Source: www.databreachtoday.com – Author: 1 Breach Notification , HIPAA/HITECH , Security Operations The Company Will Start Notifying Individuals Affected by the Breach in Late July Marianne Kolbasuk McGee (HealthInfoSec) • June 21, 2024     Change Healthcare, a unit of UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, has begun to notify customers whose data was compromised in the company’s […]

La entrada Change Healthcare Begins to Notify Clients Affected by Hack – Source: www.databreachtoday.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Details About Romania Cyberattack

• The Government of Romania: This is not the first time that the country’s official site was hacked. In 2022, Pro-Russia hacker group Killnet claimed to have carried out cyberattacks on websites of the government and Defense Ministry. However, at that time, the Romania Government claimed that there was no compromise of data due to the attack and the websites were soon restored.
• National Bank of Romania: The National Bank of Romania is the central bank of Romania and was established in April 1880. Its headquarters are in the capital city of Bucharest.
• Aedificium Bank for Housing: A banking firm that provides residential lending, home loans, savings, and financing services. It was founded in 2004 and has branches in the European Union (EU), and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).
• Bucharest Stock Exchange: The Bucharest Stock Exchange is the stock exchange of Romania located in Bucharest. As of 2023, there were 85 companies listed on the BVB.

Romania Cyberattacks Are Not Uncommon

How to Mitigate NoName DDoS attacks

For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. It’s not just a question of size, but also of shape, surface conditions, and duration—ideally in a beautiful natural environment. 

While this hunt has taken surfers from tropical coastlines reachable only by boat to swells breaking off icebergs, these days—as the sport goes mainstream—that search may take place closer to home. That is, at least, the vision presented by developers and boosters in the growing industry of surf pools, spurred by advances in wave-­generating technology that have finally created artificial waves surfers actually want to ride. 

Some surf evangelists think these pools will democratize the sport, making it accessible to more communities far from the coasts—while others are simply interested in cashing in. But a years-long fight over a planned surf pool in Thermal, California, shows that for many people who live in the places where they’re being built, the calculus isn’t about surf at all. 

Just some 30 miles from Palm Springs, on the southeastern edge of the Coachella Valley desert, Thermal is the future home of the 118-acre private, members-only Thermal Beach Club (TBC). The developers promise over 300 luxury homes with a dazzling array of amenities; the planned centerpiece is a 20-plus-acre artificial lagoon with a 3.8-acre surf pool offering waves up to seven feet high. According to an early version of the website, club memberships will start at $175,000 a year. (TBC’s developers did not respond to multiple emails asking for comment.)

That price tag makes it clear that the club is not meant for locals. Thermal, an unincorporated desert community, currently has a median family income of $32,340. Most of its residents are Latino; many are farmworkers. The community lacks much of the basic infrastructure that serves the western Coachella Valley, including public water service—leaving residents dependent on aging private wells for drinking water. 

Just a few blocks away from the TBC site is the 60-acre Oasis Mobile Home Park. A dilapidated development designed for some 1,500 people in about 300 mobile homes, Oasis has been plagued for decades by a lack of clean drinking water. The park owners have been cited numerous times by the Environmental Protection Agency for providing tap water contaminated with high levels of arsenic, and last year, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against them for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Some residents have received assistance to relocate, but many of those who remain rely on weekly state-funded deliveries of bottled water and on the local high school for showers. 

Stephanie Ambriz, a 28-year-old special-needs teacher who grew up near Thermal, recalls feeling “a lot of rage” back in early 2020 when she first heard about plans for the TBC development. Ambriz and other locals organized a campaign against the proposed club, which she says the community doesn’t want and won’t be able to access. What residents do want, she tells me, is drinkable water, affordable housing, and clean air—and to have their concerns heard and taken seriously by local officials. 

Despite the grassroots pushback, which twice led to delays to allow more time for community feedback, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the plans for the club in October 2020. It was, Ambriz says, “a shock to see that the county is willing to approve these luxurious developments when they’ve ignored community members” for decades. (A Riverside County representative did not respond to specific questions about TBC.) 

The desert may seem like a counterintuitive place to build a water-intensive surf pool, but the Coachella Valley is actually “the very best place to possibly put one of these things,” argues Doug Sheres, the developer behind DSRT Surf, another private pool planned for the area. It is “close to the largest [and] wealthiest surf population in the world,” he says, featuring “360 days a year of surfable weather” and mountain and lake views in “a beautiful resort setting” served by “a very robust aquifer.” 

In addition to the two planned projects, the Palm Springs Surf Club (PSSC) has already opened locally. The trifecta is turning the Coachella Valley into “the North Shore of wave pools,” as one aficionado described it to Surfer magazine. 

The effect is an acute cognitive dissonance—one that I experienced after spending a few recent days crisscrossing the valley and trying out the waves at PSSC. But as odd as this setting may seem, an analysis by MIT Technology Review reveals that the Coachella Valley is not the exception. Of an estimated 162 surf pools that have been built or announced around the world, as tracked by the industry publication Wave Pool Magazine, 54 are in areas considered by the nonprofit World Resources Institute (WRI) to face high or extremely high water stress, meaning that they regularly use a large portion of their available surface water supply annually. Regions in the “extremely high” category consume 80% or more of their water, while those in the “high” category use 40% to 80% of their supply. (Not all of Wave Pool Magazine’s listed pools will be built, but the publication tracks all projects that have been announced. Some have closed and over 60 are currently operational.)

Zoom in on the US and nearly half are in places with high or extremely high water stress, roughly 16 in areas served by the severely drought-stricken Colorado River. The greater Palm Springs area falls under the highest category of water stress, according to Samantha Kuzma, a WRI researcher (though she notes that WRI’s data on surface water does not reflect all water sources, including an area’s access to aquifers, or its water management plan).

Now, as TBC’s surf pool and other planned facilities move forward and contribute to what’s becoming a multibillion-dollar industry with proposed sites on every continent except Antarctica, inland waves are increasingly becoming a flash point for surfers, developers, and local communities. There are at least 29 organized movements in opposition to surf clubs around the world, according to an ongoing survey from a coalition called No to the Surf Park in Canéjan, which includes 35 organizations opposing a park in Bordeaux, France.  

While the specifics vary widely, at the core of all these fights is a question that’s also at the heart of the sport: What is the cost of finding, or now creating, the perfect wave—and who will have to bear it? 

Though wave pools have been around since the late 1800s, the first artificial surfing wave was built in 1969, and also in the desert—at Big Surf in Tempe, Arizona. But at that pool and its early successors, surfing was secondary; people who went to those parks were more interested in splashing around, and surfers themselves weren’t too excited by what they had to offer. The manufactured waves were too small and too soft, without the power, shape, or feel of the real thing. 

The tide really turned in 2015, when Kelly Slater, widely considered to be the greatest professional surfer of all time, was filmed riding a six-foot-tall, 50-second barreling wave. As the viral video showed, he was not in the wild but atop a wave generated in a pool in California’s Central Valley, some 100 miles from the coast.

Waves of that height, shape, and duration are a rarity even in the ocean, but “Kelly’s wave,” as it became known, showed that “you can make waves in the pool that are as good as or better than what you get in the ocean,” recalls Sheres, the developer whose company, Beach Street Development, is building mul­tiple surf pools around the country, including DSRT Surf. “That got a lot of folks excited—myself included.” 

In the ocean, a complex combination of factors—including wind direction, tide, and the shape and features of the seafloor—is required to generate a surfable wave. Re-creating them in an artificial environment required years of modeling, precise calculations, and simulations. 

Surf Ranch, Slater’s project in the Central Valley, built a mechanical system in which a 300-ton hydrofoil—which resembles a gigantic metal fin—is pulled along the length of a pool 700 yards long and 70 yards wide by a mechanical device the size of several train cars running on a track. The bottom of the pool is precisely contoured to mimic reefs and other features of the ocean floor; as the water hits those features, its movement creates the 50-second-long barreling wave. Once the foil reaches one end of the pool, it runs backwards, creating another wave that breaks in the opposite direction. 

While the result is impressive, the system is slow, producing just one wave every three to four minutes. 

Around the same time Slater’s team was tinkering with his wave, other companies were developing their own technologies to produce multiple waves, and to do so more rapidly and efficiently—key factors in commercial viability. 

Fundamentally, all the systems create waves by displacing water, but depending on the technology deployed, there are differences in the necessary pool size, the project’s water and energy requirements, the level of customization that’s possible, and the feel of the wave. 

Thomas Lochtefeld is a pioneer in the field and the CEO of Surf Loch, which powers PSSC’s waves. Surf Loch uses pneumatic technology, in which compressed air cycles water through chambers the size of bathroom stalls and lets operators create countless wave patterns.

One demo pool in Australia uses what looks like a giant mechanical doughnut that sends out waves the way a pebble dropped in water sends out ripples. Another proposed plan uses a design that spins out waves from a circular fan—a system that is mobile and can be placed in existing bodies of water. 

