The Magazine of The Sierra Club
January/February 2021
A bar-tailed godwit flies 7,500 miles from Alaska to New Zealand, setting a world’s record for avian nonstop flight.
Bottle-fed infants ingest 1,580,000 plastic particles each day.
California’s energy-storage capacity surpasses Australia’s, making it the largest in the world.
The European Union rules that veggie burgers are still “burgers.”
The Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro sent four secret agents to last year’s UN climate conference, COP25, in Madrid to intimidate Brazilian environmentalists and their own delegation.
Forty percent of the Amazon rainforest may become savanna over the next decades because burning and deforestation have limited the ecosystem's ability to produce its own rain.
The long-delayed Mose flood barrier successfully protected Venice from a high tide for the first time.
Eleven Tasmanian devils have been reintroduced to mainland Australia, more than 3,000 years after they died out there.
The US officially withdraws from the Paris climate accord.
Vladimir Putin orders the Russian government to meet the Paris climate goals.
Leaked documents from ExxonMobil show a plan to massively increase its emissions to 143 million tons of CO₂ per year by 2025.
Sixty percent of US coal-fired power plants are now slated for retirement.
France nixes a $7 billion deal to buy liquefied natural gas from Texas because Trump’s deregulation has made the gas too dirty.
Record temperatures and winds spark more than 90 major wildfires across the West. For the most part, major media outlets fail to make a connection between the fires and climate disruption.
Florida wildlife officials bust a ring of poachers who illegally trapped 3,600 flying squirrels over the past three years and shipped them to South Korea.
Great egrets in the Everglades lose interest in sex because of mercury poisoning from the fish they eat.
Colorado voters approve reintroducing wolves.
At least 14 countries have now given legal rights to rivers and other ecosystems.
In the Netherlands, a runaway commuter train overshoots its elevated platform but is safely caught by a large sculpture of a whale’s tale.
NASA confirms the presence of water on the moon.
November/December 2020
Eight previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica are discovered when satellite images reveal traces of their poop.
In Kansas, it is now legal to hunt coyotes at night using lights and thermal-imaging equipment.
Death Valley hits 130°F, the third-hottest temperature on Earth ever recorded.
The past decade was the hottest in human history.
A bald eagle disables a government drone, sinking it to the bottom of Lake Michigan.
Global fertility rates are crashing. The populations of 23 nations— including Portugal, South Korea, Spain, and Thailand—are expected to halve by the end of the century. The human population is forecast to peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion people.
Denmark builds a 43-mile fence on its border with Germany to keep out wild boars.
A wolverine and her two kits are spotted on Mt. Rainier; they’re the first to be sighted there in more than a century.
Chevron embraces solar power—in order to pump oil more cheaply in California. Oil giant BP, for the second time, vows to cut oil production and invest heavily in renewables. Tesla is now worth more than ExxonMobil, which was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Tahlequah, the Puget Sound orca who two years ago bore the body of her dead calf for 17 days over 1,000 miles, gives birth again.
The ag departments in 27 states warn residents not to plant unsolicited packages of seeds sent to them from China.
A three-mile section of border wall that Trump supporters privately donated $25 million to build is in danger of falling into the Rio Grande. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is arrested in connection with another wall-building scam.
Glacial runoff from record heat on Svalbard floods the Norwegian Arctic island’s coal mine. The amount of freshwater in the Arctic Ocean has increased by 2,400 cubic miles.
Painting one of a wind turbine’s three blades black can reduce bird strikes by over 70 percent.
Crows hold grudges against particular humans and teach their families and flocks to dislike them as well.
Africa has eliminated the wild polio virus.
Three people in southern Mexico attempting to smuggle two howler monkeys in a suitcase are apprehended when the monkeys start to howl.
September/October 2020
The white-throated sparrow changes its song from “Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody” to “Old Sam Peabuh-Peabuh-Peabuh-Peabuh.”
Tesla overtakes Toyota to become the world’s most valuable automaker.
A federal judge rules that California Republican representative Devin Nunes cannot sue Twitter over mocking tweets by a fictional cow.
The South Pole is warming three times faster than the rest of the planet.
