A draft deal to cut global fossil fuel production is "grossly insufficient" and "incoherent" and will not stop the world from avoiding dangerous climate breakdown, according to delegates at the UN's Cop28 summit. From a report: The text put forward by the summit presidency after 10 days of wrangling was received with concern and anger by many climate experts and politicians, though others welcomed elements of the draft including the first mention in a Cop text of reducing fossil fuel production. Some countries are despairing that the text does not require a full phase-out of fossil fuels.

Cedric Schuster of Samoa, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: "We will not sign our death certificate. We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels." The Cop28 presidency released a draft text in the early evening on Monday, which called for "reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, so as to achieve net zero by, before or around 2050, in keeping with the science."

The text avoids highly contentious calls for a "phase-out" or "phase-down" of fossil fuels, which have been the focus of deep disagreement among the more than 190 countries meeting in Dubai. But instead of requiring fossil fuel producers to cut their output, it frames such reductions as optional, by calling on countries to "take actions that could include" reducing fossil fuels. "That one word 'could' just kills everything," said Eamon Ryan, Ireland's environment minister.

"The machines in the facility waft air towards a water-based solvent," reports the Times of London, "which carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into. An electrical current then separates those compounds from the solvent, creating a pure stream of CO2."

More details from Sky News: The UK's first-ever direct air capture plant has been turned on to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into jet fuel. The machine, developed by Mission Zero Technologies in partnership with the University of Sheffield, will run on solar power to recover 50 tonnes of CO2 from the air per year and turn it into Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)...

Aviation accounts for about 2% of the world's emissions and Ihab Ahmed, research associate from the University of Sheffield, said the fuel has the capacity to massively reduce the impact of aviation on the environment — and is an important step towards the government's ambitious target to increase the use of SAF to at least 10% by 2030.
America opened its first carbon-capture facility in November in a warehouse in California. While the carbon isn't converted into sustainable air fuel, it can capture a maximum of 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year/

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an interesting article from ScienceAlert: Undersea volcanic eruptions account for more than three-quarters of all volcanism on Earth, but rarely do we see the impacts. The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption of 2022 was a dramatic exception. Its furious explosion from shallow waters broke the ocean surface and punched through the stratosphere, generating supercharged lighting and an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe several times.

But there was far more to the fallout than satellite images could possibly capture or observers could report. We know the human toll this explosion took, but now a new study investigating the underwater impacts of the Hunga-Tonga eruption has detailed just how ferociously the explosion tore open the seafloor, ripped up undersea cables, and smothered marine life... The team also compiled a trove of data from ship-based sonar, sediment cores, geochemical analyses, water column samples, and video footage to chart the devastatingly powerful upheaval...

Their analyses show at least 6 cubic kilometers (km3) of seafloor was lost from within the caldera — 20 times the eruptive volume of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption — and an additional 3.5 km3 of material was blasted out of the Hunga volcano's submerged flanks... That leaves roughly four-fifths of the ejected material in the ocean; material that was funneled into fast-moving density flows that scoured out tracks 30 meters deep in the seafloor and accumulated 22 meters (72 feet) thick in some places.

"U.S. lawmakers and ministers from around the world blasted a letter that emerged Friday night, warning OPEC member states to resist calls at the COP28 climate summit for a fossil fuel phase-out," reports Axios: The letter has shaken up the climate talks in a critical phase, as nations spar over whether to include historic language in an emerging climate agreement that calls for a phase-out of fossil fuels... "OPEC's letter is outrageous. OPEC wants to talk about emissions, but not the source of the emissions," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), who is visiting COP28 as part of a congressional delegation. "It would be like the tobacco industry saying you can talk about lung cancer, but you can't talk about cigarettes. It's outrageous, it's preposterous," he told Axios. "The extent to which they had the nerve to write such a preposterous letter, just shows you how much in denial they still are." The letter, reportedly sent by the OPEC secretary general to all 13 member nations and 10 members of the larger OPEC+ coalition on Dec. 6, warned of the possibility of a tipping point toward a COP28 outcome containing language calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels.
Reuters reports that "It was the first time OPEC's Secretariat has intervened in the U.N. climate talks with such a letter, according to Alden Meyer of the E3G climate change think tank. 'It indicates a whiff of panic,' he said."

More from Politico: The full-scale resistance that oil-exporting countries are mounting against a COP28 deal to end fossil fuel use is a sign of "panic," said Germany's climate envoy... [T]o Jennifer Morgan, Germany's special envoy for international climate action, the letter was also a rare admission from the oil industry that these climate talks pose an existential threat to its business model...

