HARARE - Zimbabwe put its wild animals up for sale on Tuesday, saying it needed buyers to step in and save the beasts from a devastating drought.

Members of the public "with the capacity to acquire and manage wildlife"— and enough land to hold the animals — should get in touch to register an interest, the state Parks and Wildlife Management Authority said.

There were no details on the animals on offer or their cost, but the southern African country's 10 national parks are famed for their huge populations of elephants, lions, rhinos, leopards and buffalos.

A drought across the region has left more than 4 million Zimbabweans needing aid and hit the crops they rely on for food and export earnings, from maize to tobacco.

It has also exacerbated an economic crisis in the cash-strapped country that has largely been deserted by foreign donors since 1999.

Selling the animals would give some of them a new home and ease financial pressure on the parks authority, which says it receives little government funding and struggles to get by on what it earns through hunting and tourism.

"In light of the drought ... Parks and Wildlife Management Authority intends to destock its parks estates through selling some of the wildlife," the authority said in a statement.

It asked interested Zimbabweans to get in touch and did not mention foreign buyers. Parks authority spokeswoman Caroline Washaya-Moyo would not say whether the animals could be exported or how many it wanted to sell.

"We do not have a target. The number of animals depends on the bids we receive," she said.

There was no immediate comment from the wildlife groups that protested loudly last year when Zimbabwe exported 60 elephants, half of them to China, where the animals are prized for their tusks.

About 54,000 of Zimbabwe's 80,000 elephants live in the western Hwange National Park, more than four times the number it is supposed to hold, the agency says.

The drought is expected to worsen an already critical water shortage in Hwange, which has no rivers and relies on donors to buy fuel to pump out underground wells.

The privately-owned Zimbabwe Independent newspaper reported in February that Bubye Conservancy, a private game park in southern Zimbabwe, could be forced to kill 200 lions to reduce over-population.

Many hunters have stayed away, the paper quoted Bubye general manager Blondie Leathem as saying, since the furor over the killing of Cecil, a rare black-maned lion, by a U.S. dentist last year. 

(Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; Editing by James Macharia and Andrew Heavens)

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Hidden under Antarctic ice that's sometimes miles thick and millions of years old are vast lakes teeming with creatures that scientists have yet to identify.

Now the discovery of a new so-called "sub-glacial" lake in what could be the planet's biggest canyon is fueling speculation that the dark, frigid waters of the South Pole might hold clues to figuring out whether life exists under potentially similar conditions beyond Earth.

Scientists believe that oceans that could support life are churning under the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa, for example.

"Even 10 or 20 years ago, no one thought you would find organisms on a frozen planet," said Bowling Green State University biologist Scott Rogers, who has discovered new bacteria and other microbes in Antarctic lake ice samples.

"You just thought there was no way these organisms could survive those conditions," said Rogers. "Now we know that's not true. Organisms can survive not only in cold water but some live in the ice."

Using satellite date and aerial radar observations, a team of British scientists recently unveiled a canyon that they estimate is 621 miles long and more than half a mile deep, a geologic formation comparable to the Grand Canyon. The team first announced the discovery earlier this year, but at a recent meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna they provided more details about how they believe the canyon contains a massive lake.

If correct, the new lake could become a treasure trove of insights into life that not only survives, but thrives, under harsh conditions.

Rogers discovered around 3,400 forms of life from ice samples extracted from the bottom of more than two miles of ice covering Lake Vostok, the largest sub-glacial lake at 150 miles long and 37 miles wide.

"We can't identify about half of them," said Rogers. "We suspect a good proportion are viruses. The other half we have identified. We've found thousands of unknown organisms."

The critters in the lake live without sunlight, so Rogers believed heat and chemicals from thermal vents on the lake floor could be sustaining them.

Since more than two miles of ice has covered Lake Vostok for 15 million years, the organisms Rogers discovered might have evolved with little or no interaction with the world, though he suspects they have mixed with water flowing in and out of the sub-glacial lake over the eons.

Of three samples of genetic material he discovered in some two-million-year-old ice cores from the bottom of the Lake Vostok ice shelf, for example, he still hasn't figured out if one has been discovered before. He grew cultures out of all three, nothing that while he took precautions he didn't think the microbes were dangerous.

"We still don't know what it is," said Rogers. "We just know we grew it in the lab. It was a bacterium. But it didn't make anyone sick here so I don't think it was a pathogen. But we are careful with that."

Included among the bacteria he found were some that live only in the guts of fish as well as on bivalves, like clams and mussels. "We made the inference there might be fish down there," he said.

Doubts have been cast on Rogers' work, however, because he obtained his ice cores from Russian scientists who might have contaminated their samples as they drilled. He claims that he was able to take samples from ice that was not contaminated.

