The first bank to do so was Goldman Sachs, which exactly one month ago announced it was leaving the NZBA because their institution had supposedly “made significant progress in recent years on the firm’s net zero goals and we look forward to making further progress.” They were swiftly followed by Wells Fargo, Citi, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Only JPMorgan remains among the Big Six U.S. banks.
The NZBA committed the Big Six banks to zero out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels and other activities that emit greenhouse gases. When present in excessive quantities in the atmosphere, gases like methane and carbon dioxide trap heat, eventually leading to global heating, which in turns causes droughts and heat waves to become more frequent and more intense, sea levels to rise and hurricanes to become more extreme.
Despite the alarm of climate scientists, Reuters reports the Big Six banks are reacting to pressure from Republican politicians who oppose taking climate action on principle. They have argued that the NZBA could be in breach of antitrust laws if they reduced financing to fossil fuel companies. Instead, these same institutions may feel incentivized to move away from environmentally-friendly investment policies.
The banks themselves publicly insist that they remain committed to their environmental goals. A Bank of America spokesperson said the financial institution would “continue to work with clients on this issue and meet their needs,” while Morgan Stanley said its “commitment to net-zero remains unchanged.”
Because large banks provide fossil fuel companies with the investments they need to do business, climate activists often point to large banks as main culprits in climate change. Speaking with Salon in June, the Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance senior campaign strategist Adèle Shraiman explained that “banks can play a key role in driving the climate crisis through their financing activities.”
She added, “Many of the world’s largest banks, including the top banks on Wall Street, lend billions of dollars to fossil fuel companies, enabling the buildout of the deadly and destructive industry that is most responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.”
The universe is full of icy worlds that scientists suspect could serve as homes for alien life. These celestial bodies are so cold that humans could never set foot upon them without freezing to death — yet if they have liquid water and carbon, they could facilitate the evolution of organic beings like the inhabitants of our own planet. In addition to containing organic chemicals, these worlds would need to be stable enough that life could realistically reside there. That is why astrobiologists are increasingly turning their eyes toward icy bodies like the Jovian moons of Europa and Ganymede, Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus, Uranus’ moon Miranda and the dwarf planet Ceres.
So how could life survive in such a cold, hostile environment? We’ve found plenty of ice in our solar system, but no consistent liquid water is known on any moon or planetary surface aside from Earth. But many theories exist that subsurface oceans could exist, which is why NASA has launched the Europa Clipper last October, which will hunt for signs of life on Jupiter’s moon when it arrives in 2030. In the meantime, scientists are still puzzling out the physics behind such an icy ocean that could harbor life.
Researchers from Texas A & M University and the University of Washington, Seattle recently published a study in the journal Nature Communications proposing a new concept: the “cenotectic,” or the absolute lowest temperature at which a liquid remains stable under varying pressures and concentrations. The term comes from the Greek meaning “universal-melt.” By applying cenotectic physics to known conditions on various distant worlds, the researchers ascertained how water on these icy distant bodies could remain liquid enough to sustain life.
“This low-temperature limit, called the cenotectic, helps us to constrain the conditions under which liquid water — often considered a prerequisite for habitability — might exist on distant worlds,” study co-author Matthew Powell-Palm, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A & M, told Salon.
Those limits mostly include water being frozen and therefore unable to support life; the cenotectic takes into account thermodynamic forces like pressure and chemical activity that can keep water in its liquid state despite the extremely low temperatures on icy worlds.
According to the study authors, “the cenotectic plays a central role in the ‘endgame’ of planetary oceans. As large water-rich planetary bodies cool over geologic timescales or with loss of internal heating such as tidal dissipation or radiogenic heating, their oceans will gradually freeze from top to bottom, until complete solidification is achieved. This effect is particularly interesting in the case of large icy moons like Ganymede, Callisto, and Titan, but also for cold ocean exoplanets like Trappist 1e-g and water-rich rogue exoplanets.”
The authors speculate in their work about the “fascinating applications” of the cenotectic concept to planetary science, particularly for “icy worlds such as Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Ganymede, Ceres, Pluto, and potentially moons of Uranus Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon.” For instance, “by measuring the cenotectic of various water-salt solutions that may capture some of the chemistry of Europa’s oceans, we can identify the lowest temperature at which these solutions will remain liquid, and the according pressure and salt concentrations required for this liquidity,” Powell-Palm said. “Thus, by conceptualizing and measuring the cenotectic, we can constrain the most extreme temperature-pressure conditions under which liquid water might exist” and tie that into other possible variables like gravity or the depth of liquid under a world’s icy and crusty surface.
