One of the United States’ largest utilities, Xcel Energy Inc., announced it will close its remaining coal-fired power plants in the Upper Midwest a decade ahead of schedule and add 3,000 megawatts of new solar capacity by 2030, E&E News reported. 

Record levels of greenhouse gas pollution continued to increase humanity’s impact on the atmosphere’s heat-trapping capacity during 2018, according to a yearly analysis released by NOAA scientists today.

NOAA and partners have launched a new buoy in Fagatele Bay within NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the waters around a vibrant tropical coral reef ecosystem.

Improved air quality in the Los Angeles region is linked to roughly 20 percent fewer new asthma cases in children, according to a USC study that tracked Southern California children over a 20-year period.

As well as causing significant harm to human health, air pollution also stunts the growth of trees, one of the very elements that can attenuate this typically urban environmental problem.

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil have shown that atmospheric pollutants restrict tree growth and the ecosystem services provided by trees, such as filtering pollution by absorbing airborne metals in their bark, assimilating CO2, reducing the heat island effect by attenuating solar radiation, mitigating stormwater runoff, and controlling humidity.

The study was supported by FAPESP. The results have been published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

“We found that in years when levels of particulate matter in the atmosphere were higher, for example, the trees grew less. As a result, they started later in their lives to provide ecosystem services that play an important role in reducing urban pollution and mitigating or adapting the city to climate change,” said Giuliano Maselli Locosselli, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo’s Bioscience Institute (IB-USP) with a scholarship from FAPESP and first author of the study.

Read more at São Paulo Research Foundation

Charcoal may be the solution to reducing ammonia pollution and lowering greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer for crop plants, according to a groundbreaking study by a University of Guelph soil scientist.

The Cocos Keeling Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean, are covered with an estimated 414 million pieces of plastic pollution, weighing 238 tons, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Dr. Laurie Chan and his team from the University of Ottawa are pleased to announce that the first phase of the Yellowknife Health Effects Monitoring Program (YKHEMP) is complete.

This week USGS scientists, with support from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, installed technologically advanced monitoring systems to study water-quality conditions and harmful algal blooms—known as HABs—in Owasco and Seneca lakes.

New analysis by the UK Trade Policy Observatory is warning that what should have been the technical formality of transferring EU powers into national law when the UK leaves the European Union, could instead open the gates for the widespread use of outlawed carcinogenic pesticides that have been shown to alter human reproductive, neurological, and immune systems.