English references

The world has become well versed in the importance of the strait of Hormuz to the world’s energy flows, but attention is increasingly turning to its vital role in another market – the fertiliser on which harvests depend. A third of the global trade in raw materials for fertiliser passes through the maritime choke point, which is also the route for 20% of shipments of natural gas, which is required to make it.

We can’t know how long the war in the Middle East will last. Nor can we know who will “win” it, and in which terms. What we know is that the destruction already wreaked on things and people is immense, and it keeps escalating. The longer the war, the bleaker their perspectives in a region already plagued by all sorts of problems, including drought, soil degradation, ecosystem damage, scarce agricultural resources, declining fertility rates, and more.

Residents report terror of smoke-filled city, from potentially toxic rain, air and water to food scarcity and difficulty of escape

Fears US-Israeli onslaught could lead regime to push for bomb or embolden other groups to steal uranium stockpile

Ocean acidification has already crossed a crucial threshold for planetary health, scientists say in unexpected finding

A new analysis shows the world's oceans were the warmest in 2019 than any other time in recorded human history, especially between the surface and a depth of 2,000 meters. The study, conducted by an international team of 14 scientists from 11 institutes across the world, also concludes that the past 10 years have been the warmest on record for global ocean temperatures, with the past five years holding the highest record.

A carbon bomb is any fossil fuel extraction project that will generate more than one gigatonne of carbon dioxide (1GtCO2) over its remaining life.

Population likely to peak sooner and lower than expected with beneficial results – but environment is priority

CarbonBombs.org is a tool to follow the evolution of carbon bombs in the world.

Plutonium spike in Canadian lake sediments marks dawn of new epoch in which humanity dominates planet

Humanity is now a ‘geological superpower’ and declaring a new epoch is critical to tackling its impact, scientists say

In 1968, the best-seller “The Population Bomb,” written by Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned of the perils of overpopulation: mass starvation, societal upheaval, environmental deterioration. The book was criticized at the time for painting an overly dark picture of the future. But while not all of the Ehrlich’s dire predictions have come to pass, the world’s population has doubled since then, to over seven billion, straining the planet’s resources and heating up our climate.

On Sept. 10, 1969, six and a half miles south of Rulison, Colorado, a 40-kiloton nuclear bomb exploded in the subterranean depths of the Piceance Basin. The device, more than twice as powerful as the weapon at Hiroshima and with muscle equivalent to 40,000 tons of TNT, was an unorthodox tool in a grand experiment to free natural gas and kickstart a boom. The nuclear age wanted to give the oil and gas age a hand up.

Vast carbon store may be close to point where it could flip from absorbing CO2 to releasing it, research shows. The Congo peatlands are a huge carbon “timebomb” that could be triggered by the climate crisis, research has shown.

US and UK financial institutions have been among the leading investors in Russian “carbon bomb” fossil fuel projects, according to a new database of holdings from recent years.

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Oil and gas majors are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal. If governments do not act, these firms will continue to cash in as the world burns

When the lights went out at Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on 9 March, the Russian soldiers holding Ukrainian workers at gunpoint became the least of Anatolii Nosovskyi’s worries. More urgent was the possibility of a radiation accident at the decommissioned plant. If the plant’s emergency generators ran out of fuel, the ventilators that keep explosive hydrogen gas from building up inside a spent nuclear fuel repository would quit working, says Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv. So would sensors and automated systems to suppress radioactive dust inside a concrete “sarcophagus” that holds the unsettled remains of Chornobyl’s Unit Four reactor, which melted down in the infamous 1986 accident.

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