An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A 41-year-old man in New Hampshire died last week after contracting a rare mosquito-borne illness called eastern equine encephalitis virus, also known as EEE or "triple E." It was New Hampshire's first human case of the disease in a decade. Four other human EEE infections have been reported this year, in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Though this outbreak is small, and triple E does not pose a risk to most people living in the United States, public health officials and researchers are concerned about the threat the deadly virus poses to the public, both this year and in future summers. There is no known cure for the disease, which can cause severe flu-like symptoms and seizures in humans four to 10 days after exposure and kills between 30 and 40 percent of the people it infects (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). Half of the people who survive a triple E infection are left with permanent neurological damage. Because of EEE's high mortality rate, state officials have begun spraying insecticide in Massachusetts, where 10 communities have been designated "critical" or "high risk" for triple E. Towns in the state shuttered their parks from dusk to dawn and warned people to stay inside after 6 pm, when mosquitoes are most active.

Like West Nile virus, another mosquito-borne illness that poses a risk to people in the US every summer, triple E is constrained by environmental factors that are changing rapidly as the planet warms. That's because mosquitoes thrive in the hotter, wetter conditions that climate change is producing. "We have seen a resurgence of activity with eastern equine encephalitis virus over the course of the past 10 or so years," said Theodore G. Andreadis, a researcher who studied mosquito-borne diseases at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a state government research and public outreach outfit, for 35 years. "And we've seen an advancement into more northern regions where it had previously not been detected." Researchers don't know what causes the virus to surge and abate, but Andreadis said it's clear that climate change is one of the factors spurring its spread, particularly into new regions. [...]

Studies have shown that warmer air temperatures up to a certain threshold, around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, shorten the amount of time it takes for C. melanura eggs to hatch. Higher temperatures in the spring and fall extend the number of days mosquitoes have to breed and feed. And they'll feed more times in a summer season if it's warmer -- mosquitoes are ectothermic, meaning their metabolism speeds up in higher temperatures. Rainfall, too, plays a role in mosquito breeding and activity, since mosquito eggs need water to hatch. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which means that even small rainfall events dump more water today than they would have last century. The more standing water there is in roadside ditches, abandoned car tires, ponds, bogs, and potholes, the more opportunities mosquitoes have to breed. And warmer water decreases the incubation period for C. melanura eggs, leading one study to conclude that warmer-than-average water temperatures "increase the probability for amplification of EEE." Climate change isn't the only factor encouraging the spread of disease vectors like mosquitoes. The slow reforestation of areas that were clear-cut for industry and agriculture many decades ago is creating new habitat for insects. At the same time, developers are building new homes in wooded or half-wooded zones in ever larger numbers, putting humans in closer proximity to the natural world and the bugs that live in it. The report notes that the best way to prevent mosquito bites is to "wear long sleeves and pants at dusk and dawn, when mosquitoes are most prone to biting, and regularly apply an effective mosquito spray." Local health departments can also help protect the public by "testing pools of water for mosquito larvae and conducting public awareness and insecticide spraying campaigns when triple E is detected," notes Wired.

A vaccine for the disease exists for horses, but because the illness is so rare "there is little incentive for vaccine manufacturers to develop a preventative for triple E in humans," adds the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Northwest Oregon had never seen anything like it. Over the course of three days in June 2021, Multnomah County -- the state's most populous county, which rests in the swayback along Oregon's northern border -- recorded highs of 108, 112, and 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures were so hot that the metal on cable cars melted and the asphalt on roadways buckled. Nearly half the homes in the county lacked cooling systems because of Oregon's typically gentle summers, where average highs top out at 81 degrees. Sixty-nine people perished from heat stroke, most of them in their homes. When scientific studies showed that the extreme temperatures were caused by heat domes, which experts say are influenced by climate change, county officials didn't just chalk it up to a random weather occurrence. They started researching the large fossil fuel companies whose emissions are driving the climate crisis -- including ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron -- and sued them (PDF).

