Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images )

As soon as Lars Ruiter steps out of his car, he is confronted by a Microsoft security guard, who is already seething with anger. Ruiter, a local councillor, has parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that rises out of the flat North Holland farmland. He wants to see the construction site. The guard, who recognizes Ruiter from a previous visit when he brought a TV crew here, says that’s not allowed. Within minutes, the argument has escalated, and the guard has his hand around Ruiter’s throat.

The security guard lets go of Ruiter within a few seconds, and the councillor escapes with a red mark across his neck. Back in his car, Ruiter insists he’s fine. But his hands shake when he tries to change gears. He says the altercation—which he will later report to the police—shows the fog of secrecy that surrounds the Netherlands’ expanding data center business.

Enlarge / Westlands Solar Park, near the town of Lemoore in the San Joaquin Valley of California, is the largest solar power plant in the United States and could become one of the largest in the world. (credit: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty)

California’s San Joaquin Valley, a strip of land between the Diablo Range and the Sierra Nevada, accounts for a significant portion of the state’s crop production and agricultural revenues. But with the state facing uncertain and uneven water supply due to climate change, some local governments and clean energy advocates hope solar energy installations could provide economic reliability where agriculture falters due to possible water shortages.

In the next two decades, the Valley could accommodate the majority of the state’s estimated buildout of solar energy under a state plan forecasting transmission needs [PDF], adding enough capacity to power 10 million homes as California strives to reach 100 percent clean electricity by 2045. The influx of solar development would come at a time when the historically agriculture-rich valley is coping with new restrictions on groundwater pumping. Growers may need to fallow land. And some clean energy boosters see solar as an ideal alternative land use.

But a significant technological hurdle stands in the way: California needs to plan and build more long-distance power lines to carry all the electricity produced there to different parts of the state, and development can take nearly a decade. Transmission has become a significant tension point for clean energy developers across the US, as the number of project proposals balloons and lines to connect to the grid grow ever longer.

Enlarge (credit: Walter Zerla via Getty Images)

Say you are a maker of computer graphics cards, under pressure from investors questioning your green credentials. You know what to do. You email your various departments, asking them to tally up their carbon emissions and the energy they consume. Simple enough. You write a report pledging a more sustainable future, in which your trucks are electrified and solar panels adorn your offices.

Good start, your investors say. But what about the mines that produced the tantalum or palladium in your transistors? Or the silicon wafers that arrived via a lengthy supply chain? And what of when your product is shipped to customers, who install it in a laptop or run it 24/7 inside a data center to train an AI model like GPT-4 (or 5) ? Eventually it will be discarded as trash or recycled. Chase down every ton of carbon and the emissions a company creates are many times times higher than it first seemed.

Enlarge / If this road is your only route to the outside world, it might not matter that your house didn't flood. (credit: Maurice Alcorn / EyeEm )

Climate change produces lots of risks that are difficult to predict. While it will make some events—heatwaves, droughts, extreme storms, etc.—more probable, all of those events depend heavily on year-to-year variation in the weather. So, while the odds may go up, it's impossible to know when one of these events will strike a given location.

In contrast, sea level rise seems far simpler. While there's still uncertainty about just how quickly ocean levels will rise, other aspects seem pretty predictable. Given a predicted rate of sea level rise, it's easy to tell when a site will start ending up underwater. And that sort of analysis has been done for various regions.

But having a property above water won't be much good if flooding nearby means you can't get to a hospital or grocery store when you need to or lose access to electricity or other services. It's entirely possible for rising seas to leave a property high, dry, but uninhabitable as rising seas cut connections to essential services. A group of researchers has analyzed the risk of isolation driven by sea level rise, and shows it's a major contributor to the future risks the US faces.

Enlarge / Magnified view of Vibrio vulnificus bacteria. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images )

Cases of a potentially fatal infection from a seawater-borne pathogen have increased off the US Atlantic coast as ocean waters warmed over the last 30 years and are expected to rise further in future because of climate change, according to a study published on Thursday by Scientific Reports, an open-access journal for research on the natural sciences and other topics.

