Electric utilities spent billions after 2014’s polar vortex to ensure power plants and the grid could handle extreme cold, but this winter it still wasn’t enough
The warnings to residents in the south-east US came right before Christmas: delay washing clothes or running the dishwasher, and curb hot water use until the bitterly cold temperatures eased up.
It still wasn’t enough for two of the nation’s largest electric utilities.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
03/19/2023 - 04:15
03/19/2023 - 03:00
Coton Orchard can literally boast a partridge in a pear tree – but the idyll is threatened by a busway scheme, which campaigners say is totally unnecessary
The Coton Orchard is the eighth largest traditional orchard left in the UK, its owner Anna Gazeley is proud to say. “Not because we’re huge but because 80% have gone since the 1900s,” she said. Commercial fruit trees are smaller and more productive, but this orchard is filled with wildlife, a legacy of Gazeley’s father, who bought the land three decades ago to save the trees from developers.
That may have been a temporary reprieve. The fate of the the trees and farmland west of Cambridge will be decided on Tuesday, when Cambridgeshire county council votes on a £160m scheme to include a bus bypass that would tear through the orchard.
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03/19/2023 - 02:45
Demonstrations at 90 sites are billed as first major action by older activists: ‘It’s not fair to ask 18-year-olds to solve this’
Climate activists across the US will on Tuesday blockade branches of banks that finance fossil fuels, cutting up their credit cards in protest and holding rallies featuring everything from flash mobs to papier-mache orca whales. Unusually for such a spectacle, the protests won’t be led by young activists but those of a grayer hue.
The protests, across more than 90 locations, including Washington DC, are billed as the first set of mass climate demonstrations by older Americans, who have until now been far less visible than younger activists, such as the school strike movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg. In a nod to the more seasoned age of participants, older people in painted rocking chairs will block the entrances to some of the US’s largest banks to highlight their funding of oil and gas extraction.
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03/19/2023 - 02:00
Unusual weather has created the ideal conditions for fungus, delighting foragers and researchers
On a sun-dappled trail in the woods of Calabasas, Jess Starwood narrows her eyes and gasps with glee. Scrambling up a leafy hillside, she points to a small hump in the ground, covered in leaf litter. “That’s a shrump,” she says – a mushroom hump, where a mushroom may be pushing up the ground as it emerges.
There were times when Starwood, an author, naturalist and foraging guide, would walk this trail and consider herself lucky to find even one mushroom. Today, on one of the hikes she regularly leads, we uncover nearly 50 mushrooms of 10 different species pushing up through the ground, growing out of damp logs, or springing from the dark earth.
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03/19/2023 - 00:58
Cate Faehrmann of NSW Greens says ‘harmful tragedy’ will further degrade water quality
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Politicians are calling for the urgent removal of millions of dead fish that are clogging the waterways of the lower Darling-Baaka River near Menindee in the far west of New South Wales.
The NSW Department of Planning and Environment saidon Saturday it would continue to monitor the situation closely and keep the community informed.
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03/18/2023 - 16:18
Discoveries that could help diabetics titled in honour of activist and journalist murdered in Amazon
Scientists in Brazil have found two new species of fermenting yeasts and named them after journalist Dom Phillips and activist Bruno Pereira, the two men murdered last year in the Amazon rainforest.
The discovery came from four isolates of the Spathaspora species, according to a paper published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.
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03/18/2023 - 14:00
Research into critically endangered orange-bellied parrot finds 1mm difference in length of one feather is enough to reduce survival rate by 2.7 times
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Breeding in captivity can alter birds’ wing shapes, reducing their chances of surviving migratory flights when they are released to the wild, new research suggests.
A study of the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot has found that in captive-bred birds, those with altered wing shapes had a survival rate 2.7 times lower than those born with wings close to an ideal “wild type” wing.
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03/18/2023 - 12:07
From elephants to tigers, study reveals scale of damage to wildlife caused by transformation of wildernesses and human activity
The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals – from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers – is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children living on the planet.
A study by scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, published this month, concludes that wild land mammals alive today have a total mass of 22m tonnes. By comparison, humanity now weighs in at a total of around 390m tonnes.
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03/18/2023 - 09:19
Drone footage filmed above a stretch of the Darling-Baaka River near the Australian town of Menindee showed millions of dead fish blanketing the water on Saturday. The New South Wales Department of Primary Industries said the deaths were related to low oxygen levels after the extreme flooding in the region in January had receded. It is the latest in a series of large-scale fish deaths that have prompted questions about the management of water levels in the Murray-Darling Basin
‘The smell is next level’: millions of dead fish begin to rot
‘Unfathomable’: millions of dead fish blanket river near Menindee
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03/17/2023 - 20:00
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series with a highlight of two policies--the Antarctic Treaty and the Hamilton Agreement for the Sargasso Sea--that are working to successfully engage parties and members and maintain oversight for ocean and ecosystem conservation. RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