Of the two most popular techniques in commercial use, one relies on modular paddles attached to a pier that runs across a pool, which move in precise ways to generate waves. The other is pneumatic technology, which uses compressed air to push water through chambers the size of bathroom stalls, called caissons; the caissons pull in water and then push it back out into the pool. By choosing which modular paddles or caissons move first against the different pool bottoms, and with how much force at a time, operators can create a range of wave patterns. 

Regardless of the technique used, the design and engineering of most modern wave pools are first planned out on a computer. Waves are precisely calculated, designed, simulated, and finally tested in the pool with real surfers before they are set as options on a “wave menu” in proprietary software that surf-pool technologists say offers a theoretically endless number and variety of waves. 

On a Tuesday afternoon in early April, I am the lucky tester at the Palm Springs Surf Club, which uses pneumatic technology, as the team tries out a shoulder-high right-breaking wave. 

I have the pool to myself as the club prepares to reopen; it had closed to rebuild its concrete “beach” just 10 days after its initial launch because the original beach had not been designed to withstand the force of the larger waves that Surf Loch, the club’s wave technology provider, had added to the menu at the last minute. (Weeks after reopening in April, the surf pool closed again as the result of “a third-party equipment supplier’s failure,” according to Thomas Lochtefeld, Surf Loch’s CEO.)

SPENCER LOWELL

In some ways, these pneumatic waves are better than what I typically ride around Los Angeles—more powerful, more consistent, and (on this day, at least) uncrowded. But the edge of the pool and the control tower behind it are almost always in my line of sight. And behind me are the PSSC employees (young men, incredible surfers, who keep an eye on my safety and provide much-needed tips) and then, behind them, the snow-capped San Jacinto Mountains. At the far end of the pool, behind the recently rebuilt concrete beach, is a restaurant patio full of diners who I can’t help but imagine are judging my every move. Still, for the few glorious seconds that I ride each wave, I am in the same flow state I experience in the ocean itself.  

Then I fall and sheepishly paddle back to PSSC’s encouraging surfer-employees to restart the whole process. I would be having a lot of fun—if I could just forget my self-consciousness, and the jarring feeling that I shouldn’t be riding waves in the middle of the desert at all.  

Though long inhabited by Cahuilla Indians, the Coachella Valley was sparsely populated until 1876, when the Southern Pacific Railroad added a new line out to the middle of the arid expanse. Shortly after, the first non-native settlers came to the valley and realized that its artesian wells, which flow naturally without the need to be pumped, provided ideal conditions for farming.  

Agricultural production exploded, and by the early 1900s, these once freely producing wells were putting out significantly less, leading residents to look for alternative water sources. In 1918, they created the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) to import water from the Colorado River via a series of canals. This water was used to supply the region’s farms and recharge the Coachella Aquifer, the region’s main source of drinking water. 

SPENCER LOWELL

The water imports continue to this day—though the seven states that draw on the river are currently renegotiating their water rights amid a decades-long megadrought in the region. 

The imported water, along with CVWD’s water management plan, has allowed Coachella’s aquifer to maintain relatively steady levels “going back to 1970, even though most development and population has occurred since,” Scott Burritt, a CVWD spokesperson, told MIT Technology Review in an email. 

This has sustained not only agriculture but also tourism in the valley, most notably its world-class—and water-intensive—golf courses. In 2020, the 120 golf courses under the jurisdiction of the CVWD consumed 105,000 acre-feet of water per year (AFY); that’s an average of 875 AFY, or 285 million gallons per year per course. 

Surf pools’ proponents frequently point to the far larger amount of water golf courses consume to argue that opposing the pools on grounds of their water use is misguided. 

PSSC, the first of the area’s three planned surf clubs to open, requires an estimated 3 million gallons per year to fill its pool; the proposed DSRT Surf holds 7 million gallons and estimates that it will use 24 million gallons per year, which includes maintenance and filtration, and accounts for evaporation. TBC’s planned 20-acre recreational lake, 3.8 acres of which will contain the surf pool, will use 51 million gallons per year, according to Riverside County documents. Unlike standard swimming pools, none of these pools need to be drained and refilled annually for maintenance, saving on potential water use. DSRT Surf also boasts about plans to offset its water use by replacing 1 million square feet of grass from an adjacent golf course with drought-tolerant plants. 

SPENCER LOWELL

With surf parks, “you can see the water,” says Jess Ponting, a cofounder of Surf Park Central, the main industry association, and Stoke, a nonprofit that aims to certify surf and ski resorts—and, now, surf pools—for sustainability. “Even though it’s a fraction of what a golf course is using, it’s right there in your face, so it looks bad.”

But even if it were just an issue of appearance, public perception is important when residents are being urged to reduce their water use, says Mehdi Nemati, an associate professor of environmental economics and policy at the University of California, Riverside. It’s hard to demand such efforts from people who see these pools and luxury developments being built around them, he says. “The questions come: Why do we conserve when there are golf courses or surfing … in the desert?” 

(Burritt, the CVWD representative, notes that the water district “encourages all customers, not just residents, to use water responsibly” and adds that CVWD’s strategic plans project that there should be enough water to serve both the district’s golf courses and its surf pools.)  

Locals opposing these projects, meanwhile, argue that developers are grossly underestimating their water use, and various engineering firms and some county officials have in fact offered projections that differ from the developers’ estimates. Opponents are specifically concerned about the effects of spray, evaporation, and other factors, which increase with higher temperatures, bigger waves, and larger pool sizes. 

As a rough point of reference, Slater’s 14-acre wave pool in Lemoore, California, can lose up to 250,000 gallons of water per day to evaporation, according to Adam Fincham, the engineer who designed the technology. That’s roughly half an Olympic swimming pool.

More fundamentally, critics take issue with even debating whether surf clubs or golf courses are worse. “We push back against all of it,” says Ambriz, who organized opposition to TBC and argues that neither the pool nor an exclusive new golf course in Thermal benefits the local community. Comparing them, she says, obscures greater priorities, like the water needs of households. 

SPENCER LOWELL

The “primary beneficiary” of the area’s water, says Mark Johnson, who served as CVWD’s director of engineering from 2004 to 2016, “should be human consumption.”

Studies have shown that just one AFY, or nearly 326,000 gallons, is generally enough to support all household water needs of three California families every year. In Thermal, the gap between the demands of the surf pool and the needs of the community is even more stark: each year for the past three years, nearly 36,000 gallons of water have been delivered, in packages of 16-ounce plastic water bottles, to residents of the Oasis Mobile Home Park—some 108,000 gallons in all. Compare that with the 51 million gallons that will be used annually by TBC’s lake: it would be enough to provide drinking water to its neighbors at Oasis for the next 472 years.

Furthermore, as Nemati notes, “not all water is the same.” CVWD has provided incentives for golf courses to move toward recycled water and replace grass with less water-­intensive landscaping. But while recycled water and even rainwater have been proposed as options for some surf pools elsewhere in the world, including France and Australia, this is unrealistic in Coachella, which receives just three to four inches of rain per year. 

Instead, the Coachella Valley surf pools will depend on a mix of imported water and nonpotable well water from Coachella’s aquifer. 

But any use of the aquifer worries Johnson. Further drawing down the water, especially in an underground aquifer, “can actually create water quality problems,” he says, by concentrating “naturally occurring minerals … like chromium and arsenic.” In other words, TBC could worsen the existing problem of arsenic contamination in local well water. 

When I describe to Ponting MIT Technology Review’s analysis showing how many surf pools are being built in desert regions, he seems to concede it’s an issue. “If 50% of the surf parks in development are in water-stressed areas,” he says, “then the developers are not thinking about the right things.” 

Before visiting the future site of Thermal Beach Club, I stopped in La Quinta, a wealthy town where, back in 2022, community opposition successfully stopped plans for a fourth pool planned for the Coachella Valley. This one was developed by the Kelly Slater Wave Company, which was acquired by the World Surf League in 2016. 

Alena Callimanis, a longtime resident who was a member of the community group that helped defeat the project, says that for a year and a half, she and other volunteers often spent close to eight hours a day researching everything they could about surf pools—and how to fight them. “We knew nothing when we started,” she recalls. But the group learned quickly, poring over planning documents, consulting hydrologists, putting together presentations, providing comments at city council hearings, and even conducting their own citizen science experiments to test the developers’ assertions about the light and noise pollution the project could create. (After the council rejected the proposal for the surf club, the developers pivoted to previously approved plans for a golf course. Callimanis’s group also opposes the golf course, raising similar concerns about water use, but since plans have already been approved, she says, there is little they can do to fight back.) 

It was a different story in Thermal, where three young activists juggled jobs and graduate programs as they tried to mobilize an under-resourced community. “Folks in Thermal lack housing, lack transportation, and they don’t have the ability to take a day off from work to drive up and provide public comment,” says Ambriz. 

But the local pushback did lead to certain promises, including a community benefit payment of $2,300 per luxury housing unit, totaling $749,800. In the meeting approving the project, Riverside County supervisor Manuel Perez called this “unprecedented” and credited the efforts of Ambriz and her peers. (Ambriz remains unconvinced. “None of that has happened,” she says, and payments to the community don’t solve the underlying water issues that the project could exacerbate.) 

