The credibility of the Cop28 agreement to "transition away" from fossil fuels rides on the world's biggest historical polluters like the US, UK and Canada rethinking current plans to expand oil and gas production, according to the climate negotiator representing 135 developing countries. The Guardian: In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Pedro Pedroso, the outgoing president of the G77 plus China bloc of developing countries, warned that the landmark deal made at last year's climate talks in Dubai risked failing. "We achieved some important outcomes at Cop28 but the challenge now is how we translate the deal into meaningful action for the people," Pedroso said. "As we speak, unless we lie to ourselves, none of the major developed countries, who are the most important historical emitters, have policies that are moving away from fossil fuels, on the contrary, they are expanding," said Pedroso.

These countries must also deliver adequate finance for poorer nations to transition -and adapt to the climate crisis. In Dubai, Sultan Al Jaber, Cop28 president and chief of the Emirates national oil company, was subject to widespread scrutiny -- understandable given that the UAE is the world's seventh biggest oil producer with the fifth largest gas reserves. Yet the US was by far the biggest oil and gas producer in the world last year -- setting a new record, during a year that was the hottest ever recorded. The US, UK, Canada, Australia and Norway account for 51% of the total planned oil and gas expansion by 2050, according to research by Oil Change International. "It's very easy to label some emerging economies, especially the Gulf states, as climate villains, but this is very unfair by countries with historic responsibilities -- who keep trying to scapegoat and deviate the attention away from themselves. Just look at US fossil fuel plans and the UK's new drilling licenses for the North Sea, and Canada which has never met any of its emission reduction goals, not once," said Pedroso, a Cuban diplomat.

Scientists have underestimated recent mass loss from Greenland by as much as 20%, finds a new study published in the journal Nature. CBS News reports: Since 1985, Greenland's ice sheet has lost approximately 5,091 square kilometers of ice researchers found using satellite imagery. Scientists said earlier estimates did not track melting at the edges of the ice sheets, known as calving, which measures ice breaking off at the terminus of a glacier. Greenland's ice sheet loses about 193 square kilometers of ice per year, researchers found. Study co-author Chad Greene and his colleagues said they qualified the extent of calving, which increased the scope of ice mass lost.

They combined "236,328 observations of glacier terminus positions" compiled from various public data sets to capture monthly ice melt. Their measurements found that between 1985 and 2022, almost every glacier in Greenland experienced some level of loss. [...] Researchers in the study noted that "this retreat does not appear to substantially contribute to sea level rise" because most of the glacier margins the scientists measured were already underwater. The loss, however, may play a part in ocean circulation patterns, and how heat energy is distributed across the planet.

With NASA's Artemis moon program now targeting September 2025 for its Artemis 2 mission and September 2026 for Artemis 3, some members of Congress are concerned about the potential repercussions, particularly with China's growing ambitions in lunar exploration. "For the United States and its partners not to be on the moon when others are on the moon is unacceptable," said Mike Griffin, former NASA administrator. "We need a program that is consistent with that theme. Artemis is not that program. We need to restart it, not keep it on track." Space.com reports: The U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology held a hearing about the new Artemis plan today (Jan. 17), and multiple members voiced concern about the slippage. "I remind my colleagues that we are not the only country interested in sending humans to the moon," Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) said in his opening remarks. "The Chinese Communist Party is actively soliciting international partners for a lunar mission -- a lunar research station -- and has stated its ambition to have human astronauts on the surface by 2030," he added. "The country that lands first will have the ability to set a precedent for whether future lunar activities are conducted with openness and transparency, or in a more restricted manner."

The committee's ranking member, California Democrat Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), voiced similar sentiments. "Let me be clear: I support Artemis," she said in her opening remarks. "But I want it to be successful, especially with China at our heels. And we want to be helpful here in the committee in ensuring that Artemis is strong and staying on track as we look to lead the world, hand-in-hand with our partners, in the human exploration of the moon and beyond." Several other committee members stressed that the new moon race is part of a broader competition with China, and that coming in second could imperil U.S. national security.