"There are some strange stories out there," Mahlon Kennicutt, a professor emeritus of oceanography at Texas A&M University, said. "Most people don't don't believe there is anything more than microbes" in Antarctica's approximately 400 sub-glacial lakes.

But there's no question the lakes are teeming with life. Scientists who sampled water from Lake Whillans in Antarctica found 130,000 cells in each milliliter of lake water, a concentration that resembled deep ocean water, according to the journal Nature. The lake contains around 4,000 species of bacteria and other tiny organisms, the researchers found.

Sub-glacial lakes might provide more than a window to potential life on other heavenly bodies. They might also be hiding important traces of how life evolved on prehistoric Earth, said environmental scientist James Haynes of the State University of New York's College at Brockport.

Antarctica was once part of a landmass that included Australia and South America. Marsupials migrated to Australia via Antarctica, then got cut off from the southern continent as they split apart. Today, on the outcroppings of land in Antarctica, scientists have found fossils that suggest Antarctica was once tropical.

Whatever is in those pristine, isolated lakes, including microbes, could provide a glimpse into a past that many believed had been lost forever, he said.

"Life on the entire planet for 2 billion years was just bacteria," Haynes said. "These dudes have been around a long time. They are really tough."

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Oil is on a massive charge on Thursday, surging after a huge wildfire disrupted production in Canada and after news that production in the US fell to its lowest levels in 18 months.

Just after 1:30 p.m. BST (8:30 a.m. ET) the two major oil benchmarks — West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude — have popped 4.45% and 3.8%, getting an unexpected boost after a huge wildfire in Canada's oil-producing region disrupted production there. "Our understanding is that up to 800,000 barrels a day of production has been (or is in the process of being) shut down," analysts at Energy Aspects said, as first quoted by the Financial Times. "The situation remains fluid and further disruptions cannot be ruled out."

The US production drop also gave another suggestion to investors that the market may be on its way to balancing.

Both major benchmarks are now above $45 a barrel. Here's how things look in the markets right now:

Oil's charge is also being helped by data from the US Energy Information Administration released Wednesday showing that oil production in the country had fallen to its lowest level since September 2014. US production decreased by 113,000 barrels a day last week, marking the biggest weekly decline in output since July. US domestic output has now fallen for 11 consecutive weeks.

That further fall in production suggests that the markets are starting to address the supply-demand imbalance that has plagued markets and caused prices to fall from more than $100 a barrel in 2014 to as low as $27 in January.

Despite the good news from the EIA, however, oil inventories actually continued to grow last week. The EIA's Weekly Petroleum Status Report showed that US commercial crude inventories increased by 2.8 million barrels for the week that ended Friday.

Finally, news coming out of Saudi Arabia that the country has raised oil prices for export to Asia by the most in 14 months has also helped oil, Bloomberg reports. The move suggests that demand for crude is on the up, giving prices a further boost.

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A massive wildfire has been raging in Fort McMurray, Alberta — the center of the Canadian oil industry — forcing the entire town of over 88,000 people to evacuate.

And it's still burning out of control.

The fire's area grew eight times overnight, according to satellite images from NASA's Earth Observatory. 

See for yourself, in this tweet from Judy Trinh, a CBC reporter:

If the entire town has to be rebuilt, insurers estimate that the damage caused by the fire could hit up to $9 billion dollars, according to the CBC.

It would be by far the costliest disaster in Canadian history.

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It's not every day that an eight-lane road becomes a pedestrian pathway, but in Paris it's now a monthly event. 

In February, Paris officials voted to turn the Champs-Élysées into an open space for Parisians and visitors to the City of Light to enjoy on the first Sunday of every month in an effort to curb regular emissions.

This comes in addition to other routes that already go car-free once a month as part of the "Paris Respire" or "Paris Breathes" program.

Last year after the city was so polluted that it was difficult to see the Eiffel Tower, the city announced a plan to ban cars when pollution reaches high levels. 

Then in December, 195 countries (including France) agreed to curb emissions to mitigate further climate change resulting in the Paris Agreement that was signed in April.  

Due to the closure, the mile-long street that leads to the Arc De Triomphe was full of people enjoying a sunny day in the city Sunday. 

While cars weren't allowed, bikes were:

 People took the opportunity to sing and dance in the street.

And strolled along the road that's usually full of vehicles.

 A refreshing sight compared to the usual congestion of the roadway.

Paris organized the first car-free Sunday in September, which, in addition to a reduction in noise pollution, resulted in nitrogen dioxide levels dropping by almost one third along the Champs-Élysées, according to The Guardian. This was part of the reason officials decided to make car-free days a more regular event in Paris. 

