By TONY BRISCOE
Los Angeles Times

A cancer-causing chemical that is widely used to degrease aviation components and heavy machinery could also be linked to Parkinson’s disease, according to a new research paper that recommends increased scrutiny of areas long contaminated by the compound.

Trichloroethylene, or TCE, is a colorless liquid that has been used to remove gunk from jet engines, strip paint and remove stains from shirts dropped off at the dry cleaners. Decades of widespread use in the U.S. have left thousands of sites contaminated by the TCE.

In a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, authors hypothesize that this pollution may be contributing to the global spread of Parkinson’s, a neurological disorder characterized by uncontrollable tremors and slow movement. Although authors were unable to prove a direct connection, they cited a number of other studies that suggest TCE may play a role in the degenerative brain disorder, and urged further research on the matter.

“When Dr. Parkinson described the condition in 1817 in London, he reported six individuals with the disease,” said Dr. Ray Dorsey, a neurology professor at the University of Rochester and lead author. “Two hundred years later, the global burden of disease is estimated that over 6 million people have the disease worldwide. So how do you go from six to 6 million? The rates are growing far faster than aging could explain alone. It has to be environmental factors. I think TCE and air pollution are important contributors.”

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NEWS UN

The study, “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report”, released on Monday following a week-long IPCC session in Interlaken, brings into sharp focus the losses and damages experienced now, and expected to continue into the future, which are hitting the most vulnerable people and ecosystems especially hard.

Temperatures have already risen to 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a consequence of more than a century of burning fossil fuels, as well as unequal and unsustainable energy and land use. This has resulted in more frequent and intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world.

Climate-driven food and water insecurity is expected to grow with increased warming: when the risks combine with other adverse events, such as pandemics or conflicts, they become even more difficult to manage.

Time is short, but there is a clear path forward

If temperatures are to be kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, deep, rapid, and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions will be needed in all sectors this decade, the reports states. Emissions need to go down now, and be cut by almost half by 2030, if this goal has any chance of being achieved.

The solution proposed by the IPCC is “climate resilient development,” which involves integrating measures to adapt to climate change with actions to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions in ways that provide wider benefits.

Examples include access to clean energy, low-carbon electrification, the promotion of zero and low carbon transport, and improved air quality: the economic benefits for people’s health from air quality improvements alone would be roughly the same, or possibly even larger, than the costs of reducing or avoiding emissions

“The greatest gains in wellbeing could come from prioritizing climate risk reduction for low-income and marginalized communities, including people living in informal settlements,” said Christopher Trisos, one of the report’s authors. “Accelerated climate action will only come about if there is a many-fold increase in finance. Insufficient and misaligned finance is holding back progress.”

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UN chief announces plan to speed up progress

In a video message released on Monday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb.”

Climate action is needed on all fronts: “everything, everywhere, all at once,” he declared, in a reference to this year’s Best Film Academy Award winner.

The UN chief has proposed to the G20 group of highly developed economies a “Climate Solidarity Pact,” in which all big emitters would make extra efforts to cut emissions, and wealthier countries would mobilize financial and technical resources to support emerging economies in a common effort to ensure that global temperatures do not rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

In a video message released on Monday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb.”

Climate action is needed on all fronts: “everything, everywhere, all at once,” he declared, in a reference to this year’s Best Film Academy Award winner.

 The UN chief has proposed to the G20 group of highly developed economies a “Climate Solidarity Pact,” in which all big emitters would make extra efforts to cut emissions, and wealthier countries would mobilize financial and technical resources to support emerging economies in a common effort to ensure that global temperatures do not rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

TIME BOMB
The study, “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report”, released on Monday following a week-long IPCC session in Interlaken, brings into sharp focus the losses and damages experienced now, and expected to continue into the future, which are hitting the most vulnerable people and ecosystems especially hard.

Watch video and read full story here

The Guardian
Robin McKie

The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals – from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers – is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children living on the planet.

