Global Warming

A new study led by a team including researchers at MIT has found that more than half of the world’s ocean has changed color in the last 20 years, reports Coco Liu for Bloomberg. “The color shift could be caused by changes in plankton communities that are critical to the marine food chain,” writes Liu. “And biodiversity isn’t the only thing at stake: The shift could also affect how much carbon dioxide the ocean takes up, since different types of plankton have different abilities to absorb it."

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray highlights a number of MIT startups that are focused on tackling climate change. “Boston has long been a center of clean energy, driven by innovations spinning out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities,” writes Bray.

Al Jazeera spotlights a study co-authored by postdoctoral associate Qian Li that finds that rapidly melting Antarctic ice is slowing down the flow of water through the world’s oceans and “could have a disastrous effect on global climate.”

A study co-authored by postdoctoral associate Qian Li has found that “melting ice around Antarctica will cause a rapid slowdown of a major global deep ocean current by 2050 that could alter the world’s climate for centuries and accelerate sea level rise,” reports Graham Readfearn for The Guardian.

Carlos Casanovas MS ’14 co-founded X1 Wind, a startup that has developed a floating wind turbine prototype, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “Floating wind is set to play a vital role supporting the future energy transition, global decarbonization and ambitious net-zero targets,” says Casanovas.

Prof. Kerry Emanuel and First Street Foundation have found that based on warming climate conditions and patterns, future storms will increase in intensity and travel farther north up the East Coast, reports Leslie Kaufman and Eric Roston for Bloomberg.

Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with CNN reporters Ella Nilsen and Renée Rigdon about future hurricane trends. “The bottom line is the models that are being used by the existing [catastrophe] modeling industry are based strictly on historical statistics,” says Emanuel. “The historical record isn’t very long, and it isn’t very good when you get back to before 1970.”

Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner spotlights Boston as a potential leader in climate technology for their “incubator spaces like Greentown Labs in Somerville and The Engine in Cambridge.”

Prof. Steven Barrett speaks with New York Times reporter Paige McClanahan about the pressing need to make air travel more sustainable and his research exploring the impact of contrails on the planet’s temperature. “Eliminating contrails is quite a big lever on mitigating the climate impact of aviation,” said Barrett.

Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Bloomberg reporter Kyle Stock about the carbon impact of electric vehicles. “On average, your emissions are substantially lower if you go for the full electric [vehicle],” says Trancik. “But we could probably think of extreme edge cases where a hybrid is just as good.”

Prof. Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, speaks with NPR host Rob Schmitz about fusion energy and its impact on climate and energy sustainability. “So in fusion, what you're doing is literally fusing or pushing together these hydrogen atoms,” explains Whyte. “They turn into helium. This is what happens in our sun as well, too. And when that happens, that can release large amounts of net energy.”

Research Scientist Josué Velázquez Martínez speaks with Allyson Chiu from The Washington Post about how online and in-store shopping can impact the climate. “In general, anybody that is in logistics and supply chains agree that having one or two or three days more to deliver is always better,” Velázquez Martínez says. More time for deliveries makes planning, inventory replenishment and distribution “way more efficient, which in turn also reduces the amount of fuel and energy that you require to serve your customers.”

A new study by MIT scientists finds that Earth can self-regulate its temperature thanks to a stabilizing feedback mechanism that works over hundreds of thousands of years, reports Troy Farah for Salon. “The finding has big implications for our understanding of the past, but also how global heating is shaping the future of our home world,” writes Farah. “It even helps us better understand the evolution of planetary temperatures that can make the search for alien-inhabited exoplanets more fruitful.”

CNN reporter Isabelle Gerretsen spotlights Lisa Dyson PhD ’04 and her startup Air Protein, which is developing a new technique to make protein “using just microbes, water, renewable energy and elements found in the air.” Air Protein has created “a new type of agriculture and a new way of growing food that doesn’t require arable land,” Dyson says.

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that brown carbon – released from burning biomass – could have a larger impact on the Earth’s climate than originally thought, write University of British Columbia student Nealan Gerrebos and University of British Columbia Prof. Alan Bertram for The Conversation. “The results show a warming effect on the climate from brown carbon that is twice that of the previous estimate,” write Gerrebos and Bertram.