By ISABELLA O’MALLEY, Associated Press

Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a study published Wednesday.

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Planet-warming emissions from 180 major cement, oil and gas producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study, which was published in the journal Nature and examined a set of 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023. The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level.

Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57% of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, the study found.

“It just shows that it’s not that many actors … who are responsible for a very strong fraction of all emissions,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who was one of the study’s contributors.

The set of heat waves in the study came from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, which the researchers described as the most widely used global disaster repository. The Nature study examined all of the heat waves in the database from 2000 to 2023 except for a few that weren’t suitable for their analysis.

Global warming made all 213 of the heat waves examined more likely, the study found. Out of those, 55 were 10,000 times more likely to have happened than they would have been before industrialization began accelerating in the 1800s. The calculation is equivalent to saying those 55 heat waves “would have been virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, the authors wrote.

“Many of these heat waves had very strong consequences,” said Seneviratne. She said the series of heat waves that struck Europe in 2022 that was linked to tens of thousands of deaths sticks out in her mind as one of the events with particularly grave consequences.

FILE – Nicole Brown wipes sweat from her face while setting up her beverage stand near the National Mall on July 22, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard, File)

Scientists calculate how carbon emitters influence heat waves

Climate scientists can use complex computer programs and historic weather data to calculate the connection between extreme weather events and the planet-warming pollutants humans emit. Climate change attribution studies often focus on how climate change influenced a specific weather event, but the scientists say this new Nature study is unique because it focused on the extent to which cement and fossil fuel producers have contributed to heat waves.

“They are drawing on a pretty well-established field of attribution science now, which has existed for about 20 years,” said Chris Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. Callahan has used similar attribution methodologies in his research and said the new study is appropriate and high-quality.

Scientists say the new study could be taken into consideration in legal cases. Globally, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against fossil fuel companies by climate activists, American state governments and others seeking to hold the companies accountable for their role in climate change.

For example, Vermont and New York have passed laws that aim to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their emissions and the damage caused.

“For a while, it was argued that any individual contributor to climate change was making too small or too diffuse a contribution to ever be linked to any particular impact. And this emerging science, both this paper and others, is showing that that’s not true,” said Callahan.

FILE – A tourist uses a fan to shade her face from the sun while waiting to watch the Changing of the Guard ceremony outside Buckingham Palace, during hot weather in London, July 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College climate scientist who wasn’t involved in the study, said the findings provide insight into the origins of the heat waves and how potential hazards from them could be minimized in the future.

“As we contend with these losses, the assessment of who or what’s responsible is going to become really important,” Mankin said. “I think there are some really appropriate questions, like who pays to recoup our losses, given that we’re all being damaged by it.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By Summer Ballentine, The Detroit News

Electric vehicles in the United States produce fewer greenhouse gases than gas automobiles, even when factoring in battery-making emissions, limited range during bad weather and coal-fired power grids, according to a new analysis.

The University of Michigan study, published in an American Chemical Society journal, compared projected lifetime emissions of battery, hybrid and gas-powered vehicles from the 2025 model year. On average, gas-powered vehicles will produce 70% more greenhouse gases than EVs with 300-mile charging ranges.

The data include emissions from battery and auto production, a roughly 200,000-mile vehicle lifespan and final recycling or other disposal of the vehicle. Data show EVs create less pollution than plug-in hybrids and other hybrids; plug-in hybrids are more environmentally friendly than other hybrids; hybrids create less pollution than gas-powered vehicles; and smaller vehicles of any powertrain are less emission-intensive than SUVs and pickups.

Pickups, SUVs, sedans and other vehicles used for personal transportation make up roughly 16% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, according to the study, and individuals’ vehicle choices “will play a significant role” in reducing pollutants.

“Yes, there are differences in terms of how much benefit but again, we want to make it clear that our study shows advantages everywhere in the country,” said Greg Keoleian, a study author and co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, “which demonstrates that consumers everywhere in the country play a key role in addressing climate pollution and in lowering climate pollution.”

The adoption challenge

Widespread EV adoption lags in the United States, where battery-powered models make up roughly 8% of the market share and account for at most about 5% of vehicles in use. Analysts expect a surge in sales through the end of September, when legislation signed by President Donald Trump will end $7,500 tax credits for buyers and lessees. After that, automakers are bracing for a steep drop-off in sales, at least temporarily.

While many auto industry analysts and insiders still have faith battery-powered automobiles will dominate sometime in the future, the short-term fate of electrification has been shaken by “openly antagonistic” policies enacted under Trump, said Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at auto communications firm Telemetry.