Other countries are joining in to help mitigate climate change by limiting the emission of harmful green house gasses. India experimented with a 15-day trial ban on vehicles in Delhi that began January 1. And in Norway, there is a plan to ban vehicles from Oslo by 2020. 

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The Indian government is planning on spending an impressive $6.2 billion on reforesting parts of the country.

The scheme, which has unilateral support and has already been passed by members of India’s lower house of Parliament, is now just waiting to be passed by the upper house.

The aim is to increase the overall forest cover of the nation, which currently covers 21% of the country’s surface, up to 33% over the coming years.

The developing country is undergoing rapid industrialization, and is one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters.

In 2015, India submitted its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), which details the nation's plan to cut its emissions by 33 to 35% of 2005 levels by 2030. The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill, as the new scheme is officially known, is seen as part of this commitment.

“I am sure that this fund will give a tremendous push in our afforestation movement,” India’s Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar told reporters outside of Parliament on May 3. “Our forest cover will dramatically increase and it will result in achieving our target 33% of tree cover and most importantly 2.5 billion tonne of carbon sink as we have indicated in our INDCs.”

The money has been collected by the government over the past 12 years from various private companies who have paid fees to let them set up projects on forested land. In a country that has one of the largest human populations, estimated at around 1.2 billion people, the environment has come under increasing pressure. While historically nature has suffered, it seems that potentially things might change, however slightly.

Yet some have criticized the plan, especially as there is no mechanism in place with which to monitor the scheme to check exactly where the funds are being directed, especially in a country often overshadowed by the specter of corruption. There are even reports of forestry officials burning down their own patches of forest they are meant to be protecting when they don’t reach targets and then blaming their failure on forest fires.

Others question the government on a scheme to replant forests using money they have collected from industry for building on forestland in the first place. Not only that, but where are they to find the new bits of land to reforest? Will it, for example, require turning over agricultural land, in turn forcing people out in order to fulfill the project? This remains to be seen.

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25-year-old Lauren Singer decided to go plastic free and embrace the zero-waste lifestyle a few years ago. Now, she can fit four years worth of trash into a single mason jar.

She blogs about her zero-waste life, and even started a business selling sustainable detergent.

Story and editing by A.C. Fowler

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Sea-level rise, erosion, and coastal flooding are some of the greatest challenges facing humanity from climate change.

Recently at least five reef islands in the remote Solomon Islands have been lost completely to sea-level rise and coastal erosion, and a further six islands have been severely eroded.

These islands lost to the sea range in size from one to five hectares.

They supported dense tropical vegetation that was at least 300 years old. Nuatambu Island, home to 25 families, has lost more than half of its habitable area, with 11 houses washed into the sea since 2011.

This is the first scientific evidence, published in Environmental Research Letters, that confirms the numerous anecdotal accounts from across the Pacific of the dramatic impacts of climate change on coastlines and people.

A warning for the world

Previous studies examining the risk of coastal inundation in the Pacific region have found that islands can actually keep pace with sea-level rise and sometimes even expand.

However, these studies have been conducted in areas of the Pacific with rates of sea level rise of 3-5 mm per year – broadly in line with the global average of 3 mm per year.

For the past 20 years, the Solomon Islands have been a hotspot for sea-level rise. Here the sea has risen at almost three times the global average, around 7-10 mm per year since 1993. This higher local rate is partly the result of natural climate variability.

These higher rates are in line with what we can expect across much of the Pacific in the second half of this century as a result of human-induced sea-level rise. Many areas will experience long-term rates of sea-level rise similar to that already experienced in Solomon Islands in all but the very lowest-emission scenarios.

Natural variations and geological movements will be superimposed on these higher rates of global average sea level rise, resulting in periods when local rates of rise will be substantially larger than that recently observed in Solomon Islands. We can therefore see the current conditions in Solomon Islands as an insight into the future impacts of accelerated sea-level rise.

We studied the coastlines of 33 reef islands using aerial and satellite imagery from 1947-2015. This information was integrated with local traditional knowledge, radiocarbon dating of trees, sea-level records, and wave models.

Waves add to damage

Wave energy appears to play an important role in the dramatic coastal erosion observed in Solomon Islands. Islands exposed to higher wave energy in addition to sea-level rise experienced greatly accelerated loss compared with more sheltered islands.

Twelve islands we studied in a low wave energy area of Solomon Islands experienced little noticeable change in shorelines despite being exposed to similar sea-level rise. However, of the 21 islands exposed to higher wave energy, five completely disappeared and a further six islands eroded substantially.

The human story

These rapid changes to shorelines observed in Solomon Islands have led to the relocation of several coastal communities that have inhabited these areas for generations. These are not planned relocations led by governments or supported by international climate funds, but are ad hoc relocations using their own limited resources.

