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NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.

Venus is in many ways a twin of Earth — it is comparable in size, mass and composition, and it is the planet whose orbit is the closest to Earth’s. But the history of the two planets diverged. While Earth is moderate in temperature and largely covered with water, Venus, with a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide, is a hellishly hot 900 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface. After numerous missions by the United States and the Soviet Union to explore it in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, attention shifted elsewhere.

They said they had detected a molecule, phosphine, for which they could come up with no plausible explanation for how it might have formed there except as the waste product of living organisms.

NASA has decided to send two new missions to Venus, our closest planetary neighbor, making it the first time the agency will go to this scorching hot world in more than three decades.The news has thrilled planetary scientists who have long argued that Venus deserves more attention because it could be a cautionary tale of a pleasant, Earth-like world that somehow went horribly awry.

Venus has been called Earth's "evil twin" because it is about the same size as Earth and probably was created out of similar stuff; it might have even had at one time oceans of liquid water.

But Venus appears to have suffered a runaway greenhouse effect. Temperatures at its surface now exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and its atmosphere is toxic to humans.NASA's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced that after considering four different proposals for its Discovery Program, including proposed trips to moons of Jupiter and Neptune, the agency went all in on Venus.

NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.On Wednesday, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, announced the agency’s latest choices for robotic planetary missions, both expected to head to Venus in the late 2020s: DAVINCI+ and VERITAS.

In the past year, a neglected Venus re-entered the planetary limelight after a team of scientists using Earth-based telescopes claimed they had discovered compelling evidence for microbes living in the clouds of Venus today where temperatures remain comfortably warm instead of scorching.

The other finalists were Io Volcanic Observer, which would have explored Io, a moon of Jupiter that is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, and Trident, which would have sent a spacecraft flying past Triton, an intriguing large moon of Neptune.

Scientists have known for years that climate change is disrupting monsoon season. Past research based on computer models has suggested that the global heating caused by greenhouse gases, and the increased moisture in the warmed atmosphere, will result in rainier summer monsoon seasons and unpredictable, extreme rainfall events.

The monsoon season, which generally runs from June to September, brings enormous amounts of rain to South Asia that are crucial to the region’s agrarian economy. Those rains affect the lives of a fifth of the world’s population, nourishing or destroying crops, causing devastating flooding, taking lives and spreading pollution. The changes wrought by climate change could reshape the region, and history, the new research suggests, is a guide to those changes.

The core samples were 200 meters long, and provided a rich record of monsoon rainfall. Wetter seasons put more fresh water into the bay, reducing the salinity at the surface. The plankton that live at the surface die and sink to the sediment below, layer after layer.

As the world’s oil and gas giants face increasing pressure to reduce their fossil fuel emissions, small, privately held drilling companies are becoming the country’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, often by buying up the industry’s high-polluting assets.According to a new analysis of the latest emissions data disclosed to the Environmental Protection Agency, five of the industry’s top ten emitters of methane, a particularly potent planet-warming gas, are little-known oil and gas producers, some backed by obscure investment firms, whose environmental footprints are wildly large relative to their production.

Nick Piatek, a spokesman for Hilcorp, said the company “spends substantial capital retrofitting and refurbishing aging equipment” at its newly-acquired sites and that its investments would eventually bring down emissions while extending the life of those assets. “We inherit those emissions,” he said.The analysis, carried out by the energy consultancy M.J. Bradley & Associates using data that companies are required to submit to the E.P.A. Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, highlights the climate consequences of methane.

The analysis also comes with significant caveats. The E.P.A. data, from 2019, includes emissions from drilling and fracking sites, but excludes emissions from offshore drilling, as well as some parts of the oil and gas supply chain like pipelines or processing plants.

Japan plans to cut approval times for wind projects, open up abandoned farmland, boost grid capacity and other measures to slash red tape that has for decades impeded efforts to bring more renewable energy into the power mix.

"The entire government will work together to make renewable energy a mainstream power source," Japan's Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said on Friday.Japan is the world's fifth-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. To meet its new target of cutting emissions by 46% by 2030 on fiscal 2013 levels, against the previous goal of 26%, the ministry will seek to expand use of rooftop solar power, faster development of geothermal power in national parks and quicker environmental assessment for wind power projects

It's not easy to achieve the ambitious target that is 70% higher than the previous goal," industry minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said, adding the country needs "a maximum expansion of renewable energy."

