articles

With spring finally here and warmer temperatures just around the corner, snow will slowly melt away, releasing us from the clutches of winter. However, that’s not the only thing that the melting snow will release. Researchers from McGill University and École de technologie supérieure in Montreal have found that urban snow accumulates a toxic cocktail from car emissions - pollutants that are in turn unleashed into the environment as the weather warms up.

For the second time in just 12 months, scientists have recorded severe coral bleaching across huge tracts of the Great Barrier Reef after completing aerial surveys along its entire length. In 2016, bleaching was most severe in the northern third of the Reef, while one year on, the middle third has experienced the most intense coral bleaching.

In the wake of 2015 Climate Paris Agreements to limit global temperature below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, many governmental and private stakeholders have advocated for the introduction of policies to mitigate climate change. This would affect directly only the fossil-fuel and utility sector, but it would also expose indirectly many other economic sectors, in particular the energy-intensive sectors. The financial system can be affected due to its exposure to firms in the form of equity shares, bonds holdings and loans. However, the impact of climate policies on the financial system has remained unclear so far.

One way to understand how ocean acidity can change, for example, in response to rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, is to look to the history of seawater acidity. Dr. Itay Halevy of the Weizmann Institute of Science has looked to the distant past – all the way back to Earth’s earliest oceans. The model he developed, together with Dr. Aviv Bachan of Stanford University, suggests that the early oceans, right around the time that life originated, were somewhat acidic, and that they gradually became alkaline. The study, published in Science, sheds light on how past ocean acid levels were controlled by CO2in the atmosphere, an important process for understanding the effects of climate change.

Americans used more renewable energy in 2016 compared to the previous year, according to the most recent energy flow charts released by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Overall, energy consumption was nearly flat.

Each year, the Laboratory releases energy flow charts that illustrate the nation's consumption and use of energy. Americans used 0.1 quads (quadrillion BTU), more in 2016 than in 2015. A BTU, or British Thermal Unit, is a unit of measurement for energy; 3,400 BTUs is equivalent to about 1 kilowatt-hour.