As the talks speed toward a close, officials are working to craft language that can get support from the nearly 200 countries participating in the process. It will be up to the UAE presidency of COP28 to attempt to find consensus. Draft text over the weekend offered several options for a pledge to "phase out" fossil fuels, all with various caveats. But several people close to the talks said that Saudi Arabia and the Arab group of negotiators have resisted such language, including storming out of one meeting room, according to one observer of the process granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks.

"We have raised our consistent concerns with attempts to attack energy sources instead of emissions," Saudi Arabia's Albara Tawfiq said during Sunday's public session.
The Guardian adds that "there is some optimism coming from the discussions." Catherine Abreu, the executive director of Destination Zero, said: "In eight years of attending climate talks, I have never felt more that we were talking about what really matters. Hearing ministers from all around the world talk straight about the realities of phasing out fossil fuels is something I could not have imagined happening in this process even two years ago. "What's clear after this Majlis dialogue at Cop28 is that there is overwhelming consensus that phasing out fossil fuels and scaling up renewable energy is absolutely necessary to hold to the promise of the Paris Agreement and keep the hope of 1.5 alive.

"A tomato lost for eight months on the orbiting lab has been located, " reports Gizmodo, "absolving astronaut Frank Rubio of playful allegations that he ate it." NASA's Veg-05 experiment, a project focusing on growing fruits and vegetables in space, experienced an unusual turn of events when a Red Robin dwarf tomato vanished shortly after being harvested in March. This tomato, part of a study to explore the feasibility of continuous fresh-food production in space, was finally found, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli revealed during a livestream on December 6...

The Veg-05 project expanded the scope of in-space farming to include dwarf tomatoes, exploring how lighting and fertilizer variations influence fruit growth, safety, and nutritional value (and yes, tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables)... Following the harvest in March, each astronaut received a tomato sample stored in a Ziploc bag. However, concerns about potential fungal contamination led NASA to instruct the astronauts not to consume the fruit, as Space.com reported.

News of the missing tomato first emerged on September 13, during an event commemorating Rubio's one-year stay in orbit. Rubio, who had an extended mission on the ISS due to a malfunctioning Russian Soyuz spacecraft, lamented the loss of his tomato share, which had floated away before he could take a bite. Rubio, who spent a record 371 days in space, mused about the missing tomato, saying: "I spent so many hours looking for that thing. I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future."
In the livestream Moghbeli "did not specify where on the 356-foot space station the one-inch-wide red dwarf tomato was located," notes the Guardian, "or in what condition." The Rubio tomato turned out to be one of only 12 red dwarves successfully germinated and grown to ripeness in space during the Veg-05 project, compared with more than 100 in a parallel experiment conducted on Earth, according to NASA.
Thanks to Slashdot reader christoban for sharing the news.

"The United States military is preparing to launch its secretive X-37B space plane on a seventh mission in orbit," reports NBC News.

Shaped like a small space shuttle, "It's an itty-bitty spaceplane, not quite 30 feet long and under 10 feet tall," writes the Washington Post, "with a pair of stubby wings and a rounded, bulldog-like nose." Space.com says the launch window for the uncrewed vehicle opens Monday at 8:14 p.m. EST.

From NBC News: For the first time, the X-37B will ride into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Since its debut more than a decade ago, the X-37B has been a source of intrigue within the space community, mostly owing to the mysterious nature of its activities in low Earth orbit. Despite not knowing its true purpose or location, skywatchers have occasionally spotted and photographed the space plane in the night sky using telescopes... The military is tight-lipped about such operations, but the Space Force said the X-37B missions "are key to ensuring safe and responsible operations in space for all users of the space domain..."
The "U.S. Space Force says that launching on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket will allow testing "in new orbital regimes, experimenting with space domain awareness technologies and investigating the radiation effects to NASA materials."

The Washington Post notes that "The reference about 'space domain awareness' could mean that it will be keeping an eye on other satellites, potentially watching for threats": At least one part of the mission is known. The vehicle will "expose plant seeds to the harsh radiation environment of long-duration spaceflight" in an experiment for NASA. In the past, the Pentagon has also used the X-37B to test some of its cutting edge technologies, including a small solar panel designed to transform solar energy into microwaves, a technology that one day could allow energy harnessed in space to be beamed back to Earth...