"It's no secret that China has a goal to surpass the United States by 2045 as global leaders in space. We can't allow this to happen," Rich McCormick (R-GA) said during the hearing. "I think the leading edge that we have in space technology will protect the United States -- not just the economy, but technologies that can benefit humankind." And Bill Posey (R-FL) referred to space as the "ultimate military high ground," saying that whoever leads in the final frontier "will control the destiny of this Earth."

In a new paper published in the journal Science Progress, author Joseph Merz argues that climate issues are symptoms of ecological overshoot, driven by exploited human behaviors such as overconsumption, waste, and population growth. The paper emphasizes the need to change societal norms and behaviors through various means, including using marketing and media strategies to promote sustainable living, rather than solely focusing on technological or policy solutions. The Guardian reports: Merz and colleagues believe that most climate "solutions" proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three "levers" of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. They claim that unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster. "We can deal with climate change and worsen overshoot," says Merz. "The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously underdiscussed. These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades -- they're not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand."

"Overshoot" refers to how many Earths human society is using up to sustain -- or grow -- itself. Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet's biocapacity can regenerate. Where discussion of climate often centers on carbon emissions, a focus on overshoot highlights the materials usage, waste output and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth's biosphere. "Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behavior," says Merz. "For decades we've been telling people to change their behavior without saying: 'Change your behavior.' We've been saying 'be more green' or 'fly less', but meanwhile all of the things that drive behavior have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction -- and we've been wondering why nothing's changing."

The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signaling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviors which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one's status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies to create behaviors incompatible with a sustainable world. "People are the victims -- we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction," says the evolutionary behavioral ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. "Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?" Just one-quarter of the world population is responsible for nearly three-quarters of emissions. The authors suggest the best strategy to counter overshoot would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms. "We're talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they're trying to say about themselves. Right now, our signals have a really high material footprint -- our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials sourced from all over the world, shipped to south-east Asia most often and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season's trends. The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint -- or even better, have an ecologically positive one."

Apple has announced several new experiences launching with their upcoming Vision Pro spatial computing headset, including 3D content from Disney Plus. "Other apps announced with Vision Pro support include ESPN, MLB, PGA Tour, Max, Discovery Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus, Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi, Fubo, Crunchyroll, Red Bull TV, IMAX, TikTok, and MUBI," reports The Verge, noting that Netflix's existing app "will work unmodified on Apple's new headset." From the report: The announcement lists some of the movies that will be in 3D, and naturally, Avatar: The Way of Water is among them. But Vision Pro owners will also get 3D versions of movies like Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Encanto. The movies will be available to rent through the Apple TV app, and the company says that anyone who has already bought the movies will now get 3D versions without paying extra. Otherwise, "more titles, including those available exclusively to Disney Plus subscribers, will be announced at a later date."

Among the four screening environments for Disney Plus subscribers, one is called the Disney Plus Theater, which the company says takes inspiration from Hollywood's El Capitan Theatre, as well as others based on Pixar's Monsters, Inc., the fictional Avengers Tower from Marvel Avengers films, and one set in the cockpit of a landspeeder sitting in Star Wars' Tatooine desert. Besides Disney content, Apple mentioned the Apple TV app will have some free "immersive entertainment" that includes Alicia Keys: Rehearsal Room and a film from Planet Earth producers called Prehistoric Planet Immersive. The $3,499 Vision Pro headset will start shipping on February 2nd. Pre-orders begin January 19th at 8AM ET.

Japanese startup EX-Fusion plans to eliminate small pieces of space junk with laser beams fired from the ground. Nikkei Asia reports: EX-Fusion stands apart in that it is taking the ground-based approach, with the startup tapping its arsenal of laser technology originally developed in pursuit of fusion power. In October, EX-Fusion signed a memorandum of understanding with EOS Space Systems, an Australian contractor that possesses technology used to detect space debris. EX-Fusion plans to place a high-powered laser inside an observatory operated by EOS Space outside of Canberra. The first phase will be to set up laser technology to track debris measuring less than 10 cm. Pieces of this size have typically been difficult to target from the ground using lasers.