Most recently, Trump’s administration announced plans to scrap federal rules on vehicle tailpipe emissions, which have been a driving force in pressuring automakers to electrify their fleets.

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“Clean energy incentives, tax credits, and regulations enacted during the previous administration were designed to build a new landscape for American manufacturing by fostering technological advances and encouraging domestic manufacturing,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Ann Arbor, said in a statement.

“They worked, and led to a surge in EV investments, driving sales, lowering costs for consumers, and creating thousands of good-paying union jobs. The rollback of these incentives and regulations reverses all that progress and puts us on a dangerous path.”

Buyer concerns about high sticker prices, limited access to quick charging, and anxiety about how far an EV will go before its battery needs a boost have also limited sales growth.

U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, said in a statement that forcing automakers to electrify faster than market demand is not a viable policy: “While I am not against EVs or reducing transportation emissions, we must not implement misguided regulations that limit consumer choice or exacerbate the pollution they are trying to address.

“Even after the Biden-Harris administration’s Green New Deal giveaways and costly regulations, electric vehicles continued to sit unpurchased on auto dealership lots due to a lack of consumer demand,” Walberg added. “Government mandates that force the mass production of EVs, only for them to sit idly on lots, don’t help with emissions reductions — they make it worse.”Even without government pressure or incentives, Abuelsamid said, the industry will move toward electrification.

“People are not going to stop buying EVs just because Trump says they’re bad,” he said. “Manufacturers, despite slowing some product rollout, are still producing EVs and are going to continue producing EVs.”

Still, recent developments demonstrate the industry’s slow and uneven march toward electrification. Last month, Ford Motor Co. said it would invest $2 billion at its Louisville Assembly Plant to build a $30,000 electric midsize pickup while delaying the start of production at a Tennessee battery plant until 2027. And this week, General Motors Co. said it would temporarily reduce planned production of EVs at plants in Kansas and Tennessee because of soft demand.

‘Overwhelming’ benefit

A University of Michigan-made calculator based on the study’s data allows users to compare greenhouse gas emissions between two vehicles on a county-by-county basis. The local power supply matters. Fossil fuels such as natural gas and oil, among the top power sources in Michigan, create more pollution. Wind, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear power are considered cleaner.

But overall, driving an EV is still greener, even in coal-heavy areas.

“Study after study has shown that driving an electric vehicle, no matter the electricity grid mix, is significantly cleaner than a gasoline vehicle,” Kathy Harris, Natural Resources Defense Council director for clean vehicles, said in a statement. “And, unlike other cars, electric vehicles actually get cleaner over time — as the dirtiest sources of electricity retire and new, clean energy gets hooked up to the grid. A cleaner grid means a cleaner EV.”

Driving an EV sedan in some counties in hydroelectric-powered Oregon could mean a roughly 90% cut in emissions compared to a gas-powered SUV, according to an example from the study. In coal-powered Appalachian counties, EV sedans are still expected to produce 60% less in greenhouse gases than traditional gas-powered SUVs.

While EVs do not produce tailpipe emissions when driven, making the batteries is emissions-intensive. But those emissions pale in comparison to pollution caused by gas-powered vehicles on the road, according to the data.

“We acknowledge there are tradeoffs,” Keoleian said. “But the overall benefit is overwhelming.”

Previous research based on 2020 model-year vehicles estimated that driving certain gas vehicles was better for the environment in about 1-2% of U.S. counties, considering the local power grid.

The University of Michigan research is based on the assumption that, over time, the U.S. power grid will increasingly rely on renewable energy sources rather than fossil fuels. Keoleian said utilities already are planning on increased demand from EV charging and are adjusting to provide more power.

“When you actually look at total life cycle emissions for vehicle manufacturing and production and then energy used through vehicle lifetime and end-of-use processing of vehicles through recycling and disposal, EVs always come out ahead,” Abuelsamid said. “Every single time.”

©2025 www.detroitnews.com. Visit at detroitnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has uncovered rocks in a dry river channel that may hold potential signs of ancient microscopic life, scientists reported Wednesday.

They stressed that in-depth analysis is needed of the sample gathered there by Perseverance — ideally in labs on Earth — before reaching any conclusions.

Roaming Mars since 2021, the rover cannot directly detect life. Instead, it carries a drill to penetrate rocks and tubes to hold the samples gathered from places judged most suitable for hosting life billions of years ago. The samples are awaiting retrieval to Earth — an ambitious plan that’s on hold as NASA seeks cheaper, quicker options.

