3 . Xu Hai’ou has spent most of her life promoting environmental protection work in Beihai, a coastal city in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, by cleaning beaches, protecting mi-grant birds and recycling kitchen waste.

Though her family originally comes from the eastern province of Shandong, the 60-year-old was raised in Guangxi and moved to Beihai for work at age 23, directly after graduating from college. Before she retired, she worked as a reporter for the Guangxi Daily Media Group, a news outlet in the region. In her free time, she became involved in voluntary work.

“In initially, in the 1990s, I helped impoverished children in Guangxi’s rural areas obtain financial aid from donors in Hong Kong, and set up my own NGO in 2004. At the time, it was Beihai’s only nonprofit social organization involved in volunteer work,” she said, “It’s very enjoyable to do this charity work and I have made many friends through it.”

She said her NGO focuses on environmental protection work and organizes a range of voluntary activities, including cleaning up beaches, and protecting mangrove forests and migratory birds.

In 2008, the organization joined a marine life protection event supported by the central government, the UN Environment Programme and the Global Environmental Facility.

Xu and her colleagues at the association arranged a number of voluntary events such as raising awareness of marine biodiversity among local residents and students, and beach-cleaning activities to help promote understanding of the need to protect marine animals and plants.

“Undertaking voluntary activities or charitable work has become my mission, and I want to contribute my own efforts to the nation’s environmental protection work, even if they only produce a small improvement. However, protecting the environment is very hard work. which can’t be done by a single person. I sometimes feel like my ability falls short of my wishes.”

According to Xu, her NGO is currently promoting the classification of waste in Beihai and recycling kitchen waste into compost. “We have mature technologies, but still face difficulties in promoting the program because many residents lack awareness of environmental protection. We hope the government can figure out better ways of managing the garbage after we classify it to make full use of this ‘waste’.”

4 . A GIF of the Wicked Witch (巫婆) of the West from “The Wizard of Oz” saying “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!” played behind Economics Professor Michael Rizzo as students gathered in Wegmans Hall on Oct. 30 to hear him argue against the opinion that the Earth is going through a climate disaster.

“I’m curious to see how many people will misunderstand the point of my talk, which is about addressing the issue of disaster and not at all the issue of whether climate change is happening, or even the mechanics of it,” he said in an interview with the Cambus Times.

The talk included Rizzo stating his biggest fear—that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about climate change. The talk, he said, was assembled from everything he’s read, and, to him, things don’t look so bad, but he knows he hasn’t read everything.

First-year Aidan Lieberman, who attended the talk after hearing about it in Rizzo’s Prin- ciples of Economics class, thought the professor tried to fit too much into his time, but he agreed with the points that he could follow, saying “they seemed to make sense.”

“I was only able to follow a few of the points he was making, ” Lieberman said. “My biggest takeaway is that humans will be able to manage the effects of climate change as they become more severe. ”

Rizzo said he wanted students to leave the talk understanding that the rhetoric around climate “disaster” often comes more from how information is reported rather than the science it- self. Addressing issues of climate change, he stressed, requires a careful understanding that takes lots of research to achieve-research that he found students weren’t doing before coming to him with disagreements.

6 . This past July was the hottest recorded month in human history. Heat waves brake temperature records worldwide. It’s more than just a matter of sweaty discomfort. As climate change worsens, access to artificially cooled spaces is rapidly becoming a health necessity.

Yet standard air-conditioning systems leave us trapped in a negative feedback cycle: the hotter it is, the more people use the air condition er and the more energy is consumed as a result. Cooling is the fastest-growing single source of energy use in buildings, according to the International Energy Agency. Breaking the cycle requires new innovations that will help bring cooler air to more people with less environmental impact.

Standard air-conditioning systems cool and dehumidify (除湿) through a relatively inefficient mechanism: in order to condense (冷凝) water out of the air, they overcool that air past the point of comfort. Many new designs therefore separate the dehumidification and cooling processes, which avoids the need to overcool. For example, some new air conditioner designs pull water from the air with desiccant (干燥剂) materials. The dried air can then be cooled to a more reasonable temperature. Massachusetts-based start-up Transaera claims that the system it is developing could use 35 percent less energy than the average standard air-conditioning unit.

However, the gains in efficiency might not help us get rid of the impact of air-conditioning. “It won’t work to simply replace every existing air conditioner with a better model and call it a day,” says Nicole Miranda, an engineer at the University of Oxford. “Instead, a truly coder future will have to employ other strategies. It’s critical to bring greenery and water bodies into cities to take advantage of natural airflow.”

