It's a vicious cycle. As sea ice melts and opens new routes for maritime traffic in the Arctic, the environmental fallout caused by vessels burning fossil fuels adds to global warming, which in turn melts more sea ice.

A perfect example of this is black carbon. It's a sooty material emitted from gas and diesel engines that aren't completely combusted. Not only does black carbon pollute the air with particulate matter, but because of its ability to absorb light as heat, it contributes to climate change by warming the air.

When black carbon is deposited on ice in the Arctic, it takes away its ability to reflect heat.

On the Berkeley data, the PLF10 model estimates the final value at 1.41 ± 0.10 °C and final warming rate at 0.38 ± 0.14 °C/decade (2σ confidence intervals).

If the globe continues to warm at that rate, then we’ll cross the 1.5 °C limit of the Paris Climate Accord before the year 2030.

NGO says Afghan capital’s 7 million people face existential crisis that world needs urgently to address

The Mercy Corps report can be found here: Kabul’s Water Crisis - An Inflection Point for Action

Rocket fire, artillery shelling, and explosive devices, such as land mines, from both militaries have ravaged Ukraine’s landscapes and ecosystems. Over a third of all carbon emissions in Ukraine stem from warfare — the largest share of any sector in the country. Fighting has triggered destructive wildfires in heavily forested and agricultural grassland regions of eastern Ukraine. From February 2022 through September 2024, almost 5 million acres burned, nearly three-quarters of which are in or adjacent to the conflict zone.

This is why a collective of forestry scientists in Ukraine and abroad are working together to study war-driven wildfires and other forest destruction, as well as map unexploded ordnance that could spur degradation down the road. The efforts aim to improve deployment of firefighting and other resources to save the forests. It is welcome work, but far from easy during a war, when their efforts come with life-threatening consequences.

“The shelling, it’s an explosive wave, the fire makes everything unrecognizable,” a medic with the National Guard 13th Khartiya Brigade told the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in March. “When they get up, the forest is different, it has all changed.”

When you introduce war, you create fires that can’t be effectively extinguished. “You cannot fly aircraft to suppress fire with water because that aircraft will be shot down,” Maksym Matsala, a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, explained.

Forests and agricultural land are woven together across Ukraine, meaning wildfires also endanger the country’s food supply. Battle-sparked blazes destroy harvests and eliminate the trees that shelter cropland from drying winds and erosion that can lead to drought — leaving those on the military front lines and Ukrainian citizens at risk of food insecurity.

https://archive.ph/tadCp

The study

Climate experts such as University of Pennsylvania scientist Michael Mann have for years argued that carbon capture and storage is a false solution to the climate crisis that allows oil and gas companies to suck up huge amounts of public money while continuing to pump fossil fuels.

A jumble of shipping containers hold all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, Alaska, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.

Late in 2024, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.

Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved 9 miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik, but much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets, and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.

Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaskan communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say that what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. It also highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica, and KYUK Public Media in Bethel, Alaska.

World Meteorological Organization report says record heat in 2024 was driven by climate crisis and intersected with extreme weather events

Archive link

Carbon stored in landscapes for thousands of years is leaching back into the atmosphere via rivers, and human activity may be to blame

“There is a possibility that we’re disturbing these long-term carbon stores, and so, as a result, we’re seeing more old carbon coming out through this pathway,”

For example, rising temperatures caused by climate change could be triggering the release of carbon from thawing permafrost, or accelerating the rate of rock weathering. Other activities, such as the draining of peatlands or drying out of wetlands, could also be contributing. Dean stresses that more work is needed to determine the extent to which human activity is driving this process, and how the release of carbon is changing over time.

Journal reference

Japan’s struggle to encourage couples to have more children has been given greater urgency after data showed the annual number of births dropped to below 700,000 for the first time since records began more than a century ago.

According to government data released this week, the number of births reached 686,061 in 2024, a decline of 5.7% from the previous year and the lowest since statistics were first kept in 1899. The data excludes babies born to foreign residents.

The fertility rate – the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime – also fell to a record-low of 1.15, down from 1.20 in 2023, the health ministry said. That is well below the rate of 2.1 needed to keep the population stable. The ministry said 1.6m deaths had been recorded in 2024, up 1.9% from a year earlier.

If current trends persists, Japan’s population of about 124 million is projected to fall to 87 million by 2070, when 40% of the population will be 65 or over.

A shrinking and ageing population could have serious implications for the economy and national security, as the country seeks to boost its military to counter potential threats from China and North Korea.

A massive wall of dust enshrouded the city of Chicago recently, forcing a ground stop at the Midwestern hub’s airports and stunning the city’s more than 2.6 million residents.

But, while sudden dust storms can be dangerous, the lesser known harms lie in the windswept particles themselves — with the Chicago dust storm likely to contain lead, farm chemicals and particles that aggravate respiratory conditions such as asthma. “I’m sure people will have some health issues after it,” said Karin Ardon-Dryer, an assistant professor at Texas Tech University, said of Saturday’s event.