"This catastrophe was not caused by an act of God," said Jeffrey B. Simon, a lawyer for the county, "but rather by several of the world's largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people by selling as much oil and gas as they could." Now, 11 months after the suit was filed, Multnomah County is preparing to move forward with the case in Oregon state court after a federal judge in June settled (PDF) a monthslong debate over where the suit should be heard. About three dozen lawsuits have been filed by states, counties, and cities seeking damages from oil and gas companies for harms caused by climate change. Legal experts said the Oregon case is one of the first focused on public health costs related to high temperatures during a specific occurrence of the "heat dome effect." Most of the other lawsuits seek damages more generally from such ongoing climate-related impacts as sea level rise, increased precipitation, intensifying extreme weather events, and flooding. [...]

The Multnomah County lawsuit says that Exxon, Shell, Chevron, and others engaged in a range of improper practices, including negligence, creating a public nuisance, fraud, and deceit. The suit alleges that the companies were aware of the harms of fossil fuels and engaged in a "scheme to rapaciously sell fossil fuel products and deceptively promote them as harmless to the environment, while they knew that carbon pollution emitted by their products into the atmosphere would likely cause deadly extreme heat events like that which devastated Multnomah County." "We know that climate-induced weather events like the 2021 Heat Dome harm the residents of Multnomah County and cause real financial costs to our local government," Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement. "The Court's decision to hear this lawsuit in State Court validates our assertion that the case should be resolved here -- it's an important win for this community." In the suit, officials in Portland's Multnomah County said that they will ultimately incur costs in excess of $1.5 billion to deal with the effects of the 2021 heat dome.

"We allege that this is just like any other kind of public health crisis and mass destruction of property that is caused by corporate wrongdoing," said Simon, partner in the law firm of Simon Greenstone Panatier. "We contend that these companies polluted the atmosphere with carbon from the burning of fossil fuels; that they foresaw that extreme environmental harm would be caused by it; that some of them, we contend, deliberately misled the public about that."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A storm hit the United Arab Emirates and Oman this week bringing record rainfall that flooded highways, inundated houses, grid-locked traffic and trapped people in their homes. [...] In the UAE, a record 254 millimetres (10 inches) of rainfall was recorded in Al Ain, a city bordering Oman. It was the largest ever in a 24-hour period since records started in 1949. Rainfall is rare in the UAE and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, that is typically known for its dry desert climate. Summer air temperatures can soar above 50 degrees Celsius. But the UAE and Oman also lack drainage systems to cope with heavy rains and submerged roads are not uncommon during rainfall.

Following Tuesday's events, questions were raised whether cloud seeding, a process that the UAE frequently conducts, could have caused the heavy rains. Cloud seeding is a process in which chemicals are implanted into clouds to increase rainfall in an environment where water scarcity is a concern. The UAE, located in one of the hottest and driest regions on earth, has been leading the effort to seed clouds and increase precipitation. But the UAE's meteorology agency told Reuters there were no such operations before the storm. The huge rainfall was instead likely due to a normal weather system that was exacerbated by climate change, experts say. A low pressure system in the upper atmosphere, coupled with low pressure at the surface had acted like a pressure 'squeeze' on the air, according to Esraa Alnaqbi, a senior forecaster at the UAE government's National Centre of Meteorology. That squeeze, intensified by the contrast between warmer temperatures at ground level and colder temperatures higher up, created the conditions for the powerful thunderstorm, she said.

An article in the Washington Post remembers a 1980s-era "glass box with metal water pipes running through it" that "converted sunlight into hot water. By trapping solar energy like a greenhouse, it heated the water to a scorching 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

"[T]oday, hardly anyone is using these solar water heaters even as photovoltaic panels have popped up on the roofs of nearly 4 million American homes." Unlike photovoltaic panels, which can power your home, solar thermal panels are mainly used to heat water. But they're smaller and more efficient. The technology converts 60 to 70 percent of the sun's energy into heat. Even the best photovoltaics, which generate electricity, only achieve 24 percent efficiency. Now, a new generation of solar water heater manufacturers is hoping subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, and growing interest in net-zero emissions, will reignite their growth.

Theoretically, solar thermal offers a big opportunity to slash emissions. Nearly 20 percent of an average home's energy is used to heat water, and nearly 50 percent globally, according to MIT. By adopting solar water heaters, the average household can keep 2 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the equivalent of not driving your car for four months, estimates the Environmental Protection Agency. Solar water heaters can also save money, cutting the average utility bill by $400 to $600 per year, the Energy Department estimates...