“Cooling is a challenge involving many aspects,” says Sneha Sachar, an expert at the nonprofit organization ClimateWorks. “There isn’t one strategy or one answer. We need a combination of better buildings and cities, better technologies and a better understanding that the true cost of air-conditioning extends beyond electric bills.”

7 . Wildfire season has begun in many places around the world. The dangerous smoke wildfires produce can spread far and wide. It blocks sunlight, poisons the air and damages the health of people and other living things.

Some of those living things could be the plants in gardens, says gardening expert Jessica Damiano, who writes gardening stories for the Associated Press. Damiano lives in New York City and recently experienced several days of very smoky air. Wildfires in eastern Canada were the source.

Damiano, like other people, limited the time she spent outdoors when the air quality was poor. She also wore a face covering when she had to go outside.

But the plants in her garden had no such escape. They had to breathe the poisoned air through the extremely small holes in their leaves.

Pollutants in smoke landing on plants can block sunlight, which is essential for photosynthesis (光合作用). Reduced photosynthesis results in reduced energy. That means slower growth. Additionally, smoke can also affect a plant’s ability to take in nutrients(营养物质).

Brooke Edmunds, a plant scientist and community horticulturalist with Oregon State University Extension, said plants that are affected by smoke for a short amount of time will usually recover quickly. “It depends on how close they are,” she said. “There could also be a localized effect, where one garden is covered in ash(灰烬), and a half-mile away, there’s nothing because that’s the way the wind was moving things around.”

The best thing home gardeners can do is keep an eye on plants. Edmunds suggests giving plants some extra love and care. “Wash the plants gently to remove pollutants left by smoke. Then give them a long, slow drink of water. Most will pull through,” Edmunds said. However, people should not use leaf blower machines to remove ashes from plants because they will risk breathing in what is blowing around.

A new study found that nearly half of bald eagles    1    (test) across the United States show signs of repeated lead (铅) exposure. Researchers examined the blood, bones, feathers and liver tissue (肝脏组织) of l,210 eagles between 2010 and 20l8.

Lead is a poisonous substance     2     affects the nervous system and interferes (妨碍) with the normal function of nerve cells. Even in low amounts, lead can reduce bald eagles’ ability     3     (fly), hunt and reproduce. In high amounts, lead causes     4    (breathe) difficulty and death.

Bald eagles are one of America’s most celebrated conservation success stories. The birds       5    (remove) from the U. S. Endangered Species List in 2007. But scientists say that high lead levels are still     6     concern. Lead exposure also reduces their ability to face future difficulties, such as climate change or infectious diseases.

“Lead is available to these birds more than we     7    ( previous) thought,” said VinceSlabe, a research wildlife biologist at the nonprofit group Conservation Science Global.

The blood samples from live eagles in the new study were taken from birds trapped andstudied     8    other reasons. The bone, feather and liver samples came from eagles killed by vehicles, power lines or other causes.

The researchers also found higher levels of lead exposure in fall     9    winter. During these months, eagles eat animal remains left by hunters. These remains often contain many    10    (piece) of lead ammunition (弹药).

9 . Today, battery power per kilowatt hour costs around only ten per cent of what it did a decade ago. And the expectation is that the costs will continue to fall, both as battery chemistry improves and because manufacturing lots of batteries on a massive scale makes the production of individual batteries cheaper.

You can be forgiven for thinking that this might only be of interest to accountants, but the implications of this are enormous, and will benefit all of us. First and most obviously, it had made the batteries in electric cars cheaper and longer-lasting. And brilliantly, because electric batteries are improving so dramatically, we can already see the results. Last September, 15 per cent of all new vehicle registrations were pure electric vehicles. So the change is starting to happen.

Better batteries don’t just mean better cars, however. They can also help us decarbonise the entire national grid(网格). Storing energy has always been a problem for the grid. Today, only a tiny amount of generated electricity is stored for later use, which leads to lots of power going to waste. But better batteries make it technologically and economically viable to store large amounts of energy from the grid.

It’s conceivable(可想象的) that in the not-too-distant future, alongside other essentials in our homes like a boiler and a fusebox, we might also have an enormous battery in the garage. This would take power from the grid (or maybe even solar panels on the roof), and power appliances and lights in our homes at the times when demand for electricity is high. Home batteries are not yet as established as electric cars, but they are also growing in popularity.

So, given how much technology has improved batteries over the last decade, I can’t help but be strangely optimistic about the future. Batteries may not be as flashy(华丽的) as phones, rockets or other new technologies, but when it comes to technology to fight climate change, they’re definitely leading the charge.