This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian. In the quest to decarbonize the world, one element gets a lot of hype: hydrogen. “If you burn it, it produces only water, with no impact on the environment,” explains Alberto Vitale Brovarone, a professor in the …
Read More »Climate Change’s Latest Deadly Threat: Lightning Strikes
Through local papers and word of mouth, volunteer Daya Shankar keeps track of a very specific cause of death. As soon as he receives news of someone being struck by lightning around his neighborhood in Jharkhand, East India, he picks up his motorcycle and heads to the destination. Sometimes he …
Read More »Trump won't stop making a deceptive bird claim. Experts debunk it.
Billions of birds are likely killed in the U.S. each year — but contrary to popular claims, wind turbines aren’t nearly a primary culprit. Former President Trump has continually used his prominent platform to claim that wind turbines — an economically sensible part of energy generation in the U.S. — …
Read More »The Run of Record-Breaking Heat Has Ended, for Now
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. A 13-month streak of record-breaking global warmth has ended. From June 2023 until June 2024, air and ocean surface water temperatures averaged a quarter of a degree Celsius higher than records set only a few years previously. Air …
Read More »Urban Birds Are Harboring Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria
This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Urban ducks and crows might offer us a connection to nature, but scientists have found wild birds that live near humans are more likely to harbor bacteria resistant to important antibiotics. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is …
Read More »Extreme Weather Poses a Challenge for Heat Pumps
Andreas Bangheri knows how to read the wind. He’s been hang gliding and piloting small aircraft around the mountains of his native Austria for years. And he can tell that things are changing. “The wind is getting stronger and stronger. It’s becoming more of an issue,” says Bangheri, CEO of …
Read More »She’s the New Face of Climate Activism—and She’s Carrying a Pickax
The atmosphere is more festival than crime scene. There’s an accordionist, and two men in beanie hats are playing the drums. It’s a clear spring day in the farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone …
Read More »How to Go to Burning Man in an Extreme Climate and Feel Good About It
Ever since I wrote (twice) about my serious misgivings about Burning Man and how the annual event will survive on an extremely hot and unpredictable planet, I’ve been asked by friends and acquaintances whether it is still worth going if they’ve never been before. My answer to that is a …
Read More »Mountain Bikers Are Rewilding Land by Paying the Government to Do It
The dark spaces beneath the conifers make it feel as if the mountain bikers are emerging from nowhere. Racing down the hill, they slalom perilously close to the trees, bouncing over roots, rocks, and purpose-built jumps, their progress punctuated by the occasional, adrenaline-fueled whoop of delight. This is Bike Park …
Read More »Jane Goodall Thinks It’s Not Too Late to Save the World
Jane Goodall understands better than most the impact humans have had on the planet. The world, the primatologist says, isn’t what it used to be. Having witnessed so much environmental deterioration during her lifetime, today Goodall is as much an activist as a scientist. She warns tirelessly of accelerating environmental …
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