.
In this landscape, even a very large vole—weighing less than three ounces and no more than nine inches long—is easy to miss. But Nick Patel knows what to look for. Last August, Patel pointed my attention toward a depression worn into the moss, a path that disappeared into a yellowed tuft of sedge. Voles are creatures of habit, scurrying so often over the same route that they wear trails—runways—into the soil. Once you know to look for them, the tundra is laced through with vole runways.
Patel is a field tech with Team Vole, a group of some 20 researchers studying Alaska’s voles and lemmings. Despite their size, these creatures are a force on the tundra. Caribou migrate. So do the geese, ducks, swans, and sandhill cranes that come north by the hundreds of thousands each summer. But voles and lemmings stay put. Unlike many Arctic animals, they don’t hibernate. And as Team Vole is finding, this means that these small mammals—which live throughout the circumpolar north—fundamentally shape the ecosystem around them. In their tiny paws rests a crucial part of the climate’s future: whether the world’s tundra will help pull carbon from the atmosphere, or instead emit more.
Oregon Public Radio News
The sun was peeking through the clouds during a short break in the rain as Nick Edwards was making his way along the Charleston Marina. Edwards fished along the Oregon Coast for more than 40 years and now owns an 80-foot trawler named the Carter Jon, which commercially fishes Dungeness crab and pink cocktail shrimp. […]
Edwards said the Oregon Coast offers a great place to fish because of its abundance of species. He’s worried that could be lost to floating offshore wind.
“We don’t want the demise of our ecosystem to be the unintended consequences of offshore wind,” he said.
It’s a concern that’s been steadily growing in coastal towns that would be most directly affected by any offshore wind project. […]
While the Biden administration has previously said offshore wind is one way the country can more quickly move away from fossil fuel for its energy needs, Oregonians are demanding answers even as the plan remains in its infancy. Others frustrated with the lack of research, transparency and engagement from the federal government are filling the information gap with their own answers.
The Washington Post
The Great Lakes had the smallest amount of ice cover this New Year’s Day in at least the past 50 years and are on track to see less than the seasonal average this winter, according to government data. The decline comes during a five-decade drop in ice cover that experts say is due in part to human-caused climate change.
“It’s an extreme number,” said James Kessler, a physical scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL). “That said, it is early in the season, and there is year-to-year variability. But on average, we are seeing less ice cover and shorter seasons.”
On the first of the year, only 0.35 percent of the Great Lakes was under ice, below the roughly 9 percent that on average at this point in the winter, according to data from GLERL. On New Year’s Day 2023, more than 4 percent of the Great Lakes was covered in ice, while 2.35 percent was covered in ice on Jan. 1, 2022.
The Washington Post
[…] Siberia is heating up around twice as quickly as other parts of the world. The rapid change is causing the frozen ground known as permafrost that coats about two-thirds of Russia to thaw for the first time in ages.
Its brittle underbrush has fueled vicious forest fires. The melting ground is releasing greenhouse gases. Sheets of the softening land have emerged for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, revealing skeletons, disease and awakening life.
In July, scientists were able to revive a 46,000-year-old worm that was trapped in the permafrost. European researchers have warned that as the ground continues to thaw, ancient viruses may emerge.
Live Science
Deep beneath the permafrost that blankets a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean lurks a growing and migrating sea of methane, researchers have discovered.
The thick permafrost, or ground that remains frozen for at least two years, forms a tight seal that has so far prevented millions of cubic feet of methane from wafting out — but there's no guarantee that the potent greenhouse gas won't eventually escape, according to a study published Dec. 13 in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science.
"At present, the leakage from below permafrost is very low, but factors such as glacial retreat and permafrost thawing may 'lift the lid' on this in the future," lead author Thomas Birchall, a geologist at the University Center in Svalbard in Norway, said in a statement.
Inside Climate News
A California state grant program designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions results in the direct release of approximately 225,000 to 300,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of state data. The pollution, which comes from burning biomethane fuel that was captured from decomposing cow manure, is equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of between 50,000 and 65,000 automobiles.
However, the emissions aren’t counted in the state’s annual greenhouse gas inventory. Rather, the California Department of Food and Agriculture considers the pollution to be the opposite—part of the emissions reductions that come from its $200 million dairy digester program.
Critics of the program note that burning methane, the biggest component of natural gas, releases carbon dioxide emissions regardless of whether the gas comes from cow manure or from underground fossil gas reservoirs. They argue that using biomethane fuel in vehicles should not be counted as a source of emissions reductions.