If Sunday's X-37B mission is like previous ones, the spaceplane could be in space for a while. Its first flight, which launched in 2010, lasted 224 days.

Record-breaking land and sea temperatures, driven by climate breakdown, will probably cause "unprecedented mass coral bleaching and mortality" throughout 2024, according to a pioneering coral scientist. From a report: The impact of climate change on coral reefs has reached "uncharted territory," said Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, Australia, leading to concerns that we could be at a "tipping point."

The upper ocean is undergoing unmatched changes in conditions, ecosystems and communities that can be traced back to the 1980s, when mass coral bleaching first appeared. In a paper published in the journal Science, US and Australian researchers say that historical data on sea surface temperatures, over four decades, suggests that this year's extreme marine heatwaves may be a precursor to a mass bleaching and coral mortality event across the Indo-Pacific in 2024-25.

Mass coral bleaching happens when delicate corals become stressed due to factors including heat, causing them to lose their brown microbial algae, turning them white. At low stress levels, the algae can return to corals over a few months. But many Caribbean reef areas have recently experienced historically high sea temperatures that began one or two months earlier and lasted longer than usual. Crucially, 2023 is the first year of a potential pair of El Nino years, with the warmest average global surface sea temperature from February to July on record. Since 1997, every instance of these El Nino pairs has led to a global mass coral bleaching event.

WindBourne shares a report: Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached record levels again in 2023, as experts warned that the projected rate of warming had not improved over the past two years. The world is on track to have burned more coal, oil and gas in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project, pumping 1.1% more planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a time when emissions must plummet to stop extreme weather from growing more violent.

The finding comes as world leaders meet in Dubai for the fraught Cop28 climate summit. In a separate report published on Tuesday, Climate Action Tracker (CAT) raised its projections slightly for future warming above the estimates it made at a conference in Glasgow two years ago. As carbon clogs the atmosphere, trapping sunlight and baking the planet, the climate is growing more hostile to human life. The growth in CO2 emissions had slowed substantially over the past decade, the Global Carbon Project found, but the amount emitted each year had continued to rise. It projected that total CO2 emissions in 2023 would reach a record high of 40.9 gigatons. If the world continued to emit CO2 at that rate, the international team of more than 120 scientists found, it would burn through the remaining carbon budget for a half-chance of keeping global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures in just seven years. In 15 years, the scientists estimated, the budget for 1.7C would be gone too.

India wants to be the voice of the global south in the negotiations. But can the world's most populous nation cut its massive coal use? From a report: India is pitching itself as a leader of the global south at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), under way in Dubai. During his opening speech at the meeting, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a sharp rebuke to wealthy nations: "A small section of mankind has exploited nature indiscriminately. But the whole of humanity is paying its price, especially the residents of the global south." But India -- now the world's most populous nation -- relies heavily on coal to meet its energy needs, and faces a difficult path to cutting its emissions to net zero. The country's priority remains reducing poverty -- which India says requires more energy use -- but more action on climate change is essential, say researchers.

"If we have to reach net-zero by 2050 collectively, then India's share in that collective goal should be a significant one," says Nandini Das, a climate researcher based in Perth, Australia, who works for the global research group Climate Action Tracker. But she adds that in terms of finance, "India requires substantial international support." India is the world's third biggest carbon producer, accounting for 7.3% of global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2022. But those emissions come from 1.43 billion people, accounting for 18% of the world's population. India's per capita emissions last year were equivalent to 2.76 tonnes of carbon dioxide, less than one-sixth of the per capita emissions of the United States and 24 times smaller than the figure for Qatar, the world's largest per capita emitter.
India's average standard of living is far below those of the United States and Qatar, with 210 million people living in poverty according to United Nations metrics. India has maintained that coal -- a cheap fossil fuel readily available in the country -- is required to power its economic development. Coal supplied 73% of India's electricity in 2022; and in November this year, the country announced that it would install 80 gigawatts of new coal-fired power-generation capacity by 2032. "We have to give a fair share to all developing countries in the global carbon budget," Modi said at COP28.

Many of the gravest threats to humanity are drawing closer, as carbon pollution heats the planet to ever more dangerous levels, scientists have warned. From a report: Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report, and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures. Triggering these planetary shifts will not cause temperatures to spiral out of control in the coming centuries but will unleash dangerous and sweeping damage to people and nature that cannot be undone.