The incidence of infections from Vibrio vulnificus , a pathogen that thrives in shallow, brackish water, was eight times greater in the Eastern US in 2018 than it was in 1988, and its range shifted northward to areas where waters were previously too cold to support it, according to the paper, “Climate Warming and Increasing Vibrio Vulnificus Infections in North America,” by academic researchers in the US, England, and Spain.

By the middle of the 21 ^st century, the pathogen is expected to become more common in major population centers, including New York City, and by the end of the century, infections may be present in every US Atlantic coast state if carbon emissions follow a medium- to high-level trajectory, the report said.

Enlarge / The IPCC chair and secretary preside over a marathon final approval session. (credit: IPCC/Antoine Tardy)

The reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are massive undertakings, requiring years of effort and hundreds of scientists who volunteer as authors. The 6th assessment report cycle saw its first documents released in 2018, and five more followed through 2022. Today puts a coda on that cycle, as the condensed Synthesis Report is now out.

The first three reports were focused on narrow topics: the 1.5°C warming milestone, land use and climate change, and the world’s oceans and ice . The next three followed the traditional structure of previous assessment reports: the physical science of climate change, the impacts of climate change, and solutions .

Each of these reports is meant to represent the state of scientific knowledge on a topic so decision makers and other interested readers don’t have to take on the many thousands of published studies that form their foundation. The role of the Synthesis Report is to further distill the most important information into the simplest reference that the scientists can bear to put their stamp of approval on. The 18 key conclusions in this report provide an impressively comprehensive yet succinct description of our situation—the ultimate TL;DR of Earth’s climate.

Enlarge / A field of solar panels and windmills in the desert. (credit: Getty )

A new study finds that houses within a half-mile of a utility-scale solar farm have resale prices that are, on average, 1.5 percent less than houses that are just a little farther away.

The research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory helps to refute some of the assertions of solar opponents who stoke resistance to projects with talk of huge drops in property values. But it also drives a hole through the argument made by people in the solar industry who say there is no clear connection between solar and a drop in values.

The authors analyzed 1.8 million home sales near solar farms in six states and found diminished property values in Minnesota (4 percent), North Carolina (5.8 percent) and New Jersey (5.6 percent). The three other states—California, Connecticut and Massachusetts—had price changes that were within their margins of error, which means the price effects were too close to zero to be meaningful. The paper was published in the journal Energy Policy.

Enlarge / Is it natural, or is it us? (It's us.) (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images)

It starts as a reasonable question: If the Earth's climate changed before humans existed, how can we be so sure the current change is due to us and not something natural?

To answer that question, we need to understand what caused the natural changes of the past. Fortunately, science has a good handle on the causes of Earth’s natural climate changes going back hundreds of millions of years. Some were cyclical; others were gradual shifts or abrupt events, but none explain our changing climate today.

A zombie claim

With energy policy and elections in the news, the claim by some politicians that climate change is natural is once again bubbling up from the disinformation swamp. So I asked some scientists a very unscientific question: What would they buy if they had a dollar for every time they heard it?

Enlarge (credit: Hans Meleman | Getty Images)

It's an oppressively hot morning in the barnyard, even in the shade of the long open-air structure where the cows come to feed. On a typical farm, they would gather around a trough, but here at UC Davis they chow from special blue bins, which detect when and how much each one eats. It’s like Weight Watchers, only researchers here aren’t so much interested in these cows’ figures, but how much they burp.

Animal scientist Frank Mitloehner leads me to another kind of feeder, one that could easily be mistaken for a miniature wood chipper. He grabs a handful of the alfalfa pellets that the machine dispenses when it detects that a cow has poked its head in. “This is like candy to them,” Mitloehner says. I stick my head into the machine as Mitloehner points out a small metal tube within: “This probe measures the methane they exhale, and that happens every three hours for all the animals in this study.”

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