For the second phase, EX-Fusion and EOS Space will attempt to remove the space debris by boosting the power of the laser beams fired from the surface. The idea is to fire the laser intermittently against the debris from the opposing direction of its travel in order to slow it down. With a decreased orbiting speed, the debris will enter the Earth's atmosphere to burn up. High-powered lasers are often associated with weapons that blast objects into smithereens. Indeed, the EOS Space group supplies laser weapon systems used to destroy drones. But lasers designed to remove space debris are completely different from weapon-grade lasers, EOS Space's executive vice president James Bennett said during a visit to Japan in November.

Current laser weaponry often uses fiber lasers, which are capable of cutting and welding metal and can destroy targets like drones through heat created from continuous firing. Capturing and removing space junk instead involves diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers, which are pulsed to apply force to fast moving debris, stopping it like a brake. EX-Fusion's signature laser fusion process also involves DPSS lasers, which strike the surface of a hydrogen fuel pellet just millimeters in diameter, compressing it to trigger a fusion reaction. This makes space debris removal a useful test along the path to commercializing the fusion technology.

America's Environmental Protection Agency "has signed off on a California oil company's plans to permanently store carbon emissions deep underground to combat global warming," reports the Los Angeles Times: California Resources Corp., the state's largest oil and gas company, applied for permission to send 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year into the Elk Hills oil field, a depleted oil reservoir about 25 miles outside of downtown Bakersfield. The emissions would be collected from several industrial sources nearby, compressed into a liquid-like state and injected into porous rock more than one mile underground.

Although this technique has never been performed on a large scale in California, the state's climate plan calls for these operations to be widely deployed across the Central Valley to reduce carbon emissions from industrial facilities. The EPA issued a draft permit for the California Resources Corp. project, which is poised to be finalized in March following public comments. As California transitions away from oil production, a new business model for fossil fuel companies has emerged: carbon management. Oil companies have heavily invested in transforming their vast network of exhausted oil reservoirs into a long-term storage sites for planet-warming gases, including California Resources Corp., the largest nongovernmental owner of mineral rights in California...

[Environmentalists] say that the transportation and injection of CO2 — an asphyxiating gas that displaces oxygen — could lead to dangerous leaks. Nationwide, there have been at least 25 carbon dioxide pipeline leaks between 2002 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Perhaps the most notable incident occurred in Satartia, Miss., in 2020 when a CO2 pipeline ruptured following heavy rains. The leak led to the hospitalization of 45 people and the evacuation of 200 residents... Under the EPA draft permit, California Resources Corp. must take a number of steps to mitigate these risks. The company must plug 157 wells to ensure the CO2 remains underground, monitor the injection site for leaks and obtain a $33-million insurance policy.
Canadian-based Brookfield Corporation also invested $500 million, according to the article, with California Resources Corp. seeking permits for five projects — more than any company in the nation. "It's kind of reversing the role, if you will," says their chief sustainability officer. "Instead of taking oil and gas out, we're putting carbon in."

Meanwhile, there's applications for "about a dozen" more projects in California's Central Valley that could store millions of tons of carbon emissions in old oil and gas fields — and California Resources Corp says greater Los Angeles is also "being evaluated" as a potential storage site.

The fuel-leaking Peregrine lunar lander is now "on a parth towards Earth," according to Update #16 from Astrobotic, which predicts their spacecraft "will likely burn up in the Earth's atmosphere." "Our analysis efforts have been challenging due to the propellant leak... The team is currently assessing options and we will update as soon as we are able. The propellant leak has slowed considerably to a point where it is no longer the teams' top priority...

We have now been operating in space for 5 days and 8 hours and are about 242,000 miles from Earth.
"A soft landing on the Moon is not possible," the announcement emphasizes. NDTV explains: Shortly after it separated from the rocket, the spaceship experienced an onboard explosion and it soon became clear it would not make a soft lunar touchdown because of the amount of the propellant it was losing — though Astrobotic's team were able to power up science experiments they were carrying for NASA and other space agencies, and gather spaceflight data...

Astrobotic itself will get another chance in November with its Griffin lander transporting NASA's VIPER rover to the lunar south pole.