"Tipping points in the Earth system pose threats of a magnitude never faced by humanity," said Tim Lenton, from the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute. "They can trigger devastating domino effects, including the loss of whole ecosystems and capacity to grow staple crops, with societal impacts including mass displacement, political instability and financial collapse." The tipping points at risk include the collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the widespread thawing of permafrost, the death of coral reefs in warm waters, and the collapse of one atmospheric current in the North Atlantic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Increasingly intensive and frequent wildfires in the western U.S. are deteriorating air quality and causing more premature deaths, a new study found. Fires have damaged federal efforts from the Environmental Protection Agency to improve air quality mainly through reductions in automobile emissions, per the study published Monday in The Lancet Planetary Health. From 2000 to 2020, air quality has worsened in the western U.S. due to wildfires. Black carbon concentrations have risen 55% on an annual basis, mostly due to the wildfires, researchers found. The fires have also caused an increase of 670 premature deaths per year in the region in the two-decade span. Meanwhile, the eastern U.S. had no major declines in air quality during the same time period.

Our air is supposed to be cleaner and cleaner due mostly to EPA regulations on emissions, but the fires have limited or erased these air-quality gains," said Jun Wang, the study's lead corresponding author and chair of the University of Iowa's Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, in a statement. "[A]ll the efforts for the past 20 years by the EPA to make our air cleaner basically have been lost in fire-prone areas and downwind regions," Wang added. "We are losing ground."

[Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA] said the findings were consistent with other studies that contribute to the same overall picture that after the air quality regulations' great success, "the extremes of those air pollution episodes are actually now increasing again" due to wildfires. "On average, the air quality is still better, but the problem is, it's during these episodes of just-near apocalyptic conditions where we're really losing a lot of ground and that really is because the size and the intensity of wildfires has increased greatly," he said. Given climate change is a wildfire driver, keeping global heating to the lowest level possible will help. "But we're still going to see more warming no matter what moving forward, and so there will be further increases in the wildfire hazard," Swain said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A little more than three months ago the Indian space agency, ISRO, achieved a major success by putting its Vikram lander safely down on the surface of the Moon. In doing so India became the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, and this further ignited the country's interest in space exploration. But it turns out that is not the end of the story for the Chandrayaan 3 mission. In a surprise announcement made Monday, ISRO announced that it has successfully returned the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This experimental phase of the mission, the agency said in a statement, tested key capabilities needed for future lunar missions, including the potential for returning lunar rocks to Earth.

The United States has committed to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that's a huge factor in global warming. From a report: U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which means the Biden Administration commits to building no new coal plants and phasing out existing plants. No date was given for when the existing plants would have to go, but other Biden regulatory actions and international commitments already in the works had meant no coal by 2035.

"We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities," Kerry said in a statement. "The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants." Coal power plants have already been shutting down across the nation due to economics, and no new coal facilities were in the works, so "we were heading to retiring coal by the end of the decade anyway," said climate analyst Alden Meyer of the European think-tank E3G. That's because natural gas and renewable energy are cheaper, so it was market forces, he said.

An anonymous reader writes: Using realistic ecological modeling, scientists led by Western Sydney University's Jürgen Knauer found that the globe's vegetation could actually be taking on about 20% more of the CO2 humans have pumped into the atmosphere and will continue to do so through to the end of the century.

"What we found is that a well-established climate model that is used to feed into global climate assessments by the likes of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicts stronger and sustained carbon uptake until the end of the 21st century when extended to account for the impact of some critical physiological processes that govern how plants conduct photosynthesis," said Knauer.

Mathematical models of ecological systems are used to understand complex ecological processes and in turn attempt to predict how the real ecosystems they're based on will change. The researchers found that the more complex their modeling, the more surprising the results – in the environment's favor.

Current models, the team adds, are not that complex so likely underestimate future CO2 uptake by vegetation... [T]he modeling makes a strong case for the value of greening projects and their importance in comprehensive approaches to tackling global warming.

It can regenerate bits of its body. Ancient Mexicans revered it as a mischievous, shape-shifting god.

They named it axolotl — translation: "water monster" — and it's a "salamander with a Mona Lisa smile," reports the Washington Post, "an alien-looking creature with a permanent grin and a crown of feathery gills". But while there's over a million in the world's scientific laboratories, back in its only natural habitat — the canals of Lake Xochimilco in Mexico City — it's on the brink of extinction. In hopes of preventing the annihilation of a species with mystifying traits, ecologists at Mexico's National Autonomous University are giving the public the chance to virtually adopt an axolotl. For $30, $180 or $360, donors can choose the sex, age and name of the little buddy they get to call theirs for a month, six months or a year, respectively. The axolotls stay in Mexico, but donors receive an adoption kit with an infographic, the axolotl's identification card, a certificate of adoption and a personalized thank-you letter.