Only about 370,000 solar thermal systems were operating in the United States by the end of 2021, according to the International Energy Agency, many of them on larger commercial buildings...

Since they can cut fuel consumption to heat water by 50 percent to 70 percent, other countries are embracing the technology: Almost all new residential buildings in Israel must include solar thermal, while in countries as far north as Canada and Denmark, solar thermal energy warms millions of homes with district heating systems. Yet these systems represent a tiny fraction of the potential, supplying 0.4 percent of today's global energy demand for domestic hot water.
New U.S. subsidies can cut the price in half depending on location, the article points out.

Cheap photovoltaics still make economic sense for many homes (unless you're heating a pool). "But the cost of solar thermal could look like a bargain if we consider increasingly unreliable electric grids and the cost to the climate from burning fossil fuels."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: According to Modvion, the Swedish start-up that has just built the world's tallest wooden turbine tower, using wood for wind power is the future. "It's got great potential," Otto Lundman, the company's chief executive, says as we gaze upwards at the firm's brand new turbine, a short drive outside Gothenburg. It's 150m (492ft) to the tip of the highest blade and we are the first journalists to be invited to have a look inside. The 2 megawatt generator on top has just started supplying electricity to the Swedish grid, providing power for about 400 homes. The dream of Lundman and Modvion is to take the wood and wind much higher. On the horizon near the Modvion project, several very similar-looking turbines are turning. Steel, not wood, is the key material for them, as it is for almost all of the world's turbine towers. Strong and durable, steel has enabled huge turbines and wind farms to be constructed on land and at sea. But steel is not without its limitations, particularly for projects on land. As demand has grown for taller turbines that harvest stronger winds with larger generators, the diameter of the cylindrical steel towers to support them has had to grow too. In a world of road tunnels, bridges and roundabouts, many in the wind industry say getting those huge pieces of metal to turbine sites has become a real headache, in effect limiting how tall new steel turbines can be.

From the outside, there is little obvious difference between the Modvion wooden turbine and its steel cousins. Both have a thick white coating to protect them from the elements and blades made primarily from fiberglass attached to a generator, which produces electricity when it turns. It is only when we go inside the tower that the differences becomes clear. The walls have a curved raw wood finish, not unlike a sauna. The 105m (345ft) tower's strength comes from the 144 layers of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) that make its thick walls. By varying the grain of each of the 3mm-thick layers of spruce, Modvion says it has been able to control the wall's strength and flexibility. "It's our secret recipe," says company co-founder -- and former architect and boat builder -- David Olivegren, with a smile. [...] Lundman and Olivegren tell me their turbine's big selling point is that, by using wood and glue, towers can be built in smaller, more easily transported modules. That will make it much easier to build really tall towers, they say, and to take the pieces to challenging locations.

However, Dr Maximilian Schnippering, head of sustainability at Siemens Gamesa -- one of the worlds largest turbine manufacturers -- says more pieces are likely to mean more trucks, more people and more time to complete the installation. He considers the modular system "an advantage" and that wooden towers can "nicely complement" steel towers. [...] Though wind power is cheaper and cleaner than almost all other forms of electricity generation, making steel involves extremely hot furnaces and almost always the burning of fossil fuels. That means CO2 emissions -- the main driver of climate change. Modvion says using wood instead of steel eliminates the wind turbines' carbon footprint entirely, making them carbon negative. That's because the trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere when they are alive and, when they are chopped down, the carbon is stored in the wood. As long as the wood doesn't end up rotting or being burned, the carbon is not released. About 200 trees went into Modvion's turbine tower. They were the same species -- spruce -- that is used for Christmas trees and the company says they are farmed sustainably, meaning when they are harvested more are planted. Modvion hopes to build another even taller turbine soon with plans to open a facility that will produce 100 wooden modular turbines a year in 2027. "The industry is currently putting up 20,000 turbines a year," Lundman says. "Our ambition is that in 10 years time 10% of those turbines -- about 2,000 -- will be wooden."

Microsoft just forged a strategic alliance with a major solar panel manufacturer to try to make good on its clean energy goals. From a report: The deal comes as supply chain woes and allegations of labor abuse are making it increasingly difficult to deploy solar energy across the US. The plan is for solar energy heavyweight Qcells to provide more than 2.5 gigawatts of solar panels and related services to developers working with Microsoft. That's enough to power some 400,000 homes, according to Microsoft, which hailed the collaboration as a "first-of-its-kind." The company has a goal of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by "more than half" by 2030 and to counteract its remaining pollution by trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Microsoft also has a 2030 renewable energy commitment -- one that it won't be able to meet unless it can encourage more solar and wind energy to come online.

