This is about new things. Not just rehashed old ones!

"Chris Herd, curator of the university’s meteorite collection, received samples of the space rock so he could classify it. As he was examining it, something unusual caught his eye — some parts of the sample weren’t identifiable by a microscope. He then sought advice from Andrew Locock, head of the university’s Electron Microprobe Laboratory, since Locock has experience describing new minerals.

 "Herd, a professor in the university’s department of Earth and atmospheric sciences..."

Which University? I looked up Chris Herd, and a PhD was at the University of Alberta in a similar position.

This CNN article gives us the names of the 2 new minerals which aren't found naturally on earth. They have been created in laboratories, however.

1. Elaliite — derives from the space object itself, which is called the “El Ali” meteorite since it was found near the town of El Ali in central Somalia.

Herd named the second one 

2. Elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, vice president of Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative.

"The International Mineralogical Association’s approval of the two new minerals in November of this year “indicates that the work is robust,” said Oliver Tschauner, a mineralogist and professor of research in the department of geoscience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Whenever you find a new mineral, it means that the actual geological conditions, the chemistry of the rock, was different than what’s been found before,” Herd said. “That’s what makes this exciting: In this particular meteorite you have two officially described minerals that are new to science.”

"Both new minerals are phosphates of iron, Tschauner said. A phosphate is a salt or ester of a phosphoric acid.

“Phosphates in iron meteorites are secondary products: They form through oxidation of phosphides … which are rare primary components of iron meteorites,” he said via email. “Hence, the two new phosphates tell us about oxidation processes that occurred in the meteorite material. It remains to be seen if the oxidation occurred in space or on Earth, after the fall, but as far as I know, many of these meteorite phosphates formed in space. In either case, water is probably the reactant that caused the oxidation.”

"The findings were presented in November at the University of Alberta’s Space Exploration Symposium. The revelations “broaden our perspective on the natural materials that can be found and can be formed in the solar system,” Rubin said.

"The El Ali meteorite the minerals came from appears to have been sent to China in search of a buyer, Herd said.

"Meanwhile, the researchers are still analyzing the minerals — and potentially a third one — to find out what the conditions were in the meteorite when the space rock formed. And newly discovered minerals could have exciting implications for the future, he added.

A portion of El Ali Meteorite from Somalia, photo by Nick Gessler, Duke University

Some magic

I'm a big fan of Maria Popova, who writes/edits and produces a weekly inspirational literary column, "The Marginalian."

 "To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough. A bright gift of chance amid the cold dark sublime of pure spacetime. A triumphal something against the staggering cosmic odds of nothingness.

Stationed here on this one and only home planet, we have opposed our thumbs to build microscopes and telescopes, pressing our curiosity against the eyepiece, bending our complex consciousness around what we see, longing to peer a little more deeply into the mystery of life with the mystery of us.

Maria Popova, "The Marginalian"

Here's a free video of "The Universe in Verse."  It may not be available after a certain date. 

SEASON 5: APRIL 16, 2022 (SANTA CRUZ, CA)

For the fifth annual Universe in Verse, I joined forces with my astronomer friend and three–time alumna Natalie Batalha (who led NASA’s Kepler and its triumphant discovery of more than 4,000 potential cradles for life beyond Earth, and now heads an inspired astrobiology initiative as her work on the search for life continues at UC Santa Cruz) to explore this longing through a kaleidoscope of vantage points.

In a majestic outdoor amphitheater built into a former quarry in the redwoods, we gathered to celebrate the marvel and mystery of life, from the creaturely to the cosmic, with stories from the history of science and our search for truth, illustrated with poems spanning centuries of human thought and feeling — poems about entropy and evolution, about trees and mushrooms, about consciousness and dark matter, about the birth of flowers and the death of stars — composed by a constellation of extraordinary humans, from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks, and performed by a constellation of extraordinary humans: writers Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay, musicians Zoë Keating and Joan As Police Woman, artist and Design Matters creator Debbie Millman, artist and DrawTogether creator Wendy MacNaughton, poet Diane Ackerman, cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander, cognitive scientist, writer, and Dog Cognition Lab director Alexandra Horowitz, physicist and writer Alan Lightman, and On Being creator Krista Tippett (my largehearted collaborator in the Universe in Verse animated interlude season below, who long ago kindled my friendship with Natalie).