A study by scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, published this month, concludes that wild land mammals alive today have a total mass of 22m tonnes. By comparison, humanity now weighs in at a total of around 390m tonnes.

At the same time, the species we have domesticated, such as sheep and cattle, in addition to other hangers-on such as urban rodents, add a further 630m tonnes to the total mass of creatures that are now competing with wild mammals for Earth’s resources. The biomass of pigs alone is nearly double that of all wild land mammals.

The figures demonstrate starkly that humanity’s transformation of the planet’s wildernesses and natural habitats into a vast global plantation is now well under way – with devastating consequences for its wild creatures. As the study authors emphasise, the idea that Earth is a planet that still possesses great plains and jungles that are teeming with wild animals is now seriously out of kilter with reality. The natural world and its wild animals are vanishing as humanity’s population of almost eight billion individuals continues to grow.

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Axios
Jennifer A. Kingson

Human-shaped robots with dexterous hands will be staffing warehouses and retail stores, tending to the elderly and performing household chores within a decade or so, according to a Silicon Valley startup working toward that vision.

Why it matters: Demographic trends — such as a persistent labor shortage and the growing elder care crisis — make fully-functioning, AI-driven humanoid robots look tantalizingly appealing.

• Companies such as Amazon are reportedly worried about running out of warehouse workers, whose jobs are physically and mentally demanding with high attrition.

Driving the news: A heavy-hitting startup called Figure, which just emerged from stealth mode, is building a prototype of a humanoid robot that the company says will eventually be able to walk, climb stairs, open doors, use tools and lift boxes — perhaps even make dinner.

• The company is the brainchild of Brett Adcock, a tech entrepreneur who previously founded Archer Aviation (a "flying taxi" maker that went public) and Vettery (an online hiring marketplace that he and a partner sold for $100 million).

• He's assembled an all-star team of 40, including leading roboticists from Boston Dynamics and Tesla.

• They've moved into a 30,000-square-foot facility in Sunnyvale, California, where they plan to set up a mock warehouse to test their prototype.

• "We just got done in December with our full-scale humanoid," Adcock tells Axios. "We'll be walking that in the next 30 days."

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TIME
BY JEFFREY KLUGER

What’s in your faucet can be a dangerous thing. If you’re like an estimated 200 million Americans, every time you turn on the tap, a host of contaminants come out with the water. Among these are trace amounts of PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Also known as “forever chemicals”—because that’s pretty much how long they linger in the environment—exposure to these ubiquitous manufacturing chemicals have been linked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to potential health consequences including decreased fertility, hypertension in pregnant people, increased risk of certain cancers (especially kidney cancer), developmental delays in children, hormonal irregularities, elevated cholesterol, reduced effectiveness of the immune system, and more.

PFAS are used in hundreds of products, including shampoos, soaps, non-stick pots and pans, food packaging, fire-fighting foam, fabrics, and carpeting, and they’ve recently been detected in toilet paper and menstrual products. But it’s PFAS in the water supply that has long been of the greatest concern, simply because while our encounters with some products may be infrequent, we all need water to survive.

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Newsweek

A slew of storms has replenished several California reservoirs, a much-needed respite from the extreme drought that, until recently, plagued the West Coast.

Another atmospheric river hit the state on Friday, with a second in less than a week dumping even more precipitation on Tuesday night. Given California's tumultuous weather patterns lately, the storms posed a life-threatening flood risk while sating several depleted reservoirs and returning them to 100 percent capacity.

Lake Oroville

A tweet by KSL meteorologist Matthew Johnson showed an impressive change in water levels at Lake Oroville, California's second-largest reservoir. The excessive precipitation has allowed the lake's levels to rise by more than 200 feet.

