Year: 2023

One of modern climate science’s pioneers is warning that the world isn’t just steadily warming but is dangerously accelerating, according to a study that some other scientists call a bit overheated. The work from former NASA top scientist James Hansen, who since leaving the space agency has become a prominent protester against the use of fossil fuels, which cause climate change, illustrates a recently surfaced division among scientists about whether global warming has kicked into a new and even more dangerous gear. Hansen, who alerted much of the United States to the harms of climate change in dramatic congressional testimony in 1988, said Thursday that since 2010, the rate of warming has jumped by 50%. Hansen argues that since 2010 there is more sun energy in the atmosphere, and less of the particles that can reflect it back into space thanks to efforts to cut pollution. The loss of those particles means there’s less of the cooling effect that they can have. Hansen said a key calculation used in figuring out how much the world will warm in response to carbon pollution shows much faster warming than the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates. He called the international goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times “deader than a doornail” and said a less stringent goal of 2 degrees Celsius is on its deathbed. That matters because increases in average global temperatures lead to more frequent and intense extreme weather events. “The next few years …

The cancellation of two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey is the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, jeopardizing the Biden administration’s goals of powering 10 million homes from towering ocean-based turbines by 2030 and establishing a carbon-free electric grid five years later. The Danish wind energy developer Ørsted said this week it’s scrapping its Ocean Wind I and II projects off southern New Jersey due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted. Together, the projects were supposed to deliver over 2.2 gigawatts of power. The news comes after developers in New England canceled power contracts for three projects that would have provided another 3.2 gigawatts of wind power to Massachusetts and Connecticut. They said their projects were no longer financially feasible. In total, the cancellations equate to nearly one-fifth of President Joe Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030. Despite the setbacks, offshore wind continues to move forward, the White House said, citing recent investments by New York state and approval by the Interior Department of the nation’s largest planned offshore wind farm in Virginia. Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also announced new offshore wind lease areas in the Gulf of Mexico. “While macroeconomic headwinds are creating challenges for some projects, momentum remains on the side of an expanding U.S. offshore wind industry — creating good-paying union jobs in manufacturing, shipbuilding and …

Countries moved a step closer Saturday to getting a fund off the ground to help poor states damaged by climate disasters, despite reservations from developing nations and the United States.   The deal to create a “loss and damage” fund was hailed as a breakthrough for developing country negotiators at United Nations climate talks in Egypt last year, overcoming years of resistance from wealthy nations.   But in the past 11 months, governments have struggled to reach consensus on the details of the fund, such as who will pay and where the fund will be located.   A special U.N. committee tasked with implementing the fund met for a fifth time in Abu Dhabi this week — following a deadlock in Egypt last month — to finalize recommendations that will be put to governments when they meet for the annual climate summit COP28 in Dubai in less than four weeks. The goal is to get the fund up and running by 2024.   The committee, representing a geographically diverse group of countries, resolved to recommend the World Bank serve as trustee and host of the fund — a tension point that has fueled divisions between developed and developing nations.  Housing a fund at the World Bank, whose presidents are appointed by the U.S., would give donor countries outsized influence over the fund and result in high fees for recipient countries, developing countries have argued.  To get all countries on board, it was agreed the World Bank would serve as interim …

Called cover crops, they top the list of tasks U.S. farmers are told will build healthy soil, help the environment and fight climate change. Yet after years of incentives and encouragement, Midwest farmers planted cover crops on only about 7% of their land in 2021. That percentage has increased over the years but remains small in part because even as farmers receive extra payments and can see numerous benefits from cover crops, they remain wary. Many worry the practice will hurt their bottom line — and a study last year indicates they could be right. Researchers who used satellite data to examine over 90,000 fields in six Corn Belt states found cover crops can reduce yields of cash crops — the bushels per acre. The smaller the yield, the less money farmers make. “I don’t want to abandon it, but as far as just going whole-hog with planting cover crops, that’s a tough thing for me to do,” said Illinois farmer Doug Downs, who plants cover crops only on a sliver of his land in a relatively flat region of east-central Illinois. Cover crops are plants grown on farmland that otherwise would be bare. While crops like corn and soybeans are growing or soon after harvest, farmers can sow species such as rye or red clover that will grow through winter and into spring. They stabilize soil, reduce fertilizer runoff, store carbon in plant roots and potentially add nutrients to the dirt. The practice is key to government efforts to …