After a spring of deadly heat waves, summer floods have killed more than 1,100 people in Pakistan. Since June, rains have washed away buildings, submerged homes and destroyed roads. One-third of the country is underwater. From a report: Scientists can't yet say exactly how climate change has shaped the disaster, but they know that global warming is sharply increasing the likelihood of extreme rain in South Asia, home to a quarter of humanity. There is little doubt that it made this year's monsoon season more destructive. Today, I'll talk about some of the climate factors in play and why Pakistan, a country that has done very little to cause global warming but is now among the most vulnerable to its effects, has been hit so hard. The South Asian summer monsoon is part of a regional weather pattern. Basically, winds tend to blow from the southwest from June through September. That onshore breeze brings wet weather. In normal times, that's generally a good thing. Farmers all over the region count on monsoon rains for their crops.

But these are no longer normal times. Global warming means that water evaporates much faster out at sea. And, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. So, monsoons risk bringing way too much rain. Researchers will need time to conduct attribution studies to understand exactly what happened this summer, but Steven Clemens, a professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University, said the months of deluge in Pakistan are "super consistent with what we expect in the future" as the planet heats up. This monsoon season, rainfall in Pakistan has been nearly three times the national average of the past 30 years, the country's disaster agency said. In Sindh Province, which borders the Arabian Sea to the south, rainfall is nearly five times the average.

Australia's record-breaking wildfires of 2019 and 2020 blasted smoke so high that even the ozone layer in the stratosphere was damaged, a new analysis shows. Hmmmmmm shares a report: The Black Summer bushfires, which raged along Australia's east coast from November 2019 to January 2020, caused unprecedented destruction. The fires burned more than 70,000 square kilometres of bushland, destroyed more than 3000 homes, and killed more than 30 people and billions of animals. Smoke billowed all the way to South America and triggered distant ocean algal blooms. Now, Peter Bernath at Old Dominion University in Virginia and his colleagues have shown that the smoke also pushed its way up into the stratosphere and triggered chemical reactions that destroyed ozone. They analysed data from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment satellite, which monitors levels of 44 different molecules in the atmosphere. This revealed that stratospheric ozone declined by 13 per cent in the middle latitude area of the southern hemisphere -- which includes Australia -- in the aftermath of the Black Summer fires.

2021 was actually cooler than 2020, points out Wired science journalist Matt Simon. So is that good news?

No. One reason for cooler temperatures in 2021 was likely La Niña, a band of cold water in the Pacific. It's the product of strong trade winds that scour the ocean, pushing the top layer of water toward Asia, causing deeper, colder waters to rush to the surface to fill the void. This in turn influences the atmosphere, for instance changing the jet stream above the United States and leading to more hurricanes in the Atlantic. The sea itself cools things off by absorbing heat from the atmosphere.

The Covid-19 pandemic may have had an additional influence, but not in the way you might think. As the world locked down in 2020, fewer emissions went into the sky, including aerosols that typically reflect some of the sun's energy back into space. "If you take them away, you make the air cleaner, then that's a slight warming impact on the climate," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, during a Thursday press conference announcing the findings. But as economic activity ramped back up in 2021, so did aerosol pollution, contributing again to that cooling effect. The 2021 temperature drop "may be possibly due to a resumption of activity that produces aerosols in the atmosphere," Schmidt said...

Today's findings are all the more alarming precisely because 2021 managed to overcome these cooling effects and still tally the sixth-highest temperature. And while global temperatures were cooler in 2021 than the year before, last year 1.8 billion people lived in places that experienced their hottest temperatures ever recorded, according to a report released today by Berkeley Earth. This includes Asian countries like China and North and South Korea, African nations like Nigeria and Liberia, and in the Middle East places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. "We talk a lot about global average temperatures, but no one lives in the global average," says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. "In fact most of the globe, two-thirds of it, is ocean, and no one lives in the ocean — or very few people at least. And land areas, on average, are warming much faster than the rest of the world...."