The campaign also includes options to buy an axolotl a meal for $10 or to fix up one of their homes for $50. And for those wanting to splurge a bit more, participants can adopt the axolotl's refuge of chinampas — the artificial islands that dot Lake Xochimilco — for one, six or 12 months starting at $450. The funds will go toward building refuges for the axolotl and restoring its habitat, which has been devastated by the effects of Mexico City's urbanization over the last decades, said Luis Zambrano, an ecologist at Mexico's National Autonomous University.

"A species can't be a species without its habitat," Zambrano said.
Axolotls have "helped scientists understand how organs develop in vertebrates, uncover the causes of the birth defect spina bifida and discover thyroid hormones..."

"The salamanders have also become beloved exotic pets — to the point that 'there's claw machines in Japan that let you pick up an axolotl to take home,' Zambrano added."

Tuesday the New York Times reported that while hosting the global climate summit, the United Arab Emirates also hoped to lobby for oil and gas deals around the world.

But Friday the United Arab Emirates announced that they'd also started a $30 billion climate fund, reports Reuters, and that fund "aims to attract $250 billion of investment by the end of the decade."

The New York Times notes the fund started just months ago, and "at least 20 percent of the funds, would be earmarked for projects in the developing world, where it is especially difficult to finance clean energy projects because interest rates are high and lenders shy away from what they perceive as risky investments."

The Washington Post notes that "It immediately becomes one of the world's largest climate-focused investment funds." "This is a big deal," said Mona Dajani, global head of renewables, energy and infrastructure at the law firm Shearman and Sterling. "We have seen other programs previously, but not at this level. They were too scattered, too small, not aligned to the broader financial sector."

The lack of cash feeds into other challenges that can make it impossible to scale up clean energy in some countries. Without a steady pipeline of projects, there are no established supply chains, and nations find themselves locked out of markets for key components that are in high demand elsewhere, such as solar cells and critical minerals used to make giant batteries that store renewable power. The Global South will need an immense amount of such battery storage by the end of the decade, according to the Rockefeller Foundation, enough to store about as much power as is produced by 90 large nuclear plants. The storage is used to bottle wind and solar power and distribute it back into grids after dark and when the wind dies down.
The Post also reports that "the money to fund the projects will come largely from oil revenue." While the UAE framed its initiative as a call to global action, it is at least partly geared toward generating returns. It is one of several forays the UAE is making into clean-energy finance as it seeks to diversify its economy amid predictions the demand for oil will slump in coming years... The new initiative puts a spotlight on the UAE's evolving role in the fight against climate change. The country is at once one of the world's biggest contributors to warming, pumping massive amounts of oil into the global economy, while also using its fossil fuel wealth to put itself on the vanguard of energy innovation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, a group of military and military-adjacent scientists gathered at a conference to discuss the possibility of creating a super soldier. They discussed breeding programs, Marvel movies, The Matrix, and the various technologies the Pentagon is researching with the goal of creating a real life super soldier complete with cybernetic implants and thorny ethical issues surrounding bodily autonomy. The talk happened at the The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, or I/ITSEC, an annual conference where military leaders come to talk shop and simulation corporations gather to demo new products. It's the kind of place where execs and generals don virtual reality helmets and talk about the virtues of VR sims. You could even catch members of congress talking about the importance of simulations and war. "Winning the war of cognition by pushing readiness and lethality boundaries," reads the official poster for the 2019 I/ITSEC.

It was here, in Orlando, Florida, where five illustrious members of the military-industrial complex gathered to discuss super soldiers at the "Black Swan -- Dawn of the Super Soldier" panel. Lauren Reinerman-Jones, an analyst from Defense Acquisition University, moderated a panel that included U.S. Army Developmental Command representatives George Matook and Irwin Hudson, research scientist J.J. Walcutt, and Richard McKinley, who works on "non-invasive brain stimulation" for the Air Force. I/TSEC advertised the panel in its program with a picture of the experts next to a posing Master Chief, the genetically enhanced super soldier from the Halo video game franchise. Throughout the conversation, which covered the nuts and bolts of what's possible now and what's about to be possible along with various ethical concerns, references to science fiction and fantasy stories were common. Some of the ideas discussed include synthetic blood, pain-numbing stimulants, limb regeneration, and non-invasive brain stimulation. The discussion references the John Scalzi book about a near future where Earth wages war by offering the elderly new youthful bodies in exchange for military service.

