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A hypothetical weather forecast for 2050 is coming true next week
Analysis by Angela Fritz, CNN Senior Climate Editor
Updated 4:46 PM ET, Fri July 15, 2022
(CNN)Two years ago, forecasters in the UK conducted an interesting thought experiment: What will our forecasts look like in 2050?
The climate crisis is pushing weather to the extreme all over the world, and temperatures in the northern latitudes have been particularly sensitive to these changes. So meteorologists at the UK Met Office -- the official weather forecast agency for the UK -- dove in to the super long-range climate models in the summer of 2020 to see what kind of temperatures they'd be forecasting in about three decades.
"Not actual weather forecast," the Met Office's graphics said. "Examples of plausible weather based on climate projections."
Well, on Monday and Tuesday, the "plausible" becomes reality -- 28 years early.
[. . . ]
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/weather/2050-uk-forecast-comes-true-in-2022/
Nearly half of Europe is at risk of drought as heat wave scorches continent
Wildfires rage in France and Spain amid heat wave, while the UK faces its hottest day ever
By Joseph Ataman, Jimmy Hutcheon, Xiaofei Xu, Zahid Mahmood and Sana Noor Haq, CNN
Updated 10:17 AM ET, Mon July 18, 2022
Paris (CNN) - Raging wildfires have scorched thousands of hectares of forest in France and Spain, while Britain is set to face its hottest day on record amid a searing heat wave.
The southwestern region of Gironde in France has seen the worst of the blazes so far.
A total 14,300 hectares (35,000 acres) of land have been burned as of Monday, with 24,000 people evacuated from the region, the Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Gironde prefecture said on Twitter.
The heat wave in Portugal has intensified a pre-existing drought and sparked wildfires in central parts of the country, including in the village of Memoria, in the Leiria municipality.
Authorities have deployed 1,700 firefighters to tackle the fires.
A spokesperson for the Gironde regional fire and rescue service said 12 firefighters have sustained minor injuries since the start of the operation.
In Spain, wildfires engulfed the central region of Castile and Léon and the northern region of Galicia Sunday, Reuters reported. Firefighters steadied the flames in Mijas in the southeastern Málaga province and said evacuated people could return home.
Sweltering temperatures in Portugal have exacerbated a drought that started before the heat wave, according to data from the national meteorological institute. About 96% of the mainland was already suffering severe or extreme drought at the end of June.
'Peak of intensity'
The blistering heat wave in Western Europe is expected to peak early this week.
Monthly minimum temperature records could be broken across France Monday, according to the national weather agency. Météo-France identified nine localities where the monthly minimums look set to be broken, including Rostrenen in Brittany, northwestern France, where the record has stood since 1968.
In addition to Gironde, Météo-France issued a heatwave red alert to a total of 15 departments in western and southwestern regions, as temperatures are expected to reach as high as 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit) Monday. A further 51 regions have been placed under orange alert, including Paris, with residents urged to avoid going outside between 11 a.m. and 9 p.m. local time.
"Given the peak of intensity expected for today, the chances are low that the mercury will drop sufficiently before the end of the day" for these records not to be broken, Météo-France added.
Since May, France has seen only eight days when average daily temperatures were below aggregated summer average temperatures. In the remaining 39 days, national daily averages have been above the average temperatures for this time of year observed between 1991 and 2020, according to Météo-France data.
Spain's weather agency also issued extreme heat alerts Sunday, Reuters reported. Temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit) were forecast for the northern regions of Aragon, Navarra and La Rioja. The agency said the heat wave would end Monday, but it warned that temperatures would remain "abnormally high."
Nearly half of Europe's territory, including the UK, is "at risk" of drought, researchers at the EU Commission said Monday.
The Joint Research Centre highlighted that the drought in much of Europe is "critical" as the "winter-spring precipitation deficit ... was exacerbated by early heatwaves in May and June."
Water supply may be "compromised" in the coming months, according to the report.
Elsewhere in Europe, Britain is bracing itself for the "hottest day in UK history," according to a senior weather official. On Friday, the Met Office issued its first ever red warning for "extreme heat" over the soaring temperatures.
The Met Office's CEO, Penelope Endersby, said Monday may well be the "hottest day in UK history," but Tuesday is "expected to be even hotter."
"So it's tomorrow that we're really seeing the higher chance of 40 degrees and temperatures above that," Endersby told BBC Radio on Monday.
"Even possibly above that, 41 is not off the cards. We've even got some 43s in the model but we're hoping it won't be as high as that."
Endersby said while extreme temperatures are not expected beyond Tuesday, the Met Office will be monitoring the possibility of a drought in the coming months.
"We're expecting a big drop in temperature overnight into Wednesday -- down 10 or 12 degrees on what has been the days before," she said, adding: "Our attention is turning, once we're past these two days, to drought and when we might see any rain, and we're not seeing any significant rain coming up."
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/18/weather/europe-uk-heatwave-wildfires-france-spain-intl/index.html
AP PHOTOS: Withering drought shows Lake Mead boat graveyard
By JOHN LOCHER
an hour ago
BOULDER CITY, Nev. (AP) — An abandoned old power boat juts upright from the cracked mud like a giant tombstone. Its epitaph might read: Here lay the waters of Lake Mead.
The largest U.S. reservoir has shrunken to a record low amid a punishing drought and the demands of 40 million people in seven states who are sucking the Colorado River dry. The megadrought in the U.S. West has been worsened by climate change. Wildfire season has become longer and blazes more intense, scorching temperatures have broken records and lakes are shriveling.
Receding waters of Lake Mead National Recreation Area have revealed the skeletal remains of two people along with countless desiccated fish and what has become a graveyard of forgotten and stranded watercraft.
Houseboats, sailboats and motorboats have been beached, creating a surreal scene in an otherwise rugged desert landscape. A buoy that once marked a no-boat-zone sits in the dirt, not a drop of water anywhere in view. Even a sunken World War II-era craft that once surveyed the lake has emerged from the ebbing waters.
A sign marks the water line from 2002 near Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Saturday, July 9, 2022, near Boulder City, Nev. The largest U.S. reservoir has shrunken to a record low amid a punishing drought and the demands of 40 million people in seven states who are sucking the Colorado River dry. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Craig Miller hauls a hose while trying to free his stranded houseboat at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Thursday, June 23, 2022, near Boulder City, Nev. Miller had been living on the stranded boat for over two weeks after engine trouble and falling lake levels left the boat above the water level. (AP Photo/John Locher)
A formerly sunken boat lies in a field of grass far from the water line at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Wednesday, June 22, 2022, near Boulder City, Nev. (AP Photo/John Locher)
A formerly sunken boat sits upright into the air with its stern stuck in the mud along the shoreline of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Wednesday, June 22, 2022, near Boulder City, Nev. Lake Mead water has dropped to levels it hasn't been since the lake initially filled over 80 years ago. (AP Photo/John Locher)
https://apnews.com/article/lakes-colorado-river-droughts-trending-news-abab298019a44aef0181ad79aad12ab9
Go long big oil - more plastic orgies..
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-62013030
AP PHOTOS: Nature’s forces on display in Yellowstone flood
today
Some of the forces of nature that helped shape Yellowstone National Park into one of America’s most beloved landscapes unleashed a .. https://apnews.com/article/floods-science-travel-business-709a543605963010b620de1ba981d08f .. frightening flood this week as warm rains combined with a rapidly melting snowpack to overwhelm waterways.
Trees were uprooted and washed away, rivers jumped their banks and tore out huge chunks of highway, bridges were destroyed and homes were swept off their foundations downstream.
More than 80 people were rescued from flooded campgrounds and small towns. Remarkably, no one was hurt.
The park evacuated 10,000 visitors and has closed its gates while it assesses damage to bridges, roads, trails and facilities. Residents of hamlets downstream cleaned up the mess from hundreds of swamped homes, pumping and dumping buckets of chunky brown water outside.
Receding floodwaters flow past sections of North Entrance Road washed away at Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Mont., Thursday, June 16, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
[...]
A road ends where floodwaters washed away a house in Gardiner, Mont., Thursday, June 16, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Highway workers inspect a washed out bridge along the Yellowstone River Wednesday, June 15, 2022, near Gardiner, Mont. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Receding floodwaters flow past sections of North Entrance Road washed away at Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Mont., Thursday, June 16, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Pedestrians walk down a street washed away from Rock Creek floodwaters in Red Lodge, Mont., Wednesday, June 15, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy.
The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/environment
https://apnews.com/article/yellowstone-floods-photo-gallery-b5142bdd554cb9fdd2949bdce3e0c848
The Supreme Court is deciding a key environmental policy case. The court will soon issue a ruling in a case that challenges the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate carbon emissions, which could have broad implications for agency powers and the Biden administration’s climate policy goals. If the court rules against the E.P.A., claims that the S.E.C. is now overreaching may gain traction.
The signatories disagree on policy. But they all reject claims that the agency lacks the power to act on climate, said Satyam Khanna, a Stanford fellow who was the S.E.C.’s senior climate policy adviser. “Democrats and Republicans alike know that the S.E.C.’s recent activity in this space is an evolution, not a revolution,” he said.
How SCOTUS’ upcoming climate ruling could defang Washington
A legal fight over the EPA’s power to restrict greenhouse gases offers conservative justices an opportunity to tie the executive branch's hands on a host of issues — from Covid to net neutrality.
By ALEX GUILLÉN and SARAH OWERMOHLE
06/12/2022 07:00 AM EDT
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling this month hobbling the Biden administration’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gases — but its impact could weaken Washington’s power to oversee wide swaths of American life well beyond climate change.
The upcoming decision on the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate oversight offers the conservative justices an opportunity to undermine federal regulations on a host of issues, from drug pricing and financial regulations to net neutrality. Critics of the EPA have clamored for the high court to do just that, by declaring it unlawful for federal agencies to make “major” decisions without clear authorization from Congress.
The Supreme Court and several Republican-appointed judges have invoked the same principle repeatedly during the past year to strike down a series of Biden administration responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Liberal legal scholars worry that the EPA case could yield an aggressive version of that thinking — unraveling much of the regulatory state as it has existed since the New Deal.
Pharmaceuticals are seen in North Andover, Mass.
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
Rules at risk
BY ALEX GUILLÉN AND SARAH OWERMOHLE
That has implications for other major rules that President Joe Biden’s agencies are writing or defending in court, including wetlands protections, limits on car and truck pollution, insurance coverage for birth control under Obamacare, and even the Trump administration’s attempts to lower drug prices.
“A narrow reading of what the federal agencies can do is going to literally handcuff the federal government from taking action to protect Americans’ health safety and the environment,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown University.
Climate change and ‘major questions’
The immediate stakes in the EPA case are big enough on their own: Two coal companies and a phalanx of Republican-led states want the court to limit the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, a major driver of global warming that threatens to worsen flooding, droughts, disease and other calamities in the coming decades.
The case’s origins are messy and complicated, involving a sweeping Obama-era power plant climate rule and the Trump administration’s efforts to replace it with a much narrower regulation. The original rule had sought to push the electric power industry away from fossil fuels and toward greener sources such as wind and solar, wielding the EPA’s powers under a seldom-used section of the 1970 Clean Air Act. Under Biden, the EPA has embarked on writing its own version of the rule.
“A narrow reading of what the federal agencies can do is going to literally handcuff the federal government from taking action to protect Americans’ health safety and the environment.”
Lawrence Gostin, Georgetown University law professor
Legal experts on both sides of the issue widely expect the court to side with conservatives by saying the Obama-era EPA had gone too far. But the big mystery is whether the court’s majority is prepared to go big — and open the door to a judicial crackdown on the executive branch.
The crux of the debate concerns something called the “major questions” doctrine — the idea, debated by judges over the past two decades, that executive branch actions with “vast economic or political significance” should face an extra-high hurdle to winning the courts’ approval. In those cases, the agencies would need explicit authority from Congress for the actions they’re taking.
Some conservative justices have embraced an even more aggressive doctrine, known as “nondelegation,” that would prohibit Congress from handing off big decisions to agencies at all. That could throw a huge legal cloud over landmark laws enacted in past decades, including the Clean Air Act.
It’s unclear whether the court is prepared to go quite that far in the EPA case — it could simply knock down the agency’s climate authority on narrower grounds, deferring the larger regulatory fight until later.
But some groups siding with the red states want the justices to use this case to stake a clear boundary for both regulators and Congress.
“Congress did not — and, under our Constitution, cannot — grant unelected administrative officials at EPA legislative power to creatively reimagine energy policy for the entire country,” the anti-regulation Americans for Prosperity Foundation wrote in a legal brief filed in the EPA case.
