The Beijing Olympics are Environmentally Unfriendly

If you’ve been watching the Winter Olympics in Beijing, it’s hard to miss: Just beyond the white slopes for the ski and snowboard events lie brown hills barely touched by snow.

Machine-made snow is not a new concept in professional winter sports or the Olympics. However, my colleague Matt Futterman (and I) have shown. This week, wroteThe 2022 Games rely almost entirely on it. China’s capital gets only dustings of natural snow most winters. And water supplies in the arid region have long struggled to keep up with the city’s demands, whether for snow-making or for anything else.

To be clear, Beijing is not going to run out of water. It is a large metropolis with over 20 million people. The city has made great strides in conservation. Heavy industry and farming have been closed down or moved. (You may have seen the cooling towers at the Old steelworksThese are the major air events. Trillions of gallons of water are being channeled to the region each year, via a colossal engineering project, from China’s humid south.

There are other cities that could have hosted this year’s Games and that wouldn’t have had to go to such lengths to make artificial snow. These cities are not. Dropped out of contentionThey cited high costs and a lack of support back home.

Numbers:In 2017, the most recent year for which figures are available were not available. Beijing had roughly the same amount of freshwater per resident as Niger, a country near the Sahara.

Global warming and rising energy prices

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grows, oil prices are rising. Europe is currently suffering from a severe natural gas shortage that has roiled the energy markets. Record highs have been set for coal demand, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

As I An article explains the process.The turmoil in the fossil fuel markets around world last week could complicate efforts to combat climate change. This turmoil highlights a larger challenge: Even if countries invest in low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar power it will still take a while before the world doesn’t have to worry about volatility on oil, gas, and coal markets. This can make it difficult to shift towards cleaner energy.

Quotable: “While today’s market fluctuations cannot be traced back to climate policies, that does not mean that the road to net zero emissions will be smooth,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.

Glaciers may have less water than we think

There’s a lot of water locked up in glaciers, and it can be an indispensable resource to people living nearby. New research suggests that there may be less water than we thought.

The study was published in This week, I wrote about it, combined nearly a million pairs of satellite images to map the world’s 200,000-plus glaciers with new precision. The new paper, which was based on the scientific consensus, found that there was less of ice in certain areas, like the tropical Andes and more ice elsewhere, like in the Himalayas.

Further measurements at the site are needed to determine how much glacial waters have been removed. But one glaciologist, Regine Hock, told me that even as the data improves, the basic picture isn’t likely to change much: The glaciers are going to thin quite a bit this century, with consequences for communities all around the planet.

Numbers:The study found that the glaciers contained 11 percent less than was previously estimated. However, it found 37% more ice at the Asia high mountains, while Patagonia and the central Andes had 10 percent less.

The moral quandary of ‘slow fashion’ influencers

Is it possible for sustainability values to be preached while still being practiced? Promotion of consumption?

Climate change enters the therapy area

Ten years ago, psychologists suggested that a wide range would be affected by the disease. Climate change can cause anxiety and grief. Skepticism about that idea has been gone.

‘A sense of crisis’ for wasabi

Climate change and demographic threats are destroying centuries-old cultures surrounding the cultivation a plant that unmistakably connotes “culture”. Japanese cuisine.

As gripping tales go, it doesn’t get much better than the story of Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to walk across Antarctica.

It didn’t go as planned. His ship Endurance, which was carrying him, got stuck, crushed, and sunk in the Weddell sea in 1915. Shackleton and five other crew members set sail 800 miles in an open boat to call for rescue. The remaining 22 members of the group were saved.

The story of leadership and survival has been told in books and films and in museum exhibitions, at least one of which, at the Museum of Natural History in New York City two decades ago, even featured Shackleton’s lifeboat.

Endurance, a rocky outcrop at the bottom end of the Weddell just east of Antarctic Peninsula, was not seen for over a decade. It is located in 10,000 feet of water. As I wrote in This month’s articleThis could soon change. With a team comprising scientists, technicians, explorers and scientists, a South African icebreaker is currently on its way to the site.

The Endurance22 expedition, as it’s known, hopes to navigate through the Weddell’s notorious pack ice to the area where the ship went down and then launch a couple of underwater drones, also called autonomous submersibles, to look for it. If Endurance is located, the submersibles can photograph and survey the wreck but not touch it. The wreck is considered a historic monument.

The expedition goes beyond looking back to the past. There are also ice scientists on board who will be sampling and analyzing the Weddell’s ice, looking for signs of how climate change may affect it in the future.

You can also follow the search on Website Endurance22.

If you’re not getting Climate Fwd: in your inbox, you Sign up here.

We’d love your feedback on the newsletter. We read all messages and respond to all! We welcome your suggestions and thoughts. [email protected].