That affluent La Quinta managed to keep a surf pool out of its community where working-class Thermal failed is even more jarring in light of industry rhetoric about how surf pools could democratize the sport. For Bryan Dickerson, the editor in chief of Wave Pool Magazine, the collective vision for the future is that instead of “the local YMCA … putting in a skate park, they put in a wave pool.” Other proponents, like Ponting, describe how wave pools can provide surf therapy or opportunities for underrepresented groups. A design firm in New York City, for example, has proposed to the city a plan for an indoor wave pool in a low-income, primarily black and Latino neighborhood in Queens—for $30 million. 

For its part, PSSC cost an estimated $80 million to build. On top of a $40 general admission fee, a private session like the one I had would cost $3,500 to $5,000 per hour, while a public session would be at least $100 to $200, depending on the surfer’s skill level and the types of waves requested. 

In my two days traversing the 45-mile Coachella Valley, I kept thinking about how this whole area was an artificial oasis made possible only by innovations that changed the very nature of the desert, from the railroad stop that spurred development to the irrigation canals and, later, the recharge basins that stopped the wells from running out. 

In this transformed environment, I can see how the cognitive dissonance of surfing a desert wave begins to shrink, tempting us to believe that technology can once again override the reality of living (or simply playing) in the desert in a warming and drying world. 

But the tension over surf pools shows that when it comes to how we use water, maybe there’s no collective “us” here at all. 

Fourth and finally, we must directly confront those in the fossil fuel industry who have shown relentless zeal for obstructing progress – over decades. Billions of dollars have been thrown at distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt. I thank the academics and the activists, the journalists and the whistleblowers, who have exposed those tactics – often at great personal and professional risk. I call on leaders in the fossil fuel industry to understand that if you are not in the fast lane to clean energy transformation, you are driving your business into a dead end – and taking us all with you... Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action – with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns. They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men – remember the TV series - fuelling the madness. I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones.

The number of unhoused people in the city has boomed along with the total population, rising 72% in the past six years to nearly 10,000. People experiencing homelessness made up 45% of the county's heat-related deaths last year, compared with 38% for people with housing (the living situation was unknown for the other 17% of deaths). And none of the 156 people who died indoors last year had functioning air conditioning. In 85% of those cases, AC units were present but broken. When temperatures hit 110F for weeks at a stretch, cooling systems can struggle to keep up. Retirees and people living from paycheck to paycheck may not have the money for repairs.

Enlarge (credit: Uma Shankar sharma)

June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven't exactly been unusual in a period where the top 10 warmest years on record have all occurred within the last 15 years. And monthly records have often occurred in years that are otherwise unexceptional; at the time, the warmest July on record had occurred in 2019, a year that doesn't stand out much from the rest of the past decade.

But July 2023 set another monthly record, easily eclipsing 2019's high temperatures. Then August set yet another monthly record. And so has every single month since, a string of records that propelled 2023 to the warmest year since we started keeping track.

Yesterday, the European Union's Copernicus Earth-monitoring service announced that we've now gone a full year where every single month has been the warmest version of that month since we've had enough instruments in place to track global temperatures.

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Source: www.databreachtoday.com – Author: 1 Breach Notification , Healthcare , HIPAA/HITECH HHS OCR Advises HIPAA-Covered Entities to Coordinate Notification Duties With UHG Marianne Kolbasuk McGee (HealthInfoSec) • June 3, 2024     HHS OCR said HIPAA-covered entities can delegate to Change Healthcare the notification to millions of patients potentially affected by the company’s data breach. […]

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Seven days

No matter who he called—his mother, his father, his brother, his cousins—the phone would just go to voicemail. Cell service was out around Maui as devastating wildfires swept through the Hawaiian island. But while Raven Imperial kept hoping for someone to answer, he couldn’t keep a terrifying thought from sneaking into his mind: What if his family members had perished in the blaze? What if all of them were gone?

Hours passed; then days. All Raven knew at that point was this: there had been a wildfire on August 8, 2023, in Lahaina, where his multigenerational, tight-knit family lived. But from where he was currently based in Northern California, Raven was in the dark. Had his family evacuated? Were they hurt? He watched from afar as horrifying video clips of Front Street burning circulated online.

ALAMY

The list of missing residents meanwhile climbed into the hundreds.

Raven remembers how frightened he felt: “I thought I had lost them.”

Raven had spent his youth in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom, cream-colored home on Kopili Street that had long housed not just his immediate family but also around 10 to 12 renters, since home prices were so high on Maui. When he and his brother, Raphael Jr., were kids, their dad put up a basketball hoop outside where they’d shoot hoops with neighbors. Raphael Jr.’s high school sweetheart, Christine Mariano, later moved in, and when the couple had a son in 2021, they raised him there too.

From the initial news reports and posts, it seemed as if the fire had destroyed the Imperials’ entire neighborhood near the Pioneer Mill Smokestack—a 225-foot-high structure left over from the days of Maui’s sugar plantations, which Raven’s grandfather had worked on as an immigrant from the Philippines in the mid-1900s.

Then, finally, on August 11, a call to Raven’s brother went through. He’d managed to get a cell signal while standing on the beach.

“Is everyone okay?” Raven asked.

“We’re just trying to find Dad,” Raphael Jr. told his brother.

WINNI WINTERMEYER

In the three days following the fire, the rest of the family members had slowly found their way back to each other. Raven would learn that most of his immediate family had been separated for 72 hours: Raphael Jr. had been marooned in Kaanapali, four miles north of Lahaina; Christine had been stuck in Wailuku, more than 20 miles away; both young parents had been separated from their son, who escaped with Christine’s parents. Raven’s mother, Evelyn, had also been in Kaanapali, though not where Raphael Jr. had been.

But no one was in contact with Rafael Sr. Evelyn had left their home around noon on the day of the fire and headed to work. That was the last time she had seen him. The last time they had spoken was when she called him just after 3 p.m. and asked: “Are you working?” He replied “No,” before the phone abruptly cut off.

“Everybody was found,” Raven says. “Except for my father.”

Within the week, Raven boarded a plane and flew back to Maui. He would keep looking for him, he told himself, for as long as it took.

That same week, Kim Gin was also on a plane to Maui. It would take half a day to get there from Alabama, where she had moved after retiring from the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office in California a year earlier. But Gin, now an independent consultant on death investigations, knew she had something to offer the response teams in Lahaina. Of all the forensic investigators in the country, she was one of the few who had experience in the immediate aftermath of a wildfire on the vast scale of Maui’s. She was also one of the rare investigators well versed in employing rapid DNA analysis—an emerging but increasingly vital scientific tool used to identify victims in unfolding mass-casualty events.

Gin started her career in Sacramento in 2001 and was working as the coroner 17 years later when Butte County, California, close to 90 miles north, erupted in flames. She had worked fire investigations before, but nothing like the Camp Fire, which burned more than 150,000 acres—an area larger than the city of Chicago. The tiny town of Paradise, the epicenter of the blaze, didn’t have the capacity to handle the rising death toll. Gin’s office had a refrigerated box truck and a 52-foot semitrailer, as well as a morgue that could handle a couple of hundred bodies.

BRYAN TARNOWSKI

“Even though I knew it was a fire, I expected more identifications by fingerprints or dental [records]. But that was just me being naïve,” she says. She quickly realized that putting names to the dead, many burned beyond recognition, would rely heavily on DNA.

“The problem then became how long it takes to do the traditional DNA [analysis],” Gin explains, speaking to a significant and long-standing challenge in the field—and the reason DNA identification has long been something of a last resort following large-scale disasters.

While more conventional identification methods—think fingerprints, dental information, or matching something like a knee replacement to medical records—can be a long, tedious process, they don’t take nearly as long as traditional DNA testing.

Historically, the process of making genetic identifications would often stretch on for months, even years. In fires and other situations that result in badly degraded bone or tissue, it can become even more challenging and time consuming to process DNA, which traditionally involves reading the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome and comparing samples found in the field against samples from a family member. Meanwhile, investigators frequently need equipment from the US Department of Justice or the county crime lab to test the samples, so backlogs often pile up.

This creates a wait that can be horrendous for family members. Death certificates, federal assistance, insurance money—“all that hinges on that ID,” Gin says. Not to mention the emotional toll of not knowing if their loved ones are alive or dead.

But over the past several years, as fires and other climate-change-fueled disasters have become more common and more cataclysmic, the way their aftermath is processed and their victims identified has been transformed. The grim work following a disaster remains—surveying rubble and ash, distinguishing a piece of plastic from a tiny fragment of bone—but landing a positive identification can now take just a fraction of the time it once did, which may in turn bring families some semblance of peace more swiftly than ever before.

The key innovation driving this progress has been rapid DNA analysis, a methodology that focuses on just over two dozen regions of the genome. The 2018 Camp Fire was the first time the technology was used in a large, live disaster setting, and the first time it was used as the primary way to identify victims. The technology—deployed in small high-tech field devices developed by companies like industry leader ANDE, or in a lab with other rapid DNA techniques developed by Thermo Fisher—is increasingly being used by the US military on the battlefield, and by the FBI and local police departments after sexual assaults and in instances where confirming an ID is challenging, like cases of missing or murdered Indigenous people or migrants. Yet arguably the most effective way to use rapid DNA is in incidents of mass death. In the Camp Fire, 22 victims were identified using traditional methods, while rapid DNA analysis helped with 62 of the remaining 63 victims; it has also been used in recent years following hurricanes and floods, and in the war in Ukraine.