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As another co-author explained to Salon, some of these locations contain so much water that astrobiologists will need a tool for figuring out where and how those worlds contain liquid water on which organic molecules can turn into organisms.
“One of the most significant discoveries in planetary science and astrophysics over the past decade has been the realization that icy moons hold the largest reservoir of liquid water in our solar system,” Baptiste Journaux, research professor of Earth and Space Science at the University of Washington – Seattle, said. “For instance, Europa contains twice the amount of liquid water compared to all the oceans on Earth combined, while Titan and Ganymede are likely to contain over 10 times more liquid water each. Additionally, ocean exoplanets are believed to possess the largest reservoir of liquid water in the entire universe.”
“These icy moons serve as our most promising targets for exploring the possibility of habitability, surpassing even Mars in my opinion,” Journaux added. He hopes that future scientists will be able to use their research after acquiring data from Europa, Ganymede and Titan as a result of impending exploration missions including NASA’s Europa Clipper, ESA’s Juice, and NASA’s Dragonfly. Until that happens, Earth-bound scientists will need to further flesh out the theoretical framework behind the cenotectic.
“While we think the cenotectic concept and our initial measurements are very exciting, we’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg,” Powell-Palm said, apologizing for the pun. “In this study, we measure this cenotectic limit for simple aqueous chemistries (water + one salt), but more complicated solutions with many different salts (not to mention organic compounds that may be present) may behave differently, and may better represent the chemical complexity of the oceans of icy worlds.”
Scientists will also need to learn about the numerous new hydrate materials (solid compounds that include both salt molecules and water molecules, bound together) which will be found on these foreign worlds, as the researchers encountered many while working on their own study.
“The role of these materials in prescribing the limits of liquid stability further complicates the story, and the very existence of these materials tells us we have a ton of exciting exploration left to do in the low temperature/high pressure parameter space relevant to icy worlds,” Powell-Palm said.
As that new information comes in, Journaux is excited about the possibilities of applying the concept of the cenotectic to helping people discover life.
“This is where the groundbreaking discovery and definition of the cenotectic play a crucial role,” Journaux said. “By providing an absolute limit to the existence of liquid water, including at high pressures and high salinities, cenotectic research enables us to establish an absolute limit on the presence of oceans and potentially habitable environments.”
It was not easy for Dr. Kevin Trenberth to leave the United States. An esteemed climate scientist who has published more than 600 articles on climatology, Trenberth spent more than four decades of his life in America, first teaching at the University of Illinois before joining the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where he eventually became a distinguished scholar.
Yet by September 2019, the New Zealand native decided to return home because he’d had enough of America under President Donald Trump. Trenberth has long been a fierce critic of Trump, but now things were impacting him personally.
“I cannot go to NSF [the National Science Foundation] for research funds because NCAR is base funded that way,” Trenberth wrote in a note to himself at the time. “Nor has it been fruitful to garner funds internally, and the external grants, especially with NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] dried up after 2012 when NOAA put forward a proposal for a climate service but thoroughly messed it up, and Lamar Smith [R-Texas, then-chair of the Science Committee in the House] not only killed it but cut research funds for climate by 30%.”
America’s lack of support for climate science poses a serious problem for the survival of our species, according to Trenberth. Because the United States is both a leading world power and major contributor to climate change (along with China, the European Union and the United Kingdom), Trenberth says it must do its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As human activity dumps carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapor into the atmosphere, the overheating planet will cause sea levels to rise, hurricanes to become more extreme and droughts and heatwaves to become more frequent and more intense.
It made Trenberth think of Neil Shute’s 1957 science fiction novel “On the Beach,” in which a nuclear war wiped out the Northern Hemisphere, forcing survivors to flee to southeast Australia and New Zealand. In that fictional scenario, humanity barbecued itself; in reality, Trenberth describes our species’ demise as more of a slow boil. As the temperature rises both figuratively and literally, the question for many scientists is whether they should stay to fight in a nation whose politics make it increasingly hostile to climate science.
By leaving during Trump’s first term, the emeritus Trenberth found one drastic but simple solution to the problem, which was to simply no longer reside in America. Thirtysomething Rose Abramoff, who started as a forest ecologist and also studies climate change, biogeochemistry and land management, arrived at the same conclusion as Trenberth, but with a critical difference: She later came back.
“During the first Trump administration, I was working at a large national laboratory based on the West Coast as a postdoc,” Abramoff recalled, referring to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Alameda, California. When Trump won the presidency, however, Abramoff saw that scientists were self-censoring. It became a professional necessity.
