Gasoline became unleaded in the 1970s. The sulfur content of diesel has been lowered over decades. Ethanol has been blended into gasoline for years. The historical timeline of liquid transportation fuels is colored by change after change to fuel chemistry.
Atop the Caribbean Sea’s famously pristine waters floats a 5,000-mile-wide heap of rust-colored, brambly seaweed. When that seaweed, a form of sargassum, clumps up on beaches and decomposes, it emits hydrogen sulfide gas (also known as swamp gas), which smells like rotten eggs and, in high doses, can be toxic. For obvious reasons, this seaweed swarm is a huge problem for the Caribbean’s tourism industry and residents—and potentially for Florida, where the heap is headed next.
For the first time, US public companies will be required to tell investors about their exposure to climate risks and greenhouse gas emissions.
On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved requiring US-listed companies to communicate how they are managing material risks related to climate change and how those risks affect their bottom lines. Large companies will also be required to disclose their direct emissions from their operations and energy use, known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.
The current El Niño is now one of the strongest on record, new data shows, catapulting it into rare “super El Niño” territory, but forecasters believe that La Niña is likely to develop in the coming months.
One of the main ways scientists determine whether El Niño is present, and a key indicator of its strength, is through ocean surface temperatures. And from November to January, the temperature of the tropical Pacific Ocean where El Niño originates was 2 degrees Celsius warmer than normal, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction center – a threshold that has only been breached six times on record. It means a very strong El Niño is ongoing.
Beginning in 2018, North American farmers and scientists started noticing an unnerving and unusual trend: Oysters were dying at alarming rates in mass mortality events.
Anthropogenic emissions drive global-scale warming yet the temperature increase relative to pre-industrial levels is uncertain. Using 300 years of ocean mixed-layer temperature records preserved in sclerosponge carbonate skeletons, we demonstrate that industrial-era warming began in the mid-1860s, more than 80 years earlier than instrumental sea surface temperature records. The Sr/Ca palaeothermometer was calibrated against ‘modern’ (post-1963) highly correlated (R2 = 0.91) instrumental records of global sea surface temperatures, with the pre-industrial defined by nearly constant (<±0.1 °C) temperatures from 1700 to the early 1860s. Increasing ocean and land-air temperatures overlap until the late twentieth century, when the land began warming at nearly twice the rate of the surface oceans. Hotter land temperatures, together with the earlier onset of industrial-era warming, indicate that global warming was already 1.7 ± 0.1 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2020. Our result is 0.5 °C higher than IPCC estimates, with 2 °C global warming projected by the late 2020s, nearly two decades earlier than expected.
Scientists have issued a dire warning over the survival of polar bears as a previous theory that the species may adapt to warming temperatures has been scrapped.
As climate change continues to put the ice-reliant animals in jeopardy, some experts have previously theorized that they may, in fact, adapt to living with less ice. They believe the species may, with time, start adapting traits from their relatives, the grizzly bear, and begin resting for long periods or switching their diet to land-based animals.
Feb 20 (Reuters) - The White House will approve a request from a group of Midwest governors to allow year-round sales of gasoline with higher blends of ethanol, but will push the start date into next year, two sources familiar with discussions said.