Calling it an “exciting discovery,” a pair of scientists who were not involved in the study — SETI Institute’s Janice Bishop and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Mario Parente — were quick to point out that non-biological processes could be responsible.

“That’s part of the reason why we can’t go so far as to say, ‘A-ha, this is proof positive of life,’’’ lead researcher Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University told The Associated Press. “All we can say is one of the possible explanations is microbial life, but there could be other ways to make this set of features that we see.”

This image provided by NASA shows the 360-degree view of a region on Mars called “Bright Angel,” captured on June 12, 2024 by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover and is made up of 346 individual images that were stitched together after being sent back to Earth. (NASA via AP)

Either way, Hurowitz said it’s the best, most compelling candidate yet in the rover’s search for potential signs of long-ago life. It was the 25th sample gathered; the tally is now up to 30, with six more to go.

“It would be amazing to be able to demonstrate conclusively that these features were formed by something that was alive on another planet billions of years ago, right?” Hurowitz said. But even if that’s not the case, it’s “a valuable lesson in all of the ways that nature can conspire to fool us.”

Collected last summer, the sample is from reddish, clay-rich mudstones in Neretva Vallis, a river channel that once carried water into Jezero Crater. This outcrop of sedimentary rock, known as the Bright Angel formation, was surveyed by Perseverance’s science instruments before the drill came out.

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Along with organic carbon, a building block of life, Hurowitz and his team found minuscule specks, dubbed poppy seeds and leopard spots, that were enriched with iron phosphate and iron sulfide. On Earth, these chemical compounds are the byproducts when microorganisms chomp down on organic matter.

The findings appeared in the journal Nature.

Ten of the titanium sample tubes were placed on the Martian surface a few years ago as a backup to the rest aboard the rover, the main target in NASA’s still fuzzy return mission.

When Perseverance launched in 2020, NASA expected the samples back on Earth by the early 2030s. But that date slipped into the 2040s as costs swelled to $11 billion, stalling the retrieval effort.

Until the samples are transported off of Mars by robotic spacecraft or astronauts, scientists will have to rely on Earthly stand-ins and lab experiments to evaluate the feasibility of ancient Martian life, according to Hurowitz.

On Earth, microorganisms commonly interact with minerals in Antarctic lakes.

“There is no evidence of microbes on Mars today, but if any had been present on ancient Mars, they too might have reduced sulfate minerals to form sulfides in such a lake at Jezero Crater,” Bishop and Parente wrote in an accompanying editorial.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from the first chapter of Life in the Time of Hurricanes by Rod Davis, out this month from TCU Press. It is republished here with permission.

“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Tuesday, August 23

From the fresh gravel path on the Moon Walk atop the ancient city’s levee, Duane McGuane watched the early-morning produce trucks clump around the French Market below. Drunks and derelicts that had survived another night mingled among the rigs like vampires. He wanted them all to go home. They never did. He turned to face the river. A grayish cast to the far horizon meant storm clouds were piling up out in the Gulf, and the Mississippi already had begun to moan. The crescent that gave the city its nickname was full of gambling barges and tankers, and it wouldn’t be long until they were dispatched seaward or secured down on the docks of the river and the bayous. Early wind gusts churned the waters. Flashes of sun sparkled green, purple, and gold on choppy slicks of oil. In them, Duane saw Mardi Gras and king cakes and the tattoo on Maybelle’s back. His focus refixed itself upon one of the ferries that ran back and forth day after day from Algiers Point to Canal Street. He watched it a long time. He felt very serene.

In that moment, that precise, discrete temporal demarcation, Duane saw what was to come—the great movement, the urge of migration he knew was the lot of his species and not just his personal burden. He heard the voice come from inside, and it was that of a great fierce dog atop a jagged boulder in the Himalayas howling of distant chaos. The howl was like a marvelous force inside his entire head and body and no one knew of it. But he did, and it had breached his world and he was going where it led.

A burst of wind blew bits of earth and litter across his cheek. Duane brushed his face and looked out to the southeast. So late in the season, this was likely a bad one, if it came this way. He turned his back to the river to face the city again; the place he loved, hated, exalted, and reviled. He pondered otra vez the aforementioned produce trucks and drunks, and now also from the corner of his vision a Vietnamese waitress in black pants and white shirt at Café du Monde shaking out a tablecloth on the sidewalk below. Also, in that exact second, he watched, from another angle still, his entire being as if viewed from the heavens, poised neatly on the Moon Walk, the impetuous idea of jumping into Old Man River just to see if he could survive the strong current having passed and morphing into something much finer.