Last summer in western Canada and the US Pacific Northwest, absurd temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit killed hundreds of people. According to Hausfather, the heat wave in Portland, Oregon, would have been effectively impossible without climate change, something like a once-every-150,000-year event.
It's a fascinating article, that looks at trouble spots like Antarctica's sea level-threatening "Doomsday Glacier" and a warming Gulf of Mexico, mapping the intensity of 2021's temperature anomalies along with trend graphs for both global temperatures and land-vs-ocean averages. It touches on how climate change is impacting weather — everything from rain and floods to wildfires and locusts — as Bridget Seegers, an oceanographer at NASA, points out that "Extremes are getting worse. People are losing their homes and their lives and air quality, because the wildfires are bad."

But Seegers somehow arrives at a positive thought. "There's just a lot going on, and I want people to also feel empowered that we understand the problem. It's just this other issue of deciding to take collective action....

"There's a lot of reasons for optimism. We're in charge. This would be a lot worse if we're like, 'Oh, it's warming because we're heading toward the sun, and we can't stop it.'"

(Thanks to Slashdot reader Sanja Pantic for sharing the article!)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The fossil fuel power plant that a private equity firm revived to mine bitcoin is at it again. Not content to just pollute the atmosphere in pursuit of a volatile crypto asset with little real-world utility, this experiment in free marketeering is also dumping tens of millions of gallons of hot water into glacial Seneca Lake in upstate New York. "The lake is so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub," Abi Buddington, who lives near the Greenidge power plant, told NBC News. In the past, nearby residents weren't necessarily enamored with the idea of a pollution-spewing power plant warming their deep, cold water lake, but at least the electricity produced by the plant was powering their homes. Today, they're lucky if a small fraction does. Most of the time, the turbines are burning natural gas solely to mint profits for the private equity firm Atlas Holdings by mining bitcoin.

Atlas, the firm that bought Greenidge has been ramping up its bitcoin mining aspirations over the last year and a half, installing thousands of mining rigs that have produced over 1,100 bitcoin as of February 2021. The company has plans to install thousands more rigs, ultimately using 85 MW of the station's total 108 MW capacity. [...] The 12,000-year-old Seneca Lake is a sparkling specimen of the Finger Lakes region. It still boasts high water quality, clean enough to drink with just limited treatment. Its waters are home to a sizable lake trout population that's large enough to maintain the National Lake Trout Derby for 57 years running. The prized fish spawn in the rivers that feed the lake, and it's into one of those rivers -- the Keuka Lake Outlet, known to locals for its rainbow trout fishing -- that Greenidge dumps its heated water. Rainbow trout are highly sensitive to fluctuations in water temperature, with the fish happiest in the mid-50s. Because cold water holds more oxygen, as temps rise, fish become stressed. Above 70 F, rainbow trout stop growing and stressed individuals start dying. Experienced anglers don't bother fishing when water temps get to that point.

Greenidge has a permit to dump 135 million gallons of water per day into the Keuka Lake Outlet as hot as 108 F in the summer and 86 F in the winter. New York's Department of Environmental Conservation reports that over the last four years, the plant's daily maximum discharge temperatures have averaged 98 in summer and 70 in winter. That water eventually makes its way to Seneca Lake, where it can result in tropical surface temps and harmful algal blooms. Residents say lake temperatures are already up, though a full study won't be completed until 2023.

A new study has determined that a gas well blowout in Belmont County, Ohio last year was one of the most significant ever to occur in the country. Newsweek reports: In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists estimated that the gas well -- owned by ExxonMobil -- leaked around 120 metric tons of methane per hour over a period of 20 days before the company managed to fix the problem. This amounted to a total of more than 50,000 tons of methane. The authors -- led by Sudhanshu Pandey from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research -- said that the hourly emission rate from the leak was about twice that of the widely reported event at an oil and gas storage facility in Alison Canyon, California, which took place in 2015 -- the largest known methane leak in the country.