Friday America's Environmental Protection Agency "proposed steep new fees on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities," reports the Washington Post, "escalating a crackdown on the fossil fuel industry's planet-warming pollution."

Methane does not linger in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, but it is far more effective at trapping heat — roughly 80 times more potent in its first decade. It is responsible for roughly a third of global warming today, and the oil and gas industry accounts for about 14 percent of the world's annual methane emissions, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency. Other large methane sources include livestock, landfills and coal mines.
So America's new Methane Emissions Reduction Program "levies a fee on wasteful methane emissions from large oil and gas facilities," according to the article: The fee starts at $900 per metric ton of emissions in 2024, increasing to $1,200 in 2025 and $1,500 in 2026 and thereafter. The EPA proposal lays out how the fee will be implemented, including how the charge will be calculated...

At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai in December, EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced final standards to limit methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas operations. Fossil fuel companies that comply with these standards will be exempt from the new fee... Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said the fee will encourage fossil fuel firms to deploy innovative technologies that detect methane leaks. Such cutting-edge technologies range from ground-based sensors to satellites in space. "Proven solutions to cut oil and gas methane and to avoid the fee are being used by leading companies in states across the country," Krupp said in a statement...

In addition to methane, the EPA proposal could slash emissions of hazardous air pollutants, including smog-forming volatile organic compounds and cancer-causing benzene [according to an EPA official].
The federal government also gave America's fossil fuel companies nearly $1 billion to help them comply with the methane regulation, according to the article.

The article also includes this statement from an executive at the American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying arm of the U.S. oil and gas industry, complaining that the fines create a "regime" that would "stifle innovation," and urging Congress to repeal it.

"For months, bits of an asteroid collected by a U.S. probe during a billion-mile trek were out of reach to scientists," reports Space.com, "locked inside a return capsule in a NASA facility with two stuck fasteners preventing access to the rocky space treasure.

"This week, NASA won its battle against those fasteners."

More details from CNN: The space agency already harvested about 2.5 ounces (70 grams) of rocks and dust from its OSIRIS-REx mission, which traveled nearly 4 billion miles to collect the unprecedented sample from the near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. But NASA revealed in October that some material remained out of reach in a capsule hidden inside an instrument called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism — a robotic arm with a storage container at one end that collected the sample from Bennu. The sampler head is held shut by 35 fasteners, according to NASA, but two of them proved too difficult to open.

Prying the mechanism loose is no simple task. The space agency must use preapproved materials and tools around the capsule to minimize the risk of damaging or contaminating the samples. These "new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight, and potential arc movement," said Dr. Nicole Lunning, OSIRIS-REx curation lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a statement. "The curation team showed impressive resilience and did incredible work to get these stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head so we can continue disassembly. We are overjoyed with the success."
To address the issue, NASA said they designed and fabricated two new, multi-part tools out of surgical steel. NASA says that a "few additional disassembly steps" still remain, but there's a video on their web site showing the operation (along with some pictures).

NASA adds that "Later this spring, the curation team will release a catalog of the OSIRIS-REx samples, which will be available to the global scientific community." But CNN notes that an analysis of material from last fall "already revealed the samples from the asteroid contained abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals as well as carbon," CNN reports. And they add that scientists believe this bolsters the theory that water arrived on Earth billions of years ago on an asteroid...

Last year was the hottest ever reliably recorded globally by a blistering margin, US scientists have confirmed, leaving researchers struggling to account for the severity of the heat and what it portends for the unfolding climate crisis. From a report: Last year was the world's hottest in records that stretch back to 1850, according to analyses released concurrently by Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) on Friday, with a record high in ocean temperatures and a new low in Antarctic sea ice extent. Noaa calculated that last year's global temperature was 1.35C (2.4F) hotter, on average, than the pre-industrial era, which is slightly less than the 1.48C (2.6F) increase that EU scientists, who also found 2023 was the hottest on record, came up with due to slightly different methodologies.