The Senate passes the Great American Outdoors Act with a large bipartisan majority. The act will provide $9.5 billion for maintenance of the national parks and $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund from royalties from offshore oil and gas.
Kings Canyon National Parks remove mentions of Robert E. Lee from signage for the eponymous tree.
California requires all trucks and vans to be electric beginning in 2045.
Under pressure from deniers, Facebook stops fact-checking climate disinformation, deeming it “opinion.”
The Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, above the Arctic Circle, records a temperature of 100.4°F, likely the hottest ever recorded that far north.
Wind and rain deposit microparticles of plastic on even the most remote parks and wilderness areas of the United States.
Air pollution and heat from a warming climate makes it more likely that children—especially those born to African American mothers—will be premature, underweight, or stillborn.
DNA from Neanderthals is linked to higher fertility in modern humans and increased risk of severe illness from the coronavirus.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit effectively outlaws the widely used herbicide dicamba, ruling that the EPA “substantially understated” the risks of its use.
Today, 515 vertebrate species have fewer than 1,000 members.
Bayer says it will pay more than $10 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits from people alleging that their cancers were caused by Roundup, the company’s glyphosate-based herbicide.
Yosemite National Park concessionaire Aramark fires its vice president of operations after he films himself hitting golf balls into Ahwahnee Meadow.
The Vatican urges all Catholics to divest from armament makers and fossil fuel companies.
The abandoned school bus that Christopher McCandless lived in during his Alaska wilderness ordeal, made famous by John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, is removed by officials. Pilgrimages to the site have resulted in 15 search-and-rescue operations and two deaths.
Sweden and Austria have closed all their coal-fired power plants.
Despite the global slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere hit a record high of 417 parts per million in May.
July/August 2020
In 2020, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels could decrease by 5 percent, the largest single-year drop ever recorded. Republican members of Congress accuse Wall Street of discriminating against fossil fuel companies during the pandemic.
Asian giant hornets, colloquially known as murder hornets for their zeal in decapitating honeybees, arrive in the United States.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett regrets the $10 billion he invested in Occidental Petroleum last year. Owing largely to the drop in crude oil prices, coal becomes the world’s most expensive fossil fuel.
The corn-ethanol industry is hurting from the nationwide decline in driving but is profiting from the increased demand for hand sanitizer.
President Donald Trump signs an executive order asserting the United States’ right to mine the moon.
For the second year in a row, Iceland will not hunt any whales. Its commercial whaling industry may be at an end.
A widespread pause in commercial fishing during the coronavirus outbreak may allow some depleted fish stocks to bounce back.
In the absence of tourists, poachers are slaughtering wildlife in African parks and wildlife reserves.
For the first time, a large hole in the ozone layer has opened up over the Arctic.
Past ozone holes have been confined to the Antarctic.
An enormous glut of oil in the world market, shelter-in-place orders, and a lack of storage capacity cause oil futures to temporarily dip into negative numbers.
Shelter-in-place orders in areas hit by the coronavirus lead to vastly improved air quality. Smog-free skies in Germany result in a new record for solar power generation.
Two giant pandas who lived together in a Hong Kong zoo for 13 years finally get around to mating after the zoo closes because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Wolf OR-7, which made headlines in
2011 when it loped into California from Oregon, is presumed dead, possibly of old age.
May/June 2020
A deadly coronavirus sweeps the world in the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918, killing hundreds of thousands and devastating the global economy.
As many as 10,000 koalas perished in wildfires in New South Wales, Australia. Overall, the country lost 20 percent of its forests. BHP, Australia’s largest mining company, complains that smoke from the fires curtailed its ability to mine coal.
Climate change sets off a devastating plague of locusts in East Africa.
The temperature in Antarctica hits a record 69°F. An iceberg twice the size of Washington, DC, calves off a glacier there.
Japan plans to build as many as 22 coal- fired power plants in the next five years.
Warmer temperatures, drought, and deforestation are reducing the ability of tropical forests to absorb atmospheric carbon.
Coca-Cola, the world’s biggest corporate plastic polluter, says that it won’t abandon single-use plastic bottles because people like them.