2020 was effectively tied with 2016 for the hottest year on record, as global warming linked to greenhouse gas emissions showed no signs of letting up.

The heat was also felt in Europe, which had its warmest year ever and experienced blistering heat waves as late as September.

In central South America, warming and drought resulted in wildfires burning a quarter of the vast Pantanal wetland

There’s something sacred to this sight. As the source of all life, as the birthplace of our species, it deserves veneration. It follows that any harm done to it — and we’re doing plenty — is a desecration.

It’s also a stage, the only one we’ve ever known. All the individuals who’ve strutted and fretted here for millenniums, or for that matter fled and trembled, producing what we call history, are merely players. But even by the standards of that problematic legacy, this latest period seems different. It’s more worrisome, more global, and with increasing frequency, more terrifying.

On the first Sunday of 2020 I decided to take a look. Himawari-8 revealed a vista as spectacular as it was unnerving. A giant furnace door had seemingly been pried open. A plume of smoke extended outward from the continent’s southeastern quarter, a region twice the size of Texas where flame vortexes had been spiraling 200 feet into the air. Carrying the color of the land it came from, that noxious exhalation bore the residue of a billion or more incinerated animals and innumerable plants, baked into tinder from decades of ever-hotter summers.

NASHVILLE — In this family, we are not new-car people. My husband and I buy used vehicles, and we keep them until the cost of patching them up far exceeds their value, a time-honored practice known as driving a car into the ground. We don’t drive a lot, either: My husband works a mile and a half from our house, and I work from a home office. I kept thinking about electric cars anyway.

Meanwhile, evidence of the growing climate calamity was becoming clearer and grimmer with every new study — and with every wildfire, every drought, every hurricane — even as the Trump administration kept rolling back environmental protections at a breathtaking rate. I felt a rising desperation to do everything possible to reduce my own carbon footprint, to foster as much biodiversity as I could on my own little half-acre plot of ground.

But the single greatest change we can make is to change the way we get around. “Transportation is the largest source of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the United States today, and the bulk of those emissions come from driving in our cities and suburbs,”

President Joseph R. Biden on Wednesday said climate change should be regarded as “an essential element of U.S. foreign policy and national security.” That is likely to bring big changes for America’s role in the world.

On his first day in office, Mr. Biden began the process of rejoining the Paris Agreement. Now comes the hard part: The United States, which is responsible for the single largest chunk of greenhouse gases that have warmed the planet since the industrial age, needs to set specific targets to reduce its own emissions by 2030 — and to put in place domestic policies to achieve them.

Climate may be one of the few areas of cooperation in an increasingly tense relationship between Washington and Beijing. The two countries are the world’s largest emitters and the world’s largest economies, and without ambitious steps from both, there is no way the world can slow down warming

After his deftly persuasive opening argument that cutting back on machine-made cooling is the most pressing environmental task of our generation, Wilson walks us through the science of chemical coolants in detail, both the chemistry and physics of these miracle molecules, and the horrifying discovery of the havoc they wreak within the thin protective layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

is an interesting fable about how our best efforts toward environmental regulation can bring out the worst in us.

the Montreal Protocol effectively ended the production of CFCs in 1987, forcing the temperature-control industry to switch to less powerful fluorocarbon compounds. Since then, while the production of CFCs has been banned, their use has not been. This has created a vigorous underground market in previously hoarded Freon that caters to small-time farmers and mechanics

Red O. GreeneNew Mexico11h ago"Economists—the secular priests of the current age—have developed an elaborate theology in which perpetual growth is necessary, good, and inevitable, and those who acknowledge limits to growth are deemed pessimists who oppose human progress. They justify the rejection of limits by appeal to a view of human nature as greedy and insatiable, and to a definition of freedom that (unlike Kant’s) limits the use of reason to the instrumental pursuit of arbitrary ends, rather than seeing the recognition and pursuit of higher ends as key to real freedom. They have developed a metaphysics in which everything which is 'not us' has value exclusively as a resource for us." - Prof. Philip Cafaro, Colorado State University