Thus now did he see his new life, all at once and stretched out to infinity, and in that spectacle did Duane McGuane join the ranks of the prophets, and he had in mind a certain redoubt in Texas. From there they would begin it all, the fierce, stray, lost dogs of his acquaintance and yet of his fortune to come. They would howl from within that place where they would no longer have to deal with any of this shit.

Maybelle woke up from her nap later than usual, which meant she would be later than usual to work, a bent toward tardiness that disturbed her less than it might in others more inclined to guilt. You could include her boss in that latter conglomerate of sad and desperate clock-watchers. Also she could be cranky. Part of her wanted Arturo to just fire her and be done with it. But the part of her that didn’t—that saw getting fired as the first stage in a domino progression that led to getting bounced from her duplex and sundry other privations of unemployment—made her bolt upright from bed, shake her head once to kick the gears into motion, and proceed with her ablutions.

When that was done and a rice cake and Community coffee in her stomach, she blew out the door and hurried to her old Toyota on the narrow street of small brick houses about a half step ahead of receivership. Most of the houses didn’t have garages, so all the cars were crammed together on the curb, and it took her a good five minutes to wheedle herself free of the cramped space defined in front by an old Caddy and in back by a Dodge van with a bondo-packed fender. Except for the weather, it was looking like “just another day,” as that Paul McCartney song went, for the best waitress at Arturo’s, “the finest restaurant in the Irish Channel,” as Arturo’s ads went, no sense of irony at all in that man.

But she tried not to fault him any more than he deserved. Her own shortcomings were her long-term future, as her mother had put it. Maybelle herself had a sense of irony—but those were hard words nonetheless. We didn’t send you to Tulane to be a waitress or work in a department store or clerk for those communist lawyers in Baton Rouge was the rest of her mother’s verdict. The response—Then what did you send me to Tulane for?—was no longer answered, only sighed upon. But the department store wasn’t bad, the argument usually went, because it was an entry point to becoming a buyer and then a ladder into management, which of course was what a degree from Tulane was for. That and marrying the right boy so she could settle in over by Audubon Park on Henry Clay or maybe even St. Charles. Which scenario her mother always duly denied, thus confirming it as truth. They never even talked about the storefront poverty law center work two years ago and all that had ensued from that. Sometimes Maybelle did think upon it herself, and every so often she drove up the River Road, the slow way, to William’s grave and left some flowers, for him, for them. But that seemed long ago and a certain amount of regrouping was in order.

She went into the back of the restaurant and took off her summer smock and put on the black shift and low-heeled shoes of her station. She didn’t really have a locker, just a hook on the wall on which to hang her stuff. A hooker, she frequently said to herself long after the joke had gone flat. Her purse went under the cash register out front, where she could keep an eye on it. As she disrobed, Benny, the other waiter for the night, unless it got busy, came in. He already had on his white shirt and dark pants, but they had changed in front of each other before and it didn’t matter because he was gay, but in truth Maybelle wouldn’t have cared anyway. Sexual interludes were far from her mind. And her, thirty-three years old!

It wasn’t yet five, and a Tuesday, so nobody had come in, not even the early conventioneers. Benny went around fixing and fussing at the dozen tables in the dining room. Bertie, the creepy guy from New Zealand, cleaned off the marble counter in the long, dark bar and lined up the glasses hanging upside down overhead. He would get the first wave of customers, and he would lubricate them.

Maybelle waited for the onslaught in a high-backed, lacquered wooden chair against the wall, under a print from the South of France. She looked out the window toward the street, and at the parking lot on the other side next to the corner grocery. Two beige sedans with Avis stickers on the back slowed and pulled tentatively into the lot.

Four men got out of one car and four women out of the other, all dressed in suits or the equivalent, and rejoined each other, stiffly, then came across the street.

Seeing them, Bertie yelled to Lisa, the main bar waitress, to get some ice, and in came the people, their convention badges still hanging from cords around their necks. Maybelle had a theory about that, that people kept the name tags not because they had forgotten to remove them but because in an alien city it reminded them who they were. Maybelle knew how easily that could be forgotten. How easily anything could be forgotten if you put your mind to it.

The post Life in the Time of Hurricanes appeared first on The Texas Observer.