Climate

If we learned anything from 2024, it’s that climate change is rapidly reshaping our world. We’re on course to set the hottest year on record. In just the past few months, supercharged hurricanes, 1-in-1,000-year floods and drought-fueled wildfires have devastated parts of the United States.

It’s a very bad time to put the brakes on the aggressive actions — including slashing U.S. carbon emissions and transitioning to greener, lower-carbon sources of energy — that scientists have repeatedly said are necessary to help keep the planet’s warming in check. There is simply no more time for denial or delay, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned back in 2021 (SN: 8/9/21). More

Earth’s space junk may be wreaking havoc on the stratosphere.

The rapid surge in satellite megaconstellations is connecting much of the world to broadband internet. But each year, hundreds of those satellites die, burning up in the atmosphere as they fall. And each year, more and more satellites are being launched to replace them.

The dying satellites, it turns out, don’t just wink out into the ether. Each one leaves a bit of itself behind. More

As if hurricanes needed any more kick.

Human-caused climate change is boosting the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes by a whole category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which rates hurricanes based on their peak sustained wind speed, researchers report November 20 in two new studies.

From 2019 to 2023, climate change enhanced the maximum wind speeds of hurricanes by an average of about 29 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour), or roughly the breadth of a Saffir-Simpson category, researchers report in Environmental Research: Climate. Climate change similarly increased the intensities of all hurricanes in 2024 by an average of about 29 kph (18 mph), escalating the risk of wind damage, a companion analysis from Climate Central shows. More

Stand back, ordinary ocean-dwelling, oxygen-spewing organisms: There’s a new green, hulkish mutant in town.

And hefty UTEX 3222 — dubbed “Chonkus” by the researchers who found it — may have just the right combination of traits to help with some of humanity’s most pressing problems. In particular, Chonkus could help fight climate change, report microbiologist Max Schubert, formerly of the Wyss Institute at Harvard and now launching a start-up, and colleagues in a study published October 29 in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.  

Chonkus (right) settles quickly to the bottom of a water-filled test tube, compared with another strain of cyanobacteria (left). That quick accumulation of green sludge could make it more useful for sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide.Ted Chavkin

Chonkus was discovered in the shallow sunlit waters off the coast of Italy’s Vulcano Island, where volcanic gas-rich groundwater seeps into the sea. It’s an environment that Schubert and colleagues suspected to be fertile ground for finding photosynthesizing, carbon-consuming microbes. The waters collected from those seeps turned out to contain a spontaneous mutant strain of Synechococcus elongatus, a species of photosynthesizing bacteria that’s at the base of ocean food webs around the world (SN: 10/20/16; SN: 6/9/16).

S. elongatus is a favorite lab organism, because of how quickly it grows and how resistant it is to environmental stressors (SN: 6/14/17). And Chonkus, the new mutant, is like a superpowered version, the team found. When they cultured the strain in the laboratory, its individual cells were larger than those of other fast-growing cyanobacteria, and it built larger colonies. The mutant also contained more carbon than other strains of S. elongatus, apparently stored in white granules within its cells. The strain was also heavy: When placed into a test tube, the cyanobacteria rapidly sank to the bottom, forming a dense sludge. More

Air blowing from an electric fan alone isn’t enough to cool off older adults sweltering indoors in a heat wave, new research shows. A study of 18 adults aged 65 to 72, monitored in a controlled-climate chamber simulating extreme heat wave conditions, found little difference in peak core temperatures as a result of electric fan use, scientists report October 17 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Older adults, many of whom prefer to weather heat waves their own homes, are particularly at risk for heat-related health impacts (SN: 5/14/24). In the absence of access to air conditioning, using pedestal-style electric fans has been one recommended strategy for individuals at home to try to stay cool. Fans can speed up heat loss, lowering the body’s core temperature, by increasing sweat evaporation. More

Meteorologists have watched in awe as Hurricane Milton, churning over the anomalously warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, swiftly transformed into one of the strongest Atlantic storms on record.

Over just 20 hours on October 7, Hurricane Milton explosively intensified from a Category 1 to a catastrophic Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 290 kilometers per hour (180 miles per hour). The storm is expected to make landfall on the west coast of Florida either late on October 9 or early October 10 as a major Category 3 or 4 hurricane, bringing deadly storm surge and hurricane-force winds to coastal regions still reeling from Hurricane Helene just two weeks earlier (SN: 10/1/24). More

A perfect storm of climate, geologic and geographic conditions have combined to make Hurricane Helene one of the most devastating storms to ever hit the United States. Days after it slammed into Florida’s Big Bend region on September 26 and traveled hundreds of kilometers inland, Helene’s destructive impact has continued to grow.

Fueled by warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, which climate change made hundreds of times more likely, the tempest rapidly intensified offshore. By the time Helene came onshore as a Category 4 storm, its wind speeds surpassed 209 kilometers per hour (130 miles per hour) (SN: 9/27/24). More

In 2013, Ning Zeng came across a very old, and ultimately very important, log.

He and his colleagues were digging a trench in the Canadian province of Quebec, one that they planned to fill with 35 metric tons of wood, cover with clay soil, and let sit for nine years. The team hoped to show that the wood wouldn’t decompose, a proof-of-concept that burying biomass could be a cheap way to store climate-warming carbon. But during excavation, they unearthed a pristine, twisted log that was very old, older than anything they could have possibly produced in their experiment. More