Matt Simon

Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be a key to understanding how drastically the world is changing as it warms. Aerosols are little bits of dust, wildfire smoke, and fossil fuel pollution floating around the atmosphe…

In this basement, a company called Epic Cleantec intercepts the building’s gray water (dirty water that doesn’t contain human waste or food scraps) and passes it through tanks and a maze of pipes for fine filtration and disinfection with chlorine and UV light. The resulting liquid is then piped back upstairs to fill toilets and urinals, taking at least some of the “waste” out of wastewater. “By regulation, we’re only reusing the water for nonpotable applications,” says Aaron Tartakovsky, cofound…

While everyone’s been focused on accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles to cut carbon emissions, a technological hero has been rapidly ascending under the radar: the heat pump. Instead of burning natural gas or coal to produce heat, this fully electric device extracts warmth from outdoor air—even when it’s freezing outside—and pumps it inside to warm a structure. After years of stealthy, steady growth, heat pumps are now outselling gas furnaces in the United States, whereas EVs accounted…

You can see 2023 in the orange line below, the other gray lines being previous years. That solid black line is where we are so far in 2024—way, way above even 2023. While we’re nowhere near the Atlantic hurricane season yet—that runs from June 1 through the autumn—keep in mind that cyclones feed on warm ocean water, which could well stay anomalously hot in the coming months. Regardless, these surface temperature anomalies could be triggering major ecological problems already. “In the tropical ea…

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms. The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfac…

One of the most powerful weapons you can wield to fight climate change is … an appliance. A heat pump is a fully electric device that transfers warmth from outdoor air into a building, then reverses in the summer to act like an air conditioning unit. It’s much more efficient than burning planet-warming gas in a furnace, and will save the average American household more than $550 a year on their utility bill, according to one estimate. Emphasis on average. Every American home is different in size…

Urban areas in the United States generate an estimated 59.5 million acre-feet of stormwater runoff per year on average—equal to 53 billion gallons each day—according to a new report from the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research group specializing in water. Over the course of the year, that equates to 93 percent of total municipal and industrial water use. American urban areas couldn’t feasibly capture all of that bountiful runoff, but a combination of smarter stormwater infrastructure and “sp…

Anywhere else in the world, more trees would be a blessing. But in the far north of Alaska, they’re a reckoning. As the Arctic warms up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, white spruce trees are now spreading into tundra that was once inhospitable. Bully for the white spruce, but not so much for the Arctic: Because the trees are darker than snow, they absorb more of the sun’s energy, potentially further heating the region and further driving dramatic change. That, in turn, could rel…

An alarming new study in the journal Nature shows how bad the problem could get in 32 coastal cities in the United States. Previous projections have studied geocentric sea level rise, or how much the ocean is coming up along a given coastline. This new research considers relative sea level rise, which also includes the vertical motion of the land. That’s possible thanks to new data from satellites that can measure elevation changes on very fine scales along coastlines. With that subsidence in mi…

If you ever watch a duck float across a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the surface, that bird is way ahead of its time. The buoyant greenery is azolla, a tiny fern that grows like crazy, doubling its biomass as quickly as every two days to conquer small bodies of water. The duck doesn’t know it—and who could blame it, really—but azolla may soon spread across human civilization, becoming food for people and livestock, fertilizer for crops, and even biofuel. “I’m not out here saying ever…

Your city isn’t prepared for what’s coming. The classical method for dealing with stormwater is to get it out of town as quickly as possible, with gutters and sewers and canals. But more and more, that strategy is breaking down: As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture, spawning ever-wetter storms that overwhelm this creaky infrastructure. Your city was built for a climate of 100, 200, 300 years ago, but that climate no longer exists. The hot new strategy in urban design, which was pio…

The phone or computer you’re reading this on may not be long for this world. Maybe you’ll drop it in water, or your dog will make a chew toy of it, or it’ll reach obsolescence. If you can’t repair it and have to discard it, the device will become e-waste, joining an alarmingly large mountain of defunct TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, cameras, routers, electric toothbrushes, headphones. This is “electrical and electronic equipment,” aka EEE—anything with a plug or battery. It’s increasingly…

Gouging a mine into the Earth is so 1924. In 2024, scientists are figuring out how to mine with plants, known as phytomining. Of the 350,000 known plant species, just 750 are “hyperaccumulators” that readily absorb sky-high amounts of metals and incorporate them into their tissues. Grow a bunch of the European plant Alyssum bertolonii or the tropical Phyllanthus rufuschaneyi and burn the biomass, and you end up with ash that’s loaded with nickel. “In soil that contains roughly 5 percent nickel—t…

Unless you’ve got a cellar stockpiled to last you the rest of your life, climate change is probably coming for your favorite wine. Temperature fluctuations during the growing season create the flavors, alcohol content, and even color of your preferred fermented grape juice—producing a beautiful ballet in a bottle. So as global temperatures soar and water availability in many regions plummets, the characteristics of individual wines are changing. Up to 70 percent of today’s wine regions could be…

Future generations will marvel at the ridiculous ways we’ve been keeping warm. With a furnace, you’re inefficiently burning toxic, planet-warming gas. In a big city like New York, your building might have a boiler that burns oil or gas to heat water or produce steam, which feeds wheezing radiators in every unit. Electric-resistance space heaters are more efficient, but even they’re not nearly efficient enough, as you’ll see in your utility bill if you run one too much. For many decades now, ther…

Friday morning at around 10:30 local time, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake popped three miles below Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Though nowhere near the magnitude of the West Coast’s monster quakes, the seismic waves traveled hundreds of miles, jostling not just nearby New York City, but Philadelphia and Boston and Washington, DC. The United States Geological Survey is urging the region to prepare for aftershocks of smaller magnitude. For a region not accustomed to earthquakes, it was a jolt. Its…

That includes the city’s Metro system, the second-largest in North America after New York City’s. Now, satellites have allowed scientists to meticulously measure the rate of sinking across Mexico City, mapping where subsidence has the potential to damage railways. “When you’re here in the city, you get used to buildings being tilted a little,” says Darío Solano‐Rojas, a remote-sensing scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “You can feel how the rails are wobbly. Riding the M…

No good deed goes unpunished—and that includes trying to slow climate change. By cutting greenhouse gas emissions, humanity will spew out fewer planet-cooling aerosols—small particles of pollution that act like tiny umbrellas to bounce some of the sun’s energy back into space. “Even more important than this direct reflection effect, they alter the properties of clouds,” says Øivind Hodnebrog, a climate researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “In essence, they…

There’s one word that will get any American fuming, regardless of their political inclination: infrastructure. Pothole-pocked roads, creaky bridges, and half-baked public transportation bind us nationally like little else can. And that was before climate change’s coastal flooding, extreme heat, and supercharged wildfires came around to make things even worse. US infrastructure was designed for the climate we enjoyed 50, 75, even 100 years ago. Much of it simply isn’t holding up, endangering live…

You might visit Amsterdam for its famous canals, and who could blame you, really. But the truly interesting waterways aren’t under your feet—they’re above your head. Beautiful green roofs have popped up all over the world: specially selected plants growing on structures specially designed to manage the extra weight of biomass. Amsterdam has taken that one step further with blue-green roofs, specially designed to capture rainwater. One project, the Resilience Network of Smart Innovative Climate-A…