The courts have never precisely defined where the line between legislative and executive power lies. But they have repeatedly cited the “major questions” principle to knock down executive branch actions that they think went too far.
“Congress did not — and, under our Constitution, cannot — grant unelected administrative officials at EPA legislative power to creatively reimagine energy policy for the entire country.”
Legal brief by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation
In one early high-profile case, the Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the Food and Drug Administration lacked the authority to regulate most tobacco products. (Congress overrode that ruling in 2009 by passing a law giving FDA clear authority over tobacco, but such bipartisan agreement is unlikely in the current political climate.)
The issue also arose in the court’s 2015 ruling that upheld Obamacare’s exchange markets — although the Obama administration won that case.
Biden’s Covid actions — and beyond?
Judges’ use of the major questions doctrine has surged during the past year, especially as the Biden administration leaned on long-established laws to respond to threats like Covid-19.
In August, the Supreme Court sided with real estate agents who challenged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic-inspired moratorium on evictions, reasoning that Congress had not given the public health agency regulatory power over housing policy.
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In January, the court blocked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from requiring Covid vaccination or testing for workers at companies with 100 or more employers, a mandate that would have covered about 84 million people. That decision didn’t explicitly cite the major questions doctrine, although Justice Neil Gorsuch did in a concurrence joined by Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
A federal judge in Florida last year cited the major questions doctrine in striking down the CDC’s Covid-related restrictions on Florida cruises, which he called a “breathtaking” expansion of authority. More recently, a judge’s ruling in April cited the doctrine to strike down a federal travel mask mandate. The Biden administration is appealing that ruling.
On the other hand, a federal judge in December said the doctrine was “inapplicable” in a challenge to a Covid vaccine mandate for the military, in part because service members already must get a litany of other vaccines.
Opponents of federal regulations have raised the major questions doctrine to attack other rules, including an EPA air pollution rule that oil and biofuels groups call an attempt to promote electric cars. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also expected to face legal challenges to its recent proposal to require companies to disclose their climate-related risks to investors — a mandate that critics say the SEC doesn’t have congressional authority to impose.
Agencies need flexibility to react to new threats, Georgetown’s Gostin argued. That’s why many laws contain open-ended provisions that give agencies some level of authority to act when Congress hasn’t specifically required it.
“When Congress gave powers to the Food and Drug Administration, or to EPA, or the CDC, it did so many, many decades ago — and it couldn’t possibly foresee all of the hazards that the American public would face,” he said.
Lisa Heinzerling, a Georgetown University law professor and Obama-era EPA official, noted that the major questions doctrine is becoming more popular among judges at a time when Congress is in full gridlock. That means it would be difficult if not impossible to pass new laws to address emerging threats.
“They’re introducing these new principles at precisely the moment when they’re the most damaging, which is when we are relying on long-existing statutes to do a lot of the work of addressing our problems,” Heinzerling said.
Katy O’Donnell and John Hendel contributed to this report.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/12/how-scotus-upcoming-climate-ruling-could-defang-washington-00038595?campaign_id=4&emc=edit_dk_20220616&instance_id=64190&nl=dealbook®i_id=1477058&segment_id=95286&te=1&user_id=3b6708353eb4d86d1549f97d1e8d7b46
Yellowstone flooding prompts 10,000 to flee national park
By AMY BETH HANSON and MATTHEW BROWN 29 minutes ago
1 of 22 - Floodwaters are seen along the Clarks Fork Yellowstone River near Bridger, Mont., on Monday, June 13, 2022. The flooding across parts of southern Montana and northern Wyoming forced the indefinite closure of Yellowstone National Park just as a summer tourist season that draws millions of visitors annually was ramping up. (AP Photo/Emma H. Tobin)
01:35
Apparently a lot of Canes fans left at the beginning of 3rd down 4-0
Now 4-1
After such an amazing season.
Not like the old daze,
The #LetsGoCanes fans still at the game chanting “let’s go canes” to the horn 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/O6iQl3FEjy
— Keith Napolitano (@IslesNapolitano) May 31, 2022
Anyone in the market for a good bird feeder:
The West's megadrought will persist and may get worse in coming months.
Water availability is a high concern
By Rachel Ramirez, CNN
Updated 2:22 PM ET, Thu March 17, 2022
Lake Powell's Wahweap Bay and Marina on February 1 when the reservoir was at 26% of capacity.
(CNN) -- The West's intense multi-year drought is expected to at least continue — if not worsen — in the coming months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday in its spring outlook.
For the second year in a row, NOAA forecasters are predicting "prolonged, persistent drought in the West where below-average precipitation is most likely," the agency wrote.
Nearly 60% of the Lower 48 was experiencing moderate to exceptional dry conditions this week, the largest area in a decade. In California, which did not get enough much-needed precipitation this winter, extreme drought expanded from 12% of the state to 35% in the past week, according to Thursday's Drought Monitor report.
And there's little to no relief in sight.
Given the combined forecast of low precipitation and high temperatures, "it's very likely, or makes sense, that areas will certainly some of the drought areas will become worse," Jon Gottschalck, a chief at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, said at a news conference.
"[The forecasts] are not favorable" for the drought, Justin Mankin, assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College and co-lead of NOAA's Drought Task Force, told CNN. "I think you're going to see a rapid re-establishment of conditions analogous to last fall quite quickly across a number of states."
A recent study found the period from 2000 to 2021 was the driest in 1,200 years for the West. Last year's drought severity was "exceptional," those researchers said.
Water availability is a high concern in the West, where the need for precipitation is dire.
"The Southwest’s most important river is drying up"
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/08/us/colorado-river-water-shortage/
Years of low rainfall and more intense heat waves have fed directly to multi-year, unrelenting drought conditions and water shortages. These water concerns are likely to persist this year given NOAA's spring outlook, which calls for below-average precipitation in the West and Southern Plains.
The intense drought has pushed reservoirs in the West to alarmingly low water depths.
"In general, these water shortages are stressing systems. They're stressing communities," Ed Clark, the director of NOAA's National Water Center, told reporters. "In particular, the Colorado River Basin, we are seeing the Bureau of Reclamation begin their calls for for additional actions that will provide or curtail some water allocations."
On the Colorado River, Lake Powell plunged below a critical threshold this week — 3,525 feet above sea level — sparking additional concerns about water supply and a critical source of hydropower generation that millions of people in the Western states rely on for electricity.
According to the US Bureau of Reclamation's drought contingency plans, the 3,525-foot mark is a significant "target elevation" for Lake Powell, under which the situation becomes dire. The 3,525-foot target is crucial because it allows a 35-foot buffer for emergency response to prevent Lake Powell from dropping below the minimum pool elevation of 3,490 feet above sea level, the lowest at which Glen Canyon Dam is able to generate hydropower for millions of people.
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US, also dipped below a critical level last fall which triggered unprecedented water cuts for states in the Southwest.
"This year the Colorado River Basin has experienced extremely variable conditions with a record high snowpack one month, followed by weeks without snow," Reclamation Acting Commissioner David Palumbo said in a statement last week, in anticipation of the reservoir dropping. "This variable hydrology and a warmer, drier west have drastically impacted our operations and we are faced with the urgent need to manage in the moment."
Brad Pugh, the operational drought lead for NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, also said drought in the West will exacerbate wildfire risk.
"As we go into the summer months, [the drought] will set the stage for elevated risk of wildfire activity," Pugh told reporters. "So as far as preparations go, I just urge the public to stay abreast, stay aware of the public forecasts from the National Weather Service offices as we get closer to the summer wildfire season there in California."
Beyond the West, drought conditions in the South, particularly Texas, have worsened in recent months, with over 90% of the state now in drought, according to the latest US Drought Monitor.
NOAA's report suggests this trend will continue through the spring.
"So while the spring outlook for this year from NOAA look quite similar to last year, there is a key difference about this spring, which is that the drought has expanded eastward, pushing 70% of Texas -— which was less impacted over the last two years — into severe drought," Mankin said.
Texas's drought is in part fueling an extreme fire threat on Thursday, according to the Storm Prediction Center, creating what officials say is "a highly volatile fire environment."
Scientists say the recent drought is just a preview of what's to come, not just for the US but for the rest of the world.
Globally, UN scientists found droughts that may have occurred only once every 10 years or so now happen 70% more frequently due to climate change. Unless the world cuts its reliance on fossil fuels and stabilizes the planet's temperature rise, reservoirs will continue to drain and and wildfires will become more dangerous.
This story has been updated with additional information.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/us/noaa-drought-spring-outlook-climate/index.html
Going to a baseball game at 1PM.
Thanks Bull, will add to a few others that can discuss ideas with balance
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168932590&txt2find=Skeptics
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168931419
Have a great day! (must still be hot there cuz it's Sunday and you are neither in church or golfing unless you text from those places ;)
Olear is a good read.
PREVAIL is a regular column about politics, history, national security, foreign affairs, organized crime, dirty money, global corruption, the fight for democracy—and, on Sundays, poetry and literature.
https://gregolear.substack.com/
His prevail columns are free.
Thanks Bull, appreciate a good translation. And, these relationships are tough
Whether personal or planetary.
In the end (the dire one as well as daily)
You pay your money and you take your chances
notes:
Sunday Pages: "To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough"
A poem by Robert Burns
Greg Olear
May 22
Dear Reader,
I don’t know if it’s residue from the lunar eclipse that Neil deGrasse Tyson said was lame, a particularly virulent Mercury Retrograde, or, to paraphrase Sullivan, the agency of an ill-natured fairy, but every single plan I made this past week was either canceled, postponed, or rescheduled.
Some of these plans were thwarted by friends and family catching covid (which seems to once again be on the rise, despite our collective denial). Others were driven off by lighting and thunder and possible tornado in the forecast. Since last Saturday, it’s been like this with all my best-laid plans.
And now that I think of it, “the best-laid plans of mice and men” is one of those lines that my mother used to quote just the first part of. When I was a kid, she would frequently say, “‘I see,’ said the blind man,” and definitively end the sentence right there, and I would sort of play along as if this made sense. I think I was a senior in high school when she finally supplied the punchline: “…as he took out his hammer and saw.”
Another expression where you only ever get the first part is this: “You win some, you lose some, and some get rained out.” This is supposed to be a profound nugget of baseball wisdom, but all the beginning of Satchel Paige’s famous aphorism does is list the three possible outcomes. It’s the oft-ignored second part that gives meaning to the first: “…but you have to dress for all of them.”
Why do some expressions get truncated like this? In the case of the “mice and men” line, it’s because the second part is written in the Scots dialect: “The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley.” Aft means often, and gang agley means go wrong. I suggest translating it thus:
The best-laid plans of mice and men,
Get all fucked up again and again.
“To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough” was written in November, 1785—three and a half years before George Washington’s first inauguration. Robert Burns is the national poet of Scotland, and his fusion of the Scots dialect with standard English makes his work accessible to non-Scots speakers. “To a Mouse” is an example of this—although it did require me to look up a few words. As the poem is difficult, I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing each verse:
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murdering pattle!
Chill, sleek little rodent! I’m not going to chase you.
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An’ fellow-mortal!
It sucks the plough destroyed your house. As a fellow mammal and mortal, I sympathize.
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ requet;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!
All you took is one ear (icker) of corn in this whole pile (thrave). That’s cool with me, little dude. Not a lot to ask for.
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuing,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Shit, your house is toast, and December is coming, and it’s cold! Major bummer.
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
You were nice and warm until the coulter came and chopped up your lodging. (A coulter is a round cutting blade, but the horror aspects of the poem are enhanced if you imagine Ann.)
That wee bit heap o’ leaves and stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
There’s so much bad weather on the way, including cranreuch, which means hoarfrost. (I don’t know what hoarfrost is, either, but it sounds unpleasant.)
And now, the famous part:
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Mouse, my friend, you can’t blame yourself for having terrible foresight. You’re a mouse! You have a small brain! We humans have big brains, and the ability to plan ahead, and we still fuck shit up all the time! We hope things will turn out great, and they usually don’t! We are no better than you! If anything, we are worse!
Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I cannot see,
I guess an’ fear!
Consider yourself fortunate, mouse, that you can’t look back with rue and regret, or look ahead to fear and dread! You live completely in the moment, you lucky rodent!
These are fearsome times, Dear Reader, and we are all of us terrified mice scurrying off to safety, with dreadful panic in our breast. But unlike the wee beastie, we can see the coulter coming.