BobTaos, NM9h agoThe Green New Deal proposed by Axlexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders has two things that recommend it -- 1) it is the first policy proposal or more accurately set of proposals that appreciates the URGENCY of the climate crisis, and 2) it recognizes the SCOPE of the climate crisis. We have to act NOW and we must review and revamp EVERYTHING -- energy generation and transmission, agriculture, industry, transportation, buildings and their power use. Switching to emission free energy sources and electrifying everything could halt the buildup of greeenhouse gased in the atmosphere. Reforming agriculture holds out the promise of sequestering CO2 in the soil and bringing atmospheric levels back toward 350. But, as AOC and Bernie say it must be done now and on a massive scale. To be fair, there are literally millions of people including most leading scientists, engineers and business people like Elon Musk, and nobodies like me who have been saying this for decades. Now for the first time it is politically feasible. This is truly the test for the generation of humans who are currently alive.

Comments

The US will definitely withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, President Trump has confirmed.

He described the accord as a bad deal and said his pro fossil fuel policies had made the US an energy superpower.

It committed the US to cutting greenhouse gases up to 28% by 2025 based on 2005 levels.

The US will definitely withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, President Trump has confirmed.

He described the accord as a bad deal and said his pro fossil fuel policies had made the US an energy superpower.

The pull-out will take effect a year later - the day after the 2020 US presidential election – assuming that Mr Trump is re-elected. The Paris agreement brought together 195 nations in the battle to combat climate change.

Sea level rise is set to challenge human civilization for centuries to come, even if internationally agreed climate goals are met and planet-warming emissions are then immediately eliminated, researchers have found.

The lag time between rising global temperatures and the knock-on impact of coastal inundation means that the world will be dealing with ever-rising sea levels into the 2300s, regardless of prompt action to address the climate crisis, according to the new study.

This scenario, modeled by researchers, assumes that all countries make their promised emissions reductions by 2030 and then abruptly eliminate all planet-warming gases from that point onwards. In reality, only a small number of countries are on track to meet the Paris target of limiting global heating to 2C above the pre-industrial era.

the goal is so fundamental that policymakers should focus above all else on quickly and efficiently decarbonizing. They should not muddle this aspiration with other social policy, such as creating a federal jobs guarantee,

the goal is so monumental that the country cannot afford to waste dollars in its pursuit. If the market can redirect spending most efficiently, money should not be misallocated on vast new government spending or mandates.

we propose our own Green New Deal. It relies both on smart government intervention — and on transforming the relentless power of the market from an obstacle to a centerpiece of the solution.

The world's oceans are now heating at the same rate as if five Hiroshima atomic bombs were dropped into the water every second, scientists have said.

"The upward trend is relentless, and so we can say with confidence that most of the warming is man-made climate change," said Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat trapping gases to explain this heating," Cheng said, adding that to reach this temperature, the ocean would have taken in 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- or 228 sextillion -- joules of heat.

A three-judge panel in the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to dismiss the Juliana v. US lawsuit on Friday, a seminal case involving 21 young people who sued the federal government for violating their right to a safe climate. The decision is a blow to climate activists and shows the limits of the courts’ willingness to assign legal responsibility to the government for the harms caused by greenhouse gases.

The judges all agreed that climate change is an urgent, threatening problem, but ruled that the plaintiffs, who were between the ages of 8 and 19 when the suit was filed, didn’t have standing to sue.

unprecedented and contrary to American principles of justice.

Climate change and its effects are accelerating, with climate related disasters piling up, season after season.

But reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change will require drastic measures, Dr. Taalas said. “The only solution is to get rid of fossil fuels in power production, industry and transportation,” he said.

Even the ground itself is warming faster. Permanently frozen ground, or permafrost, is thawing more rapidly, threatening the release of large amounts of long-stored carbon that could in turn make warming even worse, in what scientists call a climate feedback loop.

When President Trump flies to California on Monday to assess the state’s raging forest fires, he will come face to face with the grim consequences of a reality he has stubbornly refused to accept: the devastating effects of a warming planet.

“It’s mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview on Sunday. “He doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t particularly believe in science. It’s all about him and his re-election.”

Mr. Trump has doubled down on his anti-climate agenda as a way of appealing to his core supporters.