A thick layer of toxic haze choked Indian capital New Delhi on Friday, and some schools were ordered closed as the air quality index plummeted to the “severe” category. New Delhi again topped a real-time list of the world’s most polluted cities compiled by Swiss group IQAir, which put the Indian capital’s air quality index, or AQI, at 640, which is in the “hazardous” category, followed by 335 in the Pakistani city of Lahore. Regional officials said a seasonal combination of lower temperatures, a lack of wind and crop stubble burning in neighboring farm states caused a spike in air pollutants. Many of New Delhi’s 20 million residents complained of irritation in the eyes and itchy throats with the air turning a dense gray. An AQI of 0-50 is considered good while anything between 400-500 affects healthy people and is a danger to those with existing diseases. “In my last 24 hours duty, I saw babies coughing, children coming with distress and rapid breathing,” Aheed Khan, a Delhi-based doctor, said on social media platform X. Fewer people came to the city’s parks, such as Lodhi Garden and India Gate, popular with joggers. Residents snapped up air purifiers. One service center for the appliances said there was a shortage of new filters and fresh stocks were expected Monday. Officials said they did not expect an immediate improvement in the air quality. “This pollution level is here to stay for the next two to three weeks, aggravated by incidents of stubble burning, …

The little asteroid visited by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft this week had a big surprise for scientists. It turns out that the asteroid Dinkinesh has a dinky sidekick — a mini moon. The discovery was made during Wednesday’s flyby of Dinkinesh, 480 million kilometers (300 million miles) away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The spacecraft snapped a picture of the pair when it was about 435 kilometers (270 miles) out. In data and images beamed back to Earth, the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. Its closely circling moon is a mere one-tenth-of-a-mile (220 meters) in size. NASA sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter. Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids now stands at 11. Dinkinesh means “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It’s also the Amharic name for Lucy, the 3.2 million year old remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia in the 1970s, for which the spacecraft is named. “Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” Southwest Research Institute’s Hal Levison, the lead scientist, said in a statement. …

Fewer high school students are vaping this year, the government reported Thursday. In a survey, 10% of high school students said they had used electronic cigarettes in the previous month, down from 14% last year. Use of any tobacco product — including cigarettes and cigars — also fell among high schoolers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. “A lot of good news, I’d say,” said Kenneth Michael Cummings, a University of South Carolina researcher who was not involved in the CDC study. Among middle school student, about 5% said they used e-cigarettes. That did not significantly change from last year’s survey. This year’s survey involved more than 22,000 students who filled out an online questionnaire last spring. The agency considers the annual survey to be its best measure of youth smoking trends. Why the drop among high schoolers? Health officials believe a number of factors could be helping, including efforts to raise prices and limit sales to kids by raising the legal age to 21. “It’s encouraging to see this substantial decrease in e-cigarette use among high schoolers within the past year, which is a win for public health,” said Brian King, the Food and Drug Administrations tobacco center director. The FDA has authorized a few tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes intended to help adult smokers cut back but has struggled to stop sales of illegal products. Other key findings in the report: Among students who currently use e-cigarettes, about a quarter said they use them every day. About …

Colombia will try to control its population of more than 100 hippopotamuses, descendants of animals illegally brought to the country by late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in the 1980s, through surgical sterilization, the transfer of hippos to other countries and possibly euthanasia, the government said Thursday. The hippos, which spread from Escobar’s estate into nearby rivers where they flourished, have no natural predators in Colombia and have been declared an invasive species that could upset the ecosystem. Authorities estimate there are 169 hippos in Colombia, especially in the Magdalena River basin, and that if no measures are taken, there could be 1,000 by 2035. Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said the first stage of the plan will be the surgical sterilization of 40 hippos per year and this will begin next week. The procedure is expensive — each sterilization costs about $9,800 — and entails risks for the hippopotamus, including allergic reactions to anesthesia or death, as well as risks to the animal health personnel, according to the ministry. The hippos are dispersed over a large area and are territorial and often aggressive. Experts say sterilization alone is not enough to control the growth of the invasive species, which is why the government is arranging for the possible transfer of hippos to other countries, a plan that was announced in March. Muhamad said Colombian officials have contacted authorities in Mexico, India and the Philippines, and are evaluating sending 60 hippos to India. “We are working on the protocol for the export …

