Environment

Environment

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.

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,

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

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.

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.

In the Rockies and Southwest, several states are projected to see over a foot of accumulation through Friday. Eastern California is expected to be the hardest hit, with the Sierra Nevada Mountains set to receive more than five feet of snow. Parts of Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah are predicted to see over ten inches, but totals could reach two to three feet at higher elevations throughout those states.

The Bay Area is about to get frigid enough to potentially break more than a century-old low temperature records in some cities. That's after a series of cold storms encompassed the region this week, dusting the highest peaks in snow. National Weather Service forecasters said they are evaluating whether to issue public alerts for extreme cold over the next 48 hours, with the possibility that the frigid temperatures extend deeper into Friday and linger into Saturday.

Carquinez Strait and Delta and Northern San Joaquin Valley are under a freeze warning which was released by the National Weather Service on Thursday at 12:16 p.m. The warning is valid for Friday, Feb. 20 between midnight and 9 a.m. The NWS Sacramento CA said, Sub-freezing temperatures of 28 to 32 degrees expected. Frost and freeze conditions could kill crops and other sensitive vegetation, the NWS said. Take steps now to protect tender plants from the cold.

A storm sweeping through the San Francisco Bay Area knocked out power to more than 7,000 customers across the Peninsula and South Bay on Thursday morning, according to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. The company issued a power outage alert in San Mateo County at 8:23 a.m., initially reporting 4,107 customers affected in neighborhoods including Brentwood Park, Avalon Park and Crestmoor 2. At 9:03 a.m., the utility updated the alert to say 2,929 customers were impacted in that outage area.

LIVE RADAR: Track storms as they move through the Bay Area with Live Doppler 7 Take a look at the chart above -- we will give each storm a number with 1 being the lightest type of storm and 5 being the most severe. This way you'll know what to expect. Number 1 means a light storm with 1/2 an inch of rain or less and likely lasting a few hours or less. Number 2 is a moderate storm with 1/2 an inch to one inch of rain forecast and could include scattered power outages.

Each piece begins with used coffee pods collected from my community, materials that were never meant to last beyond a single use. Before any design work begins, the pods must be cleaned, sanitized, flattened, cut, folded, and shaped entirely by hand. They arrive dented, stained, and inconsistent, carrying the marks of their previous life. Learning how to work with those imperfections, rather than erasing them, was one of my first challenges.

If you are reading this on the East Coast, congratulations on the warmer weather you're finally getting this week. It was cold and snowy for a while there. Here in the West, we wish we'd been in your shoes. Spare a thought for the tens of millions of us who live on the other side of the continent, where a catastrophe is unfolding.

Data published by the insurer Aviva reveals that of the 396,602 new homes recorded by the Ordnance Survey in England between 2022 and 2024, 43,937 are in areas of medium or high risk of flooding, while 26% of new homes have some risk of flooding.

Analysis by insurer Aviva reveals that 11% of the 396,602 new homes in England built between 2022 and 2024 were built in areas of medium or high risk of flooding, while more than a quarter (26%) have some flood risk. While comparable statistics have not been published since 2022, Aviva said its assessment showed the number of homes built in flood risk areas has accelerated as housebuilding increases. The problem is particularly acute in and around the capital, the analysis reveals.

Vonn started skiing on glaciers in Austria when she was just 9 years old. Most of the glaciers that I used to ski on are pretty much gone, 41-year-old Vonn said Feb. 3 in response to a question from The Associated Press at a prerace press conference in Cortina before she crashed on the Olympic downhill course. So that's very real and it's very apparent to us.

On a stretch of Brooklyn's waterfront, the 34-story Riverie looks like any other high-rise in New York City's crowded skyline. But beneath its foundation, an invisible network of boreholes extends hundreds of feet into the ground to tap Earth's natural reservoir of warmth. Instead of burning fossil fuels, the Riverie relies on geothermal energy; it uses the steady temperature underground to warm apartments in winter and cool them in summer.

A few years ago, Ketan Joshi read a statistic about artificial intelligence and climate change that caught his eye. In late 2023, Google began claiming that AI could help cut global greenhouse gas emissions by between five and 10 percent by 2030. This claim was spread in an op-ed coauthored by its chief sustainability officer, and subsequently quoted across the press and in some academic papers.

The challenge is getting the water deep enough to generate steam. At least in the case of the Fervo trial, this involved technologies originally developed by the oil and gas industry to bore two parallel wells to a depth of 8,000 feet (2,438 meters). The rock was then fractured to allow water to pass between the two wells where it was heated to temperatures exceeding 190 degrees Celsius.

Parties on both sides of a long-running debate over the California Public Utilities Commission's controversial overhaul of rooftop solar regulations are anxiously awaiting a ruling from the state's court of appeals. Depending on what conclusion the justices reach, the decision may alter the rate of compensation that at least some of the roughly 2 million Californians with solar installations on their homes and businesses receive when their systems generate excess electricity.