For almost a decade, farmer Qin Bin, 50, has toiled his plot, growing peaches and dragon fruits for sale to visiting tourists at his orchard on the outskirts of the Chinese megacity of Chongqing.. The extreme heat has forced Qin and fellow farmers to work odd hours -- it's simply too hot to toil during the day as the mercury pushes past 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).
A two-week negotiating session on a treaty to protect the high seas wraps up Friday, with UN observers holding their breath that the long-stalled deal can cross the finish line.. "I think they have made a lot of progress in the last two weeks on issues that were very controversial," said Klaudija Cremers, a researcher at the IDDRI think tank, which like multiple other NGOs has a seat with observer status at the negotiations.
Living in one of the poorest parts of the Middle East and facing some of the region's highest fuel costs, Palestinians in Gaza are burning plastic to make affordable diesel.. "We use this diesel because it's half the cost of the Israeli equivalent," he said.
The months-old James Webb Space Telescope has added another major scientific discovery to its growing list: detecting for the first time signs of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system.. The Hubble and Spitzer telescopes had already detected water vapor, sodium and potassium in WASP-39's atmosphere, but carbon dioxide can now be added to that list thanks to Webb and its NIRSpec instrument.
The first crewed flight of Boeing's space capsule Starliner is scheduled for February 2023, the company and NASA announced Thursday, as the United States seeks to secure a second way for its astronauts to reach the International Space Station.. After a series of hiccups in its space program that led to serious delays, including a 2019 flight that did not reach the ISS, Boeing finally managed to send the gumdrop-shaped capsule to the station in May -- without a crew.
The number of forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon hit a nearly 15-year high this week, according to official figures that provided the latest warning on the advancing destruction of the world's biggest rainforest.. Satellite monitoring detected 3,358 fires on Monday, August 22, the highest number for any 24-hour period since September 2007, according to the Brazilian space agency, INPE. The number was nearly triple that recorded on the so-called "Day of Fire" -- August 10, 2019 -- when farmers launched a coordinated plan to burn huge amounts of felled rainforest in the northern state of Para.
Many millions of people in the tropics could be exposed to dangerous heat for half the year by 2100 even if humanity manages to meet climate goals, researchers warned Thursday.. They found that many people in tropical regions could face dangerous heat levels for half the year by the end of the century, even if the world limits temperature rises to the Paris climate deal goal of less than two degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
Australia's catastrophic "Black Summer" bushfires significantly affected the hole in the Earth's ozone layer, according to a new report published Friday.. The report, which appeared in the Nature journal "Scientific Reports", traced a link from the unprecedented smoke released by the fires to the ozone hole above Antarctica.
In chaotic and crowded subways, middle-aged and older residents of Chinese megacity Chongqing are taking shelter from the country's hottest summer on record -- the air conditioning and subterranean cool providing respite from the scorching temperatures outside.. Desperate to escape the heat, hundreds of middle-aged and older residents have headed to the depths of the city's subway stations, whiling away the hours smoking, playing cards and napping.
A crippling drought exacerbated by a record heatwave has spread across half of China and reached the normally frigid Tibetan Plateau, according to official data released ahead of more searing temperatures on Thursday.. A chart from the National Climate Centre showed Wednesday that swathes of southern China -- including the Tibetan Plateau -- were experiencing "severe" to "extraordinary" drought conditions.
