#climate impacts

#climate impacts

Researchers have developed a skin-permeable polymer that can deliver insulin into the body, which they say could one day offer an alternative to injections for diabetes management. The skin's structure presents a formidable barrier to the delivery of large drugs but in this work a team show that their polymer can penetrate though the different layers without causing damage. Insulin attached to this polymer was able to reduce blood glucose levels in animal models for diabetes at a comparable speed to injected insulin.

In his memo, Gates posited that climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise." That's true, Hayhoe said, but it's also an unhelpful "straw man" argument, because scientists sounding the alarm on climate change have never argued it will lead to humanity's extinction. Humanity's fate amid the climate crisis is not a binary, she explains, but a question of scale: How much will humanity suffer due to climate change? And how much suffering can we prevent?

A new report from the nonprofit Coffee Watch says that modern coffee production in Brazil continues to be a significant driver of deforestation, with hundreds of thousands of hectares of native forest cleared inside coffee farm boundaries since 2001. Beyond the global implications for biodiversity and climate change, the continued loss of forest in key coffee regions presents economic threats to the Brazilian coffee sector, driving a cycle of drought and yield volatility, according to the report.

Five times stronger than the Gulf Stream and 100 times larger than the Amazon River, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is by far the world's largest ocean current. But this key system is grinding to a halt, a new study has warned. Analysing core samples, scientists from the University of Bonn have found that the ACC has undergone a major slowdown. In fact, the ocean current is now running three times slower than it was 130,000 years ago. Worryingly, if it continues, this dramatic slowdown could have disastrous consequences.

The Guardian has long been at the forefront of agenda-setting climate journalism, and in a news cycle dominated by autocrats and war, we refuse to let the health of the planet slip out of sight. We stand out as a media organisation by examining why the climate emergency is creating a new era of demagogues and how powerful governments, financial institutions and big oil companies are turning their back on climate promises.