While the emission rate of the Ohio event was higher, the California event lasted longer and produced more emissions overall, The New York Times reported. Nevertheless, the leak at the Belmont County well still released vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere, according to the researchers. In fact, it emitted more of the gas in 20 days than the oil and gas industries of some European nations do in a year. The scientists detected the leak using an instrument known as TROPOMI on the recently launched European Space Agency satellite Copernicus Sentinel-5P, which is designed to continuously monitor methane and other pollutants. [...] The Ohio incident did not garner much attention at the time, although 100 residents within a 100-mile radius had to be evacuated from their homes while workers attempted to fix the leak. Some of these residents had complained of health issues such as throat irritation, dizziness and breathing problems.

A California-based company called SkyCool Systems is in the early stages of manufacturing a cooling system that's more energy efficient than anything humans have used for a century. It's doing it using radiative cooling, a concept that was used in the Middle East and India hundreds of years ago. Quartz reports: To understand how radiative cooling works, forget for a moment the sun. Think instead about the night sky. Once the sun has set and the cooler evening begins, just about everything on Earth -- the soil, the grass, the roofs of homes, even people -- give off heat. A lot of that heat rises up into the atmosphere where it effectively transmits out into space, never returning to Earth. The night sky is very chilly, and objects sending heat upward at night send up more heat than the whole sky is sending back down.

Hundreds of years ago, long before refrigeration existed, people in India and Iran used this basic concept to make ice in climates with temperatures above freezing. Water was filled into large and shallow ceramic pools that were surrounded and insulated by hay, and then the pools were left out on clear nights. It sounds counterintuitive, but if the air wasn't too far above freezing, the heat emitted by the water made it lower in temperature than the surrounding air, allowing it to freeze. It's the same principle at play when you wake up on a summer morning to find a layer of frost or dew. Now the people at SkyCool are taking that principle and applying it to the modern era, employing it to reimagine how we cool our homes, data centers, and refrigerators. SkyCool's three co-founders created a material that helps facilitate the radiative cooling process.

"Their invention looks a lot like a solar panel," reports Quartz. "A flat metal panel is covered in a sheet of the material -- a high-tech film -- the trio invented. The material reflects the light and heat of the sun so effectively that the temperature beneath the film can drop 5 to 10-degrees Celsius (41 to 50-degrees Fahrenheit) lower than the air around it. A system of small pipes circulating through the metal panel beneath the film are exposed to that colder temperature, cooling the fluid inside before it's sent out to current-day refrigeration systems." A new study published today in the journal Nature Sustainability says radiative cooling could one day be its own, electricity-free system.

New York lawmakers have agreed to pass a sweeping climate plan that could help the state achieve a net-zero economy in which all energy is drawn from carbon-free sources by 2050. "The bill would require New York to get 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and by 2050, the state would have to cut emissions by at least 85 percent below 1990 levels," reports New York Magazine. "To offset the remainder, the state would enact measures to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, like mass tree-planting and the restoration of wetlands." From the report: The bill, if passed, would be one of the world's most ambitious climate plans, made more impressive by the size of New York's economy. If the state were its own country, its economy would be the 11th largest in the world, falling between those of Canada and South Korea. "This unquestionably puts New York in a global leadership position," Jesse Jenkins, an energy expert and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, told the New York Times.

Of course, energy costs will go up in pursuit of the goal. New York gets around 60 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources -- primarily an energy mix of hydroelectric and nuclear power. To make up the difference, the state will invest in large-scale offshore wind farms and rooftop solar projects. More challenging than the electric grid is the heat for homes and commercial buildings, which generally burn natural gas or oil, and take up around a quarter of the state's emissions. In New York City, for example, an April law requiring skyscrapers to retrofit to meet new energy standards is expected to cost building owners over $4 billion. The bill also marks the first major piece of legislation to include aspects of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, routing hundreds of millions of dollars into polluted or environmentally vulnerable areas of the state in an attempt at both economic and environmental revival.

AmiMoJo writes: Today is five years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami, leading to a series of meltdowns. Nearly half a million people were evacuated at the time, with 100,000 still unable to return to their homes. The government has set a goal of 20mSv/year before people are allowed to live in affected areas again, and while progress is being made hotspots are still a problem in many areas. Reconstruction has been largely waiting for decontamination to be completed, allowing homes and businesses to fall into ruin. Those who do wish to return find their communities gutted, with essential services and jobs gone. Meanwhile, engineers are still unable to determine exactly what happened at Daiichi, particularly what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from exploding. The initial reports were scary even before the nuclear plant problems were evident. Engadget notes that even now, the worst part of the cleanup remains a grueling work in progress, tough even for robots. Reader the_newsbeagle writes, too, with a link to the New York Times' take on the 5-year mark, and notes that The state and location of the melted fuel inside the reactors is still a mystery. The meltdown zone is too dangerous for human workers to enter, and robots have had limited success navigating in the wreckage. So Japan is recruiting subatomic particles called muons to map the reactors' insides. These particles, born of cosmic rays, constantly stream down from the atmosphere, passing through most matter unimpeded. But their occasional interactions with the subatomic components of uranium allow physicists to locate the blobs of the deadly stuff.