Like other blowing dust, the composition of the Illinois dust could include heavy metals. Lead exposure is another concern, according to U.C. Merced researcher Estrella Herrera. Exposure can result in reproductive issues, high blood pressure, hypertension, nerve disorders, muscle and joint pain, and memory and concentration problems in adults. In children, it can lead to hearing problems, slowed growth, headaches, learning and behavioral difficulties, lowered IQ, and damage to the brain and nervous system.

Archive : https://archive.ph/vUDSo

At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, Americans see a host of economic issues – from inflation to the affordability of health care and the federal budget deficit – as top problems facing the country.

Over the past decade, a number of issues have been marked by deep partisan divides, with some of the issues that rank among the top concerns for one party ranking among the lowest for the other.

There is a 54-point gap in the share of Democrats (67%) and Republicans (13%) who rate climate change as a very big problem facing the nation, also similar to previous years. Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to see “the impact of natural disasters” as a very big problem, though the partisan gap on these views is more modest (54% of Democrats vs. 33% of Republicans).

As millions of students get ready to graduate this spring, their prospects for landing that first job that helps launch their careers is looking dimmer.

LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, said artificial intelligence is increasingly threatening the types of jobs that historically have served as stepping stones for young workers who are just beginning their careers.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for college graduates has been rising faster than for other workers in past few years, Raman pointed out, though there isn’t definitive evidence yet that AI is the cause of the weak job market.

To fix entry-level work, Raman called for colleges to incorporate AI across their curricula and for companies to give junior roles higher-level tasks.

Archive : https://archive.ph/mPnIP

While he may be right, the future for young workers is tough. I think it's a waste that colleges have to incorporate AI into the curriculum.

This could be a solution for a while. But every time AI gets better, these kinds of job positions will eventually be replaced by AI. In the end they are only useful to help AI companies get richer.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23109024

Its collapse was in many ways a good thing for a lot of people.

Looking around me, as it will be again

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36057050

Archived

China and India have approved the construction of the largest capacity of new coal-fired power plants in a decade, as the world’s two most populous nations seek to bolster energy security, according to the International Energy Agency.

China gave the green light to almost 100 gigawatts of new coal-fired plants in 2024, and India a further 15 gigawatts, pushing global approvals to their highest level since 2015, the Paris-based agency said.

“The capacity in coal is increasing,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in an interview as the agency published its annual World Energy Investment report. “But we also see that the capacity utilization rate in China is lower than in previous years, they are mainly using this when there are major challenges to meet the electricity demand.”

AI’s Need for Power Spurs Return of Dirty Gas Turbines Senate to Reinstate US Public Lands Sale to Pay for Tax Cuts European Power Markets Brace for Extreme Heat Over the Summer Coal Power Costs Climb Just as Trump Wants to Prop Up the Fuel

Investments in coal supply continue to tick upward with another 4% increase expected in 2025, a slight slowdown compared with the 6% annual average growth seen over the last five years, the IEA said. “Nearly all the growth in coal investments in 2024 came from China and India to meet domestic demand,” according to the report.

Trends in coal and other carbon-intensive sources may not be conducive to meeting global climate targets.

[...]

Global public debt could increase to 100 percent of global gross domestic product by the end of the decade if current trends continue, according to projections in our latest Fiscal Monitor. The rising ratio of public debt to GDP reflects renewed economic pressures as well as the consequences of pandemic-related fiscal support, according to our report. This trend raises fresh concerns about long-term fiscal sustainability as many countries face rising budget challenges.

The Chart of the Week shows that about a third of countries, accounting for 80 percent of global GDP, have public debt that’s both higher than it was before the pandemic and rising at a faster pace. More than two-thirds of the 175 economies in our study now have heavier public debt burdens than before COVID spread in 2020.

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2025/05/29/debt-is-higher-and-rising-faster-in-80-percent-of-global-economy

A new study by the non-profit Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP) looked at access to antibiotics for nearly 1.5 million cases of carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative (CRGN) infections across eight major low- and middle-income countries, including India, Brazil and South Africa. CRGN bacteria are superbugs resistant to last-line antibiotics - yet only 6.9% of patients received appropriate treatment in the countries studied.

India bore the lion's share of CRGN infections and treatment efforts, procuring 80% of the full courses of studied antibiotics but managing to treat only 7.8% of its estimated cases, the study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal reports. (A full drug course of antibiotics refers to the complete set of doses that a patient needs to take over a specific period to fully treat an infection.)

Common in water, food, the environment and the human gut, Gram-negative bacteria cause infections such as urinary tract infections (UTIs), pneumonia and food poisoning.

They can pose a serious threat to newborns and the elderly alike. Especially vulnerable are hospital patients with weakened immunity, often spreading rapidly in ICUs and proving difficult - and sometimes impossible - to treat. Treating carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative bacterial infections is doubly difficult because those bacteria are resistant to some of the most powerful antibiotics.

"These infections are a daily reality across all age groups," says Dr Abdul Gaffar, infectious disease consultant at Apollo Hospital in India's Chennai city. "We often see patients for whom no antibiotic works - and they die."