The Guardian
by Carey Gillam

When US regulators issued a 2019 assessment of the widely used farm chemical paraquat, they determined that even though multiple scientific studies linked the chemical to Parkinson’s disease, that work was outweighed by other studies that did not find such links.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reiterated its assessment in a 2021 report, determining that when weighing all the risks and benefits, US farmers could continue to apply the weedkiller across millions of US acres to help in the production of soybeans, corn, cotton and an array of other crops.

This is in stark contrast to the EU, where it is banned. It is also outlawed in the UK, where it is manufactured; Switzerland, where its manufacturer, Syngenta, is based; and China, the home of Syngenta’s parent company.

A growing chorus of US farm worker, health and environmental advocacy groups is demanding that this must change. They argue that research conducted by independent scientists provides abundant evidence of paraquat’s ability to cause Parkinson’s and other health dangers, and the EPA is improperly discounting that body of research.

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By Ishaan Tharoor
Washington Post

The climate news is as grim as ever.

Despite the stated ambitions of the international community to take action, the world’s nations have shaved just 1% off their projected greenhouse gas emissions for 2030, according to a new U.N. report. The meager outcome places the planet on a path to warm by 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century – below some of the greatest fears of climate watchers but still beyond the safe temperature threshold set at 1.5 degrees Celsius. It precipitates a dangerous future of extreme weather, rising sea levels and “endless suffering,” as the United Nations put it itself.

Two other reports this week from U.N. agencies compounded these woes. An analysis by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change found that few countries had adjusted their climate pledges since a major U.N. climate conference last year held in Glasgow, Scotland. This year’s conference is set to be hosted in Egypt next month. Another study by the World Meteorological Organization found that methane emissions are rising faster than ever. The evidence raises “questions about humanity’s ability to limit the greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the near term,” my Washington Post colleagues reported.

Advances have been made – the world is weaning itself off coal, while the governments of major emitters Australia and United States have recently enacted significant legislation to reduce emissions. But it’s not happening fast enough. “Global and national climate commitments are falling pitifully short,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a video message this week. “We must close the emissions gap before climate catastrophe closes in on us all.”

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Mind Matters
By RICHARD W. STEVENS

Whether you’re a professional gourmet, a self-styled “foodie,” or an everyday North American who likes to eat, you probably look forward to celebration dinners. At any feast on Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, or the Passover Seder, the focal feature is the food. It doesn’t occur to us to ask: How do we sense the flavors of the food? After all, the food itself has no flavor at all. Flavor is in the mouth — and the nose, tongue, eyes, inner ears, and really the brain — of the beholder.

Venture to learn how human beings enjoy food, and you’ll discover exquisite evidence of intelligent design. Like so many biological systems, detecting flavor involves specialized hardware components and the corresponding software to process information delivered by those components.

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NPR

Global demand for all types of fossil fuels will peak by the mid-2030s, according to new projections from the International Energy Agency that offer a rare glint of optimism about climate change.

In its annual World Energy Outlook released on Thursday, the IEA — a highly influential energy group — said it expects that the world's demand for oil, natural gas and other carbon-emitting fuels will start to decline because of new policies that governments have put in place to fight climate change. It also suggested that the energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine will accelerate the switch to green energy.

The report did not show that the world is on track to stop global warming. The gap between what's happening and what needs to happen remains immense.

But the world is shifting — and it's shifting in the right direction, the IEA said.

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Mashable
By Mark Kaufman

We live in an age of accelerated extinction.

Today's rate of extinctions — driven by a quintuple-whammy of destroyed wilderness, exploited critters, invasive species, rapid climate change, and widespread pollution — are happening "at least tens to hundreds of times higher" than extinctions occurred over the past 10 million years, the UN concluded in a major 2019 report.

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The Guardian
By Damian Carrington

The destruction of global forests slowed in 2021 but the vital climate goal of ending deforestation by 2030 will still be missed without urgent action, according to an assessment.

