REVISITING A CLASSIC Exploring how exploring our universe is harming our planet. As rocket launches become more and more frequent every year, we have to ask: how much does this industry actually contribute to the climate crisis? Back in 2022, I set out to find the answer to this question. And now, we are revisiting it. This piece is part of our Throwback Series, where we revisit early CNM articles and rebuild them with new reporting, new context, and a clearer understanding o

In November of 2023, I published an article about decreasing snow pack levels. Here, I have elaborated on that article. If you haven't read my original article on this topic, you can find it here . According to study from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measuring April snowpacks across various sites in the Western United States, 81% of the sites saw decreased snowpack. This resulted in an average decrease of 18% from 1955 to 2023. Here are a couple more facts from

The first quarter of the 21st century is almost over, and I decided to dive into the fact that some of the hottest years in our history have occurred already in this century. We have been keeping track of global temperatures since 1850, and the last 25 years have been among the hottest of the 175 years we've been keeping track. As you probably know, 2024 broke the record for being the hottest year on record, which by itself, you may think might just be a fluctuation, nothing

On Tuesday April 2nd, researchers at the University of Washington used a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay to launch microscopic salt particles into the air in an effort to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. This is part of a new area of research called solar radiation modification. In this specific experiment the researchers aimed to increase the density, and therefore the reflectiveness, of the clouds. This experiment was kept very secretive to avo

With the ski season coming up, many people in mountain towns are worried about how global warming will affect their snowpack. This month I looked into what mountains are doing to reduce snow loss and melting and stay open all winter long. I’m also going to look at some ways we are trapping carbon to reduce global warming. Research shows that cleaner snow does not melt as fast as dirtier snow. When air pollution particles settle and make the snow dirty it will absorb more sunl

As some of you may know, July was Earth’s hottest month on record and many devastating effects of climate change started to show themselves such as huge wildfires in Hawaii and Canada as well as dying coral reefs in Florida and Australia. As I sit here on a high mesa in Southwest Colorado I can feel that this summer has been warmer than in the past and every year there is less snow on the mountains. But so far I have been relatively shielded from the biggest impacts. In order

There has been a lot of climate news in the past two months. In early April an important new report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we are not doing enough to curb global warming to only 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal set in the Paris Agreement in 2015. The report which was written by hundreds of leading scientists says that despite some efforts to curb emissions, greenhouse gas emissions did, in fact, increase globally from 2010 to 2019 and c

Every time a rocket is launched it releases black carbon or soot, which, when there were only about 70 worldwide rocket launches a year didn’t have a significant impact, but now with an average of about twice that is becoming more of a problem. Each year about 1,000 metric tons of soot is released into the stratosphere from rocket launches. However, this does not include all the fossil fuels used to build and transport these rockets.  Currently rocket launches account for 0.2