Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
You are here
Feed aggregator
‘The ice is not freezing as it should’: supply roads to Canada’s Indigenous communities under threat from climate crisis
Northern Ontario is seeing a ‘shorter window’ on only overland routes for vital deliveries to remote First Nations
At first there was no answer on the satellite phone. But on the third call, Donald Meeseetawageesic heard his sister’s voice. “We need somebody to come and tow us out,” he told her.
It was a warmer-than-normal night in early March and Meeseetawageesic, the elected band councillor for Eabametoong First Nation, was stranded in a 4x4 truck on the dark winter road leading to his community. The tyres were stuck in the deep snow and the temperature outside was below freezing. Help was about 60km (37 miles) away.
Continue reading...Average person will be 40% poorer if world warms by 4C, new research shows
Experts say previous economic models underestimated impact of global heating – as well as likely ‘cascading supply chain disruptions’
Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.
The study by Australian scientists suggests average per person GDP across the globe will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C above pre-industrial levels. This is a much greater reduction than previous estimates, which found the reduction would be 1.4%.
Continue reading...‘The ultimate circular economy’: how coral holobionts conjure magnificence from nothing
These creatures evolved over millenia to create nature’s finest circular economy, but are now struggling to survive
There’s no preparing for a first encounter with a thriving coral reef: your attention ricochets between dramas of colour, form and movement. A blaze of fire coral, darting clown fish, crimson sponge, electric blue ray … a turtle! Your heart soars, your head spins. Nowhere else will you encounter such density and diversity of life.
Corals are the architects of all this splendour. Their immobile forms suggest plants, but they’re animals – solar-powered ones. Each is a colony of thousands, sometimes millions, of tiny coral polyps, each resembling a slimmed-down sea anemone, just millimetres tall.
Between 24 March and 2 April, we will be profiling a shortlist of 10 of the invertebrates chosen by readers and selected by our wildlife writers from more than 2,500 nominations. The voting for our 2025 invertebrate of the year will run from midday on Wednesday 2 April until midday on Friday 4 April, and the winner will be announced on Monday 7 April.
Continue reading...Lee Zeldin, E.P.A. Head, Shuts National Environmental Museum
A Quarter-Billion Dollars for Defamation: Inside Greenpeace’s Huge Loss
‘A pandemic-level shock to the system’: RFK Jr’s old environmental group weighs EPA cuts
Head of Riverkeeper, which helped clean up Hudson River, talks about challenges during the second Trump term
Donald Trump’s push to repurpose the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) amid funding cuts and staffing losses poses a huge threat to water safety and environmental advances in one of the big environmental success stories in the US in recent decades: the clean-up of the Hudson River.
Once a byword for environmental degradation, the Hudson River is now recovering, in part due to the work of Riverkeeper, a non-profit environmental organization that established a model of legal activism for water protection and inspired more than 300 programs globally. It is also where Robert F Kennedy Jr cut his teeth as an environmental lawyer, before becoming a senior member of Trump’s rightwing cabinet.
Continue reading...Clean energy spending boosts GOP districts. But lawmakers are keeping quiet as Trump targets incentives
We asked 18 Republicans whose districts benefit most from Biden’s IRA climate law if they back Trump’s demands
Billions of dollars in clean energy spending and jobs have overwhelmingly flowed to parts of the US represented by Republican lawmakers. But these members of Congress are still largely reticent to break with Donald Trump’s demands to kill off key incentives for renewables, even as their districts bask in the rewards.
The president has called for the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act – a sweeping bill passed by Democrats that has helped turbocharge investments in wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electric vehicle manufacturing in the US – calling it a “giant scam”. Trump froze funding allocated under the act and has vowed to claw back grants aimed at reducing planet-heating pollution.
Continue reading...A New Dinosaur Museum Rises From a Hole in the Ground in New Jersey
Una antigua tradición japonesa se vuelve advertencia sobre el cambio climático
Rain records to fall in Queensland with Townsville to set new annual high – in April
Meanwhile, Adelaide records driest period in decades and Perth swelters through temperatures above 35C
- Outback deluge pushes Queensland towns to the brink: ‘Out here it’s drought or floods’
- Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Queensland cities and towns are dealing with the effects of flooding – including extensive stock losses and widespread damage – after a year’s worth of rain fell in a matter of days.
The north Queensland city of Townsville would “almost certainly” surpass its annual rainfall record this week, just three months into 2025, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s senior meteorologist, Jonathan How.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...Work and money worry young people more than culture wars or climate, UK poll finds
Class, education and gender found to influence difference in views but anxiety about finances was a common theme
Young people are more worried about their finances, work pressures and job insecurity than social media, the climate crisis and culture war debates, research shows.
The polling also challenges the simplistic characterisation of generational conflict, revealing that differences within gen Z, whether around class, education or gender, are often more pronounced than the differences between generations.