The area razed in 2021 fell by 6.3% after progress in some countries, notably Indonesia. But almost 7m hectares were lost and the destruction of the most carbon- and biodiversity-rich tropical rainforests fell by only 3%. The CO2 emissions resulting from the lost trees were equivalent to the emissions of the entire European Union plus Japan.

Global heating could not be limited to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels without ending deforestation, experts said. At the UN’s Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow last year, 145 countries pledged to end the felling of forests by the end of the decade. The demolition and degradation of forests causes about 10% of global carbon emissions.

However, based on current trends, the Glasgow leaders’ declaration would be as “hollow” as the pledge made by countries in 2014 to end deforestation by 2020, the assessment’s authors said.

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NewsWeek
By Jess Thomson

A Reddit user in Britain found an area of the forest floor that was mysteriously smoking, with no fire in sight.

User u/TomakaTom shared a video of the strange sight, which showed the ground charred and smoking. "I found it in Blidworth Woods, which is in a village called Blidworth just on the outskirts of Nottinghamshire [in the U.K.]," the poster, who was jogging in the area, told Newsweek.

"There had been a fire in those woods a few months back during the heat wave, and so the woods are still all charred and ashy," u/TomakaTom continued. "I thought the smoke was a remnant of that fire at first, but it was too long ago and there was heavy rain. So I had an inspection and found that it was just the ground itself that was smoking. There was no fire."

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Mashable
By Mark Kaufman

While counting snow crabs at sea in 2021, fisheries biologist Erin Fedewa saw that something was deeply amiss.

Fedewa, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist, spends three or four months with a team that collects crabs from 376 stations in Alaska's Bering Sea each year. Some of these areas always teem with crabs. Scientists count thousands. But in 2021, thousands dwindled to hundreds.

"The survey last year was a huge red flag for me," she told Mashable.

The harbingers proved right. The population of snow crabs has crashed after hitting record highs somewhat recently, in 2018. Numbers have fallen so low, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, for the first time, canceled the snow crab fishing season this year. The NOAA abundance surveys found the total snow crab population in the eastern Bering Sea dropped from an estimated 11.7 billion in 2018 down to 1.9 billion in 2022 (these surveys are a critical piece, but not the only piece, that NOAA uses to determine long-term population trends). That's a drop of well over 80 percent.

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Scienfitic American
By Douglas Fox

On December 26, 2019, Erin Pettit trudged across a plain of glaring snow and ice, dragging an ice-penetrating radar unit the size of a large suitcase on a red plastic sled behind her. The brittle snow crunched like cornflakes underneath her boots—evidence that it had recently melted and refrozen following a series of warm summer days. Pettit was surveying a part of Antarctica where, until several days before, no other human had ever stepped. A row of red and green nylon flags, flapping in the wind on bamboo poles, extended into the distance, marking a safe route free of hidden, deadly crevasses. The Thwaites Ice Shelf appeared healthy on the surface. But if that were the case, Pettit wouldn’t have been there.

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By The Oregonian/OregonLive.com

An international index is rating Portland and Seattle among the top five cities with the worst global air quality on Wednesday.

The IQAir index says Portland is fourth in the world for terrible air quality and pollution on Wednesday evening, and Seattle is second.

No. 1 in the world is Lahore, Pakistan, and No. 3 is Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Rounding out the top five is Chengdu, China.

Seattle briefly ranked No. 1 on Wednesday, according to The Seattle Times. IQAir is a Swiss air-quality technology company that also operates a real-time air-quality information platform.

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President Biden became the first president to officially recognize Indigenous Peoples' Day in 2021, and did so again this year. It falls on the same day as Columbus Day, which was established by Italian American groups to celebrate their heritage and to acknowledge the mistreatment of the immigrant group in the U.S.

Indigenous Peoples' Day is a time of reflection, recognition and celebration of the role Native people have played in U.S. history, as NPR has reported. One way to mark the day — and to learn about Indigenous history year-round — is to learn which Native lands you live on.

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