The customary land tenure (native title) system in Solomon Islands has provided a safety net for these displaced communities. In fact, in some cases entire communities have left coastal villages that were established in the early 1900s by missionaries, and retraced their ancestral movements to resettle old inland village sites used by their forefathers.

In other cases, relocations have been more ad hoc, with indivdual families resettling small inland hamlets over which they have customary ownership.

In these cases, communities of 100-200 people have fragmented into handfuls of tiny family hamlets. Sirilo Sutaroti, the 94-year-old chief of the Paurata tribe, recently abandoned his village. “The sea has started to come inland, it forced us to move up to the hilltop and rebuild our village there away from the sea,” he told us.

In addition to these village relocations, Taro, the capital of Choiseul Province, is set to become the first provincial capital in the world to relocate residents and services in response to the impact of sea-level rise.

The global effort

Interactions between sea-level rise, waves, and the large range of responses observed in Solomon Islands – from total island loss to relative stability – shows the importance of integrating local assessments with traditional knowledge when planning for sea-level rise and climate change.

Linking this rich knowledge and inherent resilience in the people with technical assessments and climate funding is critical to guiding adaptation efforts.

Melchior Mataki who chairs the Solomon Islands' National Disaster Council, said: “This ultimately calls for support from development partners and international financial mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund. This support should include nationally driven scientific studies to inform adaptation planning to address the impacts of climate change in Solomon Islands.”

Last month, the Solomon Islands government joined 11 other small Pacific Island nations in signing the Paris climate agreement in New York. There is a sense of optimism among these nations that this signifies a turning point in global efforts.

However, it remains to be seen how the hundreds of billions of dollars promised through global funding models such as the Green Climate Fund can support those most at need in remote communities, like those in Solomon Islands.

Simon Albert, Senior Research Fellow, School of Civil Engineering, The University of Queensland; Alistair Grinham, Senior research fellow, The University of Queensland; Badin Gibbes, Senior Lecturer, School of Civil Engineering, The University of Queensland; Javier Leon, Lecturer, University of the Sunshine Coast, and John Church, CSIRO Fellow, CSIRO. 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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If temperatures warm at expected rates, 80% of land in parts of Brazil and Central America currently used to grow the most popular type of coffee, Arabica, will become unsuitable to the crop by 2050, according to research by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture.

Globally a 50% decline is predicted over the same period.

The most likely outcome would be a drop in quantity and a rise in prices.

In addition to devastating farming communities dependent on the crop, coffee buyers could very well be forced to build a new roster of bean suppliers and establish new supply routes, an expensive and complicated shift.

“Your supply of coffee as you know it is definitely at risk,” says Bambi Semroc, who works on coffee and climate change issues at the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business at Conservation International.

This is why one of the companies most worried about climate change is Starbucks, which is the largest seller of coffee worldwide.

Starbucks has responded both by working with farmers to improve their ability to grow coffee in a warming climate and by trying to reduce the company’s own environmental impact.

The farming efforts are progressing but are far from a broad fix. The attempts to reduce Starbucks’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have run into even more trouble.

For over a decade, the company has cultivated a network of farmers around the world who grow their beans under a set of standards that include using shade and tree conservation to protect crops, and managing risks from pests and disease spurred by changes in the climate. Today 99% of its coffee, more than 400 million pounds each year, complies with those standards, the company reports.

In 2013 Starbucks even bought its own coffee farm in Costa Rica and turned it into a laboratory for testing coffee-growing practices and developing plants that can thrive in warmer temperatures.

Coffee’s growing region stretches like a belt around the equator, through more than 50 countries including Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, and Tanzania. Rising average temperatures in many of these countries have already begun to shrink coffee farmers’ yields. Leaf rust and other damaging diseases have also come to coffee farms that didn’t suffer from them historically as their climates have shifted, severely damaging crops.

Some of the coffee experimentation may be bearing fruit, though not yet at the large scale Starbucks would need. In an early experiment, in 2014, the company sold a small batch—only 170 bags—of a coffee varietal it developed with a Costa Rica cooperative that is more resistant to fungal infestation, but is also slower-growing and lower-yielding.

That same year, after the farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, lost 60% of their coffee production to leaf rust following increasing temperature and rain, Starbucks Mexico began to distribute coffee plants bred to be rust-resistant in the area. By the end of next year Starbucks will have donated 20 million of the seedlings to farmers affected by the fungus. It openly shares its formula for breeding the plants.

The company is also hoping that by offering financial support and advice to farmers on how they can increase their productivity by better pruning their existing trees or replacing ones, they can help them succeed in a more difficult environment.