A separate analysis of 2023 released on Friday by Berkeley Earth has the year at 1.54C above pre-industrial times, which is above the 1.5C (2.7F) warming limit that countries have agreed to keep to in order to avoid disastrous global heating impacts. This guardrail will need to be broken on a consistent basis, rather than one year, to be considered fully breached, however. The burning of fossil fuels and deforestation has driven the extraordinary warmth, which follows a string of hotter-than-average years in recent decades. Each decade over the past 40 years has been warmer than the last, Noaa said, with the most recent 10 years all making up the hottest 10 years ever recorded. Last year's record heat was further spurred by El Niño, a periodic climatic event that heats up parts of the Pacific Ocean and heightens global temperatures.

Just six days after being launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket, one of SpaceX's six Starlink satellites was used to send text messages for the first time. Space.com reports: That update didn't reveal what the first Starlink direct-to-cell text said. In a post on X on Wednesday, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the message was "LFGMF2024," but the chances are fairly high that he was joking. [...] Beaming connectivity service from satellites directly to smartphones -- which SpaceX is doing via a partnership with T-Mobile -- is a difficult proposition, as SpaceX noted in Wednesday's update.

"For example, in terrestrial networks cell towers are stationary, but in a satellite network they move at tens of thousands of miles per hour relative to users on Earth," SpaceX wrote. "This requires seamless handoffs between satellites and accommodations for factors like Doppler shift and timing delays that challenge phone-to-space communications. Cell phones are also incredibly difficult to connect to satellites hundreds of kilometers away, given a mobile phone's low antenna gain and transmit power."

The direct-to-cell Starlink satellites overcome these challenges thanks to "innovative new custom silicon, phased-array antennas and advanced software algorithms," SpaceX added. Overcoming tough challenges can lead to great rewards, and that's the case here, according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. "Satellite connectivity direct to cell phones will have a tremendous impact around the world, helping people communicate wherever and whenever they want or need to," Shotwell said via X on Wednesday.

In order to reach places like Alpha Centauri this century, we'll need to utilize gram-scale spacecraft that rely on directed-energy propulsion. To that end, NASA has selected the Swarming Proxima Centauri project for Phase I development as part of this year's NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. According to Universe Today, Swarming Proxima Centauri is "a collaborative effort between Space Initiatives Inc. and the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) led by Space Initiative's chief scientist Marshall Eubanks." From the report: According to Eubanks, traveling through interstellar space is a question of distance, energy, and speed. At a distance of 4.25 light-years (40 trillion km; 25 trillion mi) from the Solar System, even Proxima Centauri is unfathomably far away. To put it in perspective, the record for the farthest distance ever traveled by a spacecraft goes to the Voyager 1 space probe, which is currently more than 24 billion km (15 billion mi) from Earth. Using conventional methods, the probe accomplished a maximum speed of 61,500 km/h (38,215 mph) and has been traveling for more than 46 years straight.

In short, traveling at anything less than relativistic speed (a fraction of the speed of light) will make interstellar transits incredibly long and entirely impractical. Given the energy requirements this calls for, anything other than small spacecraft with a maximum mass of a few grams is feasible. [...] In contrast, concepts like Breakthrough Starshot and the Proxima Swarm consist of "inverting the rocket" -- i.e., instead of throwing stuff out, stuff is thrown at the spacecraft. Instead of heavy propellant, which constitutes the majority of conventional rockets, the energy source for a lightsail is photons (which have no mass and move at the speed of light). But as Eubanks indicated, this does not overcome the issue of energy, making it even more important that the spacecraft be as small as possible. "Bouncing photons off of a laser sail thus solves the speed-of-stuff problem," he said. "But the trouble is, there is not much momentum in a photon, so we need a lot of them. And given the power we are likely to have available, even a couple of decades from now, the thrust will be weak, so the mass of the probes needs to be very small -- grams, not tons."