Tiffany Roy, a forensic DNA expert with consulting company ForensicAid, says she’d be concerned about deploying the technology in a crime scene, where quality evidence is limited and can be quickly “exhausted” by well-meaning investigators who are “not trained DNA analysts.” But, on the whole, Roy and other experts see rapid DNA as a major net positive for the field. “It is definitely a game-changer,” adds Sarah Kerrigan, a professor of forensic science at Sam Houston State University and the director of its Institute for Forensic Research, Training, and Innovation.

But back in those early days after the Camp Fire, all Gin knew was that nearly 1,000 people had been listed as missing, and she was tasked with helping to identify the dead. “Oh my goodness,” she remembers thinking. “These families are going to have to wait a long period of time to get identification. How do we make this go faster?”

Ten days

One flier pleading for information about “Uncle Raffy,” as people in the community knew Rafael Sr., was posted on a brick-red stairwell outside Paradise Supermart, a Filipino store and restaurant in Kahului, 25 miles away from the destruction. In it, just below the words “MISSING Lahaina Victim,” the 63-year-old grandfather smiled with closed lips, wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt, his right hand curled in the shaka sign, thumb and pinky pointing out.

COURTESY OF RAVEN IMPERIAL

“Everybody knew him from restaurant businesses,” Raven says. “He was all over Lahaina, very friendly to everybody.” Raven remembers how hard his dad worked, juggling three jobs: as a draft tech for Anheuser-Busch, setting up services and delivering beer all across town; as a security officer at Allied Universal security services; and as a parking booth attendant at the Sheraton Maui. He connected with so many people that coworkers, friends, and other locals gave him another nickname: “Mr. Aloha.”

Raven also remembers how his dad had always loved karaoke, where he would sing “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra. “That’s the only song that he would sing,” Raven says. “Like, on repeat.” 

Since their home had burned down, the Imperials ran their search out of a rental unit in Kihei, which was owned by a local woman one of them knew through her job. The woman had opened her rental to three families in all. It quickly grew crowded with side-by-side beds and piles of donations.

Each day, Evelyn waited for her husband to call.

She managed to catch up with one of their former tenants, who recalled asking Rafael Sr. to leave the house on the day of the fires. But she did not know if he actually did. Evelyn spoke to other neighbors who also remembered seeing Rafael Sr. that day; they told her that they had seen him go back into the house. But they too did not know what happened to him after.

A friend of Raven’s who got into the largely restricted burn zone told him he’d spotted Rafael Sr.’s Toyota Tacoma on the street, not far from their house. He sent a photo. The pickup was burned out, but a passenger-side door was open. The family wondered: Could he have escaped?

Evelyn called the Red Cross. She called the police. Nothing. They waited and hoped.

Back in Paradise in 2018, as Gin worried about the scores of waiting families, she learned there might in fact be a better way to get a positive ID—and a much quicker one. A company called ANDE Rapid DNA had already volunteered its services to the Butte County sheriff and promised that its technology could process DNA and get a match in less than two hours.

“I’ll try anything at this point,” Gin remembers telling the sheriff. “Let’s see this magic box and what it’s going to do.”

In truth, Gin did not think it would work, and certainly not in two hours. When the device arrived, it was “not something huge and fantastical,” she recalls thinking. A little bigger than a microwave, it looked “like an ordinary box that beeps, and you put stuff in, and out comes a result.”

The “stuff,” more specifically, was a cheek or bloodstain swab, or a piece of muscle, or a fragment of bone that had been crushed and demineralized. Instead of reading 3 billion base pairs in this sample, Selden’s machine examined just 27 genome regions characterized by particular repeating sequences. It would be nearly impossible for two unrelated people to have the same repeating sequence in those regions. But a parent and child, or siblings, would match, meaning you could compare DNA found in human remains with DNA samples taken from potential victims’ family members. Making it even more efficient for a coroner like Gin, the machine could run up to five tests at a time and could be operated by anyone with just a little basic training.

ANDE’s chief scientific officer, Richard Selden, a pediatrician who has a PhD in genetics from Harvard, didn’t come up with the idea to focus on a smaller, more manageable number of base pairs to speed up DNA analysis. But it did become something of an obsession for him after he watched the O.J. Simpson trial in the mid-1990s and began to grasp just how long it took for DNA samples to get processed in crime cases. By this point, the FBI had already set up a system for identifying DNA by looking at just 13 regions of the genome; it would later add seven more. Researchers in other countries had also identified other sets of regions to analyze. Drawing on these various methodologies, Selden homed in on the 27 specific areas of DNA he thought would be most effective to examine, and he launched ANDE in 2004.

But he had to build a device to do the analysis. Selden wanted it to be small, portable, and easily used by anyone in the field. In a conventional lab, he says, “from the moment you take that cheek swab to the moment that you have the answer, there are hundreds of laboratory steps.” Traditionally, a human is holding test tubes and iPads and sorting through or processing paperwork. Selden compares it all to using a “conventional typewriter.” He effectively created the more efficient laptop version of DNA analysis by figuring out how to speed up that same process.

No longer would a human have to “open up this bottle and put [the sample] in a pipette and figure out how much, then move it into a tube here.” It is all automated, and the process is confined to a single device.

ANDE

Once a sample is placed in the box, the DNA binds to a filter in water and the rest of the sample is washed away. Air pressure propels the purified DNA to a reconstitution chamber and then flattens it into a sheet less than a millimeter thick, which is subjected to about 6,000 volts of electricity. It’s “kind of an obstacle course for the DNA,” he explains.

The machine then interprets the donor’s genome and and provides an allele table with a graph showing the peaks for each region and its size. This data is then compared with samples from potential relatives, and the machine reports when it has a match.

Rapid DNA analysis as a technology first received approval for use by the US military in 2014, and in the FBI two years later. Then the Rapid DNA Act of 2017 enabled all US law enforcement agencies to use the technology on site and in real time as an alternative to sending samples off to labs and waiting for results.

But by the time of the Camp Fire the following year, most coroners and local police officers still had no familiarity or experience with it. Neither did Gin. So she decided to put the “magic box” through a test: she gave Selden, who had arrived at the scene to help with the technology, a DNA sample from a victim whose identity she’d already confirmed via fingerprint. The box took about 90 minutes to come back with a result. And to Gin’s surprise, it was the same identification she had already made. Just to make sure, she ran several more samples through the box, also from victims she had already identified. Again, results were returned swiftly, and they confirmed hers.

“I was a believer,” she says.

The next year, Gin helped investigators use rapid DNA technology in the 2019 Conception disaster, when a dive boat caught fire off the Channel Islands in Santa Barbara. “We ID’d 34 victims in 10 days,” Gin says. “Completely done.” Gin now works independently to assist other investigators in mass-fatality events and helps them learn to use the ANDE system.

Its speed made the box a groundbreaking innovation. Death investigations, Gin learned long ago, are not as much about the dead as about giving peace of mind, justice, and closure to the living.

Fourteen days

Many of the people who were initially on the Lahaina missing persons list turned up in the days following the fire. Tearful reunions ensued.

Two weeks after the fire, the Imperials hoped they’d have the same outcome as they loaded into a truck to check out some exciting news: someone had reported seeing Rafael Sr. at a local church. He’d been eating and had burns on his hands and looked disoriented. The caller said the sighting had occurred three days after the fire. Could he still be in the vicinity?

When the family arrived, they couldn’t confirm the lead.

“We were getting a lot of calls,” Raven says. “There were a lot of rumors saying that they found him.”

None of them panned out. They kept looking.

The scenes following large-scale destructive events like the fires in Paradise and Lahaina can be sprawling and dangerous, with victims sometimes dispersed across a large swath of land if many people died trying to escape. Teams need to meticulously and tediously search mountains of mixed, melted, or burned debris just to find bits of human remains that might otherwise be mistaken for a piece of plastic or drywall. Compounding the challenge is the comingling of remains—from people who died huddled together, or in the same location, or alongside pets or other animals.

This is when the work of forensic anthropologists is essential: they have the skills to differentiate between human and animal bones and to find the critical samples that are needed by DNA specialists, fire and arson investigators, forensic pathologists and dentists, and other experts. Rapid DNA analysis “works best in tandem with forensic anthropologists, particularly in wildfires,” Gin explains.

“The first step is determining, is it a bone?” says Robert Mann, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine on Oahu. Then, is it a human bone? And if so, which one?

AP PHOTO/LUCY PEMONI

Mann has served on teams that have helped identify the remains of victims after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, among other mass-casualty events. He remembers how in one investigation he received an object believed to be a human bone; it turned out to be a plastic replica. In another case, he was looking through the wreckage of a car accident and spotted what appeared to be a human rib fragment. Upon closer examination, he identified it as a piece of rubber weather stripping from the rear window. “We examine every bone and tooth, no matter how small, fragmented, or burned it might be,” he says. “It’s a time-consuming but critical process because we can’t afford to make a mistake or overlook anything that might help us establish the identity of a person.”

