Ecodaily

What is it with scientists and clocks? Yes, determining the duration of phenomena is important to research, not to forget seemingly unconnected realms like navigation — Britain ruled the waves for centuries, thanks to John Harrison’s clock, accurate time-keeping being the key to determining longitude. Clocks also serve science as metaphor — start with Albert Einstein, struggling to jibe the fixed speed of light with his aborning theory of relativity, looking at the medieval clock tower in Bern and realizing that time is not fixed, but elastic. He started sending notional clocks zipping at the speed of light in thought experiments, trying to nudge us dullards into comprehension. The practical value of Einstein’s 1905 musings was dramatically demonstrated at the University of Chicago in 1942, when the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction was midwifed by Enrico Fermi. So it makes sense that another fine Hyde Park institution,...

More than a quarter of the wild seafood that the world eats comes from the seafloor. Shrimp, skate, sole, cod and other creatures — mostly flat ones — that roam the bottom of the ocean get scooped up in huge nets. These nets, called bottom trawls, wrangle millions of tons of fish worth billions of dollars each year. But they also damage coral, sponges, starfish, worms, and other sand-dwellers as the nets scrape against the ocean bed. Environmentalists sometimes liken the practice to strip-mining or clear-cutting forests. According to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, bottom trawling may be even worse than many people had thought. Dragging nets through the sand — which occurs over some 5 million square kilometers, a little over 1 percent of the ocean floor — isn’t just a threat to marine life. The study found that stirring up carbon-rich sediment on the seafloor releases some 370 million metric tons of planet-w...

In order to drive the progress and development of innovative solutions that tackle climate change and help the environment, there needs to be regulatory frameworks in place that help companies make bolder steps forward, top industry CEOs told CNBC. Ester Baiget, the CEO of biosolutions firm Novozymes, said that “roadblocks” usually stand in the way of companies producing sustainable solutions which needed to be removed. “We need to work more with authorities to create the framework that we can move bolder … faster,” Baiget said on an “IOT: Powering the digital economy” panel moderated by CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We have a regulation which is based on the past,” she added, pointing out that in her own sector it can take six years to register a new microbe (or microorganism) to replace fertilizers, for example. Microbes have been put...

The record drought in the Brazilian Amazon in 2023 was caused by climate change, Azernews reports, citing foreign media outlets. This conclusion was reached by an international team of scientists from the Center for the Study of Weather Phenomena World Weather Attribution (WWA). “The main cause of the record drought in 2023 in the Amazonian region of Brazil was climate change caused by human activity,” says the report posted on the organization’s website. According to scientists, the influence of the El Nino phenomenon on the weather in the Amazon basin turned out to be much weaker than experts had expected. “Climate change leads to an increase in temperature and a decrease in precipitation. These factors increased the probability of an unprecedented drought in 2023 by 30 times compared to a situation in which the only factor influencing the weather would be El Nino,” the authors of the study note. Meteorologists f...

Three-quarters of the British public have a poor understanding of commonly-used climate terminology like ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘locally grown’. The majority of people in the UK struggle to understand key language to do with the climate crisis and environmental policy, a new study has found. Only a quarter of Brits responding to a poll said they understood clearly what was meant by ‘green’ and around the same number could not define the term ‘sustainable’. The survey, conducted by insights experts Trajectory and communication agency Fleet Street, shows key terminology for discussing climate change and climate protection is understood by a minority of people in the UK. So what do these words really mean and why are they so hard to comprehend? Three-quarters of Brits don’t understand key climate language The study, published on Wednesday, found that three-quarters of the British public have a...