Environment

This video was supported by funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

TRANSCRIPT

Maria Temming: In 2021, a historic heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest killing hundreds of people and fueling wildfires. Researchers later reported that human-caused climate change made this heat wave at least 150 times more likely.

But how do scientists figure out how much climate change is to blame for a specific weather event?

Researchers use a variety of techniques for this work, which is called extreme event attribution. One method compares the world we have today–which has warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution –with what the world would look like without climate change. Researchers estimate what that second world would look like based on historic trends in weather data and climate models. More

This video was supported by funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

TRANSCRIPT

David Johnson: So in 2014, we were on a muddy bank in the marsh up here in Massachusetts, and I saw this small crab scuttle across the mud bank and pop into a hole. And so I dug out the crab, and it was a fiddler crab. I was shocked. I had worked a decade in this marsh and had never seen a fiddler crab up here. More

Access to clean water is a human right — one that half of the world may not have.

Out of the roughly 8 billion people on Earth, more than 4.4 billion lack access to safely managed drinking water, researchers report August 15 in Science. The estimate, based on computer simulations of data from low- and middle-income countries, is more than double the figure calculated by the World Health Organization (SN: 8/16/18).

“The number of people whose basic human right to safe drinking water is not being met may therefore be significantly underestimated,” says environmental microbiologist Esther Greenwood of Eawag, an aquatic research institute in Dübendorf, Switzerland. More

What’s dumped into a landfill is supposed to stay there, but a new study finds that toxic “forever chemicals” are wafting from the waste into the air.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have been detected in the gas exuded by some Florida landfills in quantities comparable to or even greater than in the liquids that seep from the waste, researchers report June 26 in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. These chemicals have been linked to cancer, weakened immune systems, developmental problems in children and a tide of other harmful health effects (SN: 6/15/21). More

The Last DropTim SmedleyPicador, $29.99

A journalist and a farmer visit three fields with different styles of cultivation — conventional, organic and no-till — to bury cotton underwear in each. Though this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, it’s actually a test of soil health. Healthy soil that produces robust crops holds plenty of water and teems with life that will feast on the undies. This scene is just one of many in U.K.-based journalist Tim Smedley’s book The Last Drop. More

The dry-looking stream in your backyard may play a major role in feeding U.S. rivers.

Channels that flow only in direct response to weather conditions like heavy rain, called ephemeral streams, on average contribute 55 percent of the water in regional river systems in the United States, researchers report in the June 28 Science.

But last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that some waterways — including these streams — are not federally protected from pollution under the Clean Water Act. The decision could have a substantial ripple effect on the environment. More

The High SeasOlive HeffernanGreystone Books, $32.95

The ocean is a rich, fertile and seemingly lawless frontier. It’s a watery wild west, irresistible to humans hoping to plunder its many riches.

That is the narrative throughout The High Seas: Greed, Power and the Battle for the Unclaimed Ocean, a fast-paced, thoroughly reported and deeply disquieting book by science journalist Olive Heffernan, also the founding chief editor of the journal Nature Climate Change.

The book begins by churning rapidly through the waves of history that brought us to today, including how we even define the high seas: all ocean waters more than 200 nautical miles from any country’s coastline. In many ways, the modern ocean grab was set in motion some 400 years ago. A bitter feud between Dutch and Portuguese traders culminated in a legal document called the Mare Liberum, or the “free seas,” which argues that the ocean is a vast global commons owned by no one. More

In the United States, urban neighborhoods with primarily white residents tend to have more trees than neighborhoods whose residents are predominantly people of color. A new analysis has now linked this inequity to a disparity in heat-related illness and death, researchers report April 8 in npj Urban Sustainability. 

Neighborhoods with predominantly people of color have 11 percent less tree cover on average than majority white neighborhoods, and air temperatures are about 0.2 degrees Celsius higher during summer, urban ecologist Rob McDonald of The Nature Conservancy and colleagues found. Trees already prevent 442 excess deaths and about 85,000 doctor visits annually in these neighborhoods. In majority white neighborhoods, trees save around 200 more lives and prevent 30,000 more doctor visits. More