In a new analysis, acclaimed climate scientist Professor James Hansen and colleagues said that scientists had greatly underestimated the rate of global heating, and that the international target of two degrees Celsius is “dead.”

The analysis concluded that the combination of recent reductions in shipping pollution — which have the effect of blocking the sun — and increasing emissions from fossil fuels have been greater than previously thought, reported The Guardian.

“A shocking rise of warming has been exposed by, ironically, a reduction of pollutants, but we now have a new baseline and trajectory for where we are,” said Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, as The Guardian reported.

Climate change target of 2C is ‘dead’, says renowned climate scientist – Prof James Hansen says pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, though other scientists disagree #climatecrisis Story by me www.theguardian.com/environment/…

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— Damian Carrington (@dpcarrington.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 12:51 PM

The study, “Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?” was published in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development.

“Global warming caused by reduced ship aerosols will not go away as tropical climate moves into its cool La Niña phase. Therefore, we expect that global temperature will not fall much below +1.5°C level, instead oscillating near or above that level for the next few years,” Hansen and colleagues wrote in the study. “The largest practical effect on humans today is increase of the frequency and severity of climate extremes. More powerful tropical storms, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, and thus more extreme floods, are driven by high sea surface temperature and a warmer atmosphere that holds more water vapor. Higher global temperature also increases the intensity of heat waves and – at the times and places of dry weather – high temperature increases drought intensity.”

Independent experts said that, though the results of the study are on the high end of the range of mainstream climate science, they cannot be ruled out, reported The Guardian.

“It’s important to emphasise that both of these issues – [pollution cuts] and climate sensitivity – are areas of deep scientific uncertainty,” said Dr. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist who did not participate in the study. “While Hansen et al are on the high end of available estimates, we cannot say with any confidence that they are wrong, rather that they just represent something closer to a worst-case outcome.”

If the estimates are correct, more extreme weather will happen sooner, with a bigger risk that the planet will surpass tipping points like the collapse of crucial Atlantic ocean currents.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) defined a scenario which gives a 50% chance to keep warming under 2C – that scenario is now impossible,” Hansen said, as The Guardian reported. “The 2C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise.”

Hansen formerly worked as a climate scientist for NASA. His testimony to a United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 1988 was an early warning to the public of the greenhouse gas effect causing climate change.

According to the new analysis, without changes the planet will likely warm by about two degrees Celsius by 2045.

“The basic problem is that the waste products of fossil fuels are still dumped in the air free of charge,” Hansen said, as reported by The Guardian.

Hansen and the research team estimated that freshwater flowing into the North Atlantic from polar ice melt would cause the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to shut down within the next two to three decades, AFP reported.

The important ocean current brings warmth to parts of the planet while carrying nutrients needed to sustain marine life.

The authors of the study said the ceasing of AMOC would “lock in major problems including sea level rise of several meters — thus, we describe AMOC shutdown as the ‘point of no return.’”

The 2015 Paris Agreement established a target of keeping global heating from surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels over a period of decades. The threshold is critical, scientists say, to preventing AMOC and other major ocean circulation systems from breaking down, as well as stopping the thawing of boreal permafrost and the collapse of warm-water coral reefs.

The past two years have brought global heating above the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Warming of two degrees Celsius would bring even greater climate impacts, including irreversible loss to the planet’s ice sheets, sea ice, mountain glaciers and permafrost.

“Failure to be realistic in climate assessment and failure to call out the fecklessness of current policies to stem global warming is not helpful to young people,” the authors of the study wrote, as reported by AFP.

“Special interests have assumed far too much power in our political systems. In democratic countries the power should be with the voter, not with the people who have the money. That requires fixing some of our democracies, including the U.S.,” Hansen said, as The Guardian reported.

The post 2°C Climate Warming Target Is ‘Dead,’ Pioneering Climate Scientist Says appeared first on EcoWatch.

In a new study, health sciences researchers at the University of New Mexico (UNM) have found microplastics in human brain tissue in concentrations much higher than in other organs.

In addition, the accumulation of the plastics appeared to grow over time, increasing 50 percent in the last eight years.

