2023 is now officially the warmest year on record – 2.67 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial period. Nearly half the days were warmer than 2.7 degrees, which of course, was the limit set in the 2015 Paris climate Agreement.
More microplastics than previously known have been found in bottled water – 10 to 100 times greater than previously known. The particles are small enough to enter human cells and cross the blood-brain barrier.
Using sophisticated imaging technology, scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty laboratory examined water samples from three popular brands (they won’t say which ones) and found hundreds of thousands of bits of plastic per liter of water.
Ninety percent of those plastics were small enough to qualify as nanoplastics: microscopic flecks so small that they can be absorbed into human cells and tissue, as well as cross the blood-brain barrier.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-01-08/thousands-of-nanoplastics-found-in-bottled-drinking-water
And finally, it appears that adding massive amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere likely has long term implication and feedback loops. Scientists at Columbia found that the last time levels were this high was 14 million years ago.
“We have long known that adding CO2 to our atmosphere raises the temperature,” said Bärbel Hönisch, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who coordinated the consortium. “This study gives us a much more robust idea of how sensitive the climate is over long time scales.”
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/12/07/a-new-66-million-year-history-of-carbon-dioxide-offers-little-comfort-for-today/