Carbon Chemist

Tag: climate change

  • Hannah Ritchie interview: ‘Eco-anxiety on its own is not that useful’

    Hannah Ritchie interview: ‘Eco-anxiety on its own is not that useful’

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    WITH constant headlines about floods, wildfires and record-breaking temperatures, it isn’t surprising that many people think our current generation will leave the planet in a worse predicament than when we inherited it. But is that belief true? Hannah Ritchie doesn’t think so. She is cautiously optimistic that we might be the first generation to pass on the environment in a better state than we found it.

    She reached this counterintuitive conclusion after a decade digging into environmental records as a data scientist at the University of Oxford and lead researcher for influential online publication Our World in Data. In her new book Not the End of the World, Ritchie lays out the graphs that show the positive steps we have already taken to change our behaviour and mitigate climate change, from cutting coal use to shrinking carbon footprints. She talks to New Scientist about her growing conviction that we can solve the world’s environmental problems and picks out some key trends that give her hope about us turning things around.

    Alison George: I’m talking to you on a day when it was reported that online searches related to “eco-anxiety” have increased dramatically. Yet you study long-term environmental trends and are somewhat optimistic.

    Hannah Ritchie: I still have anxiety and worry, but I think it’s now paired with some sense of optimism that we can change things. The anxiety is completely justified and I get why people feel it. I feel it. But that feeling on its own is not that useful. You need to combine a sense…

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  • Better weather forecasts could help billions adapt to climate change

    Better weather forecasts could help billions adapt to climate change

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    Weather balloons provide vital data for forecasting extreme weather events

    Edward Haylan/Shutterstock

    The following is an extract from our climate newsletter Fix the Planet. Sign up to receive it for free in your inbox every month.

    “Yesterday was a catastrophe,” said Ladislaus Chang’a at the Tanzania Meteorological Authority, speaking to a crowd at COP28 in Dubai on 4 December. The day before, heavy rains in northern Tanzania triggered mudslides that killed more than 63 people and injured more than 100 others.

    But even as rescue operations continued, Chang’a said his mind was…

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  • Science and technology’s newest words and what they tell us about 2023

    Science and technology’s newest words and what they tell us about 2023

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    Ageotype

    In 2020, Michael Snyder, a geneticist at Stanford University in California, discovered that we tend to age along four different pathways. He found that the biological signatures associated with ageing are mostly found in four parts of your body – your kidneys, liver, immune system and general metabolism – with one or two of these systems ageing faster than the rest.

    Snyder reckons figuring out your “ageotype” can lead you towards the best strategy to target your predominant ageing pathway, meaning you live healthier for longer. Liver agers, say, might consider laying off the booze. Metabolic agers, meanwhile, should focus on exercise.

    In any case, we might expect the term to rise to prominence, at least within the circles that obsess about this stuff, on the basis that it is at the vanguard of efforts to personalise anti-ageing interventions.

    Agrivoltaics

    The next time you find yourself walking in the countryside, you may spot some rather odd-looking fields. Some will have crops co-existing with great swathes of solar panels, while others will be full of livestock sheltering or grazing under a photovoltaic canopy. What you would be looking at are “agrivoltaics”, a term that describes solar energy installations designed to work alongside crops or livestock.

    Inevitably, some people argue that solar farms blight the landscape and change the nature of rural communities. But in North America, proponents of agrivoltaics are working to convince them that solar farms can help to restore disappearing prairies. In any case, the term will surely stick around because it captures a new…

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  • Climate change: Inside the expedition to find out how humans can adapt to extreme heat

    Climate change: Inside the expedition to find out how humans can adapt to extreme heat

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    Saudi Arabian desert extreme heat experiment

    TRUDGING through hot, red sand is hard work, especially in temperatures above 40°C (104°F). After about 40 minutes, I am drenched, dehydrated and drained. I can’t imagine doing this for 40 days, dragging all my gear behind me – including 40 litres of water, enough for five days – on a two-wheeled trolley. But that is exactly what the people I am travelling with have just done.

    I am in the Nafud desert, a vast tract of sandy and rocky wilderness in northern Saudi Arabia, to experience levels of heat that I am not built to endure – and to meet 20 people participating in an expedition called Deep Climate, dedicated to understanding how humans respond to extreme conditions. “The idea is to study how human beings can adapt to a new kind of environment,” says Christian Clot, the leader of the expedition and director of the Human Adaptation Institute in France.

    As the climate warms, the issue is becoming increasingly pressing. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, the scorching heat seen in southern Europe and across the US over the past couple of months, with temperatures exceeding 40°C, will become the norm in many parts of the world.

    That means the question of what happens to our brains and bodies, and the extent to which human physiology can cope with extreme heat, matters for millions of people. “You’re going to see a great big swathe of very densely populated areas go up to unprecedented temperatures that nobody experienced in the historical climate,” says Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, UK, who recently co-authored a research paper called “…

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  • Climate change: Something strange is happening in the Pacific and we must find out why

    Climate change: Something strange is happening in the Pacific and we must find out why

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    The Pacific “cold tongue”, an area of ocean that stretches West from Ecuador is cooler than expected

    Harvepino/shutterstock

    FOR years, climate models have predicted that as greenhouse gas emissions rise, ocean waters will warm. For the most part, they have been correct. Yet in a patch of the Pacific Ocean, the opposite is happening. Stretching west from the coast of Ecuador for thousands of kilometres lies a tentacle of water that has been cooling for the past 30 years. Why is this swathe of the eastern Pacific defying our predictions? Welcome to the mystery of the cold tongue.

    This isn’t just an academic puzzle. Pedro DiNezio at the University of Colorado Boulder calls it “the most important unanswered question in climate science”. The trouble is that not knowing why this cooling is happening means we also don’t know when it will stop, or whether it will suddenly flip over into warming. This has global implications. The future of the cold tongue could determine whether California is gripped by permanent drought or Australia by ever-deadlier wildfires. It influences the intensity of monsoon season in India and the chances of famine in the Horn of Africa. It could even alter the extent of climate change globally by tweaking how sensitive Earth’s atmosphere is to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

    Given all this, it isn’t surprising that climate scientists are trying to find out what is going on with increasing urgency. Like any good mystery, this is a tale of intrigue, confusion and competing theories. We haven’t quite…

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