May this week bring us all better health, fewer thwarted plans, and more order to things—and let us finish what we start!
https://gregolear.substack.com/p/sunday-pages-to-a-mouse-on-turning?
Sea Level to Rise up to a Foot by 2050, Interagency Report Finds
NEWS | February 15, 2022
By Jane Lee,
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Coastal cities like Miami, shown, already experience high-tide flooding. But a new federal interagency report projects an uptick in the frequency and intensity of such events in the coming decades because of rising seas. Credit: B137 (CC-BY)
In Brief:NASA, NOAA, USGS, and other U.S. government agencies project that the rise in ocean height in the next 30 years could equal the total rise seen over the past 100 years.
Coastal flooding will increase significantly over the next 30 years because of sea level rise, according to a new report by an interagency sea level rise task force that includes NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other federal agencies. Titled Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States, the Feb. 15 report concludes that sea level along U.S. coastlines will rise between 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 centimeters) on average above today’s levels by 2050.
The report – an update to a 2017 report – forecasts sea level to the year 2150 and, for the first time, offers near-term projections for the next 30 years. Agencies at the federal, state, and local levels use these reports to inform their plans on anticipating and coping with the effects of sea level rise.
“This report supports previous studies and confirms what we have long known: Sea levels are continuing to rise at an alarming rate, endangering communities around the world. Science is indisputable and urgent action is required to mitigate a climate crisis that is well underway,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “NASA is steadfast in our commitment to protecting our home planet by expanding our monitoring capabilities and continuing to ensure our climate data is not only accessible but understandable.”
The task force developed their near-term sea level rise projections by drawing on an improved understanding of how the processes that contribute to rising seas – such as melting glaciers and ice sheets as well as complex interactions between ocean, land, and ice – will affect ocean height. “That understanding has really advanced since the 2017 report, which gave us more certainty over how much sea level rise we’ll get in the coming decades,” said Ben Hamlington, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and one of the update’s lead authors.
NASA’s Sea Level Change Team, led by Hamlington, has also developed an online mapping .. https://sealevel.nasa.gov/task-force-scenario-tool .. tool to visualize the report’s state-of-the-art sea level rise projections on a localized level across the U.S. “The hope is that the online tool will help make the information as widely accessible as possible,” Hamlington said.
The Interagency Sea Level Rise Task Force projects an uptick in the frequency and intensity of high-tide coastal flooding, otherwise known as nuisance flooding, because of higher sea level. It also notes that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, global temperatures will become even greater, leading to a greater likelihood that sea level rise by the end of the century will exceed the projections in the 2022 update.
“It takes a village to make climate predictions. When you combine NASA’s scenarios of global sea level rise with NOAA’s estimates of extreme water levels and the U.S. Geological Survey’s impact studies, you get a robust national estimate of the projected future that awaits American coastal communities and our economic infrastructure in 20, 30, or 100 years from now,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, who directs the NASA Sea Level Change Team at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
“This is a global wake-up call and gives Americans the information needed to act now to best position ourselves for the future,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. “As we build a Climate Ready Nation, these updated data can inform coastal communities and others about current and future vulnerabilities in the face of climate change and help them make smart decisions to keep people and property safe over the long run.”
Building on a Research Legacy
The Global and Regional Sea Level Rise report incorporates sea level projections from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment, released by the United Nations in August 2021. The IPCC reports, issued every five to seven years, provide global evaluations of Earth’s climate and use analyses based on computer simulations, among other data.
A separate forthcoming report known as the Fifth National Climate Assessment, produced by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is the latest in a series summarizing the impacts of climate change on the U.S., and it will in turn use the results from the Global and Regional Sea Level Rise report in its analysis. The Climate Assessment is slated to publish in 2023.
NASA sea level researchers have years of experience studying how Earth’s changing climate will affect the ocean.
Their work includes research forecasting how much coastal flooding U.S. communities will experience in 10 years, .. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3093/study-projects-a-surge-in-coastal-flooding-starting-in-2030s/ .. helping to visualize IPCC data on global sea level rise using an online visualization tool, .. https://sealevel.nasa.gov/ipcc-ar6-sea-level-projection-tool .. and launching satellites that contribute data to a decades-long record of global sea surface height.
Learn more about sea level and climate change here:
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3146/sea-level-to-rise-up-to-a-foot-by-2050-interagency-report-finds/
Vegas water intake now visible at drought-stricken Lake Mead
today (4/30/2022)
This photo taken Monday, April 25, 2022, by the Southern Nevada Water Authority shows the top of Lake Mead drinking water Intake No. 1 above the surface level of the Colorado River reservoir behind Hoover Dam. The intake is the uppermost of three in the deep, drought-stricken lake that provides Las Vegas with 90% of its drinking water supply. (Southern Nevada Water Authority via AP)
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A massive drought-starved reservoir on the Colorado River has become so depleted that Las Vegas now is pumping water from deeper within Lake Mead where other states downstream don’t have access.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority announced this week that its Low Lake Level Pumping Station is operational, and released photos of the uppermost intake visible at 1,050 feet (320 meters) above sea level at the lake behind Hoover Dam.
“While this emphasizes the seriousness of the drought conditions, we have been preparing for this for more than a decade,” said Bronson Mack, water authority spokesman. The low-level intake allows Las Vegas “to maintain access to its primary water supply in Lake Mead, even if water levels continue to decline due to ongoing drought and climate change conditions,” he said.
The move to begin using what had been seen as an in-case-we-need-it hedge against taps running dry comes as water managers in several states that rely on the Colorado River take new steps to conserve water amid what has become perpetual drought.
“We don’t have enough water supplies right now to meet normal demand. The water is not there,” Metropolitan Water District of Southern California spokesperson Rebecca Kimitch said this week.
The agency told some 6 million people in sprawling Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties to cut their outdoor watering to one day a week, effective June 1, or face stiff fines.
The surface level of another massive Colorado River reservoir, Lake Powell, dipped below a critical threshold in March — raising concerns about whether Glen Canyon Dam can continue generating power for some 5 million customers across the U.S. West.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream are the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S., part of a system that provides water to more than 40 million people, tribes, agriculture and industry in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and across the southern border in Mexico.
At Lake Mead, the new pumps are fed by an intake drilled nearer to the bottom of the lake and completed in 2020 to ensure the ability to continue to draw water for Las Vegas, its casinos, suburbs and 2.4 million residents and 40 million tourists per year.
The “third straw” draws drinking water at 895 feet (272.8 meters) above sea level — below a point at which water would not be released downstream from Hoover Dam.
https://apnews.com/article/8a36b5b3e35a44969ceae706d759227c
Together, the pipeline and pump projects cost more than $1.3 billion. Drilling began in 2014, amid projections that the lake level would continue to fall due to drought. Increasingly dry conditions in the region are now attributed to long-term climate change.
Lake Mead, between Nevada and Arizona, reached its high-water mark in July 1983, at 1,225 feet (373.4 meters) above sea level. On Friday, the level was 1,055 feet (321.6 meters) — about 30% full. Some of the steepest cliffs bordering the lake show 170 feet (51.8 meters) of white mineral “bathtub ring.”
“Without the third intake, Southern Nevada would be shutting its doors,” said Pat Mulroy, former longtime chief of the Las Vegas-based water authority, who is now a consultant. “That’s pretty obvious, since the first straw is out of the water.”
A mid-level pipeline also can draw water from 1,000 feet (304.8 meters).
The authority maintains that the Las Vegas water supply is not immediately threatened. It points to water conservation efforts that it says since 2002 have cut regional consumption of Colorado River water by 26% while the area population has increased 49%.
https://apnews.com/article/climate-business-las-vegas-lakes-colorado-river-1c5396dc9c43bdb5d14835f4c8dcdb44
Frederick Law Olmsted’s Enduring Gift
The man behind many of the nation’s beloved public spaces was born 200 years ago on April 26. His creations are more essential to American life than ever.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/22/us/frederick-law-olmsted-american-parks.html
A Breakup Letter from the U.S. Government to Big Oil
By Meghana Indurti and Lucia Whalen
April 22, 2022
Dear Big Oil,
This is hard for me, the government, to write, because I love you so much, and we’ve been together for so long that I can barely imagine life without you. But I feel that our relationship is toxic and that you’ve been manipulating me for years.
When I previously tried standing up to you, you said that you’d stop giving me money. And I love money. I do. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. You really need to love it (money) to work in politics, or else the late hours get old fast.
But we are quickly arriving at a climate catastrophe, and it feels like you don’t even care?
I see now that your behavior for the past century has honestly been sort of insane. Like, there were so many red flags from the beginning.
I should have left you after the first oil spill. But I told myself, “This was an accident, there’s no way he’s gonna keep spilling oil, that would be crazy.” But then you just kept spilling oil! You’ve spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons. I can’t keep cleaning up your messes!
Sure, it wasn’t always bad. Remember when you powered your first car? Beep beep! I loved that little thing.
But then cars increased carbon pollution to the point that temperatures started warming. And you tried to hide it from me and fuck up all my efforts to offer better public transportation. We’re supposed to support each other!
When we first met I was, like, O.K., he’s into coal—not ideal, but he’ll grow out of that, right? Everyone has a coal phase! But, babe, it’s been more than a century.
Then you started drilling for oil, and I was, like, O.K., oil isn’t renewable. This has gotta be a temporary thing. But now I realize these weren’t phases—it’s who you are.
Do you know how embarrassing it was when I found out that it wasn’t just arsenic but also benzene, formaldehyde, lead, mercury, and two hundred other toxins that you had in your fracking roster? Behind my back?!
God, all you fossil-fuel companies are the same.
So that’s it. Here are my conditions if you want to be with me and make this relationship work:
STOP FRACKING NOW. Or, like, as soon as you can.
I’m not totally unreasonable. I don’t want to lose the millions of dollars I have invested in you overnight. So, if you absolutely think it’s necessary or you really need to frack, I get it. Change is hard! But if you don’t change you will literally destroy the entire planet.
Soaring emissions are producing acid rain and smog, and soon every city is going to look like Gotham City—which, like, worst-case scenario, I can turn into a tourist attraction. Maybe I can get Zoë Kravitz involved? Charge an additional fee for Batman-themed masks if people want to avoid breathing toxic fumes? Hmm.
Wait, ugh, no. It’s so easy to fall back into old patterns with you. . . .
No more oil pipelines. I really mean it this time. No more tar sands, and no more destroying entire ecosystems to create stations for natural gas. Last time you did that, seventeen different species went extinct!
It’s fine. We all make mistakes. Who needs prairie chickens anyway? But if you don’t stop then I am absolutely gonna be pissed and circle back to this conversation in ten to fifteen years.
The thing is, we’ve been talking about moving away from an economy based on fossil fuels for more than seven decades. That’s twelve Batman reboots ago. There are all these technologies, including solar and wind, which don’t release a toxic stew of air pollution. And I feel like it’s just me fighting for that? I need to know if renewable energy is something you can commit to down the line.
We’re up against the biggest existential crisis that our species has ever faced. Because of you, regions of Australia, North Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Western United States will be inhospitable owing to heat and rising sea levels by 2100. And I get it. Those places aren’t top priority to me, either, but I have to at least pretend to give a shit, don’t I?
A couple of scientists who I couldn’t pay off sat me down and told me that there will be more climate-refugee crises, increased world wars (especially over dwindling fresh-water supplies), and mounting natural disasters.
Call me an old-fashioned romantic, but I want to have kids who aren’t exposed to ancient microbes released from melting permafrost that today’s humans have never been exposed to and that will cause more pandemics.
The thing I really can’t get over is that you knew about this the whole time. In the eighties! And yet not only did you ignore that information but you literally spent millions of dollars to gaslight people into believing that they were imagining it. That’s sociopathic, toxic behavior!
You know that I have a soft spot for you. But our relationship is ruining lives.
If you stop, as a reward I’ll let you pick a part of the planet you can ruin a little bit. On the weekends. Cheat days are important.
I hear Sudan is nice.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/a-breakup-letter-from-the-us-government-to-big-oil?
Earth Day
Reports of our inadequate response to the climate emergency roll in as regularly as the tides. The latest came from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, telling us that the crisis is getting worse even faster than we’d imagined. It’s hard to envision a louder alarm, and yet we seem able to sleep through it. This week, as we commemorate Earth Day, we’re underlining the urgency of the situation with a series of pieces from some of our finest writers on the environment. In “The Climate Expert Who Delivered News No One Wanted to Hear,” Elizabeth Kolbert profiles James Hansen, the nasa scientist who offered an early warning about the ramifications of global warming. (Forty-three years ago, Hansen “created one of the world’s first climate models, nicknamed Model Zero, which he used to predict most of what has happened to the climate since. Sometimes he is referred to as the ‘father of global warming,’ and sometimes as the grandfather.”) In “How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet,” the science writer Bill McKibben explores some of the ways that radical environmental changes are making parts of the earth uninhabitable. In “Big Foot,” Michael Specter reports on new technologies aimed at reducing our carbon footprint. In “When the Earth Moved,” Nicholas Lemann chronicles the history of Earth Day and ongoing challenges to the environmental movement in America. Finally, in “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson considers the calamitous effects of chemical pollutants on nature and humanity. As one scientist put it to Carson, “We are walking in nature like an elephant in the china cabinet.” In that last case, scientists and the government made changes—effective ones. Are we capable of doing so again in the face of vastly larger challenges?
—David Remnick
INSPECTOR GENERAL -U.S. Department of Defense
A P R I L 1 3 , 2 0 2 2
Report No. DODIG-2022-083
(U) Evaluation of the Department
of Defense’s Efforts to Address
the Climate Resilience of
U.S. Military Installations
in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic
https://media.defense.gov/2022/Apr/15/2002977604/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2022-083.PDF
Climate toll on Arctic bases: Sunken runways, damaged roads
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER yesterday
3 of 3
FILE - This March 17, 2019, photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, shows an aerial view of Offutt Air Force Base and the surrounding areas affected by floodwaters in Nebraska. The U.S. military long has formally recognized climate change as a threat to national security. That's in part because of the impact that intensifying floods, wildfires, extreme heat and other natural disasters are having and will have on U.S. installations and troops around the world.
(Tech. Sgt. Rachelle Blake/U.S. Air Force via AP, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. military bases in the Arctic and sub-Arctic are failing to prepare their installations for long-term climate change as required, even though soaring temperatures and melting ice already are cracking base runways and roads and worsening flood risks up north, the Pentagon’s watchdog office said Friday.
The report from the inspector general of the Department of Defense provides a rare bit of public stock-taking of the military’s state of readiness – or lack of readiness – for the worsening weather of a warming Earth. https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-joe-biden-business-lloyd-austin-a5c79e8a005c7c4db8a61cf0e6a4267a
The U.S. military long has formally recognized climate change as a threat to national security. That’s in part because of the impact that intensifying floods, wildfires, extreme heat and other natural disasters are having and will have on U.S. installations and troops around the world.
Increasing hurricanes, flooding, storms and wildfires in recent years have caused billions of dollars in damage to Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base, Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base and other U.S. military installations, and interrupted training and other operations.
For years, laws, presidential orders and Pentagon rules have mandated that the military start planning and work so that its installations, warships, warplanes and troops can carry out their missions despite increasingly challenging conditions as the use of fossil fuels heats up the Earth.
While even acknowledging climate change was a career risk for administration officials under former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden directed faster, more sweeping action on climate change by the Department of Defense and other agencies as one of his first acts in office.
Despite Biden’s emphasis, inspectors visiting the United States’ six northernmost military bases last June and July found none were carrying out the required assessments and planning to prepare their installations and operations against long-term climate change.
Further, “most installation leaders at the six installations we visited in the Arctic and sub-Arctic region were unfamiliar with military installation resilience planning requirements, processes, and tools,” the inspector general reports said.
Senior officers told the inspector general’s inspection team .. https://media.defense.gov/2022/Apr/15/2002977604/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2022-083.PDF .. that their operations lacked the training and funding to start the required work on hardening their bases. Some saw requirements for that kind of long-term planning as assembling a “wish list” that would go up against competing priorities, the officers told the inspectors.
A Pentagon spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. The inspector general report cited Defense officials as saying that the Biden administration has finished or is working on many of the report’s recommendations to better incorporate climate preparations at bases and across military branches, and would increase resources to bases to make that possible.
One of the bases is in Greenland and the other five in Alaska: Thule Air Base, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Clear Space Force Station, Eielson Air Force Base, Fort Wainwright and Fort Greely.
The Arctic and sub-Arctic are important to U.S. strategic aims in part because of rising tensions and competition with Russia and China, and in part because sharply rising temperatures are melting sea ice and opening up both shipping lanes and access to the region’s oil and other resources, increasing interest and traffic in the region.
The Defense Department also sees “the Arctic is a potential vector for an attack on the U.S. homeland, a region where Russia and China are operating more freely, and a strategic corridor for DoD forces between the Indo-Pacific and Europe,” the report notes.
The inspectors found the kind of problems associated with worsening climate change already causing trouble at the U.S. bases.
At Fort Wainwright in Alaska, heightened wildfire risks in 2019 interrupted training for two Pacific Air Force squadrons, so that one was able to carry out only 59% of planned training for a period, the report said.
Many of the specific discussions of climate risks at the six bases were blacked-out in the version of the report made public Friday.
But inspectors photographed and described some. That included cracked and sunken runways undermined by melting ice, damaged hangers and roads, and a collapsed rock barrier that had been piled up to hold back floodwater from a river swollen by glacial melting, at Thule in Greenland.
Leaders at all six bases visited noted that kind of damage, inspectors said, “however, officials from five of these installations said they had not begun incorporating future climate risks into their installations’ planning.”
“They stated that their day-to-day focus was on reacting to immediate problems or reducing risk to existing hazards, rather than planning for future hazards,” the report noted.
The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world. .. https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-environment-and-nature-ed8a508291faa85bbf1ba5ccc5198ecf ..
A March heat wave that hiked Arctic temperatures 50 degrees (30 Celsius) higher than normal stunned scientists. .. https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-colorado-arctic-antarctica-eda9ea8704108bdab2480fa2cd4b6e34
Of 79 U.S. military installations overall, the Department of Defense says two-thirds are vulnerable to worsening flooding as the climate worsens and half are vulnerable to increasing drought and wildfires.
https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-climate-floods-arctic-fires-9c55de05afeabcdbb6aca2ba322d0458
100 seconds to go "but not everyone dies"
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168481186
In the Ocean, It’s Snowing Microplastics
Tiny bits of plastic have infiltrated the deep sea’s main food source and could alter the ocean’s role in one of Earth’s ancient cooling processes, scientists say.
By Sabrina Imbler
April 3, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
As long as there has been marine life, there has been marine snow — a ceaseless drizzle of death and waste sinking from the surface into the depths of the sea.
The snow begins as motes, which aggregate into dense, flocculent flakes that gradually sink and drift past the mouths (and mouth-like apparatuses) of scavengers farther down. But even marine snow that is devoured will most likely be snowfall once more; a squid’s guts are just a rest stop on this long passage to the deep.
Although the term may suggest wintry whites, marine snow is mostly brownish or grayish, comprising mostly dead things. For eons, the debris has contained the same things — flecks from plant and animal carcasses, feces, mucus, dust, microbes, viruses — and transported the ocean’s carbon to be stored on the seafloor. Increasingly, however, marine snowfall is being infiltrated by microplastics: fibers and fragments of polyamide, polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate. And this fauxfall appears to be altering our planet’s ancient cooling process.
Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter Earth’s oceans. Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic. A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters.
Marine snow, one of the primary pathways connecting the surface and the deep, appears to be helping the plastics sink. And scientists have only begun to untangle how these materials interfere with deep-sea food webs and the ocean’s natural carbon cycles.
“It’s not just that marine snow transports plastics or aggregates with plastic,” Luisa Galgani, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University, said. “It’s that they can help each other get to the deep ocean.”
Marine snow-making
ImagePlastic waste washing up on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.
Plastic waste washing up on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.Credit...Agung Parameswara/Getty Images
The sunlit surface of the sea blooms with phytoplankton, zooplankton, algae, bacteria and other minuscule life, all feeding on sunbeams or one another. As these microbes metabolize, some produce polysaccharides that can form a sticky gel that attracts the lifeless bodies of tiny organisms, small shreds of larger carcasses, shells from foraminifera and pteropods, sand and microplastics, which stick together to form larger flakes. “They are the glue that keeps together all the components of marine snow,” Dr. Galgani said.
Marine snowflakes fall at different rates. Smaller ones have a more languid descent — “as slow as a meter a day,” said Anela Choy, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Bigger particles, such as dense fecal pellets, can sink quicker. “It just skyrockets to the bottom of the ocean,” said Tracy Mincer, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University.
Plastic in the ocean is constantly being degraded; even something as big and buoyant as a milk jug will eventually shed and splinter into microplastics. These plastics develop biofilms of distinct microbial communities — the “plastisphere,” said Linda Amaral-Zettler, a scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who coined the term. “We sort of think about plastic as being inert,” Dr. Amaral-Zettler said. “Once it enters the environment, it’s rapidly colonized by microbes.”
Image
A sample of South Atlantic water containing plankton and microplastics. Ocean plastics commonly develop a filmy “plastisphere” of distinct microbial communities.
A sample of South Atlantic water containing plankton and microplastics. Ocean plastics commonly develop a filmy “plastisphere” of distinct microbial communities.Credit...Morgan Trimble/Alamy
Microplastics can host so many microbial hitchhikers that they counteract the natural buoyancy of the plastic, causing their raft to sink. But if the biofilms then degrade on the way down, the plastic could float back up, potentially leading to a yo-yoing purgatory of microplastics in the water column. Marine snow is anything but stable; as flakes free-fall into the abyss, they are constantly congealing and falling apart, rent by waves or predators.
“It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” said Adam Porter, a marine ecologist at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s a black box in the middle of the ocean, because we can’t stay down there long enough to work out what’s going on.”
To explore how marine snow and plastics are distributed in the water column, Dr. Mincer has begun to sample deeper waters with a dishwasher-size pump full of filters that dangles on a wire from a research boat. The filters are arranged from big mesh to small to filter out fish and plankton. Running these pumps for 10 hours at a stretch has revealed nylon fibers and other microplastics distributed throughout the water column below the South Atlantic subtropical gyre.
But even with a research boat and its expensive and unwieldy equipment, an individual piece of marine snow is not easily retrieved from deep water in the actual ocean. The pumps often disturb the snow and scatter fecal pellets. And the flakes alone offer little insight into how fast some snows are sinking, which is vital to understanding how long the plastics linger, yo-yo or sink in the water column before settling on the seafloor.
“Is it decades?” Dr. Mincer asked. “Is it hundreds of years? Then we can understand what we’re in here for, and what kind of problem this really is.”
Instant marine snow
Image
Experimental “mesocosms” created by the researcher Luisa Galgani and her team on the Greek island of Crete, to mimic and observe marine snow. “In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system,” she said.
Experimental “mesocosms” created by the researcher Luisa Galgani and her team on the Greek island of Crete, to mimic and observe marine snow. “In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system,” she said.Credit...Luisa Galgani, Chiara Esposito, Paraskevi Pitta
To answer these questions, and work within a budget, some scientists have made and manipulated their own marine snow in the lab.
In Exeter, Dr. Porter collected buckets of seawater from a nearby estuary and loaded the water into continuously rolling bottles. He then sprinkled in microplastics, including polyethylene beads and polypropylene fibers. The constant churning, and a squirt of sticky hyaluronic acid, encouraged particles to collide and stick together into snow.
“We obviously don’t have 300 meters of a tube to make it sink,” Dr. Porter said. “By rolling it, what you’re doing is you’re creating a never-ending water column for the particles to fall through.”
After the bottles rolled for three days, he pipetted out the snow and analyzed the number of microplastics in each flake. His team found that every type of microplastic they tested aggregated into marine snow, and that microplastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene — normally too buoyant to sink on their own — readily sank once incorporated into marine snow. And all the marine snow contaminated with microplastics sank significantly faster than the natural marine snow.
Image
Tubes of marine snow in the lab of Adam Porter at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” Dr. Porter said.
Tubes of marine snow in the lab of Adam Porter at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” Dr. Porter said.Credit...Adam Porter
Dr. Porter suggested that this potential change of the speed of the snow could have vast implications for how the ocean captures and stores carbon: Faster snowfalls could store more microplastics in the deep ocean, whereas slower snowfalls could make the plastic-laden particles more available to predators, potentially starving food webs deeper down. “The plastics are a diet pill for these animals,” said Karin Kvale, a carbon cycle scientist at GNS Science in New Zealand.
In experiments in Crete, with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program, Dr. Galgani has tried mimicking marine snow on a larger scale. She dropped six mesocosms — huge bags that each contained nearly 800 gallons of seawater and recreated natural water movement — in a large pool. Under these conditions, marine snow formed. “In the field, you mostly make observations,” Dr. Galgani said. “You have so little space and a limited system. In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system.”