“We, researchers in general, were doing a lot of anticipatory obedience,” Abramoff said. This anticipatory obedience is partially based on memories from Trump’s first term, which other scientists have reported to Salon. An anonymous EPA official who left during Trump’s first term described how a lot of their work “pretty much stalled” during all four years when he was in office. “We kind of had to talk about the work differently,” they explained. “No one used the word ‘climate.’ Everybody kind of just talked about, ‘What are the outcomes of climate work?’ and not necessarily name ‘climate’ just as it is, if that makes sense.”
Those who did not comply, like air pollution expert Dan Costa, found that they “had a bullseye on us,” adding that “people objected when I felt that this administration coming in would number one, go after that regulatory program, and number two, because climate was in there, that it was just going to paper over the whole situation.”
Abramoff experienced a similar demand for anticipatory obedience as she pursued her ecology studies. “In our new proposals we would say things like ‘we study climate variability’ rather than ‘climate science’ or ‘soil health’ rather than ‘climate impacts on the carbon cycle in soil,’ which is my area of study,” Abramoff said.
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When Abramoff saw a Make Our Planet Great Again scholarship subsidized by French President Emmanuel Macron, she thought the name was hilarious and applied; to her delight, she got the job, moving to France from 2018 to 2021, working for the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement. During the COVID-19 pandemic she began to miss her family, however, and eventually decided to move back to the United States. By that time Trump was out of office, having lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, but Abramoff says this was not why she chose to come back.
Yet even though Trump won the 2024 presidential election and will soon return to power, Abramoff does not plan on fleeing this time. She believes she can do more good in this country.
“When I was in France I wasn’t as politically effective as I could have been in the United States,” Abramoff said. “I didn’t understand the political system as well. I didn’t have the same level of connections and understanding of how to make social and political change.”
According to Abramoff, America is where the action is because the United States is the single greatest historical emitter of fossil fuels and the Trump administration is going to “exacerbate our responsibility. The Trump administration is going to make the climate crisis worse, not better. I feel like I have a personal responsibility to stay here and push against that.”
Today Abramoff does this through her work at the Wintergreen Earth Science based in Kennebunk, Maine. Trenberth, by contrast, prefers to stay with his family in New Zealand. Indeed, that was a big reason why — unlike Abramoff — Trenberth ultimately decided to leave America for good.
“My daughter was born in New Zealand but left at age three,” Trenberth said. “She became quite successful and was a vice president at OppenheimerFunds. She too was upset with Trump and especially the associated misogyny, since she has two daughters, now five and seven years old, my grandchildren. Very courageously, she quit, just before Oppenheimerfunds folded, and found a position in Auckland, New Zealand.”
Between that and America’s gun violence epidemic, which Trenberth blames on poor regulations, the climate scientist felt his best option was to replant himself in New Zealand. At the same time, this does not mean he lacks any hope that things could improve in the country he once called home.
“The funding under the Biden administration was a real shot in the arm, but the Trump years are looming,” Trenberth said. “The issues relate to how much scientists can pursue things that may not have an immediate payoff, and how well it is all communicated.”
Abramoff also urged climate scientists and those who support them to not let themselves be scared into suppressing the truth.
“Don’t comply in advance,” Abramoff said. “Don’t comply without being asked. Don’t censor yourself before you’ve even been asked to censor yourself. Because I think a lot of regimes that desire to be authoritarians and desire to control public discourse, they use fear to silence us. They don’t even necessarily have to lift a finger.”
The common noctule bat (Nyctalus noctula) is a tiny golden-brown thing with just 12-to-18 inch (320 to 450 mm) wingspans, but they can travel long distances. They are found across North America, Europe and Asia, but don’t stay in one place. Like some birds, common noctules migrate long distances depending on the season, and scientists have long wondered how they do so despite the threats posed by predators and climate change, as well as high energy demands. A recent study in the journal Science reveals just how they do it: by literally surfing on the wind produced by incoming storms.
Using GPS and a network of “internet of things” trackers, researchers followed the movements of 71 female bats. They learned that noctules choose to migrate on relatively warm nights when they can rely on lower crosswind speeds and favorable tailwinds; as a result, they can travel more slowly and use less energy. Additionally, the scientists learned that bats are more likely to journey at nights with better wind support in the first half of the spring migration season (mid-April to early May), while pregnant females were more likely to be careful later in the season (mid-May to early June) when it is less feasible to surf on these weather systems.
