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If you’re watching the Winter Olympics in Beijing, it’s hard to miss: Just beyond the white slopes for ski and snowboard events are brown hills where the snow barely touches.

Machine-made snow is hardly new to professional winter sports or even the Olympics. But as my colleague Matt Futterman and I wrote this weekThe 2022 Games rely almost entirely on it. China’s capital gets only natural snow dust most winters. And water supplies in the arid region have long struggled to meet the city’s demands for snowmaking or anything else.

To be clear: Beijing, a metropolis of more than 20 million, is not about to run out of water because of the Olympics. The city has made progress in conservation. Agriculture and heavy industry were closed or removed. (You may have noticed cooling towers. old steel mill where major weather events occur.) Trillions of gallons of water are channeled from the humid south of China to the region each year through a massive engineering project.

There are other cities that could host this year’s Games and not have to go this far to make artificial snow. But those cities fell out of contentioncited high costs and a lack of public support at home.

Numbers: In 2017, the last year for which figures are available, Beijing had only about 36,000 gallons of freshwater per resident of Niger, a country on the edge of the Sahara.

Increasing energy prices and global warming

Oil prices are rising as fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine increase. Europe is in the grip of a severe gas crisis that is wreaking havoc on energy markets. Demand for coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, has risen to record levels.

as me reviewed in an article Last week, the current turmoil in fossil fuel markets around the world threatens to complicate the fight against climate change. The turmoil also highlights a broader challenge: Even as countries invest in low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar, it will be long before the world has to worry about volatility in oil, gas and coal markets. complicates the transition to cleaner energy.

quotation: “While today’s market fluctuations cannot be traced back to climate policies, this does not mean that the road to net zero emissions will be smooth,” said Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency.

Glaciers may have less water than we thought

There is a lot of water that has accumulated in glaciers and can be an indispensable resource for people living nearby. But new research has found that it may be less than we thought.

work, which I wrote this weekcombined nearly a million pairs of satellite images to map the world’s more than 200,000 glaciers with new precision. Compared to previous scientific consensus, the new paper estimates that there is less ice in some places, such as the tropical Andes, but more in others, such as the Himalayas.

More in situ measurements are needed to determine how much glacial water these places have left. But Regine Hock, a glaciologist, said that even as the data improves, the basic picture won’t change much: This century, glaciers will thin out a bit, with implications for communities all over the planet.

Numbers: Worldwide, the study found 11 percent less ice in glaciers than previously estimated. But he found 37 percent more ice in the high mountains of Asia, and 10 percent more in Patagonia and central Andes.

The moral dilemma of ‘slow fashion’ influencers

Is it possible to preach the values ​​of sustainability while still going? to encourage consumption?

Climate change enters the therapy room

Ten years ago, psychologists suggested that a wide variety of people would suffer. anxiety and grief over the climate. Doubts about this idea disappeared.

‘Sense of crisis’ for Wasabi

Climate change and demographic threats are tearing apart a centuries-old culture surrounding the cultivation of a plant that clearly means: Japanese Kitchen.

As gripping stories go, it doesn’t get much better than the story of Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to circumnavigate Antarctica.

It didn’t go as planned. His ship, Endurance, was trapped, crushed, and sunk by ice in the Weddell Sea in 1915. So Shackleton and five of his crew traveled 800 miles in an open lifeboat to call a rescue mission for the other 22 members of the group. finally escaped.

The story of leadership and survival has been told in books, movies, and museum exhibits, at least one of which even included Shackleton’s lifeboat at the Natural History Museum in New York twenty years ago.

All this time Endurance itself had not been seen, lying at the bottom of Weddell in 10,000 feet of water east of the Antarctic Peninsula. But as I wrote an article this month, this may change soon. A South African icebreaker heads to the site with a team of explorers, scientists and technicians determined to find the wreckage.

The Endurance22 expedition, as it’s known, hopes to travel through Weddell’s notorious ice floe to the site of the shipwreck and then launch several underwater drones, also called autonomous divers, to search for it. If Endurance is found, submarines will photograph and examine the remains but not touch them, as the wreck is protected as a historical monument.

Discovery isn’t just about looking into the past. Also on board are ice scientists who will sample and analyze Weddell’s ice, looking for signs of how climate change may affect it in the future.

You can track the call at Endurance22 website.

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