Environment

Environment

The group said it estimated a population for the southern half of Maine of 3,174 adult loons and 568 chicks. Audubon bases its count on the southern portion of Maine because there are enough bird counters to get a reliable number. The count is more than twice the number when they started counting in 1983, and the count of adults has increased 13% from 10 years ago.

What you might not appreciate is that conifers, which grow and thrive all year alongside other evergreens, have played some surprising roles in U.S. history. Take the eastern white pine. It decorated the first coins minted in the British colonies. Spruce lumberjacks in the early 20th century, meanwhile, helped enshrine some key labor rights, including an eight-hour workday and overtime pay. These tales and more are highlighted by Trent Preszler, an environmental economist at Cornell University,

They said these "dirt-cheap" prices cost taxpayers, add to the strains on scarce water, and discourage conservation - even as the Colorado River's depleted reservoirs continue to decline. "Federal taxpayers have been subsidizing effectively free water for a very, very long time," said Noah Garrison, a researcher at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. "We can't address the growing water scarcity in the West while we continue to give that water away for free or close to it."

Counties Cork and Kerry will be under the Orange warning from 3am until 6pm on Sunday, with the highest levels of rainfall expected in Kerry and west Cork. Significant flooding, hazardous travelling conditions and poor visibility are expected for the duration of the Orange warning. A Status Yellow rain warning will come into place for 10 counties today Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Donegal and all five counties in Connacht will be under the warning from 6pm on Saturday evening until midnight on Monday.

The low cloud formation, known as tule fog, first formed over central California in November and persisted into early December. The Central Valley typically sees this type of fog during the colder months of the year, when the air near the ground is cold and moist, and the winds are calmer, allowing moisture in the air to transform into a thick layer of fog.

Internal breakdowns like those add to the chronic terror neighbors and businesses face downwind of the refinery, said Heidi Taylor, who lives along its fence line in downtown Martinez. She said she's seen level-one alerts and enormous flaring almost every day for the past month, which was confirmed by Contra Costa County officials. It's the public that suffers as a result of MRC's incompetence, or what I would argue is gross negligence, Taylor said Tuesday at a Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors meeting.

Coach John Beam changed my life when I was a 14-year-old kid on the Skyline High football field. I still remember getting flattened in a varsity drill and looking up to see Beam standing over me, demanding more because he saw more. That was his gift. He coached football, but he taught manhood: accountability, discipline, belief in yourself long before you earned it.

This week's quote comes from Duke Senior's speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 1. Let's enjoy the hidden experience that attentive time in nature reveals. It can unlock wonder, awe, and insight. "And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

You may be surprised to learn electricity only accounts for 21 percent of the world's energy consumption. Fossil fuels and the rest all play their part to make the world go around, but their role is likely to diminish no matter what happens. The International Energy Agency believes electricity's share of global energy consumption is going to in the next decade alone.

GlaMBIE has entered the research scene during a critical time: continued funding for crucial glacier monitoring technologies is uncertain, and the magnitude of global glacier decline in the 21st century has been historically unprecedented-reinforcing glaciers as clear indicators of ongoing anthropogenic climate change. Glacier monitoring is essential for tracking glacier mass changes over time, and GlaMBIE's assessment is important to ensuring the continuity of this data, especially when many glacier monitoring technologies are expected to be suspended or decommissioned due to U.S funding cuts.

Professor Xiaoxiang Zhu, who leads the project and is the chair of data science in Earth observation at TUM, says the real achievement is that the new map is a three‑dimensional picture of how much space people actually inhabit. "3D building information provides a much more accurate picture of urbanization and poverty than traditional 2D maps," she explains. With 3D models "we see not only the footprint but also the volume of each building."

It's time for the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count, held each year from Dec. 14 through Jan. 5. The citizen science tradition dates back to 1900, when an early officer of the society, ornithologist Frank M. Chapman, proposed a bird census rather than a hunt over the Christmas holiday. Today, tens of thousands of participants across the Americas participate in one of the longest-running wildlife censuses, which is designed to assess bird populations.

After record-breaking rains, an ancient lake in Death Valley national park that had vanished has returned to view. The temporary lake, known informally as Lake Manly, has appeared once more at the bottom of Badwater Basin, which sits 282ft beneath sea level, in California. The basin is the lowest point in North America, according to the National Park Service. Repeated storms from September through November filled the flat with runoff, forming a thin layer of water.

Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have found that some genes related to heat stress, ageing and metabolism are behaving differently in polar bears living in south-east Greenland, suggesting they may be adjusting to warmer conditions. The researchers analysed blood samples taken from polar bears in two regions of Greenland and compared jumping genes: small, mobile pieces of the genome that can influence how other genes work. Scientists looked at the genes in relation to temperatures in the two regions and at the associated changes in gene expression.

Now, the city's top staffer said Tagami's firm, Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal LLC, will be "treated like any other developer that comes into the city." "At this point, it's just another development project," City Administrator Jestin Johnson said in an interview. "The city has exercised all its legal options." The word "coal," he added, did not even come up during a recent meeting between the administrator and Tagami.

The once-rigid link between economic growth and carbon emissions is breaking across the vast majority of the world, according to a study released ahead of Friday's 10th anniversary of the Paris climate agreement. The analysis, which underscores the effectiveness of strong government climate policies, shows this decoupling trend has accelerated since 2015 and is becoming particularly pronounced among major emitters in the global south. Countries representing 92% of the global economy have now decoupled consumption-based carbon emissions and GDP expansion, according to the report by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

"They've tried everything," Prab Sekhon, CEO of Eclipse Energy, told TechCrunch. "There's still a ton of oil left behind."

As 2025 draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on how dramatically the conversation around IT sustainability has shifted in the past 12 months. This has been a year of transition - not because enterprises have suddenly become experts in sustainable IT, but because they've finally stopped treating it as a peripheral topic. For the first time in my career, sustainability is no longer the "add-on" to IT strategy - it's now a structural pillar shaping procurement, infrastructure planning, lifecycle decisions and

This peaceful protest is important because it bypasses all differences. During other protests, we hear stories of goons, but this one bypasses all stories and triggers humanity,

Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker, surveys the sky from a sunbaked hillside 5 miles from Utah's Great Salt Lake. On this balmy Sunday afternoon in late September, the lake is calm, but its serenity belies a potentially catastrophic problem: The Great Salt Lake is shrinking-and is at risk of disappearing altogether. At its peak 40 years ago, the lake covered 2,300 square miles; today, more than 800 square miles of lake bed are exposed.

'Tis the season of giving, and while we all want to be generous with our loved ones, it's hard not to feel like the Grinch when you find out that more than $8.3 billion may be wasted on unwanted gifts each year, according to a survey by the Center for Biological Diversity. And to make matters even worse, when those gifts are returned, they're likely to end up in a landfill instead of back on the shelves.

They look like ordinary basketball courts. But two new courts built next to public housing in New York City double as flood prevention. In a sudden flash flood-when the city's aging sewer system can easily become overwhelmed and streets can fill with water-the sunken basketball courts act like retention basins. The design can hold as much as 330,000 gallons, with the court's lowest areas filling like a pool and additional water stored in bioretention cells beneath the surface.

"We own and operate all the batteries," says Haven CEO Vinnie Campo. (The company focuses on batteries, but also installs and owns connected rooftop solar panels at some homes.) "We're then able to provide to the utility a fixed dispatch or fixed capacity from those batteries. They can almost think of it as building a mini power plant exactly where they need it."

Critically endangered animals are being advertised for sale as bushmeat on TikTok, a new study finds. The work, published recently in Nature Conservation, underscores the growing role social media plays in the global illegal wildlife trade. Bushmeatmeat sourced from wild animalsis commonly eaten in many African and some Asian countries. Though some people hunt for personal consumption, many hunters sell meat to regional traders, who may then sell it to families or restaurants.

The climate crisis supercharged the deadly storms that killed more than 1,750 people in Asia by making downpours more intense and flooding worse, scientists have reported. Monsoon rains often bring some flooding but the scientists were clear: this was not normal. In Sri Lanka, some floods reached the second floor of buildings, while in Sumatra, in Indonesia, the floods were worsened by the destruction of forests, which in the past slowed rainwater running off hillsides.

As data center power density and uptime expectations rise, it's predicted that we'll see a rapid growth in the use of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in the next three to five years. While there are utilities working on flexible load tariffs for which data center operators could use storage when called upon instead of curtailing, many are turning to off-grid solutions because interconnection for new loads is taking too long, says Allison Weis, Global Head of Energy Storage, Power, and Renewables at Wood Mackenzie.