Reducing its own carbon emissions seems to have been even more challenging. In 2008 the company set an ambitious goal of reducing its energy use by 25% in its company-owned stores, but after some early success, emissions began to increase in recent years, rising from just over one million metric tons in 2012 to 1,258,092 metric tons in 2014, mainly from energy used in its stores, offices, and roasting plants.

One reason is the company’s decision to add heated food to the menu. This requires more refrigeration and ovens, and more energy. Though it has hampered Starbucks's long-term environmental goals, the company says it is working on improving oven efficiency, and investors love the strategy, which has helped profits increase substantially.

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Each year at the break of spring, red-sided garter snakes in Narcisse, Canada engage in an unusual ritual.

Thousands of them begin emerging from their underground dens during the last week of April and their numbers peak during the second week of May. The reason? They're all out to mate.

Here is what goes down at the snake dens:

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Like all other snakes, red-sided garter snakes, are cold-blooded. During the winter, when the temperatures drop to below freezing, they hibernate for eight months.

Source: National Geographic

Manitoba, Canada is laced with sinkholes that line its superficial limestone bed rock. Underground dens form here, attracting the snakes, who see it as the ideal spot for an 8-month snooze.

Source:National Geographic

But space is limited. Thousands of snakes end up in dens as large as an average living room.

Jökulsárlón Lagoon in Iceland is one of the most visually arresting spots on earth. The lagoon sits at the base of Breiðamerkurjökull Glacier. Close to the sea but slightly below sea level, it is filled with huge chunks of ice that keep breaking off the glacier. As these icebergs flow toward the Atlantic, they often wash up on the lagoon's black-sand beach, making for some eye-catching optics.

But while it's a stunning spot, it's also a visual representation of climate change, as visitors can observe the dynamic melting of the Breiðamerkurjökull and Vatnajökull glaciers that feed it. In fact, the lagoon didn't even exist 60 years ago. Below we've gathered some stunning pictures that will make you want to visit Jökulsárlón Lagoon:

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The lagoon is about 200 miles from Reykjavik, within Vatnajökull National Park. The park is also home to Iceland's largest glacier, of the same name.

It's relatively new. Until about 60 years ago, the Vatnajökull glacier covered most of the land in the area.

The glacier started receding around 1948, leaving behind deep gorges that filled with melted glacier water, which ultimately became the lagoon.

HomeBiogas is not your average compost bin. It decomposes kitchen waste and turns it into gas for your stove. Each liter of waste creates 200 liters of gas. That's enough for an hour of cooking.

It is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo.

Written and produced by Carl Mueller 

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The world's first international study of plants estimates that there are 391,000 known unique species of vascular plants– ie. those with conductive tissue that transport water and synthesise foods – but warns that 21% of these are currently at danger of becoming extinct.

The report, released by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the UK, says about 2,000 new plant species are discovered by scientists every year, but while we're continually increasing our records of plants, there's still much we don't know about them and the factors that threaten them around the world.

"This is the first ever global assessment on the state of the world's plants. We already have a 'State of the World's … birds, sea-turtles, forests, cities, mothers, fathers, children, even antibiotics' but not plants,"said Kew director of science Kathy Willis.

"I find this remarkable given the importance of plants to all of our lives – from food, medicines, clothing, building materials and biofuels, to climate regulation. This report therefore provides the first step in filling this critical knowledge gap."

While climate change is a factor threatening the survival of plant species, the biggest issues at the moment include destruction of habitats for farming, deforestation for timber, and the construction of buildings and infrastructure – with 13 out of 14 of the world's vegetation biomes having seen a loss of more than 10% of land in the past decade. Compared to this, climate change alone isn't as much of a problem right now, although the researchers expect that to change in the future.

"I suspect we won't actually see the full impact [of climate change] until 30 years down the line as it takes so long for plants, especially trees, to produce their offspring," Willis told Damian Carrington at The Guardian.

Invasive species of plants are another problem considered in the report, with around 5,000 invasive species around the world threatening native plants and damaging natural ecosystems, with costs estimated at nearly 5% of the world economy.

In light of the pressures, the report – which took some 80 scientists more than a year to put together – is intended to become an ongoing, annual assessment of global vegetation, to help researchers, governments, and business leaders plan together for the best conservation strategies.

"We have to be pragmatic," Willis told Lucy Carter at the ABC. "I mean, we've got a growing population size, people need food, they need places to live, so the real thing we need to be doing is identifying which are the important areas to conserve because of the incredible plant diversity they contain, and which areas we should be developing."

So far, 1,771 "important plant areas" around the world have been identified by the researchers, although comparatively few of these have adequate conservation protections in place. In addition to learning more about species in less-developed corners of the globe that have not been so thoroughly researched by biologists, one of the challenges is for scientists to increase their understanding of plants at the genetic level – an area of research still in its infancy.