“It treats a compressed-natural-gas heavy duty truck emitting greenhouse gas emissions as though it were a direct carbon capture technology, which of course it is not,” Tyler Lobdell, an attorney with Food and Water Watch, said of the state’s dairy digester program.
The Conversation
Imagine a house is on fire, and someone is actively pouring gas on the fire. They then pour a little less gas and want credit for doing so, despite still feeding the fire. Perhaps they claim they are now “fire neutral”.
We’d rightly be very sceptical of such claims. Yet that is more or less what some influential supporters of the livestock industry have done.
I’m referring to eye-catching and influential recent studies published in peer-reviewed livestock science journals which claim that the meat and dairy industries are or can easily be “climate neutral”. […]
The claims are especially striking because methane is a potent greenhouse gas that accounts for 0.5°C of global warming so far, and we know that livestock production accounts for about one-third of human-caused emissions. That methane is a product of the digestion processes in cattle, sheep, and other ruminants, emitted when they belch.
Salon
[…] As Naoki Nitta wrote earlier this year, "Research shows that even a modest skew away from meat-based diets can shrink an individual’s carbon footprint as much as 75%." The journal Science of the Total Environment estimates that "Replacing beef with beans in the US could free up 42% of US cropland and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 334 mmt [million metric tons], accomplishing 75% of the 2020 carbon reduction target."
Then there are the physical benefits. When an otherwise healthy family member got some shocking results on a lipid panel recently, the doctor's advice was unambiguous — dramatically reduce meat and dairy consumption, or go on daily medication. It was an easy call. Non-meat eaters are also less likely to be obese or experience heart disease, and may have lower risks for diabetes 2 and certain cancers. A more plant-based diet can also be easier on the wallet. It's not just about opting out of pricey steaks, either. Egg prices have risen 70% over the past year, and milk prices are also on the upswing.
And then there are animals themselves. The ecosystem and ethics around eating animals are complex, but it is a whole lot easier to feel part of a more respectful, sustainable system when you just eat less meat and know where it's coming from.
Wired
[…] As the agriculture sector looks toward 2024, crop scientists are working to get ahead of ruinously unstable weather. They are envisioning adaptations for both growing systems and plants themselves. But time is not on their side.
“Plant breeding is a slow process,” says James Schnable, a plant geneticist and professor of agronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It takes seven to 10 years to develop and release a new corn variety. But we know that as a result of climate change, the depletion of aquifers, changes in policies and commodity prices, the environment seven to 10 years from now is going to be very different. And we really have no way of predicting what are the varieties that should be developed today to meet those challenges then.” […]
The loss of traditional growing areas—which in a moderate-warming scenario has been predicted to be 30 percent of current production—doesn’t only affect the major staple crops. Specialty crops such as olives and oranges are also at risk, and so are the crops that provide the basis for luxuries.
Pennsylvania State University
Honey yields in the U.S. have been declining since the 1990s, with honey producers and scientists unsure why, but a new study by Penn State researchers has uncovered clues in the mystery of the missing honey.
Using five decades of data from across the U.S., the researchers analyzed the potential factors and mechanisms that might be affecting the number of flowers growing in different regions—and, by extension, the amount of honey produced by honey bees.
The study, recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that changes in honey yields over time were connected to herbicide application and land use, such as fewer land conservation programs that support pollinators. Annual weather anomalies also contributed to changes in yields. […]
Overall, researchers found that climate conditions and soil productivity—the ability of soil to support crops based on its physical, chemical and biological properties—were some of the most important factors in estimating honey yields. States in both warm and cool regions produced higher honey yields when they had productive soils.
The New York Times
Amid concerns about climate change, demand for rail service is strong, and both governments and private investors are trying to keep up. Even Eurostar may see competition on its London-Paris route. […]
It’s all part of Europe’s ongoing rail renaissance, which is being driven in large part by strong interest from passengers.
“For long-distance travel, trains are full — and we have more demand than supply. This is true for day trains as well as night trains,” said Alberto Mazzola, the executive director of the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies, a Brussels-based industry group.
He attributed the rise in demand to passengers’ concerns about the climate as well as trains’ increasing price competitiveness with flights. […]
“The big problem that we have is lack of infrastructure,” Dr. Mazzola said, noting that train stations are the biggest bottleneck, followed by capacity on the lines themselves.