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Discover
By Eliza Strickland

A leading geothermal company has been rocked by an explosion from a well drilled deep into the earth, which was part of a system that converts the heat from buried rocks into clean, green energy. On Friday evening at the South Australian test site, a burst of pressurized water and steam blew through the well "cellar," the 22-foot deep concrete structure set in the ground through which the deeper well is drilled. In geothermal energy systems, wells are drilled two or three miles deep and water is circulated past the hot rocks at that depth to collect heat; the resulting steam is then used to run turbines in a power plant.

Geodynamics, the Brisbane-based company that operates the South Australia well, is widely tipped as being closest to making the technology cost effective. Geodynamics holds the rights to a potential power supply of up to 10 gigawatts trapped in a 1000-square kilometre slab of hot granite deep under the town of Innamincka in South Australia [New Scientist].

But this accident is an embarrassment for the cutting-edge company. No one was injured by the blast, but the company was forced to suspend work on its first demonstration power plant, and a nearby highway was diverted. Geodynamics' managing director, Gerry Grove-White, prefers not to call the incident an explosion.

"There was no explosion. This was a leak from somewhere that then burst through into the cellar [of the well] and then there was just steam and water, which continues to flow at a fairly steady rate," he said [Australia Broadcasting Corporation].

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The Sacramento Bee

Bald eagles Jackie and Shadow have been tending to their two eggs in California through snow and storms since mid-January. But the eggs have been weeks overdue to hatch, so experts said there likely wouldn’t be any eaglets from this clutch. The two eagles continued to incubate the eggs despite this. Now they have given up and left the eggs in the nest near Big Bear, the Friends of Big Bear Valley said in a Sunday, March 5, Facebook post.

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Reuters
By David Stanway

Negotiators from more than 100 countries completed a U.N. treaty to protect the high seas on Saturday, a long-awaited step that environmental groups say will help reverse marine biodiversity losses and ensure sustainable development.

The legally binding pact to conserve and ensure the sustainable use of ocean biodiversity, under discussion for 15 years, was finally agreed after five rounds of protracted U.N.-led negotiations that ended in New York on Saturday, a day after the original deadline.

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The Atlantic
By Katherine J. Wu

In the spring of 1986, in their rush to flee the radioactive plume and booming fire that burned after the Chernobyl power plant exploded, many people left behind their dogs. Most of those former pets died as radiation ripped through the region and emergency workers culled the animals they feared would ferry toxic atoms about. Some, though, survived. Those dogs trekked into the camps of liquidators to beg for scraps; they nosed into empty buildings and found safe places to sleep. In the 1,600-square-mile exclusion zone around the power plant, they encountered each other, and began to reproduce. “Dogs were there immediately after the disaster,” says Gabriella Spatola, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health and the University of South Carolina. And they have been there ever since.

Spatola and her colleagues are now puzzling through the genomes of those survivors’ modern descendants. In identifying the genetic scars that today’s animals may have inherited, the researchers hope to understand how, and how well, Chernobyl’s canine populations have thrived. The findings could both reveal the lasting tolls of radiation and hint at traits that have helped certain dogs avoid the disaster’s worst health effects. The fates of dogs—bred and adapted to work, play, and lounge at our side—are tied to ours. And the canines we leave behind when crises strike could show us what it takes to survive the fallout of our gravest mistakes.

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The increasingly dire nature of news about climate change makes many people want to take action.

July was the hottest month on record, contributing to record ice melt and unprecedented Arctic wildfires. Global warming is making extreme weather like Hurricane Dorian and this summer's European heat wave more likely. Human activity is also driving a sixth mass extinction, polluting the oceans, and deforesting the land.

To do their part in counteracting these trends, many people are trying to reduce their waste, cut down their meat consumption, and avoid high-emissions activities like flying. Some of these eco-friendly choices, however, don't have as big an impact as one might hope.

Here are nine things that probably aren't helping the environment as much as you think.

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The Sunday Times
Chris Haslam

Travel planning has always involved a gamble with the weather. Sometimes it’s a dead cert — the Canaries in December, for example. At others it’s a long shot, Brittany being rain-free in August, and occasionally it’s a no-hope outsider, as anyone who has been tempted by a bargain package to Thailand in September will know.