"[T]here are still large parts of the world where very little is known about plants. Identification of these important plant areas is now critical," said one of the authors of the report, Steve Bachman, in a press release. "Similarly, we still only know a fraction of the genetic diversity of plants, and whole-genome sequences are currently available for just 139 species of vascular plants. Activity in this area needs to speed up."

The State of the World's Plants 2016 report is available online, and Kew's website for the report provides a detailed summary of the findings.

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The El Niño of 2015-2016 was one of the strongest on record.

And now researchers have an idea about how it got so powerful.

In an April report, two researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that especially strong winds from summer 2014 didn't just keep the 2014 El Niño from happening, they also gave the next year's El Niño a headstart.

The wind in question, called "the boreal summer easterly wind burst," stopped the growth of an El Niño back in 2014, but it also didn't discharge any of the heat that had already built up. So by the time the 2015 El Niño started forming, it had quite a bit of extra heat to work with.

This past winter, El Niño led to seriously warm December temperatures on the East Coast while the south experienced flooding, and New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Oklahoma spent the weekend getting pummeled with a blizzard.

It's forecast to wrap up this summer, and in April, the NOAA said it has initiated its La Niña watch after new predictions suggest it could be here as early as this fall.

La Niñas are marked by abnormally cooler sea-surface temperatures. Those cooler sea-surface temperatures also tend to reduce something called wind shear, a phenomenon that occurs when winds change their speed and direction over short distances. When winds can change their speed and direction quickly and easily, it makes hurricanes more likely because the area near the center of the storm can't cool down.

If a La Niña does form, it won't just increase the risks of a more intense Atlantic hurricane season. It could also lead to warmer and drier winters in the southern part of the US, while the Pacific Northwest, southern part of Alaska, and Midwest could feel the chill of cooler-than-average temperatures. 

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Over 5 million cubic miles of ice covers the earth's surface. As global temperatures rise, this ice continues to melt, and at an ever increasing pace. With that, sea levels continue to rise faster than ever. According to NASA satellite calculations, 130 billion tons of ice thaw out and pour into the sea every year.

The US has nearly 10,000 miles of shoreline that is vulnerable to this rise in water levels, and people are already being displaced in some areas as a result. According to estimates of the worst-case scenario, global sea levels will rise by up to 10 feet in the next century. Some scientists say that it would take more than 5,000 years to melt all the ice, which would raise sea levels by a whopping 216 feet. This would cause whole states to be submerged under water. Here's what the US coastline would look like in that scenario:

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We're hearing plenty of encouraging stories about the growth of renewable energy and a reduction on our reliance on fossil fuels, but it's sometimes difficult to see the bigger picture.

So how's this for a benchmark: last Sunday, 8 May, at 11am in the morning, 95% of Germany's power demands were met by renewable energy sources.

Quite an achievement for one of the most developed and industrialised nations in the world.

As John Fitzgerald Weaver reports for Electrek, a sunny day and strong winds helped contribute to the record-breaking high.

Energy consumption in Germany at the time came in at 57.8 gigawatts — solar power met 45.2% of that total, wind power 36%, biomass power 8.9%, and hydropower plants 4.8%.

"Power prices actually went negative for several hours,"Michael J. Coren from Quartz reports, "meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity."

Germany is in the middle of an initiative called Energiewende ("energy transition"), through which the government hopes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 95% and hit a target of a 60% share for renewable energy sources before 2050.

Last Sunday's milestone is certainly promising, but to hit 60% year-round, Germany needs to improve the efficiency of its technology and find new ways of storing energy for days that aren't so sunny and windy. It's the same challenge facing countries across the world.

Right now, there's a north/south split in the country, Ari Phillips reports at Climate Progress, with wind turbines located mostly in the north of Germany and solar power plants in the south. The authorities also want to phase out nuclear power by 2022 — a decision made after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

With the country making gains towards its goal, experts think Germany is a good role model for other developed nations.

"Manufacturing accounts for much more of the German economy than the American economy, and they have 80 million people - much larger than a country like Denmark, which gets more of its power from renewables but has a much smaller industrial base, and has a population of 5.5 million people," author Osha Gray Davidson, who has written a book on Energiewende, told Climate Progress.

We've seen some other promising targets hit in recent years, too. In 2015, Scotland generated more than half its energy from renewables, and Uruguay already gets 95% of its power from renewables, while a large part of Austria has hit 100%.

Renewable energy capacity is now being added faster than the alternatives, and across the globe, we're on track to get 26% of our energy from natural sources by 2020.