All proceeds from the show were split halfway between a new scholarship at UCSC, honoring the life and legacy of astronomer and search-for-life pioneer Frank Drake, and The Nature Conservancy, whose tireless work stewards and protects the broadest community of life across our own irreplaceable world.

Nations agree to preserve 30 percent of nature by 2030

 

Nations agree to preserve 30 percent of nature by 2030

Here’s a quick rundown of what came from this year’s biodiversity conference.

It was a wild year for the UN Biodiversity Conference, this year known as COP15. The international event brought delegates from more than 190 countries to Montreal to discuss the steps the world needs to take to safeguard its species and ecosystems.

The conference was pushed back for two years due to the pandemic and had originally been slated to take place in Kunming, China. It was eventually moved to Montreal, which hosts the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) office. The conference saw protests from a group of local anti-capitalists, a walkout from countries concerned over funding, and many hours where countries around the globe debated the finer points of how best to preserve biodiversity.

Ultimately, the parties agreed to adopt the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). “The fact that they actually arrived at the agreement is in and of itself really momentous. A couple of weeks ago, that was looking tenuous,” Will Gartshore, senior director for policy and government affairs at WWF-US, told Ars.

Biodiversity is in crisis, with around 69 percent of wildlife populations having declined between 1970 and 2018. The new agreement is meant to reverse that trend.

“The new GBF is remarkable because we know our means of implementation must be stronger, and that this includes more financing on the table, especially for developing countries," UN Environmental Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen said in a press release. “The new GBF is different because we know that we need to have the ability to do better in ensuring a fair and equitable share of the benefits we derive from genetic resources.”

What’s in the agreement?

The GBF includes four goals and 23 targets to protect biodiversity by 2030. Perhaps the biggest of these goals is the 30x30 Conservation Plan, which requires “effective conservation and management” of at least 30 percent of the world’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems—with more focus placed on biodiverse and other vital areas.

n terms of money, the GBF stipulates that the world’s governments “phase out or reform” subsidies that harm biodiversity, with cuts on the scale of at least $500 billion per year, and increase incentives for sustainable use of ecosystems and conservation efforts. Countries also agreed to mobilize at least $200 billion in public and private funding for domestic and international biodiversity efforts.

The countries also agreed that developed nations would increase funding to developing countries to at least $20 billion per year by 2025, and to $30 billion per year by 2030. For instance, Canada is making new funding that would put its economic support for these efforts in developing nations over CA$1.5 billion (around $1.1 billion).

Now the work starts

Marcel Kok is an environment and development program leader and senior researcher at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and attended COP15. He said it was good to see representatives from sub-national governments (like cities) and the private sector attending the event. He said that all aspects of society need to coordinate, as national governments have had difficulty achieving their goals on their own. He noted that there has always been some business and municipal government presence at these events, but “now at this COP, their engagement is at a much higher level than we've seen before,” he told Ars.

Gartshore said that he was happy to see the nations agree to conserve 30 percent of terrestrial and aquatic habitats by 2030, but there also needs to be action on the parts of both the world’s governments and also the private sector. In the past, countries have missed their targets for similar international agreements. For instance, many of the Aichi Targets, set out at COP10, were only partially met by 2020, the agreement’s target year.

Gartshore added that he was happy to see more funding for developing nations, as implementing many of the goals will fall on their shoulders—many biodiversity hotspots are located in developing nations—and the matter of funding was a sticking point in the negotiations.

“I think our overarching impression here is that this is a really good and potentially transformational agreement, but it's all going to be in terms of implementation,” Gartshore said.

By DOUG JOHNSON - 12/20/2022, 4:26 PM in "Ars  TEchnica" Link including comments

Well, it's about time...

 From Treehugger Newsletter Dec. 21, 2022.

Puerto Rico Sues Oil Majors Over Hurricane Damage

First-ever U.S. climate change lawsuit accusing fossil fuel companies of racketeering.

By 

Eduardo Garcia

  Published December 21, 2022

Sixteen municipalities in Puerto Rico filed a lawsuit claiming that major oil companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell are financially responsible for the damage caused by Irma and Maria, two catastrophic hurricanes that pummeled the Caribbean island in 2017.

