Flux continu

Climate change will set the parameters of our post-Princeton lives. The fires that devastated the Palisades earlier this month were, as our nation’s exasperated and exhausted climate scientists continue to remind us, only harbingers of the floods, tornados, and heatwaves to come. Global warming is surpassing the climate models that scientists built in the 2010s and early 2020s that already forecasted a borderline-apocalyptic future. Undoubtedly, by the time current Princeton students reach middle age, they will have witnessed a slew of societal structures sag — or collapse entirely — under the weight of extreme weather events and ever-worsening ecological decline.

Human-caused climate change increased the likelihood and intensity of the hot, dry and windy conditions that fanned the flames of the recent devastating Southern California wildfires, a scientific study found. But the myriad of causes that go into the still smoldering fires are complex, so the level of global warming's fingerprints on weeks of burning appears relatively small compared to previous studies of killer heat waves, floods and droughts by the international team at World Weather Attribution. Tuesday's report, too rapid for peer-review yet, found global warming boosted the likelihood of high fire weather conditions in this month's fires by 35% and its intensity by 6%.

Microplastics and nanoplastics may be present in food, primarily from environmental contamination where foods are grown or raised.

The floods displaced more than 80,000 people, led to over 150,000 being injured and, on the 29th of May, to 169 fatalities with 44 people still missing (Governo do Estado de Rio Grande do Sul, 2024). Essential services were also disrupted, leaving 418,200 households without electricity and over a million consumer units without water. Dozens of municipalities lost telephone and internet services.

As the climate crisis causes heavier and more frequent floods across the US, one in four small businesses are one disaster away from shutting down

Nieuw onderzoek in het vakblad Nature Foods waarschuwt voor een toenemend tekort aan kalium in landbouwgrond. Dat vormt een ernstige bedreiging voor de wereldwijde voedselzekerheid.

Heatwaves, wildfires and floods are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, leading climate scientists say

Permafrost and glaciers in the high Arctic form an impermeable ‘cryospheric cap’ that traps a large reservoir of subsurface methane, preventing it from reaching the atmosphere. Cryospheric vulnerability to climate warming is making releases of this methane possible. On Svalbard, where air temperatures are rising more than two times faster than the average for the Arctic, glaciers are retreating and leaving behind exposed forefields that enable rapid methane escape. Here we document how methane-rich groundwater springs have formed in recently revealed forefields of 78 land-terminating glaciers across central Svalbard, bringing deep-seated methane gas to the surface. Waters collected from these springs during February–May of 2021 and 2022 are supersaturated with methane up to 600,000 times greater than atmospheric equilibration. Spatial sampling reveals a geological dependency on the extent of methane supersaturation, with isotopic evidence of a thermogenic source. We estimate annual methane emissions from prog

Recent verscheen bij uitgeverij Atlas 'De vloek van de nootmuskaat' van Amitav Ghosh en kreeg als ondertitel 'Boodschap aan een planeet in crisis' en eind 2022 publiceerde uitgeverij EPO 'Te groot om ons voor te stellen'. Wil Heeffer las ze allebei: “Ghosh schrijft op uiterst toegankelijke wijze over de nog altijd voortdurende effecten van het kolonialisme op natuur en mens.

Meer dan 100 mensen voeren vandaag actie aan de aandeelhoudersvergadering van Fluxys in Brussel. Samen met Vredesactie, Greenpeace, Tegengas|Dégaze en Bond Beter Leefmilieu (BBL) klagen ze aan dat Fluxys blijft investeren in fossiel gas, en zo de oorlog in Oekraïne in stand houdt en de gezondheid schaadt van gemeenschappen in de VS. “Wij eisen dat Fluxys uit fossiel gas stapt - voor het klimaat, de mensenrechten en de vrede.”