Environment

Environment

Picture two houses in the aftermath of a California wildfire. What's left of one is a scorched foundation on a blackened lot. The fire spread quickly, partly due to a bed of flammable bark mulch under the windows and tall, dry ornamental grasses touching the siding. The other home is an island in a sea of gray ash. It remained intact, thanks to its protective landscape of low-growing succulents near the foundation and a 5-foot perimeter of gravel and concrete pavers.

"I've always been more interested in how things hold up than how they look," Cheatham says. Early Life in Northern Florida Stephen Cheatham grew up in northern Florida. His childhood was simple and hands-on. He spent time outdoors, surrounded by open land and water. He was the kind of kid who took things apart just to see how they worked. Small engines. Tools. Anything he could get his hands on. "I learned more by doing than by being told," he says.

The WMO also said that predicted average temperatures in the central tropical Pacific pointed towards El Nino conditions, particularly in 2027 and 2028. "There is an El Nino predicted for the end of 2026, which increases the chances of the following year, 2027, being the next record-breaking year," said Leon Hermanson, lead author of the WMO's Global Annual-to-Decadal Update. El Nino is a climate phenomenon characterized by warmer sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean near the equator, creating disruptive effects on global weather patterns

Scientists are warning that three Washington towns could be devastated within minutes if a massive volcanic mudflow suddenly tears down Mount Rainier. Mount Rainier, deemed the most dangerous volcano in the US, threatens more than 60,000 residents living in its lahar danger zone. Lahars are fast-moving volcanic mudflows capable of obliterating entire communities, even without an eruption, when water rapidly mixes with loose rock, ash and debris on a volcano's slopes.

To fight off predators of the humpback chub, a threatened fish native to the river, Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona would need to do what is known as a "cool mix flow," where cold water is released from deep in its reservoir to cool the river below. But there are no hydropower turbines in the cool, deep section, so significant power generation would be lost.

After six days of trying to avoid an overheating chemical tank erupting into a giant fireball or spilling thousands of gallons of toxic substances at an aerospace facility in Garden Grove, Orange County leaders announced Tuesday that the risk of catastrophic explosion had largely been eliminated. Local authorities lifted a large section of the evacuation zone surrounding GKN Aerospace and allowed tens of thousands of residents to return.

ContourGlobal, the independent power producer backed by KKR, has inaugurated a nearly $500 million solar-and-storage facility in Chile's Atacama desert that stores daytime solar energy and delivers it after sundown. The Victor Jara hybrid plant combines 231 megawatt-peak of photovoltaic capacity with 1.3 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, capable of delivering 200 megawatts of power for up to 6.5 hours at night. ContourGlobal calls it Latin America's longest-duration utility-scale battery system.

Hidden plumbing errors are sending untreated household sewage into rivers, polluting waterways without residents' knowledge. One south-west London river has been badly affected by these misconnections. A misconnection happens when wastewater is incorrectly diverted into surface drains, leading to pollution in nearby waterways. Pollutants may include raw sewage, chemicals and physical debris which are harmful to wildlife and lead to further degradation of river ecosystems, according to Dr Isobel Ollard from the South East Rivers Trust (SERT).

Even small solar panels are expensive, so they need to last a long time in order to make their money back. Take my EcoFlow 400W flexible panel . This retails for $550. If you take the average price for a kWh of electricity in the US (let's say $0.19), combine that with the average amount of peak sunshine (let's say 5 hours), and allow for losses through inefficiencies, this panel can make about 1.5 kWh a day, or just under 30 cents a day of power.

The local authority refused planning permission in July last year, stating that "the applicant has not demonstrated that sufficient archaeological investigations have been undertaken to guide the proposed development towards preserving in-situ potential archaeological features and thereby safeguarding archaeological heritage." The general area features a number of standing stones, fulacht fiadh (Bronze Age cooking pits) and other objects of archaeological interest.

Less than 2% of Americans can put plastic film in their curbside recycling bin, according to The Recycling Partnership. Meanwhile, the country generates millions of pounds of bags, pallet wrap, bubble mailers, and dry cleaner sleeves every year that machinery at materials recovery facilities is designed to reject. The plastic film problem has been the recycling industry's white whale for three decades - too contaminated for most processors, too light for most economics.

Wicklow's coastline has been left out of a key funding stream for invasive species control and dune protection, despite being one of the most erosion vulnerable stretches in the country. The latest allocations under the Local Biodiversity Action Fund (LBAF) show that Wicklow will receive almost €97,000 for four biodiversity projects, but none of them relate to the county's beaches, dune systems or coastal habitats.

Crude production had plummeted to 567,000 barrels per day, barely more than a quarter of the roughly 2 million barrels pumped daily at the field's peak two decades earlier. The decline stoked concerns that the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, built to carry the state's oil bounty to the continental US, might stop operating. Engineers even worried that slow-moving crude would congeal inside the pipeline, creating waxy buildup that could turn TAPS into the world's biggest tube of ChapStick.

Drivers are facing rising fuel costs as conflict in Iran sends oil prices soaring. Photograph: Mike Kemp/In Pictures/Getty $30m an hour: that's the pure, unearned profits banked by the world's top 100 oil and gas companies in the first month of the conflict in Iran, purely due to the spike in the oil price. I revealed this exclusive analysis, commissioned by the Guardian, in April while it was based on the best data in the industry, it was an estimate. Now the first numbers are in, and that $30m may have been a major underestimate.

When 53-year-old Agbar Mohammad pulled into a petrol station in Fiji in May, he was expecting a queue. Instead, it was almost empty. I could only see one or two cars at the service station, which was very unusual, Mohammad says. The reason became clear very quickly: as Mohammad filled his car, the numbers on the fuel pump climbed so much faster than the needle on his dashboard. Normally he would put in about $40 of fuel, but this time $100 barely got his 60-litre tank halfway full.

Plug-in solar systems, also known as balcony solar, are easy, plug-and-play solar panels that include an inverter and small battery. The system connects to a home's standard 120-volt outlet and automatically flows the electricity from the battery to the nearest running appliance. These systems are small and portable, and aren't meant to replace grid electricity or dependency on utility companies. Instead, they generate anywhere between 200W and 1,800W, but are an easy solution to reduce energy costs with an affordable investment.

Heavy, prolonged rainfall in southern and central China has resulted in weather warnings for flash flooding, landslides and waterlogging. The band of rainfall spanned 1,000km (620 miles) and steadily moved eastwards across the regions on Tuesday. It was a slow-moving band of rain, formed from the convergence of multiple bands originating from the Bay of Bengal, South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Coupled with low wind speeds, high daily and hourly rainfall totals have been recorded, with as much as 75mm locally in Hunan, 85mm in Anhui in a 24-hour period and 95mm on the island of Hainan.