Climate change threatens to reverse decades of progress toward better health and well-being, particularly in the most vulnerable communities, according to a new report by the U.N. weather agency. In its annual State of Climate Services report, the World Meteorological Organization on Thursday warned that the climate crisis was generating a global health crisis and said that many ill effects of climate change could be tempered by adaptation and prevention measures. WMO said climate change was causing the world to warm at a faster rate than at any other point in recorded history. “There is no more return back to the good old milder climate of the last century.  Actually, we are heading towards a warmer climate for the coming decades, anyhow,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO secretary-general. “Unless we are successful in phasing out this negative trend” by limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, “we will see this situation getting worse,” he said. The report finds countries in Africa and southern Asia are most at risk from climate change, which it says is fueling vector-borne diseases such as dengue and malaria, even in places where they were not seen before. “And we are creating conditions for more noncommunicable diseases like lung cancer and chronic respiratory infections also, because of the bad quality of the air that we breathe,” said Maria Neira, director of the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health at the World Health Organization. “The extreme weather events obviously will have dramatic consequences for the …

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that leaders have “a moral, ethical and societal duty” to protect people from the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, as she leads the Biden administration’s push for a global AI roadmap. Analysts, in commending the effort, say human oversight is crucial to preventing the weaponization or misuse of this technology, which has applications in everything from military intelligence to medical diagnosis to making art. “To provide order and stability in the midst of global technological change, I firmly believe that we must be guided by a common set of understandings among nations,” Harris said. “And that is why the United States will continue to work with our allies and partners to apply existing international rules and norms to AI, and work to create new rules and norms.” Harris also announced the founding of the government’s AI Safety Institute and released draft policy guidance on the government’s use of AI and a declaration of its responsible military applications. Just days earlier, President Joe Biden – who described AI as “the most consequential technology of our time” – signed an executive order establishing new standards, including requiring that major AI developers report their safety test results and other critical information to the U.S. government. AI is increasingly used for a wide range of applications. For example: on Wednesday, the Defense Intelligence Agency announced that its AI-enabled military intelligence database will soon achieve “initial operational capability.” And perhaps on the opposite end of the spectrum, some …

The World Health Organization warns that disease outbreaks, malnutrition and non-communicable diseases are rising in war-torn Sudan, with devastating consequences for millions of people forced to flee their homes in the face of escalating violence.  Since conflict erupted April 15, more than 4.6 million people have become newly displaced inside Sudan. The number, added to the more than three million who already were displaced within the country before the current conflict, makes Sudan home to the world’s largest internally displaced crisis.  “The health system in Sudan is stretched to breaking point as capacities decline in the face of mounting needs,” said Ni’ma Saeed Abid, WHO representative in Sudan, speaking Tuesday in Port Sudan. “Access to health care continues to be limited due to insecurity, displacement, and shortages of medicines and medical supplies, placing millions of Sudanese at risk of severe illness or death from preventable and treatable causes,” he said.  The WHO says that 70 to 80 percent of health facilities are “non-functional in conflict hotspots.” It has verified 60 attacks against health care and personnel, leading to 34 deaths and 38 injuries.  “Conflict and the consequent massive displacement have driven the population further into a state of widespread malnutrition, with the lives of children hanging in the balance,” said Abid. “Cholera, measles, dengue and malaria are circulating in several states. And a combination of any of these diseases with malnutrition can be lethal,” he warned.  According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimates, 20.3 million people, …

Digital officials, tech company bosses and researchers are converging Wednesday at a former codebreaking spy base near London to discuss and better understand the extreme risks posed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence.  The two-day summit focuses on so-called frontier AI — the latest and most powerful systems that take the technology right up to its limits, but could come with as-yet-unknown dangers. They’re underpinned by foundation models, which power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and are trained on vast pools of information scraped from the internet.  Some 100 people from 28 countries are expected to attend Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s two-day AI Safety Summit, though the British government has refused to disclose the guest list.  The event is a labor of love for Sunak, a tech-loving former banker who wants the U.K. to be a hub for computing innovation and has framed the summit as the start of a global conversation about the safe development of AI. But Vice President Kamala Harris is due to steal the focus on Wednesday with a separate speech in London setting out the U.S. administration’s more hands-on approach.  She’s due to attend the summit on Thursday alongside government officials from more than two dozen countries including Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia — and China, invited over the protests of some members of Sunak’s governing Conservative Party.  Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also scheduled to discuss AI with Sunak in a livestreamed conversation on Thursday night. The tech billionaire was among those …