There's still plenty of work ahead, but go ahead and get excited about how far we've come. It's pretty damn cool.

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — a global health philanthropy — sold off its entire $186 million stake in BP, according to recent filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission obtained by The Guardian. 

The sell-off occured between September and December 2015, according to the filings, amid a bad year for BP. The company posted its largest ever annual loss, losing $6.5 billion in 2015. 

BP's stock price dipped 0.72% this morning, but has since rebounded slightly. 

The Gates Foundation also dumped its nearly $825 million stake in ExxonMobil in early 2015.

While Bill Gates himself called divestment a "false solution," in an interview, the Gates Foundation has shrank its total holdings in fossil fuel companies by 85% since 2014, according to The Guardian.  

Gates Divest, a campaign to encourage the Gates Foundation to completely divest from the fossil fuel industry, celebrated the move.

"We are thrilled that the Gates foundation continues to divest from fossil fuel stocks, but it’s time to divest the rest," Alec Connon, a Gates Divest organizer, told Inhabitat. "Investing in oil companies is completely inconsistent with the Gates foundation mission to ensure that everybody has the chance to live a healthy, productive life."

The Gates Foundation's divestment comes on the heels of controversy in the fossil fuel industry. ExxonMobil is under investigation by the New York state attorney general, for allegedly stifling concerns about the financial risks of climate change from their own scientists. 

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DON'T MISS: 95% of Germany’s energy was provided by renewables last Sunday

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Thousands of baby glass eels have started their swim for Bermuda from the waters of Staten Island — and were counted by students for the fifth year in a row.

Students and Cub Scouts are taking part in the annual count of baby glass eels at 10 spots along the Hudson River and its tributaries.

Students from the St. Clare School and scouts from Troop 25 waded into the water Wednesday to collect eels in Staten Island's Richmond Creek, count them, then release them upstream to continue their journey.

Since the baby fish require good conditions to survive, the annual count serves as an indicator to the Department of Environmental Conservation and Department of Environmental Protection of how healthy the city's waterways are.

"You have to have good water quality, you have to have a good watershed, you've got to have smart development to make sure that there are good habitats for these animals," said Chris Bowser, who works for the Hudson River Estuary Program and Research Reserve and as a science educator for the DEC. 

"If we can get healthy eel populations, we know something is going right."

The baby eels hatch in Sargasso Sea, close to Bermuda, and live in New York for up to 20 years before they return home to mate.

While they're approximately 2 to 3 inches in length when the students count them, they can grow to be between 1- and 2-feet long when fully mature, Bowser said.

This year, the migration started in March. Since then, more than 6,000 have been counted. On Wednesday, seven eels were collected.

The population of glass eels declined along the East Coast after water-quality degraded, but has spiked back up after the city spent more than $10 billion dollars to improve the cleanliness of its waterways, said Eric Landau, deputy commissioner for the DEP.

Last year, the students counted about 5,000 glass eels.

"That is a great testament to the constantly improving water quality in New York City's harbor," Landau said. 

"As we see the numbers of eels increasing, and increasing so dramatically, it really confirms what we believe to be true — that the harbor water quality is better than it's been in generations."

While this year's numbers aren't final, Bowser said they're on track to be the highest since they started the count.

This year's eel-counting season has also been one of the longest because the weather started to get warmer sooner, allowing the baby fish to start their journey earlier, Bowser said. 

Previous counts usually last about eight weeks, but students were able to start in early March and have continued for 10 weeks so far.

"We had an early season and we're looking at a long season," Bowser said. "Every piece of data we collect we learn something new. It's another piece of the puzzle."

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Ecologist Eben Paxton, speaking on a cell phone from somewhere in one of Hawaii’s forests, wanted to talk about the scary events happening on the island of Kauai.

The “bird crash,” he calls it.

Hawaii’s fourth-largest island, says Paxton, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, is seeing a sudden, rapid decline in native birds.

The prime suspect is avian malaria. It’s being spread by mosquitoes and it kills rare birds such as the 'i'iwi, a bright red honeycreeper with a curvy Dr. Seuss beak. Surveys carried out on the island’s rugged, roadless interior are finding fewer birds than ever before. Extinction for some species looks imminent.

So now a group of government officials, conservationists, and scientists in Hawaii are seriously looking at a high-tech solution: genetically modified mosquitoes.

They say the modified bugs, whose offspring die quickly, thereby reducing mosquito populations, could be the best chance to save Hawaii’s endangered birds. If these discussions move forward, one idea would be to release millions of genetically modified bugs to drive mosquitoes off of Kauai’s plateau and maybe right out of the entire archipelago.

