U.S. President Joe Biden’s promise to take action against climate change with a flurry of executive orders and ambitious goals faces political, legal, and economic obstacles from home, which has raised questions if he can meet his commitments reut.rs/3Ee4hYW 1/5
Setbacks include a judge overturning the administration's effort to block new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and rising retail gas prices that have led the White House to publicly ask the global oil cartel, OPEC, to boost production 2/5
Most importantly, heavy political opposition has forced the administration to put its centerpiece climate proposals to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 into a budget reconciliation bill that has an uncertain future in the closely-divided U.S. Congress 3/5
Democrats, who hope to pass the bill by the end of September, are already talking about paring back investments and targets on carbon emissions, fees on methane releases from oil and gas and tax credits for clean energy technologies, among other initiatives 4/5
If Washington fails to deliver ahead of a climate summit in November in Glasgow, Scotland, other global powers, including the world's top greenhouse gas emitter, China, will be reluctant to commit to slashing their own emissions reut.rs/3Ee4hYW 5/5
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The Umusambi Village in Rwanda’s capital of Kigali has rescued more than 200 grey crowned cranes from captivity over the years, helping to boost the population of the endangered birds to 881 from 487 just four years ago reut.rs/2Xt3T8r 1/5
Before the intervention, local communities were hunting or capturing the birds to sell, said veterinarian Olivier Nsengimana, whose conservation organization runs Umusambi Village together with the government. The name means grey crowned bird in the Kinyarwanda language 2/5
Nsengimana’s passion for cranes goes back to his childhood, growing up in a village filled with grey crowned cranes that served as alarm clocks and provided entertainment 3/5
Ice provides historical records about the climate and shows the impact humanity has had. But many glaciers are now melting, prompting renewed urgency among scientists reut.rs/3z8R5Rg 1/8
Scientists are racing to collect ice cores – along with long-frozen records they hold of climate cycles – as global warming melts glaciers and ice sheets.
Some say they are running out of time. And, in some cases, it’s already too late 2/8
Late last year, German-born chemist Margit Schwikowski and a team of international scientists attempted to gather ice cores from the Grand Combin glacier, high on the Swiss-Italian border, for a United Nations-backed climate monitoring effort 3/8
Temperatures dropped across Brazil - with rare snowfall overnight in some places - as a polar air mass advanced toward the center-south of the global agricultural powerhouse, threatening coffee, sugarcane and orange crops with frost reut.rs/3iWd9IM 1/5
'I am 62 years old and had never seen the snow, you know? To see nature's beauty is something indescribable,' said truck driver Iodor Goncalves Marques in Cambara do Sul, a municipality of Rio Grande do Sul state, speaking to TV Globo network 2/5
More than 40 cities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul had icy conditions and at least 33 municipalities had snow, the meteorology company Somar Meteorologia reports 3/5
A mixed vaccination of first AstraZeneca and then a Pfizer COVID-19 shot boosted neutralizing antibody levels by six times compared with two AstraZeneca doses, a study from South Korea shows reut.rs/3BE0Edz 1/5
The study involved 499 medical workers - 100 receiving mixed doses, 200 taking two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech shot and the remainder getting two AstraZeneca shots 2/5
All showed neutralizing antibodies, which prevent the virus from entering cells and replicating, and the result of the mixed schedule of vaccines showed similar amounts of neutralizing antibodies found from the group that received two Pfizer shots 3/5
The world doesn't have the ‘luxury' of waiting for the pandemic to end before tackling climate change, says U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, as the world continues to see the effects of a warming planet reut.rs/2UWYEfB 1/6☀️
🌡 In the UK, Britain’s Met Office announced its first amber extreme heat alert due to unusually high temperatures, warning of its health risks and business impacts reut.rs/3BktxeF 2/6
Catastrophic floods that swept Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands that killed more than 150 people led to urges in Europe for adapting infrastructure now as extreme weather events take place reut.rs/3zggE3j 3/6