Motherboard takes a look at the ongoing leak from a deep well in Southern California, and the engineering challenges that mean it won't be stopped for a while. From Motherboard's report: An enormous amount of harmful methane gas is currently erupting from an energy facility in Aliso Canyon, California, at a startling rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. The gas, which carries with it the stench of rotting eggs, has led to the evacuation 1,700 homes so far. Many residents have already filed lawsuits against the company that owns the facility, the Southern California Gas Company. ... Part of the problem in stopping the leak lies in the base of the well, which sits 8,000 feet underground. Pumping fluids down into the will, usually the normal recourse, just isn't working, said [copmany spokesperson Anne] Silva. Workers have been "unable to establish a stable enough column of fluid to keep the force of gas coming up from the reservoir." The company is now constructing a relief well that will connect to the leaking well, and hopefully provide a way to reduce pressure so the leak can be plugged. As the article notes, methane is an especially noxious gas in a figurative as well as literal sense; while it spends less time in the atmosphere than does CO2, it is more effective at trapping heat.

A joint project involving NASA and MIT researchers had demonstrated technology last year that could supply a lunar colony with broadband via lasers ("faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get") and has already demonstrated its worth in communications with spacecraft. From ComputerWorld's article: "The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) kicked off last September with the launch of NASA's LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer), a research satellite [formerly] orbiting the moon. NASA built a laser communications module into LADEE for use in the high-speed wireless experiment. LLCD has already proved itself, transmitting data from LADEE to Earth at 622Mbps (bits per second) and in the other direction at 19.44Mbps, according to MIT. It beat the fastest-ever radio communication to the moon by a factor of 4,800." Communicating at such distances means overcoming various challenges; one of the biggest is the variability in Earth's atmosphere. The LLCD didn't try to power through the atmosphere at only one spot, therefore, but used four separate beams in the New Mexico desert, each aimed "through a different column of air, where the light-bending effects of the atmosphere are slightly different. That increased the chance that at least one of the beams would reach the receiver on the LADEE. Test results [were] promising, according to MIT, with the 384,633-kilometer optical link providing error-free performance in both darkness and bright sunlight, through partly transparent thin clouds, and through atmospheric turbulence that affected signal power." At the CLEO: 2014 conference in June, researchers will provide a comprehensive explanation of how it worked.

First time accepted submitter Kreuzfeld writes "For many years, astronomers have suspected that brown dwarfs — 'failed stars' with masses between those of planets and stars — have cloudy atmospheres. Our recent paper in Nature presents the first global, 2D map of the patchy clouds in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf: our neighbor, the 6.5 light-years-distant Luhman 16B. Eventually, astronomers will use this technique to make weather movies of global cloud patterns on brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets."

Last week you asked Joseph Palaia, Chief Operating Officer & Director of research laboratory Earthrise Space, Inc. about living on Mars one day and building moon machines with students. Below you'll find his answers to your inquiries.

New Scientist has an update on the so-called "gigantic jets" first discovered in 2003 — these are lightning bolts that reach from cloud tops upward into the ionosphere, as high as 90 kilometers. (There's a video at the link.) What's new is that researchers from Duke University have managed to measure the electrical discharge from a gigantic jet and confirm that they carry as much energy skyward as ordinary lightning strikes carry to the ground. According to the article, "Gigantic jets are one of a host of new atmospheric phenomena discovered in recent years. Other examples are sprites and blue jets."

An anonymous reader writes to tell us FastCompany is reporting on the latest and greatest version of the compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL). While CFLs of the past may have been efficient, they certainly were not effective. However, according to the article, CFLs have come as far as cell phones have since the mid 80s while still maintaining that high efficiency. From the article: "if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL], took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads."