Science & Environment
Quantum batteries could discharge more power than they store
Simulations suggest that when a quantum battery shares a quantum state with the device it is powering, the device can gain more charge than was stored in the battery to begin with
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Science & Environment
Three times more land in drought than in 1980s, study finds
The area of land surface affected by drought has trebled since the 1980s, a new report into the effects of climate change has revealed.
Forty-eight per cent of the Earth’s land surface had at least one month of extreme drought last year, according to analysis by the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change – up from an average of 15% during the 1980s.
Almost a third of the world – 30% – experienced extreme drought for three months or longer in 2023. In the 1980s, the average was 5%.
The new study offers some of the most up-to-date global data on drought, marking just how fast it is accelerating.
The threshold for extreme drought is reached after six months of very low rainfall or very high levels of evaporation from plants and soil – or both.
It poses an immediate risk to water and sanitation, food security and public health, and can affect energy supplies, transportation networks and the economy.
The causes of individual droughts are complicated, because there are lots of different factors that affect the availability of water, from natural weather events to the way humans use land.
But climate change is shifting global rainfall patterns, making some regions more prone to drought.
The increase in drought has been particularly severe in South America, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.
In South America’s Amazon, drought is threatening to change weather patterns.
It kills trees that have a role to play in stimulating rainclouds to form, which disrupts delicately balanced rainfall cycles – creating a feedback loop leading to further drought.
Yet, at the same time as large sections of the land mass have been drying out, extreme rainfall has also increased.
In the past 10 years, 61% of the world saw an increase in extreme rainfall, when compared with a baseline average from 1961-1990.
The link between droughts, floods and global warming is complex. Hot weather increases the evaporation of water from soil which makes periods when there is no rain even drier.
But climate change is also changing rainfall patterns. As the oceans warm, more water evaporates into the air. The air is warming too, which means it can hold more moisture. When that moisture moves over land or converges into a storm, it leads to more intense rain.
The Lancet Countdown report found the health impacts of climate change were reaching record-breaking levels.
Drought exposed 151 million more people to food insecurity last year, compared with the 1990s, which has contributed to malnutrition. Heat-related deaths for over 65s also increased by 167% compared to the 1990s.
Meanwhile, rising temperatures and more rain are causing an increase in mosquito-related viruses. Cases of dengue fever are at an all-time high and dengue, malaria and West Nile virus have spread to places they were never found before.
An increase in dust storms has left millions more people exposed to dangerous air pollution.
“The climate is changing fast,” says Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown.
“It is changing to conditions that we are not used to and that we did not design our systems to work around.”
For the series Life at 50 degrees, BBC World Service visited some of the hottest parts of the world, where demand for water was already high. We found that extreme drought and rainfall had further squeezed access to water.
Since 2020, an extreme and exceptional agricultural drought has gripped northeast Syria and parts of Iraq.
In the past few years, Hasakah, a city of one million people, has run out of clean water.
“Twenty years ago, water used to flow into the Khabor River but this river has been dried for many years because there is no rain,” says Osman Gaddo, the Head of Water Testing, Hasakah City Water Board. “People have no access to fresh water.”
When they can’t get water, people make their own wells by digging into the ground but the groundwater can be polluted, making people ill.
The drinking water in Hasakah comes from a system of wells 25 kilometres away, but these are also drying and the fuel needed to extract water is in short supply.
Clothes go unwashed and families can’t bathe their children properly, meaning skin diseases and diarrhoea are widespread.
“People are ready to kill their neighbour for water,” one resident tells the BBC. “People are going thirsty every day.”
In South Sudan, 77% of the country had at least one month of drought last year and half the country was in extreme drought for at least six months. At the same time, more than 700,000 people have been affected by flooding.
“Things are deteriorating,” says village elder, Nyakuma. “When we go in the water, we get sick. And the food we eat isn’t nutritious enough”.
Nyakuma has caught malaria twice in a matter of months.
Her family lost their entire cattle herd after flooding last year and now survive on government aid along with anything they can forage.
“Eating this is like eating mud,” says Sunday, Nyakuma’s husband, as he searches floodwater for the roots of waterlillies.
During a drought, rivers and lakes dry up and the soil gets scorched, meaning it hardens and loses plant cover. If heavy rain follows, water cannot soak into the ground and instead runs off, causing flash flooding.
“Plants can adapt to extreme drought, to an extent anyway, but flooding really disrupts their physiology,” adds Romanello. “It is really bad for food security and the agricultural sector.”
Unless we can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and stop the global temperature from rising further, we can expect more drought and more intense rain. 2023 was the hottest year on record.
“At the moment, we are still in a position to just about adapt to the changes in the climate. But it is going to get to a point where we will reach the limit of our capacity. Then we will see a lot of unavoidable impacts,” says Romanello.
“The higher we allow the global temperature to go, the worse things are going to be”.
Science & Environment
Lochaber’s Skipinnish Oak wins UK Tree of the Year
A tree in the Scottish Highlands thought to be at least 1,000 years old and known as the Skipinnish Oak has been named UK Tree of the Year.
Native woodland experts had no idea the tree existed until a gathering in 2009.
The band Skipinnish, which had played at the event, knew of the tree and led the conservationists to where it was hidden in a non-native Sitka spruce plantation on Achnacarry Estate.
It has won a public vote against 11 other contenders in the Woodland Trust competition.
The winner was announced on BBC TV’s The One Show.
Runner-up was the Darwin Oak in Shrewsbury and in third place the 1,000-year-old Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire.
Skipinnish, which plays traditional and contemporary Scottish music, is composing a new song in honour of the winner.
The tune is to be performed for the first time at a gig in Glasgow next year.
Band member Andrew Stevenson grew up in Lochaber and knew about the ancient oak tree.
The piper said: “I am delighted that the Skipinnish Oak has won Tree of the Year.
“The tree has held a special place in my heart since my father first described it to me, and the first time I saw it many years ago.”
George Anderson, of Woodland Trust Scotland, said: “It is the tree that time forgot but the piper remembered.”
Science & Environment
WTI rebounds after worst day in two years
U.S. crude oil rose more than 1% on Tuesday, one day after posting the worst daily loss in two years.
Energy traders were relieved Monday after Israel’s long anticipated retaliatory strikes on Iran last Friday spared the Islamic Republic’s oil and nuclear facilities. The benchmark U.S. crude oil contract sold off more than 6%.
But oil prices are too cheap in the near term compared to fundamentals, Goldman Sachs analyst Daan Struyven told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Tuesday, citing demand from refeilling the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve as well as from the airline industry, Struyven said.
Here are Tuesday’s energy prices:
- West Texas Intermediate December contract: $68.27 per barrel, up 89 cents, or 1.32%. Year to date, U.S. crude oil is down nearly 5%.
- Brent December contract: $72.34 per barrel, up 92 cents, or 1.29%. Year to date, the global benchmark has fallen more than 6%.
- RBOB Gasoline November contract: $1.9829 per gallon, up 0.84%. Year to date, gasoline has pulled back more than 5%.
- Natural Gas November contract: $2.21 per thousand cubic feet, down 4.29%. Year to date, gas has lost about 12%.
Goldman Sachs expects the price of Brent to recover to $77 per barrel in the fourth quarter even without any oil supply disruptions in the Middle East.
The risks, however, are skewed to the downside in 2025, Struyven said. Demand is soft in China, U.S. production is robust and OPEC+ has plans to bring crude back to the market in December.
Science & Environment
PayPal (PYPL) Q3 2024 earnings
A PayPal sign is seen at its headquarters in San Jose, California, Jan. 30, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
PayPal reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, but revenue came in a bit light of expectations. Shares were trading lower premarket.
Here’s how the company did compared to Wall Street estimates, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: $1.20, adjusted vs. $1.07 expected
- Revenue: $7.85 billion vs. $7.89 billion expected
Revenue increased about 6% in the quarter from $7.42 billion in the same period a year ago. PayPal reported net income of $1.01 billion, or 99 cents per share, compared to $1.02 billion, or 93 cents per share, a year earlier.
It’s the first earnings report for CEO Alex Chriss since he reached his one-year mark on the job in September. The stock is up 36% this year and 42% since Chriss joined the payments company, which at the time was mired in a deep slump due to increased competition and a declining take rate, or the percentage of revenue PayPal keeps from each transaction.
Chriss has focused on prioritizing profitable growth and better monetizing key acquisitions like Braintree, which is used by Meta for credit card processing, and payments app Venmo.
Total payment volume, an indication of how digital payments are faring in the broader economy, rose 9% from a year earlier to $422.6 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 30, and came in just above the average analyst estimate of $422.5 billion, according to StreetAccount.
“PayPal delivered strong financial and operating results during a highly productive third quarter,” Chriss said in the earnings release.
The company’s operating margin came in at 18.8%, beating the StreetAccount estimate of 17.4%. PayPal reported total active accounts of 432 million, up 1% from a year earlier, and beating the average estimate of 430.5 million.
While PayPal’s take rate slipped to 1.86% from 1.91% a year earlier, transaction margin, which is how the company gauges the profitability of its core business, rose to 46.6% from 45.4%.
For the fourth quarter, PayPal is calling for “low single-digit growth.” Analysts were expecting growth of 5.4% to $8.46 billion. The investor deck says guidance reflects a “price-to-value strategy and prioritization of profitable growth.”
The company expects adjusted earnings per share of $1.07 to $1.11, versus the average analyst estimate of $1.10, according to LSEG.
One of Chriss’ strategies to address the deteriorating margin was to offer merchants increased value-added services, such as connecting a couple of data points at checkout to drive down the rate of cart abandonment. That product, dubbed Fastlane, launched in August, and is a one-click payment option for online sales that can go head-to-head with Apple Pay and Shop Pay by Shopify.
In August, fintech platform Adyen made Fastlane available to businesses in the U.S., and said it plans to expand the offering globally in the future. The company also partnered with other leaders in global commerce including Fiserv, Amazon, Global Payments and Shopify as it looks to grow its share of online checkout.
The other big product launch during the quarter was PayPal Everywhere, which went live in early September. The initiative offers 5% cash back for using a PayPal debit card within the mobile app. Thus far, PayPal has seen 1 million new PayPal debit card enrollments.
Venmo’s total payment volume rose 8% in the quarter from a year earlier. DoorDash, Starbucks and Ticketmaster are among businesses now accepting Venmo as one way that consumers can pay.
“We are making solid progress in our transformation as we bring new innovations to market, forge important partnerships with leading commerce players, and drive awareness and engagement through new marketing campaigns,” Chriss said in the release.
PayPal will hold an earnings call for analysts at 8 a.m. Eastern time.
WATCH: PayPal’s crypto lead on allowing merchants to buy and sell virtual assets
Science & Environment
British oil giant BP posts $2.3 billion in third-quarter profit
British oil and gasoline company BP (British Petroleum) signage is being pictured in Warsaw, Poland, on July 29, 2024.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
British oil major BP on Tuesday reported its weakest quarterly earnings in nearly four years, weighed down by lower crude prices and lower refining margins.
The energy firm posted underlying replacement cost profit, used as a proxy for net profit, of $2.3 billion for the July-September period. That beat analyst expectations of $2.1 billion, according to an LSEG-compiled consensus.
BP reported net profit of $2.8 billion for the second quarter of the year and $3.3 billion for the third quarter of 2023.
“We have made significant progress since we laid out our six priorities earlier this year to make bp simpler, more focused and higher value,” Murray Auchincloss, CEO of BP, said in a statement.
“In oil and gas, we see the potential to grow through the decade with a focus on value over volume. We also have a deep belief in the opportunity afforded by the energy transition – we have established a number of leading positions and will continue high-grading our investments to ensure they compete with the rest of our business.”
Shares of London-listed BP have fallen over 14% year-to-date, underperforming its European rivals as investors continue to question the firm’s investment case.
BP’s third-quarter results come shortly after reports emerged the company scrapped its pledge to reduce oil and gas production by 2030, rolling back a core tenet of the firm’s ambition to achieve net zero emissions by the middle of the century — or sooner.
The move, reported by Reuters on Oct. 7, citing three unnamed sources, would be viewed as further evidence of CEO Auchincloss’s plan to prioritize near-term returns from the firm’s more profitable fossil fuel operations.
BP was also said to be targeting several new investments in the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico to boost oil and gas output, the news agency reported.
A BP spokesperson told CNBC: “As Murray said at the start of year in our fourth quarter results, the direction is the same – but we are going to deliver as a simpler, more focused, and higher value company.”
Britain’s Shell and France’s TotalEnergies are scheduled to report quarterly results on Thursday, with U.S. majors Exxon Mobil and Chevron set to follow suit on Friday.
Last week, Norwegian oil and gas producer Equinor reported a 13% drop in adjusted operating income in the July-September period, missing analyst expectations.
Science & Environment
Oil sell-off fuels stock gains — plus, AMD earnings loom and CrowdStrike counters Delta lawsuit
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street.
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