An Indonesian court sentenced to jail on Wednesday the chief executive and three other officials of a company whose cough syrup has been linked to the death of more than 200 children, for violating drug safety laws, the company’s lawyer said. The Indonesian company, Afi Farma, was accused of producing cough syrups containing excess amounts of toxic material and prosecutors charged the four officials for “consciously” not testing the ingredients, despite having the means and responsibility to do so, according to a charge sheet.  The company’s lawyer, Reza Wendra Prayogo, said they denied negligence and the company was considering whether to appeal. The officials, including CEO Arief Prasetya Harahap, were sentenced to two years in prison by a court in the town of Kediri, in East Java province, where the company is based. Prosecutors, who had sought up to nine years in prison for the accused, said that Afi Farma did not test the ingredients sent by its supplier and instead relied on certificates provided by them regarding product quality and safety.  Reza told Reuters in October that Indonesia’s drug regulator, BPOM, did not require drugmakers to do rigorous testing of ingredients. The case comes as efforts grow worldwide to tighten oversight of drug supply chains after a wave of poisonings linked to contaminated cough syrups that killed dozens of children in countries such as Gambia and Uzbekistan. …

The abbreviation of artificial intelligence (AI) has been named the Collins Word of the Year for 2023, the dictionary publisher said on Tuesday. Lexicographers at Collins Dictionary said use of the term had “accelerated” and that it had become the dominant conversation of 2023. “We know that AI has been a big focus this year in the way that it has developed and has quickly become as ubiquitous and embedded in our lives as email, streaming or any other once futuristic, now everyday technology,” Collins managing director Alex Beecroft said. Collins said its wordsmiths analyzed the Collins Corpus, a database that contains more than 20 billion words with written material from websites, newspapers, magazines and books published around the world. It also draws on spoken material from radio, TV and everyday conversations, while new data is fed into the Corpus every month, to help the Collins dictionary editors identify new words and meanings from the moment they are first used. “Use of the word as monitored through our Collins Corpus is always interesting and there was no question that this has also been the talking point of 2023,” Beecroft said. Other words on Collins list include “nepo baby,” which has become a popular phrase to describe the children of celebrities who have succeeded in industries similar to those of their parents. “Greedflation,” meaning companies making profits during the cost-of-living crisis, and “Ulez,” the ultra-low emission zone that penalizes drivers of the most polluting cars in London, were also mentioned. Social …

Thousands of meters beneath the Pacific Ocean lie vast deposits of the metals needed for the shift to renewable energy. Mining companies are ready to scoop up this sunken treasure strewn across an area more than half the size of the continental United States. But not much is known about the ecosystem deep beneath the ocean and what impacts mining these rocks might have. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more. …

A top U.N. agency is warning that if calls for a cease-fire in Gaza are not heeded, causalities will continue to mount, putting children in the densely populated Palestinian enclave at even greater risk. “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,” said James Elder, UNICEF spokesperson, Tuesday. “It is a living hell for everyone else.” The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry says that more than 8,300 Palestinians in Gaza, including at least 3,457 children, have been killed since Israel began a punishing bombing campaign following the horrific massacre of its civilians by Hamas militants October 7. “From the earliest days of the unprecedented hostilities in the Gaza Strip, UNICEF has been forthright on the need for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, for the aid to flow and for children abducted to be released,” he said. “Like many others, we have pleaded for the killing of children to stop.” While Washington has thrown its support behind Israel, it has also called for the protection of civilians and pushed for the opening of humanitarian aid into Gaza as the Israeli military expands its ground campaign aiming to uproot Hamas, which is a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Since Israel partially lifted its blockade of Gaza on October 21, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, says 143 trucks carrying food, water, and medical supplies have entered Gaza through the Rafah Crossing with Egypt. “Before this escalation, there were 500 trucks on average going in every working day. So about 22 days …