STEM opportunities for young women
Adolescent girls show as much engagement as boys in science, tech, engineering and math, but this changes significantly when they reach college age. We discuss why young women aren’t pursuing these fields and some of the local opportunities to keep girls and young women engaged in STEM.
This year’s 100% water allocation in California does not mean the water crisis is over, experts say
Climate change will make it hard to predict how much water will come each year.
Protecting the planet
Scientists are urging drastic cuts to our fossil fuel use, saying we’re not on pace to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. As a result, some of them now support controversial technologies that could blunt the Earth’s rising temperatures, broadly known as geoengineering.
Watch on CBS Saturday Morning.
The little city that could
For Chelsea, Massachusetts, a new microgrid means energy resilience.
On a recent morning, researcher Dominick Dusseau offers a glimpse into the future of Chelsea, Massachusetts, a small, industrial city just across the Mystic River from Boston. On digital maps he displays over Zoom, great blue splashes cover large swaths of the city—areas where, by his calculations, climate-driven flooding is likely to occur. The maps depict a world where the locals who can least afford it will get hit the hardest.
Continue reading on Mother Jones.
Here’s what will happen if Colorado River system doesn’t recover from ‘historic drought’
The river system provides water to 40 million people.
Indigenous Amazon forests absorb noxious fumes and prevent diseases from wildfires, study suggests
A new study published in Nature estimates that forests in Indigenous lands in Brazil’s Amazon have the potential to absorb over 7,000 tons of noxious fumes from forest fires every year, preventing about 15 million cases of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases annually, which would otherwise cost $2 billion to Brazil’s public health system.
The effect on the health of populations adds to the environmental impacts of fires in the Amazon forest, which are mainly caused by deforestation and contribute to increased emissions.
What was not yet known was the level of those damages, the costs and the ability of the Amazon forests in Indigenous lands to absorb the pollutants, said the study’s authors.
A Homer scientist is bringing changes in Arctic permafrost into high-resolution
With permafrost thaw in the Arctic rapidly outpacing previous projections, researchers are racing to understand the impacts of an increasingly unstable future.
After growing up in Sweden, Anna Liljedahl moved to Alaska to study hydrology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She now lives in Homer, where she conducts research as an associate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, focusing on how climate change is impacting water in Arctic ecosystems.
Read more on Alaska Public Media.
IPCC report will likely shake up U.N. climate talks
Scientists say countries need to cut emissions far deeper to prevent catastrophic warming. That fact will hang over delegates when they meet later this year at the annual U.N. climate talks
When global leaders meet later this year to negotiate climate action, the urgency to cut planet-warming emissions will be starker than ever before.
The world now needs to cut emissions by 60 percent by 2035 — compared with 2019 levels — to avoid increasingly severe heat, flooding, drought and extreme weather that will make parts of the world unlivable. That’s a key conclusion of the latest assessment from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is made up of the world’s leading climate scientists.
Continue reading on Scientific American.