For Mann, the Maui disaster felt particularly immediate. It was right near his home. He was deployed to Lahaina about a week after the fire, as one of more than a dozen forensic anthropologists on scene from universities in places including Oregon, California, and Hawaii.

While some anthropologists searched the recovery zone—looking through what was left of homes, cars, buildings, and streets, and preserving fragmented and burned bone, body parts, and teeth—Mann was stationed in the morgue, where samples were sent for processing.

It used to be much harder to find samples that scientists believed could provide DNA for analysis, but that’s also changed recently as researchers have learned more about what kind of DNA can survive disasters. Two kinds are used in forensic identity testing: nuclear DNA (found within the nuclei of eukaryotic cells) and mitochondrial DNA (found in the mitochondria, organelles located outside the nucleus). Both, it turns out, have survived plane crashes, wars, floods, volcanic eruptions, and fires.

Theories have also been evolving over the past few decades about how to preserve and recover DNA specifically after intense heat exposure. One 2018 study found that a majority of the samples actually survived high heat. Researchers are also learning more about how bone characteristics change depending on the degree. “Different temperatures and how long a body or bone has been exposed to high temperatures affect the likelihood that it will or will not yield usable DNA,” Mann says.

Typically, forensic anthropologists help select which bone or tooth to use for DNA testing, says Mann. Until recently, he explains, scientists believed “you cannot get usable DNA out of burned bone.” But thanks to these new developments, researchers are realizing that with some bone that has been charred, “they’re able to get usable, good DNA out of it,” Mann says. “And that’s new.” Indeed, Selden explains that “in a typical bad fire, what I would expect is 80% to 90% of the samples are going to have enough intact DNA” to get a result from rapid analysis. The rest, he says, may require deeper sequencing.

GLENN FAWCETT VIA ALAMY

Anthropologists can often tell “simply by looking” if a sample will be good enough to help create an ID. If it’s been burned and blackened, “it might be a good candidate for DNA testing,” Mann says. But if it’s calcined (white and “china-like”), he says, the DNA has probably been destroyed.

On Maui, Mann adds, rapid DNA analysis made the entire process more efficient, with tests coming back in just two hours. “That means while you’re doing the examination of this individual right here on the table, you may be able to get results back on who this person is,” he says. From inside the lab, he watched the science unfold as the number of missing on Maui quickly began to go down.

Within three days, 42 people’s remains were recovered inside Maui homes or buildings and another 39 outside, along with 15 inside vehicles and one in the water. The first confirmed identification of a victim on the island occurred four days after the fire—this one via fingerprint. The ANDE rapid DNA team arrived two days after the fire and deployed four boxes to analyze multiple samples of DNA simultaneously. The first rapid DNA identification happened within that first week.

Sixteen days

More than two weeks after the fire, the list of missing and unaccounted-for individuals was dwindling, but it still had 388 people on it. Rafael Sr. was one of them.

Raven and Raphael Jr. raced to another location: Cupies café in Kahului, more than 20 miles from Lahaina. Someone had reported seeing him there.

ERIKA HAYASAKI

The tip was another false lead.

As family and friends continued to search, they stopped by support hubs that had sprouted up around the island, receiving information about Red Cross and FEMA assistance or donation programs as volunteers distributed meals and clothes. These hubs also sometimes offered DNA testing.

Raven still had a “50-50” feeling that his dad might be out there somewhere. But he was beginning to lose some of that hope.

Gin was stationed at one of the support hubs, which offered food, shelter, clothes, and support. “You could also go in and give biological samples,” she says. “We actually moved one of the rapid DNA instruments into the family assistance center, and we were running the family samples there.” Eliminating the need to transport samples from a site to a testing center further cut down any lag time.

Selden had once believed that the biggest hurdle for his technology would be building the actual device, which took about eight years to design and another four years to perfect. But at least in Lahaina, it was something else: persuading distraught and traumatized family members to offer samples for the test.

Nationally, there are serious privacy concerns when it comes to rapid DNA technology. Organizations like the ACLU warn that as police departments and governments begin deploying it more often, there must be more oversight, monitoring, and training in place to ensure that it is always used responsibly, even if that adds some time and expense. But the space is still largely unregulated, and the ACLU fears it could give rise to rogue DNA databases “with far fewer quality, privacy, and security controls than federal databases.”

Family support centers popped up around Maui to offer clothing, food, and other assistance, and sometimes to take DNA samples to help find missing family members.

In a place like Hawaii, these fears are even more palpable. The islands have a long history of US colonialism, military dominance, and exploitation of the Native population and of the large immigrant working-class population employed in the tourism industry.

Native Hawaiians in particular have a fraught relationship with DNA testing. Under a US law signed in 1921, thousands have a right to live on 200,000 designated acres of land trust, almost for free. It was a kind of reparations measure put in place to assist Native Hawaiians whose land had been stolen. Back in 1893, a small group of American sugar plantation owners and descendants of Christian missionaries, backed by US Marines, held Hawaii’s Queen Lili‘uokalani in her palace at gunpoint and forced her to sign over 1.8 million acres to the US, which ultimately seized the islands in 1898.

PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

To lay their claim to the designated land and property, individuals first must prove via DNA tests how much Hawaiian blood they have. But many residents who have submitted their DNA and qualified for the land have died on waiting lists before ever receiving it. Today, Native Hawaiians are struggling to stay on the islands amid skyrocketing housing prices, while others have been forced to move away.

Meanwhile, after the fires, Filipino families faced particularly stark barriers to getting information about financial support, government assistance, housing, and DNA testing. Filipinos make up about 25% of Hawaii’s population and 40% of its workers in the tourism industry. They also make up 46% of undocumented residents in Hawaii—more than any other group. Some encountered language barriers, since they primarily spoke Tagalog or Ilocano. Some worried that people would try to take over their burned land and develop it for themselves. For many, being asked for DNA samples only added to the confusion and suspicion.

Selden says he hears the overall concerns about DNA testing: “If you ask people about DNA in general, they think of Brave New World and [fear] the information is going to be used to somehow harm or control people.” But just like regular DNA analysis, he explains, rapid DNA analysis “has no information on the person’s appearance, their ethnicity, their health, their behavior either in the past, present, or future.” He describes it as a more accurate fingerprint.

Gin tried to help the Lahaina family members understand that their DNA “isn’t going to go anywhere else.” She told them their sample would ultimately be destroyed, something programmed to occur inside ANDE’s machine. (Selden says the boxes were designed to do this for privacy purposes.) But sometimes, Gin realizes, these promises are not enough.

“You still have a large population of people that, in my experience, don’t want to give up their DNA to a government entity,” she says. “They just don’t.”

BRYAN TARNOWSKI

The immediate aftermath of a disaster, when people are suffering from shock, PTSD, and displacement, is the worst possible moment to try to educate them about DNA tests and explain the technology and privacy policies. “A lot of them don’t have anything,” Gin says. “They’re just wondering where they’re going to lay their heads down, and how they’re going to get food and shelter and transportation.”

Unfortunately, Lahaina’s survivors won’t be the last people in this position. Particularly given the world’s current climate trajectory, the risk of deadly events in just about every neighborhood and community will rise. And figuring out who survived and who didn’t will be increasingly difficult. Mann recalls his work on the Indian Ocean tsunami, when over 227,000 people died. “The bodies would float off, and they ended up 100 miles away,” he says. Investigators were at times left with remains that had been consumed by sea creatures or degraded by water and weather. He remembers how they struggled to determine: “Who is the person?”

Mann has spent his own career identifying people including “missing soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, from all past wars,” as well as people who have died recently. That closure is meaningful for family members, some of them decades, or even lifetimes, removed.

In the end, distrust and conspiracy theories did in fact hinder DNA-identification efforts on Maui, according to a police department report.

33 days

By the time Raven went to a family resource center to submit a swab, some four weeks had gone by. He remembers the quick rub inside his cheek.

Some of his family had already offered their own samples before Raven provided his. For them, waiting wasn’t an issue of mistrusting the testing as much as experiencing confusion and chaos in the weeks after the fire. They believed Uncle Raffy was still alive, and they still held hope of finding him. Offering DNA was a final step in their search.

“I did it for my mom,” Raven says. She still wanted to believe he was alive, but Raven says: “I just had this feeling.” His father, he told himself, must be gone.

Just a day after he gave his sample—on September 11, more than a month after the fire—he was at the temporary house in Kihei when he got the call: “It was,” Raven says, “an automatic match.”

WINNI WINTERMEYER

The investigators let the family know the address where the remains of Rafael Sr. had been found, several blocks away from their home. They put it into Google Maps and realized it was where some family friends lived. The mother and son of that family had been listed as missing too. Rafael Sr., it seemed, had been with or near them in the end.