The discussions around the first “landscape scale” use of gene-modified insects are still at an early stage and have been coӧrdinated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for endangered species. A spokesman at the agency’s Honolulu office declined to confirm the agency’s role, but said it was looking at “several” recovery plans for forest birds.

What’s certain is that genetically modified organisms are political dynamite on Hawaii.

Some districts have passed ordinances to ban biotech crops from being planted. No one knows how Hawaiians would react to GM mosquitoes, but lately, mosquito technology has been winning positive attention as a potential high-tech fix for human diseases such as Zika.

One company, Oxitec, is testing GM mosquitoes in Brazil and hopes to do so in Florida. Because of a genetic addition to their DNA, those bugs have offspring that die prematurely. Release enough of them and the number of mosquitoes can drop drastically, although they don’t disappear altogether.

While fighting human disease gets the attention and the funding, conservation could end up being just as important a use of advanced biotechnology. At the San Diego Zoo, there are plans to save the northern white rhinoceros by cloning animals from frozen tissues. Scientists have created a genetically modified American chestnut tree resistant to the blight that’s mostly wiped them out.

Extinction capital

Separated by 2,500 miles from the nearest land, the Hawaiian archipelago has a diversity of species even greater than Darwin’s famous Galapagos Islands. But these organisms developed in such isolation that they weren’t adapted to the threats brought by Western explorers and immigrants. These days, Hawaii is called the extinction capital of the world—434 species of plants and animals are listed as endangered by the United States. And more than half the native forest birds are already extinct.

Hawaii had no mosquitoes up until 1826. That’s when, historians say, a whaling vessel that had taken on water in Mexico carelessly “drained dregs alive with wrigglers” into a stream on Maui. Soon avian malaria followed. By 1902, travelers reported a person could spend hours in the forest and “not hear the note of a single native bird.”

In fact, some birds had retreated to higher ground. Above 4,000 feet, it’s too cold for Culex quinquefasciatus, the southern house mosquito, the one that gives malaria to birds. But these refuges are now under threat due to a warmer and wetter climate.

The situation is tragic. And a little bit fascinating. Because islands are isolated ecosystems, they’re also a good testing ground for new conservation tactics. That’s what has mosquito experts studying the Hawaiian bird situation closely. One of them, Luke Alphey, is the scientist who developed Oxitec’s mosquitoes and who now heads a group studying insect and spider genetics at the Pirbright Institute, in the U.K.

Alphey says he has a student working on modifying the culex species of mosquitoes troubling Hawaii’s birds and thinks the technology would probably work, even on such difficult terrain as Hawaii’s volcanic mountains. A couple of years ago, he wowed desperate ecologists with the idea when he visited Hawaii. “People loved it. This was the first time anyone had proposed anything that could change the whole discussion,” says Dennis LaPointe, a mosquito scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey. “It got people thinking that molecular techniques are the way to go.”

A decade ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service said it would cost $2.5 billion over 30 years to preserve honeycreepers and other forest birds, including by buying land and restoring habitats.

But GM mosquitoes could be a much cheaper way to give the birds more time. “It seems to me it could be done economically,” says Alphey. “It would cost a lot less than $3 billion, that’s certain.”

The most urgent situation is on Kauai, a smaller island without a big mountain to offer the refuge of high elevations. In a prelude to extinction, wildlife officials are capturing pairs of honeycreepers in order to keep them in captivity.

No one has ever applied GM mosquitoes to such a vast landscape. Mosquitoes are too fragile to be tossed out of planes; some people have floated the idea of using drones. “A lot of these mosquito techniques have been applied to pretty small areas, but we are taking about thousands of square kilometers of rain forest,” says Michael D. Samuel, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has built computer models of the extinction threat facing Hawaiian birds due to climate change. “To me getting rid of wildlife disease over such a big area is hard. That said, the perfect place to experiment with these technologies is on an island. We know a lot about what’s driving the system and we can make predictions.”

Paxton says he is rooting for an all-out effort against the mosquitoes. He says people hope to see conventional sprays followed up with Oxitec-style bugs to drive down mosquito numbers and give the birds a respite from malaria. Eventually, in a few years, a newer technology called a gene drive, also in development as a fix for human malaria in Africa, might be used to eliminate mosquitoes from the islands altogether. With that approach, mosquitoes are modified to spread a gene when they reproduce that eventually kills them all.

“It would be nice to get rid of the mosquitoes,” says Paxton. “Hawaii used to be a true bird paradise.”

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Air pollution can lead to a cornucopia of life-threatening diseases, and new data from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that 80% of cities aren't meeting guidelines. These are some of the top cities in regions around the world that are "wreaking havoc on human health," say WHO representatives.

Produced by Maya Dangerfield. Reporting by Dave Mosher. Images courtesy of Reuters and Getty.

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