The class action lawsuit notes that according to the scientific consensus, fossil fuel emissions are to blame for the climate crisis that has increased the global average temperature by 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit). 

Much of this additional heat has been absorbed by the oceans and warmer waters are leading to more destructive and wetter tropical storms that have devastated Caribbean nations in recent years. According to official data, Maria killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and caused $107 billion in damages.1

"Puerto Rico was hit by the perfect storm and is the ultimate victim of global warming," said Marc Grossman, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in a press release. "This is an opportunity to finally get justice for all that Puerto Rico sacrificed in 2017."

States, cities, and counties in the U.S. have filed around 20 cases to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the climate crisis. 

These cases are similar to one another because they all claim that fossil fuel companies misled the public by promoting products that they knew were causing climate harm. However, the Puerto Rico lawsuit is unique because it is the first to include claims under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and, as such, it was brought in federal court instead of a state court.

Puerto Rico could potentially receive tens of billions if the case succeeds and a victory would set a precedent that would allow other jurisdictions to file RICO cases against fossil fuel companies.

It could take years for the case to unravel but a good omen is that it bears similarities with some of the RICO cases that were successfully brought against the tobacco industry in the past, said Korey Silverman-Roati, a climate law fellow at Columbia University’s Sabine Center for Climate Law.

“There is a key parallel with the tobacco industry because the plaintiffs argue that this is an industrywide effort to convince the public that dangerous, harmful products are not dangerous, even though the industry knows that they're dangerous,” Silverman-Roati told Treehugger.

Oil companies are ultimately responsible for the climate destruction that Puerto Rico suffered in 2017, the lawsuit argues, because they marketed and sold fossil fuels that are causing global warming, even though they were aware of the dangers since at least the 1970s—independent media outlets such as Inside Climate News and Drilled have thoroughly reported on this decades-long deceit.

“But instead of transparency, the defendants engaged in a pseudo-scientific campaign to sow doubt about climate change and protect their monopoly over fossil fuel production,” the plaintiffs' legal team said. 

Although oil companies have long known that warmer ocean waters would supercharge hurricanes, they continued “producing, promoting, refining, marketing, and selling fossil fuel products” that have increased the frequency of destructive storms like Irma and Maria, which caused “apocalyptic damage” to Puerto Rico, the lawsuit says. 

The future of the lawsuit is uncertain since the defendants will likely use multiple tactics to delay or block the case, such as asking that the case be dismissed or arguing that this should not be a class action lawsuit. Potential Supreme Court decisions could also derail the case.

But climate litigation has seen some huge victories in recent times, such as the May ruling against Shell in the Netherlands and a case brought by a French municipality exposed to sea level rise and flooding that concluded with a court ordering the government to slash emissions. 

Although it is hard to compare climate litigation in different countries, plaintiffs in the Puerto Rico case “may be encouraged by seeing other courts hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the climate harms they're causing with their products,” said Silverman-Roati.

An Indigenous woman speaks

 Another blogger shared this little video, a TEDx talk. I hope you enjoy it. 

From Treehugger on the Earthshot Prize

The five recipients weren't flown to the U.S. due to carbon footprint concerns. So, celebrities came in their place.

By

Katherine Martinko

  Published December 6, 2022 

On December 2, a star-studded crowd gathered in Boston to watch Prince William present the winners of his second annual Earthshot Prize. The guests were there in person, but the winners attended virtually.

Each of the five winners received a £1-million ($1.23 million) prize for their work in "ground-breaking solutions to five of the greatest environmental challenges facing our planet." These five challenges, or "Earthshots", were divided into the following categories: Protect and Restore Nature; Clean Our Air; Revive Our Oceans; Build a Waste-free World; and Fix Our Climate.

While the awards ceremony itself raised some serious environmental questions (more on that below), the winners themselves are well-deserving. They work on a wide range of fascinating and innovative projects that are sure to make a difference in the world. 

Clean Our Air: Mukuru Clean Stoves, Kenya

This female-founded social enterprise designs, produces, and distributes cleaner-burning stoves to low-income households in Kenya. It's named after the third largest slum in the country. 