By October, investigators in Lahaina had obtained and analyzed 215 DNA samples from family members of the missing. By December, DNA analysis had confirmed the identities of 63 of the most recent count of 101 victims. Seventeen more had been identified by fingerprint, 14 via dental records, and two through medical devices, along with three who died in the hospital. While some of the most damaged remains would still be undergoing DNA testing months after the fires, it’s a drastic improvement over the identification processes for 9/11 victims, for instance—today, over 20 years later, some are still being identified by DNA.

COURTESY OF RAVEN IMPERIAL

Rafael Sr. was born on October 22, 1959, in Naga City, the Philippines. The family held his funeral on his birthday last year. His relatives flew in from Michigan, the Philippines, and California.

Raven says in those weeks of waiting—after all the false tips, the searches, the prayers, the glimmers of hope—deep down the family had already known he was gone. But for Evelyn, Raphael Jr., and the rest of their family, DNA tests were necessary—and, ultimately, a relief, Raven says. “They just needed that closure.”

Erika Hayasaki is an independent journalist based in Southern California.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

I’m ready for summer, but if this year is anything like last year, it’s going to be a doozy. In fact, the summer of 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere was the hottest in over 2,000 years, according to a new study released this week. 

If you’ve been following the headlines, you probably already know that last year was a hot one. But I was gobsmacked by this paper’s title when it came across my desk. The warmest in 2,000 years—how do we even know that?

There weren’t exactly thermometers around in the year 1, so scientists have to get creative when it comes to comparing our climate today with that of centuries, or even millennia, ago. Here’s how our world stacks up against the climate of the past, how we know, and why it matters for our future. 

Today, there are thousands and thousands of weather stations around the globe, tracking the temperature from Death Valley to Mount Everest. So there’s plenty of data to show that 2023 was, in a word, a scorcher. 

Daily global ocean temperatures were the warmest ever recorded for over a year straight. Levels of sea ice hit new lows. And of course, the year saw the highest global average temperatures since record-keeping began in 1850.  

But scientists decided to look even further back into the past for a year that could compare to our current temperatures. To do so, they turned to trees, which can act as low-tech weather stations.

The concentric rings inside a tree are evidence of the plant’s yearly growth cycles. Lighter colors correspond to quick growth over the spring and summer, while the darker rings correspond to the fall and winter. Count the pairs of light and dark rings, and you can tell how many years a tree has lived. 

Trees tend to grow faster during warm, wet years and slower during colder ones. So scientists can not only count the rings but measure their thickness, and use that as a gauge for how warm any particular year was. They also look at factors like density and track different chemical signatures found inside the wood. You don’t even need to cut down a tree to get its help with climatic studies—you can just drill out a small cylinder from the tree’s center, called a core, and study the patterns.

The oldest living trees allow us to peek a few centuries into the past. Beyond that, it’s a matter of cross-referencing the patterns on dead trees with living ones, extending the record back in time like putting a puzzle together. 

It’s taken several decades of work and hundreds of scientists to develop the records that researchers used for this new paper, said Max Torbenson, one of the authors of the study, on a press call. There are over 10,000 trees from nine regions across the Northern Hemisphere represented, allowing the researchers to draw conclusions about individual years over the past two millennia. The year 246 CE once held the crown for the warmest summer in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2,000 years. But 25 of the last 28 years have beat that record, Torbenson says, and 2023’s summer tops them all. 

These conclusions are limited to the Northern Hemisphere, since there are only a few tree ring records from the Southern Hemisphere, says Jan Esper, lead author of the new study. And using tree rings doesn’t work very well for the tropics because seasons look different there, he adds. Since there’s no winter, there’s usually not as reliable an alternating pattern in tropical tree rings, though some trees do have annual rings that track the wet and dry periods of the year. 

Paleoclimatologists, who study ancient climates, can use other methods to get a general idea of what the climate looked like even earlier—tens of thousands to millions of years ago. 

The biggest difference between the new study using tree rings and methods of looking back further into the past is the precision. Scientists can, with reasonable certainty, use tree rings to draw conclusions about individual years in the Northern Hemisphere (536 CE was the coldest, for instance, likely because of volcanic activity). Any information from further back than the past couple of thousand years will be more of a general trend than a specific data point representing a single year. But those records can still be very useful. 

The oldest glaciers on the planet are at least a million years old, and scientists can drill down into the ice for samples. By examining the ratio of gases like oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen inside these ice cores, researchers can figure out the temperature of the time corresponding to the layers in the glacier. The oldest continuous ice-core record, which was collected in Antarctica, goes back about 800,000 years. 

Researchers can use fossils to look even further back into Earth’s temperature record. For one 2020 study, researchers drilled into the seabed and looked at the sediment and tiny preserved shells of ancient organisms. From the chemical signatures in those samples, they found that the temperatures we might be on track to record may be hotter than anything the planet has experienced on a global scale in tens of millions of years. 

It’s a bit sobering to know that we’re changing the planet in such a dramatic way. 

The good news is, we know what we need to do to turn things around: cut emissions of planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane. The longer we wait, the more expensive and difficult it will be to stop warming and reverse it, as Esper said on the press call: “We should do as much as possible, as soon as possible.” 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Last year broke all sorts of climate records, from emissions to ocean temperatures. For more on the data, check out this story from December.

How hot is too hot for the human body? I tackled that very question in a 2021 story.  

SIMON LANDREIN

Another thing

Readers chose thermal batteries as the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2024. If you want to hear more about what thermal batteries are, how they work, and why this all matters, join us for the latest in our Roundtables series of online events, where I’ll be getting into the nitty-gritty details and answering some audience questions.

This event is exclusively for subscribers, so subscribe if you haven’t already, and then register here to join us tomorrow, May 16, at noon Eastern time. Hope to see you there! 

Keeping up with climate  

Scientists just recorded the largest ever annual leap in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The concentration of the planet-warming gas in March 2024 was 4.7 parts per million higher than it was a year before. (The Guardian)

Tesla has reportedly begun rehiring some of the workers who were laid off from its charging team in recent weeks. (Bloomberg)

→ To catch up on what’s going on at Tesla, and what it means for the future of EV charging and climate tech more broadly, check out the newsletter from last week if you missed it. (MIT Technology Review)

A new rule could spur thousands of miles of new power lines, making it easier to add renewables to the grid in the US. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will require grid operators to plan 20 years ahead, considering things like the speed of wind and solar installations. (New York Times)

Where does carbon dioxide go after it’s been vacuumed out of the atmosphere? Here are 10 options. (Latitude Media)

Ocean temperatures have been extremely high, shattering records over the past year. All that heat could help fuel a particularly busy upcoming hurricane season. (E&E News)

New tariffs in the US will tack on additional costs to a wide range of Chinese imports, including batteries and solar cells. The tariff on EVs will take a particularly drastic jump, going from 27.5% to 102.5%. (Associated Press)

A reporter took a trip to the Beijing Auto Show and drove dozens of EVs. His conclusion? Chinese EVs are advancing much faster than Western automakers can keep up with. (InsideEVs)

Harnessing solar power via satellites in space and beaming it down to Earth is a tempting dream. But the reality, as you might expect, is probably not so rosy. (IEEE Spectrum)

Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies. 

But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to a new report from the Breakthrough Institute released today.

The report’s findings add to a growing body of evidence that technologies used to address climate change will likely lead to a future with less mining than a world powered by fossil fuels. However, experts point out that oversight will be necessary to minimize harm from the mining needed to transition to lower-emission energy sources. 

“In many ways, we talk so much about the mining of clean energy technologies, and we forget about the dirtiness of our current system,” says Seaver Wang, an author of the report and co-director of Climate and Energy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center.  

In the new analysis, Wang and his colleagues considered the total mining footprint of different energy technologies, including the amount of material needed for these energy sources and the total amount of rock that needs to be moved to extract that material.

Many minerals appear in small concentrations in source rock, so the process of extracting them has a large footprint relative to the amount of final product. A mining operation would need to move about seven kilograms of rock to get one kilogram of aluminum, for instance. For copper, the ratio is much higher, at over 500 to one. Taking these ratios into account allows for a more direct comparison of the total mining required for different energy sources. 

With this adjustment, it becomes clear that the energy source with the highest mining burden is coal. Generating one gigawatt-hour of electricity with coal requires 20 times the mining footprint as generating the same electricity with low-carbon power sources like wind and solar. Producing the same electricity with natural gas requires moving about twice as much rock.

Tallying up the amount of rock moved is an imperfect approximation of the potential environmental and sociological impact of mining related to different technologies, Wang says, but the report’s results allow researchers to draw some broad conclusions. One is that we’re on track for less mining in the future. 

Other researchers have projected a decrease in mining accompanying a move to low-emissions energy sources. “We mine so many fossil fuels today that the sum of mining activities decreases even when we assume an incredibly rapid expansion of clean energy technologies,” Joey Nijnens, a consultant at Monitor Deloitte and author of another recent study on mining demand, said in an email.

That being said, potentially moving less rock around in the future “hardly means that society shouldn’t look for further opportunities to reduce mining impacts throughout the energy transition,” Wang says.

There’s already been progress in cutting down on the material required for technologies like wind and solar. Solar modules have gotten more efficient, so the same amount of material can yield more electricity generation. Recycling can help further cut material demand in the future, and it will be especially crucial to reduce the mining needed to build batteries.  