Dr. Galgani mixed microplastics into three mesocosms in an attempt to “recreate a sea and maybe a future ocean where you can have a high concentration of plastic,” she said. The mesocosms laden with microplastics produced not just more marine snow but also more organic carbon, as the plastics offered more surfaces for microbes to colonize. All this could seed the deep ocean with even more carbon and alter the ocean’s biological pump, which helps regulate the climate.
“Of course, it’s a very, very big picture,” Dr. Galgani said. “But we have some signals that it can have an effect. Of course, it depends on how much plastic there is.”
A plastic feast
Image
Vampire squids, which live in deep waters, were collected from a contaminated patch of the Atlantic Ocean and found to have alarmingly high levels of plastic in their stomachs.
Vampire squids, which live in deep waters, were collected from a contaminated patch of the Atlantic Ocean and found to have alarmingly high levels of plastic in their stomachs. Credit...Steve Downer/Science Source
To understand how microplastics might travel through deep-sea food webs, some scientists have turned to creatures for clues.
Every 24 hours, many species of marine organism embark on a synchronized migration up and down in the water column. “They do the equivalent of a marathon every day and night,” Dr. Choy said. Guilherme V.B. Ferreira, a researcher at the Rural Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, wondered: “Is it possible they are transporting the plastics up and down?”
Dr. Ferreira and Anne Justino, a doctoral student at the same university, collected vampire squids and midwater squids from a patch of the tropical Atlantic. They found a plethora of plastics in both species: mostly fibers, but also fragments and beads.
This made sense for midwater squids, which migrate toward the surface at night to feed on fish and copepods that eat microplastics directly. But vampire squids, which live in deeper waters with fewer microplastics, had even higher levels of plastic, as well as foam, in their stomachs. The researchers hypothesize that the vampire squids’ primary diet of marine snow, especially meatier fecal pellets, may be funneling plastics into their bellies.
“It’s very concerning,” Ms. Justino said. Dr. Ferreira said: “They are one of the most vulnerable species for this anthropogenic influence.”
Ms. Justino has excavated fibers and beads from the digestive tracts of lanternfish, hatchetfish and other fish that migrate up and down in the mesopelagic, 650 to 3,300 feet down. Some microbial communities that settle on microplastics can bioluminesce, drawing in fish like a lure, said Dr. Mincer.
In the Monterey Bay Canyon, Dr. Choy wanted to understand if certain species of filter feeders were ingesting microplastics and transporting them into food webs in deeper water. “Marine snow is one of the major things that connects food webs across the ocean,” she said.
Image
The large, mucusy house of a deep-sea larvacean. When the larvaceans move out, their microplastic-laden houses sink into the deep.
The large, mucusy house of a deep-sea larvacean. When the larvaceans move out, their microplastic-laden houses sink into the deep.Credit...NOAA Ocean Exploration
Dr. Choy zeroed in on the giant larvacean Bathochordaeus stygius. The larvacean resembles a tiny tadpole and lives inside a palatial bubble of mucus that can reach up to a meter long. “It’s worse than the grossest booger you’ve ever seen,” Dr. Choy said. When their snot-houses become clogged from feeding, the larvaceans move out and the heavy bubbles sink. Dr. Choy found that these palaces of mucus are crowded with microplastics, which are funneled to the deep along with all their carbon.
Giant larvaceans are found across the world’s oceans, but Dr. Choy emphasized that her work was focused on the Monterey Bay Canyon, which belongs to a network of marine protected areas and is not representative of other, more polluted seas. “It’s one deep bay on one coast of one country,” Dr. Choy said. “Scale up and think about how vast the ocean is, especially the deep water.”
Individual flakes of marine snow are small, but they add up. A model created by Dr. Kvale estimated that in 2010, the world’s oceans produced 340 quadrillion aggregates of marine snow, which could transport as many as 463,000 tons of microplastics to the seafloor each year.
Scientists are still exploring exactly how this plastic snow is sinking, but they do know for sure, Dr. Porter said, that “everything eventually sinks in the ocean.” Vampire squids will live and die and eventually become marine snow. But the microplastics that pass through them will remain, eventually settling on the seafloor in a stratigraphic layer that will mark our time on the planet long after humans are gone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/science/ocean-plastic-animals.html
Empty canals, dead cotton fields: Arizona farmers are getting slammed by water cuts in the West
PUBLISHED SUN, APR 3 20228:00 AM EDT
Emma Newburger
@EMMA_NEWBURGER
KEY POINTS
On the drought-stricken land where Pinal County farmers have irrigated crops for thousands of years, Nancy Caywood stopped her pickup truck along an empty canal and pointed to a field of dead alfalfa.
“It’s heart wrenching,” said Caywood, a third-generation farmer who manages 247 acres an hour outside of Phoenix.
An intensifying drought and declining reservoir levels across the Western U.S. prompted the first-ever cuts to Arizona farmers’ water supply from the Colorado River.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/03/arizona-farmers-are-slammed-by-water-cuts-in-the-west-amid-drought.html
Hot poles: Antarctica, Arctic 70 and 50 degrees above normal
By SETH BORENSTEIN March 18, 2022
FILE - A drop of water falls off an iceberg melting in the Nuup Kangerlua Fjord near Nuuk in southwestern Greenland, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017. Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.
Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius),which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Celsius), beating its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius), according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.
The coastal Terra Nova Base was far above freezing at 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Celsius).
It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic where it was 50 degrees warmer than average and areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, said center ice scientist Walt Meier.
“They are opposite seasons. You don’t see the north and the south (poles) both melting at the same time,” Meier told The Associated Press Friday evening. “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.”
“It’s pretty stunning,” Meier added.
“Wow. I have never seen anything like this in the Antarctic,” said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who returned recently from an expedition to the continent.
“Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.
Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”
Both Lazzara and Meier said what happened in Antarctica is probably just a random weather event and not a sign of climate change. But if it happens again or repeatedly then it might be something to worry about and part of global warming, they said.
The Antarctic warm spell was first reported by The Washington Post.
The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said.
At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.
By comparison, the world as a whole was only 1.1 degrees (0.6 degrees Celsius) above the 1979 to 2000 average. Globally the 1979 to 2000 average is about half a degree (.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average.
What makes the Antarctic warming really weird is that the southern continent — except for its vulnerable peninsula which is warming quickly and losing ice rapidly — has not been warming much, especially when compared to the rest of the globe, Meier said.
Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice — records go back to 1979 — with it shrinking to 741,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in late February, the snow and ice data center reported.
What likely happened was “a big atmospheric river” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Meier said.
And in the Arctic, .. https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-environment-and-nature-ed8a508291faa85bbf1ba5ccc5198ecf .. which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.
___
Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate
https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-colorado-arctic-antarctica-eda9ea8704108bdab2480fa2cd4b6e34
It’s a cruel and dangerous fantasy that we’ll ever halt climate change by counting on or forcing people to live impoverished lives, forgoing food, medicine, heating, or air conditioning in an increasingly erratic and menacing world.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1042973/climate-change-action-progress-clean-energy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The Arctic will soon see more rain than snow. Scientists say it may speed up global warming.
Jordan Mendoza, USA TODAY - 3h ago
Earlier in August, it rained on the summit of Greenland's ice sheet for the first time in recorded history, and new research suggests that it not only will become a normal occurrence, but it will happen much sooner than previously thought.
© Mario Tama, Getty Images
The sun sets as rain falls beyond floating ice and icebergs in Disko Bay above the Arctic Circle on September 04, 2021 in Ilulissat, Greenland. 2021 will mark one of the biggest ice melt years for Greenland in recorded history.
The majority of Greenland is considered part of the Arctic region, along with some of northern Alaska, Canada and Russia.
Known for its frigid temperatures, which average -40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, it snows quite often. The Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in northern Alaska records snow at least eight months of the year, and it has snowed at least once in each month of the year in recorded history. But research published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday shows much of the region will, on average, experience more rain than snow in the future.
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The team of international researchers had previously concluded the region would eventually see more rain, but originally thought it wouldn't start until around 2090. The new analysis on the region determined the rain would dominate the region as early as 2050 in some areas.
The reason for more rain is melting ice. When sea ice melts or breaks away, the open ocean water mixed with rising global temperatures results in more water evaporation, which then leads to rain falling. When Greenland's summit experienced rain earlier this year, temperatures were above freezing for over nine hours, the third time since 2012 it had happened.
"The take-home message from this is really that changes are likely to occur much more rapidly and earlier than previously projected, which of course will mean that the subsequent impacts of this will also occur earlier," Michelle McCrystall, lead researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, told USA TODAY.
Greenland's ice sheet is roughly 656,000-square-miles big, and if it were to completely melt, NASA says the global sea level would rise about 23 feet and Earth's rotation would slow down enough to make the length of a day two milliseconds longer. A recent study showed that ice sheet melting would raise sea levels nearly a foot higher by the end of the century.
[...]
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/the-arctic-will-soon-see-more-rain-than-snow-scientists-say-it-may-speed-up-global-warming/ar-AARmaG7?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531
Two biggest polluters saying the right things..
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59238869
Ms Thunberg said: "It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place."
She said: "We need immediate drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen.
"The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that.
"All this while the world is literally burning, on fire, and while the people living on the front lines are still bearing the brunt of the climate crisis."
She described the UN climate change summit as a "two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah" to "maintain business as usual" and "create loopholes to benefit themselves".
Ms Thunberg added: "We know that our emperors are naked."
He also said he had received thanks from other leaders for bringing the United States back to negotiations after disengagement under former President Donald J. Trump, echoing comments he made at the end of a Group of 20 meeting in Rome on Sunday.
With Methane and Forest Deals, Climate Summit Offers Hope After Gloomy Start
Agreements to reduce methane gas emissions and protect the world’s forests were reached Tuesday at the U.N.-sponsored meeting, as President Biden chided the leaders of Russia and China for not showing up.
By Jim Tankersley, Katie Rogers and Lisa Friedman
Published Nov. 2, 2021
Updated Nov. 4, 2021, 5:44 a.m. ET
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GLASGOW — The world leaders gathered at a crucial climate summit secured new agreements on Tuesday to end deforestation and reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane, building momentum as the conference prepared to shift to a more grueling two weeks of negotiations on how to avert the planet’s catastrophic warming.
Capping off two days of speeches and meetings, President Biden on Tuesday said the United States pledged to be a “partner” with vulnerable countries confronting climate change, while expressing confidence that his own domestic climate agenda is on track to pass Congress despite the wobbling of a key Senate Democrat this week.
Mr. Biden told reporters the meeting had re-established the United States as a leader on what he has called an existential threat to humanity, saying America would keep raising its climate ambitions and that his engagement on the issue had drawn thanks from other heads of state.
He also reproached President Xi Jinping of China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, along with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, for not attending the summit.
“We showed up. We showed up,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference at the United Nations summit on climate change, known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. “The fact that China is trying to assert, understandably, a new role in the world as a world leader, not showing up? Huh. The single most important thing that’s gotten the attention of the world is climate.”
The most consequential agreements reached on Tuesday came in areas where Mr. Biden said the United States was poised to move aggressively: reducing methane emissions and protecting the world’s forests.
Image
Members of Ocean Rebellion protest outside the Grangemouth Oil Refinery in Scotland on Tuesday.
Members of Ocean Rebellion protest outside the Grangemouth Oil Refinery in Scotland on Tuesday.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
The Biden administration announced Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency intends to limit the methane coming from about one million existing oil and gas rigs across the United States, as part of a larger climate-focused plan to protect tropical forests and a push to speed up clean technology.
Soon after that announcement, administration officials said that 105 countries had signed the Global Methane Pledge, a commitment to reduce methane emissions 30 percent by 2030, including half of the world’s top 30 methane-emitting countries, and that they expected the list to grow.
Notably absent from those signing on, however, were some major methane polluters, like China, Russia, Australia and India.
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The leaders of more than 100 countries also pledged on Tuesday to end deforestation by 2030, agreeing to a sweeping accord aimed at protecting some 85 percent of the world’s forests, which are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the rise in global temperatures.
Millions of acres of forests are being lost to global demand for soy, palm oil, timber and cattle, most notably in Brazil which has seen a surge in deforestation of the Amazon since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019. Brazil is among the signatories of the agreement.
Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who has played host and master of ceremonies for the gathering of leaders, called countries to action on forests by invoking a horror movie. “Let’s end this great chainsaw massacre,” he said.
The plan is focused on an effort to reduce the financial incentives to cut down forests, with 12 governments committing $12 billion, and private companies pledging $7 billion, to protect and restore forests.