Continue reading...The Guardian view on new forests: a vision born in the Midlands is worth imitating | Editorial
If a tree-planting scheme in western England can match the first national forest, people as well as wildlife will benefit
The benefits for bats were presumably not at the top of the government’s list of reasons for announcing the creation of the new western forest. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, regards rules that protect these nocturnal mammals as a nuisance. Nevertheless, the rare Bechstein’s bat, as well as the pine marten and various fungi, are expected to be among species that benefit from the multiyear project, to which central government has so far committed £7.5m.
Like England’s only existing national forest, in the Midlands, this one will be broken up across a wide area, featuring grassland, farmland, towns and villages as well as densely planted, closed-canopy woodland. John Everitt, who heads the National Forest organisation (which is both a charity and a government arm’s length body), describes this type of landscape as “forest in the medieval sense with a mosaic of habitats”.
Continue reading...Bloom or bust? Superbloom spectacle eludes California after dry winter
Riot of native wildflowers that enthralled visitors in the past several years have failed to sprout due to too little rain
It’s one of the best known rites of spring in California: extraordinary displays known as “superblooms” that coat the hillsides in an abundance of color. Some years the blooms are massive enough to draw tourists from around the world to revel in the fields, such as in 2023 when more than 100,000 people showed up on a weekend to gawk at the poppies in Lake Elsinore, a small city about an hour outside Los Angeles.
But this year, not so much. Thanks to a brutally dry winter, the hills around the usual southern California superbloom hotspots have been conspicuously bare. Callista Turner, a state park ranger, could count the number of blooms on two hands as she surveyed the 8 miles (13km) of rolling hills at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve in the final week of March, which is typically when superbloom season peaks. “We’re still waiting to see what kind of season we have,” she says. “It’s a very slow start.”
Continue reading...How hurricanes Otis and John exposed Acapulco’s big divide and left residents ‘scared for our lives’
The last two big storms to hit Mexico have left the city vulnerable to organised crime and in fear of the next climate shock
Flora Montejo always dreamed of buying her own home. After almost three decades working as a nurse, the 68-year-old invested her retirement savings in a two-storey house in San Agustín, a working-class suburb of the Mexican resort town of Acapulco.
Montejo’s retirement dream was shortlived. Not long after moving into her newly remodelled home, Hurricane John dumped record levels of rainfall on Acapulco, triggering landslides and flash floods after calm creeks turned into roaring rivers.
Continue reading...‘God knows what’s in the water’: Los Angeles surfers in limbo as wildfire toxins linger
In a city where surfing is a way of life, the wait to get back in the water has been agonizing. But new research offers a glimmer of hope
Alex Sinunu was used to surfing three or four times a week in Santa Monica Bay – after all, the beach was just a mile from his home and he could ride his bike there with his board. But ever since the megafires that swept through neighboring Pacific Palisades in early January, the ocean has been filled with ash, debris – and endless questions.
The massive blaze consumed thousands of homes and other structures, many of them on the edge of the Pacific coastline. Subsequent rainstorms sent tons of debris washing into the ocean, turned the water brown and raised fears about the toxins that could be coming from all the charred remains of buildings and cars – including asbestos, lithium-ion batteries and plastics.
Continue reading...Pension Funds Push Forward on Climate Goals Despite Backlash
How U.S. Airports Like Pittsburgh’s Generate Electricity On Site to Avoid Heathrow-Like Outages
How Lee Zeldin Went From Environmental Moderate to Dismantling the E.P.A.
Dutton refuses to release energy price cut modelling as protesters target his campaign
Opposition leader says he will ‘leave it to other experts to talk about’ while simultaneously criticising Labor’s ‘secret’ climate targets
- Interactive guide to electorates in the Australian election
- Gina: the billionaire who wants to make Australia great
- See all our Australian election 2025 coverage
- Get ourbreaking news email,free app ordaily news podcast
Peter Dutton is, for now at least, keeping in the shadows the modelling that he claims shows his gas policy will reduce electricity prices, while simultaneously criticising Anthony Albanese for not releasing Labor modelling on climate targets.
On day one of the election campaign, the opposition leader said the Liberals had commissioned modelling on his plan to increase gas supply in Australia, but he repeatedly declined to say what the model found about price impacts.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...Dark Laboratory: groundbreaking book argues climate crisis was sparked by colonisation
Tao Leigh Goffe argues climate breakdown is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism
We all think we know what is causing the breakdown of the planet’s climate: burning fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide, change the chemistry of the air and trap more heat from the sun, leading to rising temperatures.
But Tao Leigh Goffe, an associate professor of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the City University of New York, wants us to visualise a far more specific cause: the shunting of a ship’s prow on to the sandbank of a paradise island in 1492.
Continue reading...