Their proposal calls for a 100-gigawatt (GW) laser beamer boosting thousands of gram-scale space probes with laser sails to relativistic speed (~10-20% of light). They also proposed a series of terrestrial light buckets measuring a square kilometer (0.386 mi2) in diameter to catch the light signals from the probes once they are well on their way to reaching Proxima Centauri (and communications become more difficult). By their estimates, this mission concept could be ready for development around midcentury and could reach Proxima Centauri and its Earth-like exoplanet (Proxima b) by the third quarter of this century (2075 or after). [...] Eubanks and his colleagues hope that the development of a coherent swarm of robotic probes will have applications closer to home. Swarm robotics is a hot field of research today and is being investigated as a possible means of exploring Europa's interior ocean, digging underground cities on Mars, assembling large structures in space, and providing extreme weather tracking from Earth's orbit. Beyond space exploration and Earth observation, swarm robotics also has applications in medicine, additive manufacturing, environmental studies, global positioning and navigation, search and rescue, and more.

NASA has postponed its plans to send humans to the moon after delays hit its hugely ambitious Artemis programme, which aims to get spaceboots bouncing again on the lunar surface for the first time in half a century. From a report: The US space agency has announced the Artemis III mission to land four astronauts near the lunar south pole will be delayed a year until September 2026. Artemis II, a 10-day expedition to send a crew around the moon and back to test life support systems, will also be pushed back to September 2025.

NASA said the delays would allow its teams to work through development challenges associated with the programme, which partners with private companies including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Lockheed Martin and uses some largely untested spacecraft and technology. "We are returning to the moon in a way we never have before, and the safety of our astronauts is Nasa's top priority as we prepare for future Artemis missions," said the Nasa administrator Bill Nelson. Washington wants to establish a long-term human presence outside Earth's orbit, including construction of a lunar base camp as well as a space station that circles the moon. Its ultimate plans are to send people to Mars, but it has decided to return to the moon first to learn more about deep space before embarking on what would be a months-long voyage to the red planet.

The European climate agency Copernicus said Earth shattered global annual heat records in 2023, flirting with the world's agreed-upon warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius. "On average, global temperatures in 2023 were 1.48 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times," reports the Associated Press. "If annual averages reach above 1.5 degrees Celsius, the effects of global warming could become irreversible, climate scientists say." From the report: The record heat made life miserable and sometimes deadly in Europe, North America, China and many other places last year. But scientists say a warming climate is also to blame for more extreme weather events, like the lengthy drought that devastated the Horn of Africa, the torrential downpours that wiped out dams and killed thousands in Libya and the Canada wildfires that fouled the air from North America to Europe. In a separate Tuesday press event, international climate scientists who calculate global warming's role in extreme weather, the group's leader, Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto said "we definitely see in our analysis the strong impact of it being the hottest year."

The World Weather Attribution team only looks at events that affect at least 1 million people or kill more than 100 people. But Otto said her team was overwhelmed with more than 160 of those in 2023, and could only conduct 14 studies, many of them on killer heat waves. "Basically every heat wave that is occurring today has been made more likely and is hotter because of human-induced climate change," she said. [....] Antarctic sea ice hit record low levels in 2023 and broke eight monthly records for low sea ice, Copernicus reported.

Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it's an exceptionally large margin for the new record, [Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess] said. Earth's average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus calculated.

In Jakarta, Indonesia, "the land is sinking nearly a foot a year because of collapsing aquifers," reports Wired. "Accordingly, within the next three decades, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be underwater."

"Subsidence" is caused by over-extracting groundwater, or the settling of sediments — and it's not just happening in Indonesia. "In California's agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley, elevations have plummeted not by inches, but by dozens of feet." Last year, scientists reported that the US Atlantic Coast is dropping by several millimeters annually, with some areas, like Delaware, notching figures several times that rate. So just as the seas are rising, the land along the eastern seaboard is sinking, greatly compounding the hazard for coastal communities. In a follow-up study just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, the researchers tally up the mounting costs of subsidence — due to settling, groundwater extraction, and other factors — for those communities and their infrastructure... [O]ver 3,700 square kilometers [1,428 square miles] along the Atlantic Coast are sinking more than 5 millimeters annually. That's an even faster change than sea-level rise, currently at 4 millimeters a year...