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Image
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain on Tuesday. “Let’s end this great chainsaw massacre,” he said of deforestation.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain on Tuesday. “Let’s end this great chainsaw massacre,” he said of deforestation.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
But some environmental organizations criticized Tuesday’s agreement, saying it would allow deforestation to continue and noting that similar efforts have failed in the past.
At an event unveiling the methane pledge, Mr. Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission and a partner in hosting the event, framed the agreement as one of the most effective ways countries around the world could quickly begin fighting the effects of climate change.
Emissions of methane, which is produced from oil and natural gas operations, livestock and landfills, can warm the atmosphere 80 times as fast as carbon dioxide in the short term.
Mr. Biden said that the United States was prepared to meet the methane goal and could “probably go beyond that” by 2030.
The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that represents the oil and natural gas industry, called the E.P.A. proposal “sweeping” and pledged to work with the agency to “help shape a final rule that is effective, feasible and designed to encourage further innovation.”
Before he left Glasgow on Tuesday to return to Washington on a late-evening flight, Mr. Biden hailed progress on multiple fronts from the second day of meetings with heads of state, including initiatives to reduce emissions from agriculture. John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s special envoy on climate change, said he expected new financial commitments to fulfill a long-delayed promise to provide $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries to fight and adapt to global warming.
There were private commitments as well: Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on the planet, pledged $2 billion to restore natural habitats and transform food systems to reduce their footprint and make them more sustainable in a warming world.
The pledges on Tuesday offered glimmers of some concrete progress after a pessimistic start, which included repeated warnings that the world was running out of time to solve an existential crisis for humans — along with anger from leaders of developing countries who called on wealthy countries to do more, faster, to reduce the fossil fuel emissions that are warming the planet.
Image
A coal-fueled power station near Datong, in China's northern Shanxi province.
A coal-fueled power station near Datong, in China's northern Shanxi province.Credit...Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Yet the hardest work at the conference will begin after the top leaders have left for home.
Over the next week and a half, diplomats will have to hammer out rules around international carbon markets and figure out how to deliver on a still-unmet promise from more than a decade ago to deliver $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poor countries pivot away from fossil fuels and prepare for the impact of climate change.
Most critically, vulnerable countries are pressing major emitting nations to agree to increase their climate targets each year in order to keep global temperatures from heading past 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to levels before the Industrial Revolution.
China, ahead of the summit, announced it would peak its emissions “before” 2030 — a target that is essentially the same as the one it issued six years ago. The country’s presence at the Glasgow conference itself has been muted. While China’s top negotiator Xie Zhenhua will be in Glasgow throughout the two-week conference, several diplomats said privately they don’t anticipate major new announcements from the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.
At his news conference, when Mr. Biden was asked about China, he was sharp in his critique.
“I think it’s been a big mistake for China” not to show up at the conference, he said. “They’ve lost their ability to influence people around the world.”
Mr. Biden had similarly harsh words for Mr. Putin. “His tundra is burning,” Mr. Biden said. “Literally, his tundra is burning. He has serious climate problems. And he has been mum on his willingness to do anything.”
The criticisms of China from U.S. officials — including Mr. Biden’s national security adviser’s comment that the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter had “an obligation to step up” — drew a lengthy rebuke from China’s foreign ministry and some Chinese media outlets on Tuesday.
Image
Fighting forest fire in Siberia, Russia, in July.
Fighting forest fire in Siberia, Russia, in July.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
“China sticks to its word, and its actions bear fruit,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the ministry, told reporters in Beijing.
Mr. Wang criticized the United States for having “constantly flipped and flopped and gone backward” on climate change, and said it should do more to support the poorer countries that have been worst hit by the consequences of global warming.
The Global Times, a pugnaciously nationalist Chinese newspaper, went further, warning that the Biden administration’s climate change promises were likely to come to nothing if Republicans regain control of Congress in midterm elections.
“If he is not qualified to lead his own country, how are he and his administration going to ‘lead’ in global climate change action?” the paper said in an editorial.
Mr. Biden said in his news conference that he expected to lead his $1.85 trillion climate change and social safety net bill climate bill through Congress and into law. He said he felt certain a key holdout, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, would ultimately vote for the bill.
“I believe that Joe will be there,” Mr. Biden said. “I think we’ll get this done”
He also said he had received thanks from other leaders for bringing the United States back to negotiations after disengagement under former President Donald J. Trump, echoing comments he made at the end of a Group of 20 meeting in Rome on Sunday.
“We showed up,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday, shortly before returning to Washington. “And by showing up, we’ve had a profound impact.”
Reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta and Brad Plumer in Glasgow, Christopher Buckley in Sydney, Australia, and Ivan Penn in Los Angeles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/world/europe/climate-summit-methane-forests.html
Over 100 global leaders pledge to end deforestation by 2030
November 2, 2021
8:23 AM CDT
Last Updated a minute ago
REUTERS
By Jake Spring and Simon Jessop
Summary
* Some $19 billion pledged to protect and restore forests
* Forests absorb nearly a third of CO2 emissions - WRI
* Activists says indigenous communities are forests best guardians
GLASGOW, Nov 2 (Reuters) - More than 100 global leaders have pledged to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by the end of the decade, underpinned by $19 billion in public and private funds to invest in protecting and restoring forests.
The promise, made in a joint statement issued late on Monday at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, was backed by the leaders of countries including Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which collectively account for 85% of the world's forests.
The Glasgow Leaders' Declaration on Forest and Land Use will cover forests totaling more than 13 million square miles, according to a statement released by the UK prime minister's office on behalf of the leaders.
"We will have a chance to end humanity's long history as nature's conqueror, and instead become its custodian," said British leader Boris Johnson, calling it an unprecedented agreement.
U.S President Joe Biden said a new U.S. plan would "help the world deliver on our shared goal of halting natural forest loss" and restoring at least an additional 200 million hectares of forest and other ecosystems by 2030.
"We're going to work to ensure markets recognize the true economic value of natural carbon sinks and motivate governments, landowners and stakeholders to prioritize conservation," Biden said.
A slew of additional government and private initiatives were launched on Tuesday to help reach that goal, including billions in pledges for indigenous guardians of the forest and sustainable agriculture.
CLIMATE BUFFER
Forests absorb roughly 30% of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the nonprofit World Resources Institute. The forests take the emissions out of the atmosphere and prevent them from warming the climate.
Yet this natural climate buffer is rapidly disappearing. The world lost 258,000 sq km (99,600 sq miles) of forest in 2020, according to WRI's deforestation tracking initiative Global Forest Watch. That is an area larger than the United Kingdom.
Monday's agreement vastly expands a similar commitment made by 40 countries as part of the 2014 New York Declaration of Forests and goes further than ever before in laying out the resources to reach that goal.
Non-government organization Global Witness said it was unclear how governments would be held accountable for meeting the new pledge. National laws banning companies and financial institutions from activities that fuel deforestation are needed, it said in a statement.
Under the agreement, 12 countries including Britain have pledged to provide 8.75 billion pounds ($12 billion) of public funding between 2021 and 2025 to help developing countries, including in efforts to restore degraded land and tackle wildfires.
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A logging truck is pictured among burned trees, felled following last year's Rim fire, near Groveland, California July 30, 2014. Long, heavy logging trucks, swaying with the weight of charred California pines, wind through the forest near Yosemite National Park, part of an effort to clean up from last year's devastating wildfires even as new blazes break out this summer.
To match Feature USA-CALIFORNIA/WILDFIRES-TREES REUTERS/Robert Galbraith (UNITED STATES - Tags: ENVIRONMENT DISASTER)
At least a further 5.3 billion pounds would be provided by private sector investors.
Brazil signed on to the agreement despite soaring deforestation of the Amazon rainforest under right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro.
Scientists fear destruction of the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, may push it beyond a point of no return, when it can no longer sustain itself and dries out into savanna. That would release massive amounts of greenhouse gas and be catastrophic for the global climate.
COMMUNITY GUARDIANS
Brazil separately on Monday announced a more aggressive target to end deforestation by 2028.
Gabon, also signed onto the agreement, despite plans to continue logging while using practices to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Five countries, including the Britain and United States, and a group of global charities on Tuesday also pledged to provide $1.7 billion in financing to support indigenous people's conservation of forests and to strengthen their land rights.
Environmentalists say that indigenous communities are the best protectors of the forest, often against violent encroachment of loggers and land grabbers.
More than 30 financial institutions with more than $8.7 trillion in assets under management also said they would make "best efforts" to eliminate deforestation related to cattle, palm oil, soy and pulp production by 2025.
COP26 aims to keep alive a target of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Scientists say forests and so-called nature-based solutions will be vital to reaching that goal.
Woodlands have removed about 760 million tonnes of carbon every year since 2011, offsetting about 8% of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement, according to the Biomass Carbon Monitor project backed by data analytics firm Kayrros and French research institutions.
"Our biosphere is really helping bail us out for the time being, but there is no guarantee those processes will continue," said Oliver Phillips, an ecologist at the United Kingdom’s University of Leeds.
($1 = 0.7312 pound)
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/over-100-global-leaders-pledge-end-deforestation-by-2030-2021-11-01/
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Over 100 countries vow to end deforestation at climate talks
AP NEWS
By FRANK JORDANS and JILL LAWLESS
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-business-united-nations-scotland-a96c50c03653ea95139f4cef3b621c70
Earth gets hotter, deadlier during decades of climate talks
1 of 14
FILE - In this Aug. 17, 2021, file photo, embers light up hillsides as the Dixie Fire burns near Milford in Lassen County, Calif. World leaders have been trying to do something about climate change for 29 years but in that time Earth has gotten much hotter and more dangerous. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)
By SETH BORENSTEIN
October 30, 2021
World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet.
Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.
When more than 100 world leaders descended on Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for an Earth Summit to discuss global warming and other environmental issues, there was “a huge feeling of well-being, of being able to do something. There was hope really,” said Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, one of the representatives for Native Americans at the summit.
Now, the 91-year-old activist said, that hope has been smothered: “The ice is melting. ... Everything is bad. ... Thirty years of degradation.”
Onondaga Nation Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, center, actor and activist Mark Ruffalo, far right, and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, center right, join participants during the People's Climate March in New York, Sept. 21, 2014. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)
Data analyzed by The Associated Press from government figures and scientific reports shows “how much we did lose Earth,” said former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly, who headed the American delegation three decades ago.
That Earth Summit set up the process of international climate negotiations that culminated in the 2015 Paris accord and resumes Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, where leaders will try to ramp up efforts to cut carbon pollution.
Back in 1992, it was clear climate change was a problem “with major implications for lives and livelihoods in the future,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the AP this month. “That future is here and we are out of time.”
World leaders have hammered out two agreements to curb climate change. In Kyoto in 1997, a protocol set carbon pollution cuts for developed countries but not poorer nations. That did not go into effect until 2005 because of ratification requirements. In 2015, the Paris agreement made every nation set its own emission goals.
Full Coverage: Climate
https://apnews.com/hub/climate
In both cases, the United States, a top-polluting country, helped negotiate the deals but later pulled out of the process when a Republican president took office. The U.S. has since rejoined the Paris agreement.
The yearly global temperature has increased almost 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) since 1992, based on multi-year averaging, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth has warmed more in the last 29 years than in the previous 110. Since 1992, the world has broken the annual global high temperature record eight times.
In both cases, the United States, a top-polluting country, helped negotiate the deals but later pulled out of the process when a Republican president took office. The U.S. has since rejoined the Paris agreement.
The yearly global temperature has increased almost 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) since 1992, based on multi-year averaging, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth has warmed more in the last 29 years than in the previous 110. Since 1992, the world has broken the annual global high temperature record eight times.
A chunk of ice floats past the Portage Glacier near Girdwood, Alaska. Evan though the glacier is retreating, it's still a half mile wide and four miles long on June 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)
MUCH MORE...
https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-technology-environment-europe-98e55f2c64aa6d3dc76a5fc64f8d4ba2
Exactly 12, listen to the dinosaur - don't choose extinction:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-59101218
Talk about not living in ur body or on this planet
La Nina Arrives, Threatening to Stoke Droughts and Roil Markets
California and Brazil may get drier, while the Atlantic hurricane season could see more late-season storms as a result.
By Brian K Sullivan
October 14, 2021, 8:00 AM CDT
Dry land surrounds farmlands along the Pardo River during a drought in Caconde, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, on Aug. 24.