Resource extraction may decrease overall, but it’s also likely to increase in some places as our demands change, researchers pointed out in a 2021 study. Between 32% and 40% of the mining increase in the future could occur in countries with weak, poor, or failing resource governance, where mining is more likely to harm the environment and may fail to benefit people living near the mining projects. 

“We need to ensure that the energy transition is accompanied by responsible mining that benefits local communities,” Takuma Watari, a researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies and an author of the study, said via email. Otherwise, the shift to lower-emissions energy sources could lead to a reduction of carbon emissions in the Global North “at the expense of increasing socio-environmental risks in local mining areas, often in the Global South.” 

Strong oversight and accountability are crucial to make sure that we can source minerals in a responsible way, Wang says: “We want a rapid energy transition, but we also want an energy transition that’s equitable.”

Whenever you see a solar panel, most parts of it probably come from China. The US invented the technology and once dominated its production, but over the past two decades, government subsidies and low costs in China have led most of the solar manufacturing supply chain to be concentrated there. The country will soon be responsible for over 80% of solar manufacturing capacity around the world.

But the US government is trying to change that. Through high tariffs on imports and hefty domestic tax credits, it is trying to make the cost of manufacturing solar panels in the US competitive enough for companies to want to come back and set up factories. The International Energy Agency has forecast that by 2027, solar-generated energy will be the largest source of power capacity in the world, exceeding both natural gas and coal—making it a market that already attracts over $300 billion in investment every year.

To understand the chances that the US will succeed, MIT Technology Review spoke to Shawn Qu. As the founder and chairman of Canadian Solar, one of the largest and longest-standing solar manufacturing companies in the world, Qu has observed cycle after cycle of changing demand for solar panels over the last 28 years. 

CANADIAN SOLAR

After decades of mostly manufacturing in Asia, Canadian Solar is pivoting back to the US because it sees a real chance for a solar industry revival, mostly thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in 2022. The incentives provided in the bill are just enough to offset the higher manufacturing costs in the US, Qu says. He believes that US solar manufacturing capacity could grow significantly in two to three years, if the industrial policy turns out to be stable enough to keep bringing companies in. 

How tariffs forced manufacturing capacity to move out of China

There are a few important steps to making a solar panel. First silicon is purified; then the resulting polysilicon is shaped and sliced into wafers. Wafers are treated with techniques like etching and coating to become solar cells, and eventually those cells are connected and assembled into solar modules.

For the past decade, China has dominated almost all of these steps, for a few reasons: low labor costs, ample supply of proficient workers, and easy access to the necessary raw materials. All these factors make made-in-China solar modules extremely price-competitive. By the end of 2024, a US-made solar panel will still cost almost three times as much as one produced in China, according to researchers at BloombergNEF. 

The question for the US, then, is how to compete. One tool the government has used since 2012 is tariffs. If a solar module containing cells made in China is imported to the US, it’s subject to as much as a 250% tariff. To avoid those tariffs, many companies, including Canadian Solar, have moved solar cell manufacturing and the downstream supply chain to Southeast Asia. Labor costs and the availability of labor forces are “the number one reason” for that move, Qu says.

When Canadian Solar was founded in 2001, it made all its solar products in China. By early 2023, the company had factories in four countries: China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Canada. (Qu says it used to manufacture in Brazil and Taiwan too, but later scaled back production in response to contracting local demand.)

But that equilibrium is changing again as further tariffs imposed by the US government aim to force supply chains to move out of China. Starting in June 2024, companies importing silicon wafers from China to make cells outside the country will also be subject to tariffs. The most likely solution for solar companies would be to “set up wafer capacity or set up partnerships with wafer makers in Southeast Asia,” says Jenny Chase, the lead solar analyst at BloombergNEF.

Qu says he’s confident the company will meet the new requirements for tariff exemption after June. “They gave the industry about two years to adapt, so I believe most of the companies, at least the tier-one companies, will be able to adapt,” he says.

The IRA, and moving the factories to the US

While US policies have succeeded in turning Southeast Asia into a solar manufacturing hot spot, not much of the supply chain has actually come back to the US. But that’s slowly changing thanks to the IRA, introduced in 2022. The law will hand out tax credits for companies producing solar modules in the US, as well as those installing the panels. 

The credits, Qu says, are enough to make Canadian Solar move some production from Southeast Asia to the US. “According to our modeling, the incentives provided just offset the cost differences—labor and supply chain—between Southeast Asia and the US,” he says.

Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor in energy and engineering at Princeton University, has come to the same conclusion through his research. He says that the IRA subsidies and tax credits should offset higher costs of manufacturing in the US. “That should drive a significant increase in demand for made-In-America solar modules and subcomponents,” Jenkins says. And the early signs point that way too: since the introduction of the IRA, solar companies have announced plans to build over 40 factories in the US.

In 2023, Canadian Solar announced it would build its first solar module plant in Mesquite, Texas, and a solar cell plant in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The Texas factory started operating in late 2023, while the Indiana one is still in the works. 

The remaining challenges

While the IRA has brought new hope to American solar manufacturing, there are still a few obstacles ahead.

Qu says one big challenge to getting his Texas factory up and running is the lack of experienced workers. “Let’s face the reality: there was almost no silicon-based solar manufacturing in the US, so it takes time to train people,” he says. That’s a process that he expects to take at least six months. 

Another challenge to reshoring solar manufacturing is the uncertainty about whether the US will keep heavily subsidizing the clean energy industry, especially if the White House changes hands after the election this year. “The key is stability,” Qu says, “Sometimes politicians are swayed by special-interest groups.”

“Obviously, if you build a factory, then you do want to know that the incentives to support that factory will be there for a while,” says Chase. There are some indications that support for the IRA won’t necessarily be swayed by the elections. For example, jobs created in the solar industry would be concentrated in red states, so even a Republican administration would be motivated to maintain them. But there’s no guarantee that US policies won’t change course.

The public debate over whether we should consider intentionally altering the climate system is heating up, as the dangers of climate instability rise and more groups look to study technologies that could cool the planet.

Such interventions, commonly known as solar geoengineering, may include releasing sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to cast away more sunlight, or spraying salt particles along coastlines to create denser, more reflective marine clouds.  

The growing interest in studying the potential of these tools, particularly through small-scale outdoor experiments, has triggered corresponding calls to shut down the research field, or at least to restrict it more tightly. But such rules would halt or hinder scientific exploration of technologies that could save lives and ease suffering as global warming accelerates—and they might also be far harder to define and implement than their proponents appreciate.

Earlier this month, Tennessee’s governor signed into law a bill banning the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion” of chemicals into the atmosphere for the “express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.” The legislation seems to have been primarily motivated by debunked conspiracy theories about chemtrails. 

Meanwhile, at the March meeting of the United Nations Environmental Agency, a bloc of African nations called for a resolution that would establish a moratorium, if not a ban, on all geoengineering activities, including outdoor tests. Mexican officials have also proposed restrictions on experiments within their boundaries.

To be clear, I’m not a disinterested observer but a climate researcher focused on solar geoengineering and coordinating international modeling studies on the issue. As I stated in a letter I coauthored last year, I believe that it’s important to conduct more research on these technologies because it might significantly reduce certain climatic risks. 

This doesn’t mean I support unilateral efforts today, or forging ahead in this space without broader societal engagement and consent. But some of these proposed restrictions on solar geoengineering leave vague what would constitute an acceptable, “small” test as opposed to an unacceptable “intervention.” Such vagueness is problematic, and its potential consequences would have far more reach than the well-intentioned proponents of regulation might wish for.

Consider the “intentional” standard of the Tennessee bill. While it is true that the intentionality of any such effort matters, defining it is tough. If knowing that an activity will affect the atmosphere is enough for it to be considered geoengineering, even driving a car—since you know its emissions warm up the climate—could fall under the banner. Or, to pick an example operating on a much larger scale, a utility might run afoul of the bill, since operating a power plant produces both carbon dioxide that warms up the planet and sulfur dioxide pollution that can exert a cooling effect.

Indeed, a single coal-fired plant can pump out more than 40,000 tons of the latter gas a year, dwarfing the few kilograms proposed for some stratospheric experiments. That includes the Harvard project recently scrapped in light of concerns from environmental and Indigenous groups. 

Of course, one might say that in all those other cases, the climate-altering impact of emissions is only a side effect of another activity (going somewhere, producing energy, having fun). But then, outdoor tests of solar geoengineering can be framed as efforts to gain further knowledge for societal or scientific benefit. More stringent regulations suggest that, of all intentional activities, it is those focused on knowledge-seeking that need to be subjected to the highest scrutiny—while joyrides, international flights, or bitcoin mining are all fine.

There could be similar challenges even with more modest proposals to require greater transparency around geoengineering research. In a submission to federal officials in March, a group of scholars suggested, among other sensible updates, that any group proposing to conduct outdoor research on weather modification anywhere in the world should have to notify the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in advance.