A few millimeters of annual subsidence may not sound like much, but these forces are relentless: Unless coastal areas stop extracting groundwater, the land will keep sinking deeper and deeper... The researchers selected 10 levees on the Atlantic Coast and found that all were impacted by subsidence of at least 1 millimeter a year. That puts at risk something like 46,000 people, 27,000 buildings, and $12 billion worth of property. But they note that the actual population and property at risk of exposure behind the 116 East Coast levees vulnerable to subsidence could be two to three times greater. "Levees are heavy, and when they're set on land that's already subsiding, it can accelerate that subsidence," says independent scientist Natalie Snider, who studies coastal resilience but wasn't involved in the new research. "It definitely can impact the integrity of the protection system and lead to failures that can be catastrophic...."

The study finds that subsidence is highly variable along the Atlantic Coast, both regionally and locally, as different stretches have different geology and topography, and different rates of groundwater extraction. It's looking particularly problematic for several communities, like Virginia Beach, where 451,000 people and 177,000 properties are at risk. In Baltimore, Maryland, it's 826,000 people and 335,000 properties, while in NYC — in Queens, Bronx, and Nassau — that leaps to 5 million people and 1.8 million properties.
Highways, airports, and even railway tracks could also be affected....

The BBC checks in on "the pioneers of space exploration — the 24 Nasa astronauts who travelled to the Moon in the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s." Ken Mattingly and Frank Borman died within a few days of each other late last year. Now only eight people who have voyaged beyond the Earth's orbit remain. Who are they, and what are their stories...? There are only four people still alive who have walked on the Moon — Charlie Duke is one of them. He did it aged 36, making him the youngest person to set foot on the lunar surface... Charlie Duke now lives outside San Antonio, Texas, with Dorothy, to whom he has been married for 60 years....

Jim Lovell is one of only three men to have travelled to the Moon twice, and following Frank Borman's death in November 2023, he became the oldest living astronaut....

After leaving Nasa in 1975, [Harrison Schmitt] was elected to the U.S. Senate from his home state of New Mexico, but only served one term. Since then he has worked as a consultant in various industries as well as continuing in academia.
And when confronted by a man claiming Apollo 11 was an elaborate lie, 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin "punched him on the jaw." Despite struggles in later life, he never lost his thirst for adventure and joined expeditions to both the North and South Poles, the latter at the age of 86. While embracing his celebrity, he has remained an advocate for the space programme, especially the need to explore Mars.

"I don't think we should just go there and come back — we did that with Apollo," he says.
Last 93-year-old Buzz Aldrin got married — and thanked his fans for remembering his birthday. "It means a lot and I hope to continue serving a greater cause for many more revolutions around the sun."

The White House has convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, after the Navajo Nation requested a delay due to cultural concerns over the transport of human ashes for burial on the moon. "The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology," said Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren in a statement. "The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations."

If successful, the commercial mission scheduled to launch Monday "will be the first time an American-made spacecraft has landed on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in 1972," notes CNN. Longtime Slashdot reader garyisabusyguy shares the report: The private companies providing these lunar burial services, Celestis and Elysium Space, are just two of several paying customers hitching a ride to the moon on Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine lunar lander. The uncrewed spacecraft is expected to lift off on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Celestis' payload, called Tranquility Flight, includes 66 "memorial capsules" containing "cremated remains and DNA," which will remain on the lunar surface "as a permanent tribute to the intrepid souls who never stopped reaching for the stars," according to the company's website.

"We are aware of the concerns expressed by Mr. Nygren, but do not find them substantive," Celestis CEO Charles Chafer told CNN. "We reject the assertion that our memorial spaceflight mission desecrates the moon," Chafer said. "Just as permanent memorials for deceased are present all over planet Earth and not considered desecration, our memorial on the moon is handled with care and reverence, is a permanent monument that does not intentionally eject flight capsules on the moon. It is a touching and fitting celebration for our participants -- the exact opposite of desecration, it is a celebration." Elysium Space has not responded to CNN's request for a comment, but the company's website describes its "Lunar Memorial" as delivering "a symbolic portion of remains to the surface of the Moon, helping to create the quintessential commemoration." "I've been disappointed that this conversation came up so late in the game," John Thornton, Astrobotic Technology CEO, said. "I would have liked to have had this conversation a long time ago. We announced the first payload manifest of this nature to our mission back in 2015. A second in 2020. We really are trying to do the right thing and I hope we can find a good path forward with Navajo Nation." [...]