Photographer: Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg
A weather-roiling La Nina appears to have emerged across the equatorial Pacific, setting the stage for worsening droughts in California and South America, frigid winters in parts of the U.S. and Japan and greater risks for the world’s already strained energy and food supplies.
The phenomenon—which begins when the atmosphere reacts to a cooler patch of water over the Pacific Ocean—will likely last through at least February, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said Thursday. There is a 57% chance it be a moderate event, like the one that started last year, the center said. While scientists may need months to confirm whether La Nina has definitely returned, all the signs are indicating it’s here.
“Everything you want to see in having a La Nina we are seeing,” Michelle L’Heureux, a forecaster at the center, said in an interview. “We are pretty confident La Nina is here.”
Signs have been emerging for months that the pattern was likely forming, marking the world’s second La Nina in a row. La Nina—like its counterpart, El Nino—usually peaks in the Northern Hemisphere’s winter, but its effects can trigger widespread consequences across the globe. Its onset this season could have a powerful impact on agriculture markets relying on South American crops, which could face dryer conditions, as well as palm oil across Indonesia, where there may be increased flooding. Cold and storms tend to favor the U.S.’s Pacific Northwest and northern Plains when La Nina emerges, squeezing regional energy markets.
Due to La Nina, California may see little relief from its ongoing drought, making its wildfire season even worse. The most populous U.S. state usually receives the bulk of its annual water from rain and snow spread between November and April, a pattern La Nina threatens to disrupt by shifting storm tracks north. La Nina will likely spell bad news for farmers in southern Brazil and Argentina as well, where the phenomenon can bring drought, hitting already ravaged production of corn, coffee, and soybeans.
Additionally, the Atlantic hurricane season, which has already produced 20 named storms, could see more ahead because of La Nina. That’s because it tends to disrupt the wind shear that normally rips fall storms apart before they can get too strong. While few late-season storms threaten oil and natural gas production and processing in the Gulf of Mexico, expensive real estate along the U.S. East Coast will be vulnerable.
Related: U.S. Consumers Are Set to Pay Far More for Energy This Winter
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-13/u-s-consumers-will-pay-more-for-energy-this-winter-eia-says
La Nina’s impact on the U.S. Northeast could be trickier to diagnose. Sometimes, a La Nina pattern pulls storms inland, leaving more snow and rain to fall across the Great Lakes and the Ohio and Tennessee River valleys, bypassing the large cities of the East Coast, L’Heureux said. The emergence of a La Nina pattern often brings chilly weather to the northern parts of the U.S. but milder climates in the south. Last year’s winter was the world’s eighth warmest in 142 years of record keeping, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information.
Forecasters are confident La Nina will persist through the winter because the temperatures deep within the ocean are cooler than normal. By early spring, La Nina will likely fade and the Pacific will return to neutral or near normal state.
Likely, of course, is the key word here. While forecasters are all-but certain La Nina has formed, it’s hard to predict long-term temperatures and precipitation rates, since other weather patterns can interfere with La Nina.
“Climate outlooks have probabilities associated with them because they are never guaranteed,” L’Heureux said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-14/la-nina-2021-arrives-impacting-california-drought-fires-u-s-winter-weather
‘They screwed up our lake’: tar sands pipeline is sucking water from Minnesota watersheds
The Anishinaabe people are rallying to save their lakes and their traditional wild rice harvests
Along the eastern boundary of the White Earth Indian Reservation in north-western Minnesota, Indigenous Anishinaabe wild rice harvesters Jerry and Jim Libby set down a row of wooden pallets into the mud just beyond the dock of Upper Wild Rice Lake. It was a clear day, and tight, lush clumps of green rice heads were visible across the lake’s horizon.
In a typical year, the entrance to this – one of a long necklace of wild rice lakes in northern Minnesota to which the region’s Indigenous people flock every year in the late summer – would be covered in at least two feet of water. But now it is composed of suspended sediment as solid as chocolate pudding, through which the Libbys need to create a makeshift ramp simply to carry their canoe out to the waterline.
Minnesota is weathering an historic drought, but there is another problem beyond the weather: Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline has taken a substantial toll on watersheds in the region, including through a permit to pump five billion gallons of water for construction. In the case of Upper Wild Rice Lake, a road construction contractor named Knife River Construction stuck a pump directly in the lake this past June, sucking out an unknown quantity of water, which locals suspect was related to the use of heavy trucks for the pipeline.
“As far as I’m concerned, Enbridge screwed up our lake, and they’re taking money directly away from our families,” Jerry Libby says. “It makes us feel anguished – this is our staple food, you know.”
The Indigenous-led struggle against Line 3, which seeks to move 930,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen daily from Alberta to a shipping and refinery hub in Superior, Wisconsin, has been the biggest environmental and Indigenous land protection campaign in the US this summer. More than 900 people have been arrested opposing the pipeline, including nearly 70 who were kettled in late August during protests outside Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s residence in Minneapolis.
Branded as a “replacement” project, the new pipeline would double the old Line 3’s capacity to carry tar sands bitumen. Enbridge, a Canada-based energy company, has announced it will begin sending oil through the pipeline next month.
The processing and combustion of bitumen for the pipeline would release greenhouse gases equivalent to 50 coal plants, according to analysis by the nonprofit Oil Change International, thereby significantly contributing to the global climate crisis. But one of the pipeline’s most immediate impacts is on wild rice harvesters such as the Libbys, for whom the annual harvesting season began in late August and runs through much of September.
Wild rice – known to many Anishinaabe people as “manoomin,” or “the food that grows on water” – is a dense, nutritional grain that grows naturally in the abundant lakes and rivers in Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts of Canada. Thousands of Anishinaabe people continue to harvest it with the same traditional methods used for generations, by propelling a canoe or small boat through the rice beds with a long pole.
Indigenous people of the region believe they have a sacred covenant to protect manoomin and numerous other nonhuman beings, without which they would cease to exist as distinct peoples, notes longtime Anishinaabe rice harvester Bob Shimek. “During any kind of ceremony we do here, wild rice is involved,” Shimek says. “It’s kind of like the Anishinaabe soul food.”
Line 3 runs across more than 200 bodies of water, including the headwaters of the Mississippi River and some of the region’s most important wild rice waters, streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. The state Department of Natural Resources permitted Enbridge to draw nearly five billion gallons from these water bodies absent public notice or consultation with the White Earth Indian Reservation.
Christy Dolph, a University of Minnesota research scientist focused on the state’s water resources, notes that the pipeline’s impacts on water and the species that depend on it are numerous. In the course of excavating trenches to lay pipe, Enbridge pumps out any groundwater that still seeps into the trench, inevitably leading water to evaporate.
“These activities have a major impact, especially because these wetlands are already under severe stress from the drought,” she says.
Opponents also fear leaks and spills from the tar sands pipeline, particularly since the thick substance is nearly impossible to clean up.
As with other wetland plant species, wild rice is highly sensitive to fluctuations in water levels, which damage its ability both to grow and reseed. For rice harvesters, low water levels mean they are unable to paddle their canoes out to their usual rice grounds, depriving them of a major source of physical and spiritual sustenance, as well as a significant source of income.
During a typical year, the Libby brothers say, they make up to $9,000 from rice harvesting, which they use for basic necessities like home repairs, school supplies for their grandchildren and vehicle maintenance. But since this year’s harvesting season began in late August, many harvesters have had to resort to unorthodox methods such as trekking through the muddy, dried-out lakes in snow shoes with burlap sacks slung around their shoulders, a technique that yields one-third to one-fourth the amount they could harvest with canoes.
Enbridge disputes the notion that they bear any responsibility for the dry conditions in rice beds near the pipeline route or that the pipeline has a detrimental impact on watersheds. “Line 3’s permit conditions protect the environment during construction, and specifically wild rice,” Enbridge spokersperson Juli Kelner wrote via email. “Enbridge pipelines have coexisted with Minnesota’s most sacred and productive wild rice stands for seven decades.”
In response to a request for comment, a Department of Natural Resources spokesperson wrote that “Minnesota DNR has worked consistently to minimize the impacts of the Line 3 replacement project on wild rice and other Minnesota resources. These efforts date back to our original comments to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) regarding project routing, where we strongly advocated for route alternatives that would minimize crossings in or near wild rice waters.”
The effects of Line 3 construction on wild rice are at the center of a first of its kind lawsuit brought by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in which wild rice is itself the plaintiff. Under a series of treaties that Chippewa Anishinaabe people signed with the US government during the mid-19th century, the lawsuit asserts, wild rice “possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.” The suit seeks an injunction against the Department of Natural Resources to void Enbridge’s water permit, though the case may not be decided until after construction is completed.
Beyond the direct effects of the Line 3 pipeline, wild rice faces numerous other threats – including from the climate crisis. According to a 2018 report by the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), an intertribal agency that seeks to protect Anishinaabe treaty rights, climate change will wreak devastation on virtually all the plant and animal species on which they rely. Wild rice is the most endangered of these species because of its sensitivity to flooding, drought, and disease outbreaks, the report says.
Stopping Line 3 is imperative to fighting the climate crisis, opponents note, because tar sands are one of the most intensive fossil fuels in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and because the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure locks in emissions for decades to come. For the past several months, activists have called on the Biden administration to stop the pipeline by directing the Army Corps of Engineers to revoke the permit it granted the project under the Trump administration.
According to Anishinaabe wild rice harvester Angel Stevens, a member of the anti-pipeline Manoomin Camp, the struggle against Line 3 is still going strong despite the project’s imminent completion. “We’re continuing to do everything we can to stop this pipeline,” she says.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/19/tar-sands-pipeline-minnesota-lakes?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
With about 96 percent of old-growth redwoods in California already plundered, it's illegal to touch one today.
https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The U.S. just had its hottest summer on record
This summer beat the previous record set by the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, when huge portions of the West and Great Plains were parched by severe drought.
Sept. 9, 2021, 2:05 PM CDT / Updated Sept. 9, 2021, 3:46 PM CDT
By Denise Chow
The United States had its hottest summer on record this year, narrowly edging out the previous milestone that was set 85 years ago during the Dust Bowl.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that the average temperature this summer for the contiguous U.S. was 74 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2.6 degrees warmer than the long-term average. The heat record caps off a season full of extremes, with parts of the country experiencing persistent drought, wildfires, record-breaking heat waves, .. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/heat-wave-west-coast-hints-climate-change-scientists-say-rcna1297 .. hurricanes and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change.
This summer beat the previous record set in 1936 by a hair, coming in at less than 0.01 degrees warmer than during the Dust Bowl year, when huge portions of the West and Great Plains were parched by severe drought.
Though this year's summer was technically hotter than 1936, the very small gap puts the two years "neck and neck," in what NOAA called a "virtual tie."
NOAA's report spans "meteorological summer," .. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202108 .. which covers June, July and August. During that time, 18.4 percent of the country experienced record-high temperatures, including five states — California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Utah — that had their warmest summers in recorded history, according to the agency.
"Sixteen additional states had a top-five warmest summer on record. No state ranked below average for the summer season," NOAA officials wrote in the climate report.
In June, the Pacific Northwest suffered through a heat wave .. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/heat-wave-west-coast-hints-climate-change-scientists-say-rcna1297 .. that shattered all-time temperature records in Seattle and Portland, Oregon. More than 35 cities in the western U.S. tied or set heat records during the multiday heat wave, where temperatures soared to up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in some places.
Global warming is making heat waves and other extreme weather events both more likely and more severe, and climate scientists have said conditions this summer offer a glimpse of what could become more common in the future.
NOAA's report highlighted other extreme events that plagued the country in August, including devastating floods from Tropical Storm Fred, which hit western North Carolina; Tropical Storm Henri, which soaked parts of the Northeast; and flash flooding that killed at least 22 people in Tennessee.
Hurricane Ida, which battered Louisiana and left a trail of destruction from the Gulf Coast into the Northeast, also drenched huge swaths of the country from late August into September.
"With 35 fatalities accounted for during August, it was the deadliest month for flooding across the U.S. since Hurricane Harvey in 2017," NOAA officials wrote in the report.
Dry conditions in the Western U.S. have also fueled a catastrophic wildfire season. In California, the Dixie Fire became the second largest in the state's history, .. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dixie-fire-grows-second-largest-california-history-n1276305
while the Caldor Fire forced thousands to flee from South Lake Tahoe in late August...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/thousands-forced-flee-lake-tahoe-california-s-caldor-fire-rages-n1278076
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/us-just-hottest-summer-record-rcna1957
Birds are veterans of mass extinction, but humans haven't had practice
Birds have made it through five.