But creating a standard that would require notifications from anyone, anywhere who “foreseeably or intentionally seeks to cause effects within the United States” could be taken to mean that nations can’t modify any kind of emissions (or convert forests to farmland) before consulting with other countries. For instance, in 2020, the International Maritime Organization introduced rules that cut sulfate emissions from the shipping sector by more than 80%, all at once. The benefits for air quality and human health are pretty clear, but research also suggested that the change would unmask additional global warming, because such pollution can reflect away sunlight either directly or by producing clouds. Would this qualify?

It is worth noting that both those clamoring for more regulations and those bristling to just go out and “do something” claim to have, as their guiding principle, a genuine concern for the climate and human welfare. But again, this does not necessarily justify a “Ban first—ask questions later” approach,  just as it doesn’t justify “Do something first—ask permission later.” 

Those demanding bans are right in saying that there are risks in geoengineering. Those include potential side effects in certain parts of the world—possibilities that need to be better studied—as well as vexing questions about how the technology could be fairly and responsibly governed in a fractured world that’s full of competing interests.

The more recent entrance of venture-backed companies into the field, selling dubious cooling credits or playing up their “proprietary particles,” certainly isn’t helping its reputation with a public that’s rightly wary of how profit motives could influence the use of technologies with the power to alter the entire planet’s climate. Nor is the risk that rogue actors will take it upon themselves to carry out these sorts of interventions. 

But burdensome regulation isn’t guaranteed to deter bad actors. If anything, they’ll just go work in the shadows. It is, however, a surefire way to discourage responsible researchers from engaging in the field. 

All those concerned about “meddling with the climate” should be in favor of open, public, science-informed strategies to talk more, not less, about geoengineering, and to foster transparent research across disciplines. And yes, this will include not just “harmless” modeling studies but also outdoor tests to understand the feasibility of such approaches and narrow down uncertainties. There’s really no way around that. 

In environmental sciences, tests involving dispersing substances are already performed for many other reasons, as long as they’re deemed safe by some reasonable standard. Similar experiments aimed at better understanding solar geoengineering should not be treated differently just because some people (but certainly not all of them) object on moral or environmental grounds. In fact, we should forcefully defend such experiments both because freedom of research is a worthy principle and because more information leads to better decision-making.

At the same time, scientists can’t ignore all the concerns and fears of the general public. We need to build more trust around solar geoengineering research and confidence in researchers. And we must encourage people to consider the issue from multiple perspectives and in relation to the rising risks of climate change.

This can be done, in part, through thoughtful scientific oversight efforts that aim to steer research toward beneficial outcomes by fostering transparency, international collaborations, and public engagement without imposing excessive burdens and blanket prohibitions.

Yes, this issue is complicated. Solar geoengineering may present risks and unknowns, and it raises profound, sometimes uncomfortable questions about humanity’s role in nature. 

But we also know for sure that we are the cause of climate change—and that it is exacerbating the dangers of heat waves, wildfires, flooding, famines, and storms that will inflict human suffering on staggering scales. If there are possible interventions that could limit that death and destruction, we have an obligation to evaluate them carefully, and to weigh any trade-offs with open and informed minds. 

Daniele Visioni is a climate scientist and assistant professor at Cornell University.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

The votes have been tallied, and the results are in. The winner of the 11th Breakthrough Technology, 2024 edition, is … drumroll please … thermal batteries! 

While the editors of MIT Technology Review choose the annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, in 2022 we started having readers weigh in on an 11th technology. And I don’t mean to flatter you, but I think you picked a fascinating one this year. 

Thermal energy storage is a convenient way to stockpile energy for later. This could be crucial in connecting cheap but inconsistent renewable energy with industrial facilities, which often require a constant supply of heat. 

I wrote about why this technology is having a moment, and where it might wind up being used, in a story published Monday. For the newsletter this week, let’s take a deeper look at the different kinds of thermal batteries out there, because there’s a wide world of possibilities. 

Step 1: Choose your energy source

In the journey to build a thermal battery, the crucial first step is to choose where your heat comes from. Most of the companies I’ve come across are building some sort of power-to-heat system, meaning electricity goes in and heat comes out. Heat often gets generated by running a current through a resistive material in a process similar to what happens when you turn on a toaster.

Some projects may take electricity directly from sources like wind turbines or solar panels that aren’t hooked up to the grid. That could reduce energy costs, since you don’t have to pay surcharges built into grid electricity rates, explains Jeffrey Rissman, senior director of industry at Energy Innovation, a policy and research firm specializing in energy and climate. 

Otherwise, thermal batteries can be hooked up to the grid directly. These systems could allow a facility to charge up when electricity prices are low or when there’s a lot of renewable energy on the grid. 

Some thermal storage systems are soaking up waste heat rather than relying on electricity. Brenmiller Energy, for example, is building thermal batteries that can be charged up with heat or electricity, depending on the customer’s needs. 

Depending on the heat source, systems using waste heat may not be able to reach temperatures as high as their electricity-powered counterparts, but they could help increase the efficiency of facilities that would otherwise waste that energy. There’s especially high potential for high-temperature processes, like cement and steel production. 

Step 2: Choose your storage material

Next up: pick out a heat storage medium. These materials should probably be inexpensive and able to reach and withstand high temperatures. 

Bricks and carbon blocks are popular choices, as they can be packed together and, depending on the material, reach temperatures well over 1,000 °C (1,800 °F). Rondo Energy, Antora Energy, and Electrified Thermal Solutions are among the companies using blocks and bricks to store heat at these high temperatures. 

Crushed-up rocks are another option, and the storage medium of choice for Brenmiller Energy. Caldera is using a mixture of aluminum and crushed rock. 

Molten materials can offer even more options for delivering thermal energy later, since they can be pumped around (though this can also add more complexity to the system). Malta is building thermal storage systems that use molten salt, and companies like Fourth Power are using systems that rely in part on molten metals. 

Step 3: Choose your delivery method

Last, and perhaps most important, is deciding how to get energy back out of your storage system. Generally, thermal storage systems can deliver heat, use it to generate electricity, or go with some combination of the two. 

Delivering heat is the most straightforward option. Typically, air or another gas gets blown over the hot thermal storage material, and that heated gas can be used to warm up equipment or to generate steam. 

Some companies are working to use heat storage to deliver electricity instead. This could allow thermal storage systems to play a role not only in industry but potentially on the electrical grid as an electricity storage solution. One downside? These systems generally take a hit on efficiency, the amount of energy that can be returned from storage. But they may be right for some situations, such as facilities that need both heat and electricity on demand. Antora Energy is aiming to use thermophotovoltaic materials to turn heat stored in its carbon blocks back into electricity. 

Some companies plan to offer a middle path, delivering a combination of heat and electricity, depending on what a facility needs. Rondo Energy’s heat batteries can deliver high-pressure steam that can be used either for heating alone or to generate some electricity using cogeneration units. 

The possibilities are seemingly endless for thermal batteries, and I’m seeing new players with new ideas all the time. Stay tuned for much more coverage of this hot technology (sorry, I had to). 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read more about why thermal batteries won the title of 11th breakthrough technology in my story from Monday.

I first wrote about heat as energy storage in this piece last year. As I put it then: the hottest new climate technology is bricks. 

Companies have made some progress in scaling up thermal batteries—our former fellow June Kim wrote about one new manufacturing facility in October.

VIRGINIA HANUSIK

Another thing

The state of Louisiana in the southeast US has lost over a million acres of its coast to erosion. A pilot project aims to save some homes in the state by raising them up to avoid the worst of flooding. 

It’s an ambitious attempt to build a solution to a crisis, and the effort could help keep communities together. But some experts worry that elevation projects offer too rosy an outlook and think we need to focus on relocation instead. Read more in this fascinating feature story from Xander Peters.

Keeping up with climate  

It can be easy to forget, but we’ve actually already made a lot of progress on addressing climate change. A decade ago, the world was on track for about 3.7 °C of warming over preindustrial levels. Today, it’s 2.7 °C with current actions and policies—higher than it should be but lower than it might have been. (Cipher News)

We’re probably going to have more batteries than we actually need for a while. Today, China alone makes enough batteries to satisfy global demand, which could make things tough for new players in the battery game. (Bloomberg) 

2023 was a record year for wind power. The world installed 117 gigawatts of new capacity last year, 50% more than the year before. (Associated Press)

→ Here’s what’s coming next for offshore wind. (MIT Technology Review)

Coal power grew in 2023, driven by a surge of new plants coming online in China and a slowdown of retirements in Europe and the US. (New York Times)

People who live near solar farms generally have positive feelings about their electricity-producing neighbors. There’s more negative sentiment among people who live very close to the biggest projects, though. (Inside Climate News)

E-scooters have been zipping through city streets for eight years, but they haven’t exactly ushered in the zero-emissions micro-mobility future that some had hoped for. Shared scooters can cut emissions, but it all depends on rider behavior and company practices. (Grist)

The grid could use a renovation. Replacing existing power lines with new materials could double grid capacity in many parts of the US, clearing the way for more renewables. (New York Times) 

The first all-electric tugboat in the US is about to launch in San Diego. The small boats are crucial to help larger vessels in and around ports, and the fossil-fuel-powered ones are a climate nightmare. (Canary Media)