Albatross outfitted with radar detectors are tracking down illegal fishing boats in the Indian Ocean.
In 2019, California’s electrical grid produced record amounts of energy from solar and wind—on some sunny days, more than it could use.
The world’s major ocean currents are migrating toward the poles by half a mile a year.
Citing public demand for clean energy, Teck Resources abandons its $16 billion, 260,000-barrel-a-day oil sands project in Alberta, Canada.
DuPont, which uses and produces the toxic chemicals known as PFAS, buys four companies that remove PFAS from water.
Earth acquires a new moon the size of a car, called 2020 CD3.
Light pollution is overwhelming fireflies’ mating signals.
Wells Fargo joins JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and more than a dozen other financial institutions in ruling out funding for oil and gas projects in the Arctic.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismisses Juliana v. United States, ruling that its 21 young plaintiffs lack the standing to sue the federal government for failing to act on climate change.
For the first time in more than 60 years, the eastern indigo snake is breeding in the wild in Alabama.
Only half of the Bureau of Land Management’s staff in Washington, DC, will move when the agency’s headquarters is relocated to Grand Junction, Colorado.
A quarter of all tweets about climate change are produced by bots.
March/April 2020
Catastrophic bushfires in Australia burn an area larger than Tunisia. A billion animals may have perished, leaving some species on the brink of extinction. Smoke from the fires reaches Argentina, 6,000 miles away.
Greenland’s ice sheet is melting seven times faster than in the 1990s.
Oxygen levels in some tropical oceans have dropped by as much as 40 percent in the past 50 years. Waters off California are acidifying twice as fast as the global average.
California now has 1 million rooftop solar systems.
Goldman Sachs will not finance oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States drop by 2.1 percent in 2019, driven almost entirely by an 18 percent drop in the use of coal, which saved more than 26,000 lives.
Breathing the polluted air in the Indian capital of New Delhi, population 20 million, is the equivalent of smoking 50 cigarettes a day.
The Chinese paddlefish, an ancient species once native to the Yangtze River that could grow to more than 20 feet in length, is extinct.
Global wind speeds are increasing, possibly because of climate change, and may increase the output of the world’s wind turbines by as much as a third.
Japan plans to build 11 solar arrays and 10 wind farms on land contaminated by radiation from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown.
Sweden shuts down one of four nuclear reactors at the Ringhals power station after 40 years of operation. Switzerland shutters its Muehleberg reactor, beginning the nation’s exit from nuclear power.
A report commissioned by Washington state’s legislature accuses state representative Matt Shea of “domestic terrorism” for his role in helping to plan the 2016 armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Kansas City, Missouri, approves a plant to make public transit free.
Winter floodwaters in Venice, Italy, peak at six feet above sea level, the second-highest level in recorded history. Two people die, and St. Mark’s Basilica suffers “irreparable damage.”
The Netherlands’s high court says the government must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent by the end of 2020.
January/February 2020
There are nearly 3 billion fewer birds today in North America than there were in 1970—nearly one in four has disappeared.
The mysterious “Havana Syndrome” affecting US and Canadian diplomats in Cuba may be the result of repeated exposure to insecticides meant to protect them from Zika-carrying mosquitoes.
An analysis of seafloor mud off the shore of Santa Barbara reveals that between 1945 and 2009, plastic levels in the ocean doubled every 15 years.
Next year, Texas will produce more electricity from wind than from coal.
British wind farms, solar panels, and renewable biomass plants produce more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time since the UK’s first power plant fired up in 1882.
A three-year study finds that car tires are likely the biggest source of microplastics in California’s coastal waters.
An analysis of Scotland’s Loch Ness finds no signs of a prehistoric reptile but does find a surprisingly large quantity of eel DNA in all samples.
Investing $1.8 trillion in climate mitigation and adaptation over the next decade would yield $7.1 trillion in social and environmental benefits, according to the Global Commission on Adaptation.
Gasoline pumps are disappearing in Norway as electric cars take over.
Climate change could push more than 120 million people into poverty by 2030 and undo the past 50 years of progress in global health, says the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
The last nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island shuts down for good, though some employees will stay on until 2060 to guard its nuclear waste.