The research team, led by Dr. Matthew Campen — a toxicologist and Distinguished and Regents’ Professor in the UNM College of Pharmacy — discovered that plastic concentrations appeared higher in the brain than in the kidney or liver, and higher than earlier reports for testes and placentas.

The accumulation rate of the plastics was found to mirror the growing plastic waste on the planet, Campen said in a press release from UNM.

“This really changes the landscape. It makes it so much more personal,” Campen said in the press release.

The research team found that many of the plastic pieces appeared to be smaller than previous observations — roughly two to three times bigger than viruses.

Microplastics are tiny pieces of degraded polymers, now ubiquitous in our water, air and soil. They have embedded themselves all over the human body over the course of the last 50 years.

Campen said the findings are cause for alarm.

“I never would have imagined it was this high. I certainly don’t feel comfortable with this much plastic in my brain, and I don’t need to wait around 30 more years to find out what happens if the concentrations quadruple,” he said.

To complicate matters, brain tissue from those diagnosed with dementia contained as much as 10 times the amount of plastic as everyone else, Campen said.

However, the study was not able to determine if the high plastic levels in the brain were the reason for the dementia symptoms. Campen said plastic particles might accumulate more because of the disease process itself.

In the study, the researchers compared brain tissue from 2016 and 2024. They detected and quantified a dozen different polymers, with polyethylene — widely used to make containers and packaging, including cups and bottles — being the most common.

The team discovered clusters of plastic shards of 200 nanometers or less — small enough to be able to cross the blood-brain barrier, though Campen said it wasn’t clear how they were transported into the brain.

Campen added that it was also not apparent what effects plastic — considered biologically inert and used for heart stents, artificial joints and other medical applications — could be having. He explained that the particles’ physical characteristics might be the problem, instead of some kind of chemical toxicity.

“We start thinking that maybe these plastics obstruct blood flow in capillaries,” Campen explained. “There’s the potential that these nanomaterials interfere with the connections between axons in the brain. They could also be a seed for aggregation of proteins involved in dementia. We just don’t know.”

Campen said he suspects most microplastics found in the human body get there through ingested food, especially meat.

“The way we irrigate fields with plastic-contaminated water, we postulate that the plastics build up there,” Campen said. “We feed those crops to our livestock. We take the manure and put it back on the field, so there may be a sort of feed-forward biomagnification.”

Campen added that the team had found high plastic concentrations in store-bought meat.

Global plastic production continues unabated, and since it can take existing polymers decades to break down into microscopic particles, the environmental concentrations of micro- and non-plastics will keep rising for years.

“It suggests that if we were to reduce environmental contamination with microplastics, the levels of human exposure would also decrease, offering a strong incentive to focus on innovations that reduce exposure,” said Tamara Galloway, an ecotoxicology professor at University of Exeter, who did not participate in the study, as The Guardian reported.

The study, “Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains,” was published in the journal Nature Medicine.

“These results highlight a critical need to better understand the routes of exposure, uptake and clearance pathways and potential health consequences of plastics in human tissues, particularly in the brain,” the authors of the study wrote.

Campen said the findings should serve as a warning of a worldwide threat to human health. He said it can be difficult to motivate consumers, but that these results could finally get their attention.

“I have yet to encounter a single human being who says, ‘There’s a bunch of plastic in my brain and I’m totally cool with that,’” Campen said in the press release.

The post Accumulation of Microplastics in Human Brain Tissue Rising Rapidly: Study appeared first on EcoWatch.

New survey results have revealed that vehicle tires are the biggest source of nanoparticle pollution in the remote Alps.

In the Alpine survey, trained mountaineer citizen scientists collected samples of high-altitude glaciers, and scientists used a method called thermal desorption-proton transfer reaction-mass spectrometry (TD-PTR-MS) to analyze the samples for nanoplastics.

Mountaineers collected samples from 14 sites in the French, Swiss and Italian Alps. From there, scientists analyzed nanoparticles for the presence of compounds such as polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene and tire wear particles. Out of the 14 remote sites, researchers detected nanoparticle pollution in samples from five of the sites.