Navigating storms isn’t the only or even biggest challenge these bats face —the researchers caution that human activity is endangering these bats. For example, bats are vulnerable to climate change, which is primarily caused by human activity. They also face perils unrelated to human activity, such as the dangerous disease white-nose syndrome.
“If action is not taken to address threats facing bat populations, they may not be around much longer to study,” study co-author University of Waterloo biologist Liam McGuire said in a statement.
Plastic pollution is a scourge on Earth because it doesn’t naturally degrade for decades or even centuries. When many plastics break down, they create tiny particles known as microplastics, which are less than five millimeters long. Their tiny size has allowed them to get into everything, from human blood and breastmilk to the food we eat, stretching to every corner of the globe.
Microplastics create two problems: We don’t fully understand how they impact human health and we don’t know how to get rid of them. A pair of recent studies sheds light on the issue, underscoring the potential risks of ingesting plastic as well as a potential solution to cleaning up the environment.
The first study, published in the journal TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry, looked at both microplastics and nanoplastics, or particles that are less than 1 micrometer long. After analyzing more than 900 available relevant research articles, the scholars learned that these tiny plastic particles tended to be highly concentrated in tissues with lesions, as compared to non-lesioned tissues. This suggests that plastic particles could be linked to inflammatory, cancerous and other diseases.
The study also noted that researchers have found microplastics and nanoplastics in a wide range of human tissues and bodily products: arteries, bone marrow, feces, gallstones, liver, lung tissue, placenta, saliva, semen, skin, sputum, testes and veins.
The authors noted that microplastics and nanoplastics “were also detected in human thrombi, and the [microplastics and nanoplastics] abundance was positively correlated with platelet levels.” Platelets are tiny cell fragments that coalesce to help the body stop bleeding, and the authors speculate this means the plastics “may accumulate in arteries, causing potential harm to the human circulatory system.”
They added, “The alarming link between [microplastics and nanoplastics] occurrence to human tissue lesions and even cancer has attracted scientists’ attention.”
The second study, published in the journal Science Advances, revealed a possible solution to cleaning up microplastics in the environment. Scientists from Wuhan University have invented a sponge made from squid chitlin and cotton-derived cellulose. Both organic compounds are known for eliminating pollution from wastewater, and the Wuhan researchers believe it can be used to manufacture a biodegradable anti-microplastics sponge.
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“The notorious behavior of microplastics is reflected by their long-term circulation and persistence in various water bodies,” the authors write. “The development of universal microplastic removal materials is regarded as a challenge.” They add that their biomass foam can absorb large quantities of microplastics. “Our work provides a scalable design strategy for building functional biomass materials and broadening their application for microplastic removal in real water.”
The sponge was tested in four aqueous environments: irrigation water, pond water, lake water and seawater. The new type of sponge removed up to 99.9% of microplastics in all of the samples.
In the long-term, scientists and public health experts hope to replace synthetic polymers — which are largely unregulated and can therefore contain dangerous chemicals — with biodegradable and regulated alternatives such as bioplastics like bio-polyethylene and lignin. If that happened, humanity could at least stop contributing to the problem of global plastic pollution, and then use inventions like this new sponge to clean up the remaining mess. That said, adoption of bioplastics has met resistance thanks to special interests like the fossil fuel industry.
Until an effective substitute is widely available on the market, it will be necessary for scientists and doctors to study how microplastics and nanoplastics impact human health. The authors of the lesions study note that experts are still uncertain whether these tiny plastic particles cross the blood-brain barrier or the gut-brain axis. If these potential hazards are accurate, they could contribute to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and inflammation. As such, they “require urgent attention, and additional monitoring experiments and epidemiological studies are needed to further elucidate the relevant mechanisms,” the authors warn.
As for the plastics being everywhere in the environment, scientists hope to one day clean it up so that other ecosystems do not suffer because of humanity’s pollution.
“The planet is under great threat from microplastics, and aquatic ecosystems are the first to suffer, as they provide convenient places for microplastics, which can combine with other contaminants and be ingested by multiple levels of organisms,” the authors write.
“These icy moons serve as our most promising targets for exploring the possibility of habitability, surpassing even Mars in my opinion,” Journaux added. He hopes that future scientists will be able to use their research after acquiring data from Europa, Ganymede and Titan as a result of impending exploration missions including NASA’s Europa Clipper, ESA’s Juice, and NASA’s Dragonfly. Until that happens, Earth-bound scientists will need to further flesh out the theoretical framework behind the cenotectic.