Friday's meeting convened by the White House is scheduled to feature representatives from NASA, the FAA, the US Department of Transportation, and the Department of Commerce. But Navajo Nation officials have little hope that they will be able to stop Monday's launch. "Based off of what we're seeing, and NASA are already having their pre-launch briefing, it doesn't look like they have any intention of stopping the launch or removing the remains," Ahasteen said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Using satellite imagery and AI, researchers have mapped human activity at sea with more precision than ever before. The effort exposed a huge amount of industrial activity that previously flew under the radar, from suspicious fishing operations to an explosion of offshore energy development. The maps were published today in the journal Nature. The research led by Google-backed nonprofit Global Fishing Watch revealed that a whopping three-quarters of the world's industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked. Up to 30 percent of transport and energy vessels also escape public tracking. Those blind spots could hamper global conservation efforts, the researchers say. To better protect the world's oceans and fisheries, policymakers need a more accurate picture of where people are exploiting resources at sea.

Until now, Global Fishing Watch and other organizations relied primarily on the maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS) to see what was happening at sea. The system tracks vessels that carry a box that sends out radio signals, and the data has been used in the past to document overfishing and forced labor on vessels. Even so, there are major limitations with the system. Requirements to carry AIS vary by country and vessel type. And it's pretty easy for someone to turn the box off when they want to avoid detection, or cruise through locations where signal strength is spotty. To fill in the blanks, Kroodsma and his colleagues analyzed 2,000 terabytes of imagery from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite constellation. Instead of taking traditional optical imagery, which is like snapping photos with a camera, Sentinel-1 uses advanced radar instruments to observe the surface of the Earth. Radar can penetrate clouds and "see" in the dark -- and it was able to spot offshore activity that AIS missed.

Since 2,000 terabytes is an enormous amount of data to crunch, the researchers developed three deep-learning models to classify each detected vessel, estimate their size, and sort out different kinds of offshore infrastructure. They monitored some 15 percent of the world's oceans where 75 percent of industrial activity takes place, paying attention to both vessel movements and the development of stationary offshore structures like oil rigs and wind turbines between 2017 and 2021. While fishing activity dipped at the onset of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, they found dense vessel traffic in areas that "previously showed little to no vessel activity" in public tracking systems -- particularly around South and Southeast Asia, and the northern and western coasts of Africa.

A boom in offshore energy development was also visible in the data. Wind turbines outnumbered oil structures by the end of 2020. Turbines made up 48 percent of all ocean infrastructure by the following year, while oil structures accounted for 38 percent. Nearly all of the offshore wind development took place off the coasts of northern Europe and China. In the Northeast US, clean energy opponents have tried to falsely link whale deaths to upcoming offshore wind development even though evidence points to vessel strikes being the problem. Oil structures have a lot more vessels swarming around them than wind turbines. Tank vessels are used at times to transport oil to shore as an alternative to pipelines. The number of oil structures grew 16 percent over the five years studied. And offshore oil development was linked to five times as much vessel traffic globally as wind turbines in 2021. "The actual amount of vessel traffic globally from wind turbines is tiny, compared to the rest of traffic," Kroodsma says.

Germany's emissions hit a 70-year low last year as Europe's largest economy reduced its reliance on coal. From a report: A study by the thinktank Agora Energiewende found that Germany emitted 673m tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2023, 73m tonnes fewer than in 2022. The drop was "largely attributable to a strong decrease in coal power generation," Agora said, accounting for a reduction of 46m tonnes in CO2 emissions. Emissions from industry fell significantly, largely due to a decline in production by energy-intensive companies.

Electricity generation from renewable sources was more than 50% of the total in 2023 for the first time, while coal's share dropped to 26% from 34%, according to the federal network agency. Germany had resorted to coal following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Moscow cut off gas supplies. But since then Germany has significantly reduced its use of the fossil fuels.