Cooking over open fires and burning solid fuel is notoriously bad for human health, exposing families to air pollution levels that far exceed World Health Organization recommendations. Using a cleaner stove can reduce fuel consumption by 30-60%, reduce toxic smoke emissions by 50-90%, and lower risk of burns among children under 5 by 40%.1 

Mukuru's stove are made from upcycled waste metal and burn processed biomaterial made from charcoal, wood, and sugarcane, rather than more dangerous solid fuels. The stoves only cost US$10, making them an affordable option for many households.

Protect and Restore Nature: Kheyti, India

Kheyti makes simple greenhouses for subsistence farmers to protect their crops from pests and inclement weather and to improve yields. It's a simple yet effective strategy that has already had dramatic results for over 1,000 farmers in India. Kheyti offers training and support to ensure the greenhouses are used properly.2

"Plants in the greenhouses require 98% less water than those outdoors and yields are seven times higher. 90% cheaper than standard greenhouses, Kheyti's solution is more than doubling farmers' incomes, helping them invest more in their farms and their families. Using less water and fewer pesticides, they are protecting the planet too."

Revive Our Oceans: Indigenous Women of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

A group known as the Queensland Indigenous Women Rangers Network is working to train the next generation of female rangers. It strives to establish a new approach to natural conservation by passing on Indigenous knowledge through stories and shared wisdom. 

From the Earthshot press release: "The data they have collected has given us critical insight into one of the most important ecosystems on the planet. As custodians of the land, the rangers have also protected sites of great cultural and spiritual significance."

Build a Waste-Free World: Notpla, United Kingdom

Notpla has been on Treehugger's radar for a while. This company started out making edible water pouches called Ooho and is now focused on seaweed's potential as a fully biodegradable alternative to single-use plastics. Its innovative product "can be used to create a range of packaging products, such as a bubble to hold liquids, a coating for food containers, and a paper for the cosmetic and fashion industry." It's cool stuff—and a definite game-changer.

Fix Our Climate: 44.01, Oman

Named after the molecular weight of carbon dioxide, Oman-based 44.01 is in the business of making rocks—transforming CO2 into literal rocks that can be stored permanently underground. This happens through a process of remineralization: 

"Peridotite mineralization is a natural process, but in nature it can take many years to mineralize even a small amount of CO2. 44.01 accelerates the process by pumping carbonated water into seams of peridotite deep underground. Unlike carbon 'storage', which involves burying CO2 underground in disused oil wells or aquifers, mineralization does not require long-term monitoring or insurance, and ultimately makes the process more cost-effective, scalable, and safer."

44.01 plans to remineralize 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2040.

An Odd Awards Ceremony

No doubt the hefty prize will go a long way toward helping each of these companies and organizations achieve their noble goals, as will the guidance on scaling solutions for a broader reach; however, one can't help but wonder at how the ceremony was organized—and who took priority. 

The strangest thing was that none of the award winners was present in Boston. A decision had been made not to fly them to the United States in order to reduce the event's carbon footprint. Instead, "all finalists were filmed on home turf, joining the ceremony via a live video feed."

This might be lauded as a smart move in the fight against climate change, except that William opted to fly in all sorts of other celebrities, presumably to glamorize the event and make viewers more keen to tune in. According to a press release, attendees included Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, business executive Indra Nooyi, Chadian activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, and Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki, as well as musicians and actors Annie Lennox, Billie Eilish, Catherine O'Hara, Chloe x Halle, Clara Amfo, Daniel Dae Kim, Ellie Goulding, Rami Malek, and Shailene Woodley.

Online critics appeared most annoyed by the fact that David Beckham flew from Qatar, where he's taken on a role as an ambassador for that country during the World Cup, just to present an award to a winner who wasn't even there. 

Hopefully the Earthshot organizers will rethink their approach for future ceremonies. It seems more logical to see the proud winners than random celebrities. If all goes according to plan, the prizes will continue to be handed out annually for another 8 years—part of a decade deemed crucial for keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

As I pointed out in 2020, when the Earthshot prize was first announced, I don't think solutions are what's missing. We have plenty of those floating around. What's lacking is implementation—both the ability and the will to do so. I'd also like to know how the previous year's winners are doing at scaling up, and whether the Earthshot Prize and its illustrious board have made a significant difference in their work. An annual recap would be helpful and might add credibility.