The most abundant polymers in the nanoparticles included tire wear particles (found in 41% of nanoparticles), polystyrene (28%) and polyethylene (12%). The team published their findings in the journal Scientific Reports.

In recent years, growing research has outlined the extent to which our vehicle tires emit pollutants. One study published in 2022 determined that tire particles could be harming marine life after scientists found exposure to tire particles led to negative effects on coastal and freshwater organisms.

Vehicle tyres found to be biggest source of nanoplastics in the high Alps

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) February 4, 2025 at 5:50 AM

Then, a separate study published later that year revealed an alarming finding — that the pollution coming from vehicle tires could be as much as 2,000 times worse than the pollution coming from vehicle exhaust pipes.

As Yale Environment 360 reported, tire particles could make up an estimated 78% of ocean microplastics, and globally, vehicle tires shed around 6 million tons of particles per year.

The impact is so widespread that in one study, scientists found the chemicals from tires present in human urine samples.

Moving forward, the trained mountaineers who helped with this study are also continuing on, collecting samples for evaluation from remote locations all over the world for the Global Atmospheric Plastics Survey.

“It will be the first study of global background nanoplastic pollution,” Dušan Materić, bio-analytical scientist and Head of the Research Group for Microplastics, Nanoplastics and Elements at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, told The Guardian. “We need to establish that baseline so we can come back in future decades and see if things have got better or worse. It is a pioneering study, putting this issue on the map.”

The survey is meant to dive deeper into microplastic pervasiveness by determining what types of microplastics are present, the sources of these pollutants, and how far they are traveling. As of January 2025, mountaineers Oliver Graves and Brendan O’Ciobhain have just pulled samples from the Ellsworth Mountains in Antarctica.

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Prices may soon increase at the pump due to tariffs on gas imported from Mexico and Canada enacted by President Donald Trump.

President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum has reached a deal with the Trump administration to delay the tariffs for a month, while import duties on Canadian and Chinese goods will go into effect on Tuesday.

The impact of the tariffs could harm oil companies and increase gas prices, The New York Times said.

“It’s going to be very, very messy” if the president goes ahead with the tariffs, said Tom Kloza, Oil Price Information Service’s global energy analysis lead, as The New York Times reported. “We haven’t dealt with something like this, certainly not in the modern era.”

"Enormous Destruction": Trump's Tariffs on Mexico, Canada & China Set to Worsen Inflation

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— Democracy Now! (@democracynow.org) February 3, 2025 at 10:30 AM

The United States also purchases Canadian electricity, natural gas and uranium, which is used to make nuclear power plant fuel.

As a reason for imposing the tariffs, Trump cited a national emergency related to undocumented immigrants coming into the U.S., as well as the flow of the drug fentanyl into the country, reported CNN.

The 25 percent duty on most goods imported from Canada includes a 10 percent exception for crude oil and other energy-related items.

Trump has said he will use the tariffs to raise revenue, bring other nations to the negotiating table and balance trade.

But economists have warned the tariffs would have a negative impact on U.S. consumers and businesses. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Saturday said the duties would not solve border issues, but would instead threaten supply chains while raising prices for Americans.

“Consumers are going to be clearly worse off,” Sung Won Sohn, Loyola Marymount University professor of finance, told CNN. “When you talk about a tariff, it’s an economic war; and in war, everybody loses. But hopefully we will come to some better results and conclusions as a result of the pain and suffering that we will go through.”

Here’s what will get more expensive from President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China: cnn.it/4gottxC

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— CNN (@cnn.com) February 2, 2025 at 12:08 AM

About a third of American imports come from Mexico, Canada and China, including fruits and vegetables, electronics, meat, clothing, toys, gas, lumber, beer and spirits.

Ninety-seven billion dollars worth of Canadian oil and gas was imported into the U.S. last year. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, the country has come to rely more on oil from our neighbor to the north since the Canadian Trans Mountain pipeline was expanded.

“[E]xpect fuel prices, including diesel, heating oil, jet fuel, gasoline, propane to rise slightly, primarily in the Great Lakes, Midwest, Rockies, and Northeastern U.S. in the days ahead,” said Patrick De Haan, a GasBuddy analyst, on X.