The weather, however, is no longer a safe bet. The climate is changing, and last year offered the most dramatic and convincing evidence yet of its effects. Wildfires destroyed tens of thousands of square miles of forest in the US, South America and Europe.

Devastating floods hit Australia, South Africa, the Sahel and Pakistan, and Europe endured the hottest summer since measurements began, with the UK reaching a new high of 40.3C at RAF Coningsby on July 19.

African rivers are dry. Alpine resorts are warm and muddy. Beaches in the south of France recorded June-like temperatures at Christmas and, last week, Los Angelenos built snowmen. India issued heatwave alerts in February, Adelaide issued a “code red” heatstroke warning last week, and in Mauritius holidaymakers sought shelter as Cyclone Freddy battered the island. It will come as no surprise that there’s more of the same to come, exacerbated this year and next as a new El Niño event takes over from the outgoing La Niña.

The basics of climate change are straightforward: greenhouse gases (GHGs) produced mainly by fossil-fuel consumption have filled the atmosphere like feathers in a duvet, blanketing the world and trapping the sun’s heat.

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Keith Matheny
Detroit Free Press

It's as integral a part of Michigan's fabric as its lakes and rivers: more than 20 million acres of forest land − the hickory and oak trees of southern Michigan giving way to forests of sugar maple, birch and evergreens that surround northbound travelers.

But a warming climate is harming and transforming the woods, with further, even more dramatic impacts projected by near the end of the century.

Michigan has perhaps the most exceptional forest makeup in North America, as boundaries of multiple forest types converge here: The vast boreal forest, its cold-hardy conifer trees stretching far into Canada, dips into the Upper Peninsula and northern Michigan. A diverse mixed zone then gives way to the great Eastern Broadleaf Forest across the central and southern Lower Peninsula, dominated by beech, maple, oak and hickory trees. Even the grassland prairies of the Plains states extend into far southwest Michigan.

It's the changes happening first at these border zones that give Michigan a front-row seat to climate change impacts on the forest the rest of the 21st century.

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The Kansas City Star
BY HELENA WEGNER

A female bald eagle lost one of its eggs less than a week after a storm swept across Minnesota, blanketing the bird in snow. One of its two eggs cracked in the nest, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Nongame Wildlife Program said in a Wednesday, March 1, Facebook post. “In the 10 years we’ve been watching this nest, we have never seen this occur,” the agency said. It’s unclear how the egg cracked. This bald eagle laid its first egg this year on Feb. 15, according to the DNR. It laid another egg on Feb. 18. Wildlife officials are still optimistic about the egg that’s intact.

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The New York Times

NASHVILLE — I have a dim memory of being taken on a boat ride in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge when I was 4 or 5. I remember tea-dark water lapping at the boat, a white bird on stilt legs and a drifting log that startled me by turning into an alligator. That’s it. Years later, I had to consult my brother to be sure I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing up out of nothing but a word-besotted child’s delight in the swamp’s name.

Last fall, in a moving essay for The Bitter Southerner, the writer Janisse Ray called the Okefenokee “a gigantic, ethereal, god-touched swamp in southeast Georgia that’s like no other place on earth.” This is the kind of ecstatic language the refuge inevitably inspires. Some 700,000 people visit it each year, and I have always intended to return. Now I’m worried I won’t ever have the chance.

Twin Pines Minerals, an Alabama-based mining company, has applied to build a strip mine less than three miles from the wildlife refuge. The mining operation would target a geological formation called Trail Ridge, a raised area of land on the eastern border of the swamp. During prehistoric times, Trail Ridge was a barrier island. Today the ocean is some 45 miles away, and Trail Ridge functions as a low earthen dam that holds the Okefenokee in place. “Trail Ridge is not only ecologically important in and of itself,” notes the Georgia Conservancy, “but also serves as scaffolding for the health of the Okefenokee.”

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