Scientists have found bits of polystyrene in the guts of tiny, soil-dwelling organisms in the Antarctic, raising concern that micro-plastics pollution has already deeply entered the world's most remote land-based food systems.
On World Oceans Day we recall that life underwater is essential to life on land. The ocean produces half of the oxygen we breathe. As a major heat and carbon sink, the ocean plays a fundamental role in mitigating climate change. The ocean also provides food for billions around the world.
Antarctica conjures images of an unbroken white wilderness but blooms of algae are giving parts of the frozen continent an increasingly green tinge. Warming temperatures due to climate change are helping the formation and spread of “green snow” and it is becoming so prolific in places that it is even visible from space, according to new research.
The largest hole ever observed in the ozone layer over the Arctic has closed, says Copernicus' Atmospheric Monitoring Service. Scientists spotted signs in late March of a rare hole forming and it was thought to be the result of low temperatures at the north pole.
Last year was the hottest in history across Europe as temperature records were shattered by several extreme heatwaves, the European Union's satellite monitoring surface said. In its annual report on the state of the climate, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said that 11 of the continent's 12 warmest years on record have been since 2000 as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres urged governments to use their economic responses to the coronavirus pandemic to tackle the even deeper emergency of climate change, in a message for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.
March 2020 was the driest March on record according to data from the Met Office at Mount Pleasant Airport in the Falkland Islands, with rainfall less than a third of the monthly average.
Air pollution has decreased in urban areas across Europe during lockdowns to combat the corona-virus, new satellite images showed on Monday, but campaigners warned city-dwellers were still more vulnerable to the epidemic. Cities including Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Frankfurt showed a reduction in average levels of noxious nitrogen dioxide over Mar 5-25, compared with the same period last year, according to the Sentinel-5 satellite images.
Air pollution from nitrogen dioxide has fallen by an estimated 40% in three European cities, according to new satellite data released by the European Space Agency (ESA), coinciding with a widespread lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
By Gwynne Dyer – They teach you in journalism school never to use the phrase “…X has changed the world forever”. Or at least they should. Covid-19 is certainly not going to change the world forever, but it is going to change quite a few things, in some cases for a long time. Here’s eight of them, in no particular order.