Haan predicts “localized” increases of five to 20 cents per gallon, reported Axios.

Gas prices in February are usually lower because of weak demand, CNN reported, but if the tariffs are still in effect through the summer, Kloza said the effect will be greater.

Kloza said the states most likely to feel the biggest impacts are Illinois, Indiana, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“Interestingly, 12 of those 16 states begin February with an average retail gasoline price under $3 a gallon,” Kloza said. “That probably won’t last.”

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The tiger population in India doubled between 2010 and 2022 — from 1,706 tigers to approximately 3,682 — through conservation efforts focused on protecting them from habitat loss and poaching; making sure they have enough prey; increasing community living standards close to tiger areas; and reducing human-wildlife conflict, a new study has found.

India is now home to approximately 75 percent of the world’s tiger population, according to estimates from the National Tiger Conservation Authority, as The Associated Press reported.

“Recovery of large yet ecologically important carnivores poses a formidable global challenge. Tiger (Panthera tigris) recovery in India, the world’s most populated region, offers a distinct opportunity to evaluate the socio-ecological drivers of megafauna recovery,” the authors of the study wrote. “Tiger occupancy increased by 30% (at 2929 square kilometers per year) over the past two decades, leading to the largest global population occupying ~138,200 square kilometers. Tigers persistently occupied human-free, prey-rich protected areas (35,255 square kilometers) but also colonized proximal connected habitats that were shared with ~60 million people.”

The researchers found that some communities located near tiger habitats have benefited from an increase in tigers due to the foot traffic and revenue generated by ecotourism.

The study, “Tiger recovery amid people and poverty,” published in the journal Science, said India’s success shows that conservation can benefit biodiversity as well as local communities.

This tigress has reclaimed the ancient fort within Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve and made it her home. Protection, prey, peace, and prosperity have been key factors in the tiger recovery within India, according to a new Science study. Learn more in this week's issue: https://scim.ag/42yn5Ra

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— Science Magazine (@science.org) January 30, 2025 at 2:05 PM

“The common belief is that human densities preclude an increase in tiger populations,” said lead author of the study Yadvendradev Jhala, a senior scientist with the Bengaluru-based Indian National Academy of Sciences, as reported by The Associated Press. “What the research shows is that it’s not the human density, but the attitude of people, which matters more.”

Ecologists and wildlife conservationists said India’s tigers and other wildlife would benefit from source data being made available to a bigger group of scientists. Indian government-supported institutions collected the data for the study.

According to ecologist Arjun Gopalaswamy, who is an expert in wildlife population estimation, estimates from the official tiger monitoring program in India have been “contradictory” and “chaotic.” Gopalaswamy said some of the study’s figures are much higher than earlier estimates of tiger distribution taken from the same datasets. However, he said the findings seemed to have corrected an anomaly related to the size of the tiger population and their geographic spread that had been repeatedly flagged by scientists since 2011.

The researchers found that tigers had disappeared in some places not in close proximity to protected areas like wildlife sanctuaries or national parks. Tigers had also vanished in forested areas with increased human use and more frequent armed conflicts, as well as in areas that had become more urbanized.

“Without community support and participation and community benefits, conservation is not possible in our country,” Jhala said.

Ravi Chellam, a wildlife biologist who was not part of the study, pointed out that, though tiger conservation efforts were encouraging, protections needed to be extended to additional species in order to better maintain the whole ecosystem.

“There are several species, including the great Indian bustard and caracal which are all on the edge,” Chellam said, as The Associated Press reported.

Tigers roam across roughly 53,359 square miles of India, about the size of New York state. However, only 25 percent of that area is protected and has plentiful prey, with 45 percent of the big cats’ habitat shared with approximately 60 million people.

“Habitat loss, prey depletion, conflict with humans, and illegal demand for their body parts, combined with low densities and large space requirements for viable population, have driven large carnivores to numbers at which many have lost their functional role and some are on the brink of extinction,” the authors wrote in the study. “Tiger absence and extinction were characterized by armed conflict, poverty, and extensive land-use changes. Sparing land for tigers enabled land sharing, provided that socioeconomic prosperity and political stability prevailed. India’s tiger recovery offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.”

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