A crash in the elk population in the vicinity of Vail, Colorado, appears to be related to an upsurge in the number of hikers and mountain bikers in the region.
Imidacloprid, the world’s most widely used insecticide, suppresses the appetite of birds, depriving them of the precious fat they need to migrate.
The University of California system announces that it will divest the $80 billion in its endowment and pension funds from fossil fuels--not out of idealism, says its chief investment officer, but because fossil fuels are a terrible investment.
President Trump has repeatedly suggested using nuclear bombs to prevent hurricanes from reaching the United States.
Almost two-thirds of Americans now believe that climate change is either a crisis or a serious problem, with a majority wanting immediate action to address it.
Dolphins are once again swimming, romancing, and making babies in the Potomac River.
November/December 2019
After assuming for decades that only male birds sing, scientists are trying to figure out why so many female birds do so too.
Brain scans of over 200 adult humans of various ages find that women’s brains appear metabolically two to three years younger, on average, than those of men the same age.
NASA renames the street in front of its headquarters Hidden Figures Way, to honor the African American female mathematicians who calculated the trajectories for the earliest US space missions.
A survey of half a million heart attack patients in Florida finds that female patients treated by male physicians are less likely to survive than patients of either gender treated by female physicians.
Fewer than 1 percent of US children’s drawings of scientists in the 1960s and ‘70s depicted females. Since then, the percentage has risen to 28.
Women are 73 percent more likely than men to be killed or seriously injured in a car crash. One possible culprit: a decades-long shortage of crash test dummies with female proportions.
Corporations in which women have more power in the top management team are statistically less likely to be sued.
NASA cancels the first all-women space walk after realizing it has only one appropriately sized space suit.
According to the United Nations, four out of five people displaced by climate change are female. Women are more vulnerable because they make up most of the world’s poor and are more dependent on natural resources to support themselves and their children.
A remake of the Lion King perpetuates scientific errors about lion culture. Lion prides are led by, and are almost exclusively composed of, females. Males come and go, looking for prides that will accept them.
Clitarchus hookeri, a species of stick insect that migrated to the UK from New Zealand more than seven decades ago, has evolved into an all-female matriarchy that reproduces asexually.
More than 40 percent of women with full-time jobs in science either leave the field or go part-time after having their first child. Only 23 percent of new fathers do the same.
A study measuring the effect of temperature on cognitive performance finds that women do better on tests when the thermostat is set to a warmer temperature. The reverse is true for men.
September/October 2019
The remote Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean are covered by 413.6 million pieces of plastic debris weighing 238 tons.
People around the world ingest an average of five grams of microplastic each week, the equivalent of eating a credit card.
Swedish start-up Cangaroo proposes deploying hundreds of pogo sticks in major US cities as a zero-carbon transportation option.
July 2019 surpasses July 2016 as the hottest month in recorded history.
Emissions of large amounts of CFC11--a banned greenhouse gas that also destroys atmospheric ozone--are coming from two industrial areas of China.
Emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane from ammonia-fertilizer plants are 100 times greater than reported by the industry.
So far this year, 182 dead gray whales have washed up along the Pacific Coast, many likely having starved to death because of changing fish populations in warming waters.
National Weather Service radar picks up an 80-mile-wide blob at 5,000 to 9,000 feet over Southern California. It turns out to be an enormous swarm of ladybugs.
In April 2019, for the first time ever, more US electricity generation came from renewables than from coal.
Pacific Gas & Electric starts shutting off power to thousands of California customers as on ongoing fire-safety precaution.
A heat wave bakes India. Temperatures in Rajasthan reach 123ºF, and the four reservoirs that supply Chennai (population 9.1 million) go dry.
Republican lawmakers in 18 states want to criminalize protests against fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines.
By the end of 2018, 11 million people were employed in renewable energy worldwide.
More than 1.8 million people object to a Trump proposal to strip gray wolves of endangered species protections.
Washington State legalizes the composting of human bodies.
For the first time, a North Pacific right whale is heard singing. Only 30 such whales remain in the Bering Sea; the musical male is likely looking for a mate.