Environment

Environment

In a high-growth scenario for the space industry, there could be as many as 2,000 launches per year, which her modeling shows could result in about 3 percent ozone loss, equal to the atmospheric impacts of a bad wildfire season in Australia. She said most of the damage comes from chlorine-rich solid rocket fuels and black carbon in the plumes. The black carbon could also warm parts of the stratosphere by about half-a-degree Celsius as it absorbs sunlight.

It was a Saturday in February 2020 when the flood came. It had been a wet winter, so wet it seemed that before the month was out, the brown trout of the River Taff might be washed clean out into Cardiff Bay before the fishing season had even begun. But this is Wales. People are used to a spot of rain.

On the foothills of the mountains, by the banks of the river in Cortina, there was a forest. It was full of tall larch trees. Arborists said the oldest of them had been there for 150 years and dendrologists that it was unique because it was unusual to find a monocultural forest growing at such a low altitude in the southern Alps.

Avalanches kill about 100 people in Europe each year, with vast masses of ice, snow and rock regularly crashing down on hikers and skiers who have been caught unawares. The structure of the snow, angle of the slope and variation of the weather can dictate whether a gentle disturbance like a gust of wind or the glide of a snowboard can trigger a deadly shift in the mountain.

Video submissions should be 2-5 minutes long. Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges made up of local leaders and climate professionals. Winning entries will be announced April 22 and will receive $100-$500, and the winners will be screened at an event in mid-May. The Youth Nature Video Contest is sponsored by the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority. Submissions close on March 31.

It takes an immense amount of energy to power venues and make snow for the Winter Olympics and, for the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, organizers pledged that virtually all of the electricity would be clean. The organizing committee said that energy use is where they can make the most meaningful impact, since it has been one of the main drivers of planet-warming emissions at major events. And Italy's largest electricity company, Enel, guaranteed the supply of entirely certified renewable electricity for event venues.

As a child, Marcel Mazur had to hold his breath in parts of Krakow thick with so much smoke you could see and smell it. Now, as an allergy specialist at Jagiellonian University Medical College who treats patients struggling to breathe, he knows all too well the damage those toxic gases do inside the human body. It's not that we have this feeling that nothing can be done. But it's difficult, Mazur said.

Unless you are a hair salon engaged in the business of washing customers' hair, of course. Then using 70% less water could well matter as you attempt to cut your carbon footprint. It is more efficient as well. The Water Saver showerhead came from a partnership between Swiss startup, Gjosa, and L'Oréal, the global beauty brand and Fortune 500 Europe listee. At its most basic, Water Saver makes water, well, wetter-fragmenting the water streams to create droplets better suited to rinsing hair:

Changes in the Antarctic do not stay in the Antarctic. Though Antarctica is far away, changes here will impact the rest of the world through changes in sea level, oceanic and atmospheric connections and circulation changes.

There are a lot of unanswered possibly unanswerable questions in the air at the moment. Questions such as what prompts a husband to drug his wife and, for a decade, invite strange men over to his house to rape her while she lies unconscious in the marital bed? Or: what kind of a person do you have to be to hang around with a convicted child sexual offender and billionaire who is exercising his perversions in plain sight,

Yosemite National Park is closed through Friday because of impacts from the winter storm, including heavy snowfall and heavy trees. The National Park Service announced Thursday that the park is closed and that visitors with lodging reservations may still enter the park through Highway 140 at the Arch Rock entrance. Since Monday, Yosemite Valley and the park has received about 4 feet of snow and up to 52 inches in some areas, according to the National Weather Service in Hanford.

A tiny critically endangered moth, named after the Avatar films because of the proposed mining activity threatening its primary habitat, has been crowned New Zealand's bug of the year. The Avatar moth won by a wide margin, earning 5,192 of the more than 11,000 total votes cast. It won 2,269 more votes than the runner-up, the mahoenui giant weta, one of the world's largest insects. Other contenders included the wonderfully spiky hellraiser mite, the country's heaviest spider the black tunnelweb and a giant earthworm

It was Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire, who came up with the tagline "Democracy Dies in Darkness" for The Washington Post. According to a memoir by the paper's former editor, Martin Baron, Bezos greenlighted the "democracy" line after an internal staff favorite was rejected by his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott. In his book Baron admits to initially being impressed by the new owner, now the world's third-richest man.

A moratorium that has protected vital rainforest since 2009 is on shaky ground as several players from Brazil's soy industry say they are pulling out. Specifically, the Brazilian industry association ABIOVE, whose members include global companies such as Cofco International, Bunge, Amaggi and JBS, have said they will no longer refrain from growing soy on deforested land. Environmentalists fear this could fuel a new wave of Amazon logging.