Zoë Schlanger

On Oct. 8, a consortium of 90 scientists from 40 countries published a report warning that inaction could lead to catastrophic climate change in the next 20 years. On the same day, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from MIT, Harvard, and other top American research institutions concluded that climate change has the potential to worsen mental health on a mass scale. And such changes may already be measurable in the US population.

Hurricane Michael just made landfall on the Florida panhandle as a Category 4 storm. Storms qualify for this category if they have sustained wind speeds of 130 to 156 miles per hour. Michael touched down midday Wednesday (Oct.10) with 155-mph winds, just shy of a Category 5, after being supercharged by unusually warm water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

In Europe, Mercedes is in trouble. This year, Switzerland banned registrations of its diesel vehicles and Germany found emissions-control “defeat devices” in 1 million cars manufactured by the company, sparking a mass recall.

Today, optical physicist Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize for her work on ultrashort lasers.

After the flood come the flood-borne creatures.

In a decision announced Friday (Sept. 21) in Rome, a group of UN experts tasked with deciding which chemicals should be globally banned under the Stockholm Convention decided to add PFOA and PFOS to the list.

As floodwaters from Hurricane Florence continue to rise in North Carolina, they’re overwhelming the infrastructure that separates two basins of coal ash from the public water supply. It now appears water containing arsenic, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals from at least one of the basins has leaked into Sutton Lake, breached a dam, and entered Cape Fear River. 

Another victim of Hurricane Florence: farm animals.

This story was updated Sept 20 at 3:20pm with latest hog lagoon failure numbers.

Update, Sept 18: More hog manure lagoons have flooded. Read the latest here.

Five days ago, the US National Hurricane Center predicted the spot where Hurricane Florence would make landfall. Their prediction turned out to be within two miles of where Florence actually touched down this morning (Sept 14).

They say if your business produces a lot of toxic waste, it’s best to put it in open pits near bodies of water that might flood.

Update, Sept 18: Hurricane Florence has flooded multiple pig manure lagoons in the state.

An organization called the Ocean Cleanup is set to launch one of the most ambitious ocean plastic-collection devices ever built off the coast of San Francisco this Saturday (Sept. 8). The launch is a test, but experts are already skeptical.

Yesterday (Sept. 6), a US House of Representatives hearing convened to ask why federal authorities haven’t regulated PFAS, a little-known class of chemicals that has sparked one of the biggest drinking-water contamination revelations in recent decades. The US Environmental Protection Agency has known for decades it could have a PFAS problem on its hands, and now hundreds of communities across the US are finding the chemicals in their water.

I used to quietly disdain open offices. How does anyone get anything done? I like my colleagues, they like each other, everyone is always talking. Plus, if any one of my officemates has a cough, the contagion appears to spread through the ranks at warp speed. I keep a lot of zinc tablets at my desk. My fears are backed up by science, and I’ve written about it before: The microbiome of an office—especially the kind without windows that open—can be a festering petri dish of everyone else’s insides.

“Plant blindness” is a modern phenomenon describing people’s inability to readily identify the species of plants they live among every day. It causes a lot of hand-wringing in the botany community. If people are blind to plants, they’re probably less invested in, say, saving them from extinction.

On August 31, 2017, the Arkema chemical facility in Crosby, Texas, a suburb of Houston, failed to contain the volatile compounds it housed. The 19.5 tons of organic peroxides stored on site needed to be kept refrigerated to avoid combusting but Hurricane Harvey had just inundated the facility, flooding the premises and knocking out the plant’s generators. Workers tried moving the chemicals to refrigerated trucks, but those were stalled in six feet of water.

Each time you breathe in, “it is nearly certain that you will inhale millions of solid particles and liquid droplets,” writes NASA in a release accompanying a visualization of satellite data showing how the Earth’s atmosphere looked on August 23, 2018.

It’s possible, a few decades from now, humans living in water-scarce places will find it ridiculous that we spent centuries just flushing away our watery sewage. Didn’t we know we could have been drinking it?

Exposure to a prevalent type of air pollution—particulate matter called PM2.5—takes one year off the average global lifespan, according to research published Wednesday (Aug. 22) in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters. But that air pollution is not evenly distributed; for people living in the most-polluted areas of Asia and Africa, the situation is worse—life expectancy for them drops between one year and two months to one year and 11 months.

In the recent past, humans thought of freshwater as a constant. Sometimes there was drought, and sometimes there was flood, but water levels always returned to normal eventually. So we built dams and reservoirs, hulking infrastructure they imagined as a bulwark against the pains of any short-term variation, on the assumption that the dry times would end and the basins would refill.

“This is absolutely abysmal,” David Gutzler said in March 2018, speaking to an auditorium full of US and Mexican water engineers and hydrologists in El Paso, Texas. He was talking about the state of the snow in Colorado at the time, the snow that would melt and feed the Rio Grande in summer. There wasn’t enough.

The link between air pollution and premature death is widely accepted by the scientific community. And a new Trump administration rule is set to cause between 470 and 1,400 more of those pollution-related early deaths per year in the US by 2030.