They also discuss the ethical and legal concerns surrounding the creation of super soldiers, as well as the societal norms and potential risks. "What risks are we willing to take? There's all these wonderful things we can do," Matook said. "We don't want a fair fight. We really don't, this is not an honorable thing. We want our guys to be over-matching any possible enemies, right? So why aren't we giving them pharmaceutical enhancements? Why are we making them run all week when we could just be giving them steroids? There's all these other things you could do if you change societal norms and ethics. And laws, in some cases."

The discussion concludes with considerations about the long-term effects, reversibility of enhancements, and the potential ownership of enhanced individuals by the government. "So if you do these kinds of changes to an individual, what do you do when their service is up? What happens? Or are they just literally owned by the government for life," asks Reinerman-Jones. Hudson replied with a grim joke: "Termination."

The Space Weather Prediction Center is closely watching the arrival of a super-hot plasma eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), that will slam into Earth tonight, writes longtime Slashdot reader StyleChief. Images of the huge sunspot "rotating to face the earth" can be viewed here. The Space Weather Prediction Center reports: With 3 CMEs already inbound, the addition of a 4th, full halo CME has prompted SWPC forecasters to upgrade the G2 Watch on 01 Dec to a G3 Watch. This faster-moving halo CME is progged to merge with 2 of the 3 upstream CMEs, all arriving at Earth on 01 Dec. G3 (Strong) conditions are now likely on 01 Dec. Continue to monitor spaceweather.gov for the latest updates. "The rapid Earth-bound CME left the sun on Nov. 29 during a powerful M9.8-class solar flare eruption," reports Space.com. "But it isn't alone."

"The speedy plasma outburst will merge with several slower upstream CMEs that left the sun a day earlier (Nov. 28), creating a 'Cannibal CME' that will likely trigger a strong geomagnetic storm akin to a Nov. 5 event that supercharged auroras and STEVE around the world."

Astronomers have discovered six planets orbiting a bright star in perfect resonance. The star system, 100 light-years from Earth, was described on Wednesday in a paper published in the journal Nature. From a report: The discovery of the system could give astronomers a unique opportunity to trace the evolution of these worlds to when they first formed, and potentially offer insights into how our solar system got to be the way it is today. "It's like looking at a fossil," said Rafael Luque, an astronomer at the University of Chicago who led the study. "The orbits of the planets today are the same as they were a billion years ago."

Researchers think that when planets first form, their orbits around a star are in sync. That is, the time it takes for one planet to waltz around its host star might be the same amount of time it takes for a second planet to circle exactly twice, or exactly three times. Systems that line up like this are known as orbital resonances. But, despite the theory, finding resonances in the Milky Way is rare. Only 1 percent of planetary systems still preserve this symmetry.

Most of the time, planetary orbits get knocked out of sync by an event that upsets the gravitational balance of the system. That could be a close encounter with another star, the formation of a massive planet like Jupiter, or a giant impact from space on one planet that causes a ripple effect in other orbits. When this happens, Dr. Luque said, planetary orbits become too chaotic to mathematically describe, and knowledge of their evolution is indecipherable. Astronomers are lucky to find even one pair of exoplanets in resonance. But in the newly discovered star system, there are a whopping five pairs, because all six planets have orbits that are in sync with one another. Dr. Luque described it as "the 1 percent of the 1 percent."

An "unprecedented outcome" that would keep alive hopes of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C is within reach, the president-designate of the UN Cop28 climate summit has said -- and even Saudi Arabia is expected to come with positive commitments. From a report: Significant progress has been made in recent weeks on key aspects of a deal at the crucial meeting that starts in Dubai this week, with countries agreeing a blueprint for a fund for the most vulnerable, and reaching an important milestone on climate finance. Sultan Al Jaber, who will lead the talks on behalf of the Cop28 host country, the United Arab Emirates, told the Guardian in an exclusive interview on the eve of the talks that the positive momentum meant the world could agree a "robust roadmap" of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 that would meet scientific advice.

"I have to be cautiously optimistic," he said. "But I have the levers and the traction that I am experiencing today that will allow for us to deliver the unprecedented outcome that we all hope for." He added: "Getting back on track, and ensuring that the world accepts a robust understanding of a roadmap to 2030 that will keep [a temperature rise above pre-industrial levels of] 1.5C (2.7F) within reach is my only goal."