By Jim Williams Special to the Star Tribune
August 24, 2021 — 10:55am
If this climate business is indeed the beginning of the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, as some people say, don't worry about birds. Better to worry about us humans, you and me.
There have been five previous mass extinctions. In total, they wiped away 99% of all species that ever existed. But not birds. (Humans weren't here yet.)
Birds survived all five in one form or another, eventually becoming the birds we see today.
The most recent extinction, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene event, happened 65 million years ago.
The cause of that was either the infamous asteroid, 6.2 miles in diameter, that whistled down onto the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, or massive flows of lava in Siberia. The latter theory has fewer proponents.
Both created significant long-term changes to land, air and water.
Many people think we're in a new mass extinction, the sixth, said Robert Zink in an e-mail interview. Zink, presently a faculty member at the University of Nebraska, previously taught ornithology at the University of Minnesota.
"People believe it's being caused by us changing the environment faster than plants and animals can adapt, " he said, adding parenthetically that viruses seem to be doing just fine.
"Whether our planet is changing faster than it ever has is tough to know," he told me.
"Twenty-one thousand years ago there was a mile-thick glacier where your house stands. The glacier isn't there anymore, so global climate change isn't new, but it might be a lot faster now because of us,'?" he said.
Modern bird species, like those you see in your yard, stem from that 1% of life that survived all five events. Eventually evolution produced new life forms — dinosaurs, then feathered dinosaurs which led to the 10,000-plus bird species we currently enjoy.
"There is debate about whether most modern birds evolved after the cataclysm or if there were lots of bird species present before the asteroid hit, many of them surviving," Zink said.
We do know that opportunity certainly existed on the outcome side of extinction number five.
It eliminated 80% of the life that had survived or evolved to that point, so opportunities for survivors were massive. Birds would have adapted to fill environmental gaps.
I asked Zink if any extant bird species could be traced back that far.
No one knows, he told me. "It's complicated," he said.
Usually, we expect species with small ranges to go extinct before species with larger ranges, he said. Or, we find that ecological specialists, narrow in food or habitat preferences, are perhaps more vulnerable.
We create vulnerability every time we modify a natural landscape, the landscape to which a bird belongs. We change habitat or eliminate it, leaving birds to do the best they can.
How unreal that we humans on our wristwatch time scale could be agents of change previously measured in geologic terms.
Worry about birds? Birds have survived the previous extinctions. They will survive a sixth if that's what they must do. For birds, it's not their first rodeo. Some species will disappear. Evolution will take advantage.
For us? Well, extinction number six would be our first go-round. Would we do as well as birds? Let's hope we never find out.
Illustration by Phillip Krzeminski via AP
The world's oldest modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis, nicknamed the Wonderchicken, in its original environment. The animal lived just before the asteroid impact that's blamed for killing off many species, most notably the giant dinosaurs.
https://www.startribune.com/humans-haven-t-had-practice-but-birds-are-veterans-of-mass-extinction/600090548/
There you go, stop the pleasure brain drugs (dopamine.. dope is for dopes! ;) u get from consumerism and get better ones..
System change, economy like that of Ecuador!, hit a good sustainable balance..
https://www.jbmackinnon.com/
.. per capita consumption growing faster than pop. growth..
.. more durable goods..
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whatonearth/to-help-fight-climate-change-give-your-shopping-habits-a-makeover-advocates-say-1.6138573
.. green tech, working hours, spread wealth, slow economic growth without economic collapse..
.. stop blaming the consumer, systemic change - also produces better humans!..
Good way to kill appetite for one of my and Spain's favorite dishes
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58311105
".. human activity,"
"Just trying to fit in to this scene.."
Forecasters Warn That Henri Could Be The Worst Storm To Hit The Northeast in 30 Years
August 22, 20217:59 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/22/1030099545/henri-tropical-storm-hurricane-long-island-new-england
Tropical Storm Henri charges toward southern New England
By Jason Samenow and Matthew Cappucci
Today at 11:06 a.m. EDT
Henri weakened slightly from a hurricane to a strong tropical storm Sunday morning, but is expected to be a force as it crosses the coast between eastern Long Island and southeast Massachusetts Sunday by around midday.
According to the National Hurricane Center, the storm is forecast to produce “dangerous” storm surge inundation in coastal areas, “considerable” inland flooding due to heavy rain and damaging winds.
Here’s what to know
Inland flooding could pose the most serious threat, with widespread rainfall of 3 to 6 inches north of Philadelphia and south and west of Hartford, and isolated amounts to 10 inches. Significant flooding has already affected New York City and parts of New Jersey.
The surge, or storm-driven rise in water above normally dry land at the coast, could reach 3 to 5 feet, from Long Island Sound to Nantucket Sound, flooding homes and businesses.
Near and east of where the storm makes landfall, winds could gust to at least 60 mph, downing trees and utility lines and triggering power outages.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/22/hurricane-henri-live-updates/
Central Tennessee inundated with rain, ‘catastrophic’ flooding
Parts of the region saw as much as 18 inches of rain fall in 48 hours.
By Laura Reiley
Yesterday at 5:16 p.m. EDT
Central Tennessee was inundated with rain Saturday, leaving some towns struggling with severe flooding.
“The town of Waverly [about 60 miles west of Nashville] is pretty much underwater,” said Krissy Hurley, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Nashville. “There are no deaths that we have been made aware of, but there are people on their roofs waiting to be rescued and many people trapped in their vehicles.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/21/tennessee-catastrophic-flooding/
Harrowing North Carolina floods left farm animals stranded, lifted houses off their foundations
Four died and four remain missing after a tropical storm brought torrential rain to the area
By Caroline Anders
Yesterday at 4:23 p.m. EDT
Cynthia Cordle’s daughter burst into the house.
“Y’all better come on,” she said. “We’ve got animals drowning.”
It had been raining for days when Tropical Storm Fred swept through western North Carolina this week, killing at least four people, with four others unaccounted for. The flooding ravaged this swath of Appalachia, destroying roads and bridges, washing cars away and displacing an estimated 500 families.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/21/north-carolina-floods-survivors-appalachia/
Biggest US reservoir declares historic shortage, forcing water cuts across west
Officials issue first-ever declaration of tier 1 shortage at Lake Mead as it falls to lowest level since its creation
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/16/lake-mead-drought-reservoir-water-level-cuts?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
Officials have declared a dire water shortage at Lake Mead, the US’s largest reservoir, triggering major water cuts in Arizona and other western states. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first-ever declaration of a “tier 1” shortage represents an acknowledgment that after a 20-year drought, the reservoir that impounds the Colorado River at the Hoover Dam has receded to its lowest levels since it was created in the 1930s.
Already, the lake is at about 35% capacity – the white “bathtub ring” that lines its perimeter indicates where the water level once was. The lake’s level is projected to fall even lower by the end of the year, prompting cutbacks in January 2022, the Bureau of Reclamation announced Monday.
Arizona will be hardest hit, losing nearly a fifth of the water it receives from the Colorado River. In Pinal county, farmers and ranchers will see the amount of water they get from the river drop by half next year, and disappear altogether by 2023, when the federal government is projected to enact even more severe cuts. Farmers, who have already had to make some land fallow, will probably have to continue to do so in the coming years and rely increasingly on groundwater.
“What we hoped we would never see is here,” said Camille Calimlim Touton, a deputy commissioner at the Bureau of Reclamation. “At the heart of today’s announcement is also an acknowledgment of the hardship the drought has brought.”
Hoover Dam reservoir sinks to record low, in sign of extreme Western U.S. drought<br>Low water levels due to drought are seen as visitors take photos in the Hoover Dam reservoir of Lake Mead near Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. June 9, 2021. Picture taken June 9, 2021. REUTERS/Bridget Bennett
Lake Mead: largest US reservoir falls to historic low amid devastating drought
Read more
Household water supplies will remain unaffected, though families are likely to see their water prices tick up.
Nevada will lose 7% of the water it gets from the Colorado River, though residents are unlikely to feel a real change because the state has alternative water sources and has begun to use its supplies more efficiently. Mexico will see its supply reduced by 5%, and California will be unaffected.
“This is a very big deal, because there’s never been a shortage like this over the almost 100-year history,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “The immediate impacts of this will not probably be felt by most people. But it’s a big, giant red flag telling a region that is dependent on Colorado River water that we need to adjust to a drier future.”
Cutbacks and conservation efforts – though crucial – are unlikely to reverse the reservoir’s decline in the near future. When it’s full, Lake Mead’s elevation sits at about 1,221ft above sea level. But by next year, the lake’s level is expected to drop to 1,065ft, below the 1,075ft cutoff that triggers first-tier water reductions. By 2023, federal officials and water experts expect a tier 2 shortage. And when the lake’s level dips to 1,025ft, a tier 3 declaration will trigger supply cuts to cities and tribal lands.
Lake Mead, which was formed after the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, has been declining faster than many experts predicted, amid a devastating drought and intense heatwaves that have resulted in less water trickling down from the Rocky Mountains into the Colorado River. The dam, which provides power to about 1.3m people in Nevada, Arizona and California, has seen its efficiency drop by 25%, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
The Colorado River system overall is now at half its capacity, according to the US interior department. The past 16 years have been the driest period the basin has seen in 1,200 years, the agency reported. Although the west has endured periods of extended drought, the current conditions have been exacerbated by the climate crisis, which is fueling longer and more severe dry spells, scientists have made clear.
Federal officials recognize “the very real possibility that the hydrology that we planned for years ago may not be the worst the basin may see in the future”, Touton said. Additional actions, cutbacks and conservation efforts “will likely be necessary in the very near future”, she explained.
The water level in Lake Powell, the river’s second-largest reservoir, has also been dropping precipitously, threatening to disrupt the roughly 5bn kilowatt hours of electricity generated each year at the Glen Canyon Dam. It is currently at 32% of full capacity.
“I think in the next five years, what we need to do is have a reckoning over our water use,” Porter said. “We have to rethink how we use water in the western US.”
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http://earthquake.usgs.gov/
Science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_theory
Kyoto Protocol - Core Issues
http://www.ipsnews.net/new_focus/kyoto/index.asp
Pure Energy Systems
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Latest
USGS Weekly Volcanic Activity Report
http://www.volcano.si.edu/reports/usgs/index.cfm?content=worldmap
Global Warming - Early Warning Signs
http://www.climatehotmap.org/index.html
Extreme Instability - Storm Chasers
http://www.extremeinstability.com/index.htm
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC
http://www.ipcc.ch/
Inside Climate News
https://insideclimatenews.org/
Environmental Defense
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/home.cfm
The Envirolink Network
http://www.envirolink.org/
The methodic demise of natural earth, by Dr. Michael Castle.
http://www.chemtrails.ch/dokumentationen/THE-METHODIC-DEMISE.htm
Ips News - Environment
http://ipsnews.net/environment.asp
Cool Earth
http://www.coolearth.org/
Save The High Seas
http://www.savethehighseas.org/
Climate Connections
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9657621
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/climateconnections/?fs=www7.nationalgeographic.com
National Snow and Ice Data Center
http://nsidc.org/index.html http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html
National Geographic - Environment
http://green.nationalgeographic.com/environment/index.html
American Rivers
http://www.americanrivers.org/
CNN World
http://www.cnn.com/world
Green Energy - San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/environment-science/
Conservation News and Environmental Science News
http://news.mongabay.com/
Guardian / Environment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment
INside Climate News
http://insideclimatenews.org/
The Ecologist
http://www.theecologist.org/
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
https://www.rt.com/trends/fukushima-nuclear-disaster/
Global Climate Change Vital Signs Of The Planet
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
Climate News from Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/climate
Climate Change news and analysis from The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/subject/climate-change/
Climate Central
http://www.climatecentral.org/
The Guardian / Environment
https://www.theguardian.com/us/environment
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/series/this-land-is-your-land
Mother Jones Environment
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/
https://twitter.com/motherjones
Global Land Program
https://glp.earth/
Eco Internet News
http://ecointernet.org/
Global Forest Watch
http://www.globalforestwatch.org/
Environmental Defense Fund
https://www.edf.org/
https://twitter.com/EnvDefenseFund
Natural Resources Defense Council
https://www.nrdc.org/
https://twitter.com/NRDC
National Wildlife Federation
http://www.nwf.org/
https://twitter.com/NWF
Green Peace
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/getinvolved/
https://twitter.com/Greenpeace
Sea Shephard Conservation Society
http://www.seashepherd.org/
https://twitter.com/SeaShepherdSSCS
https://twitter.com/seashepherd
https://twitter.com/CaptPaulWatson
Global Giving
https://www.globalgiving.org/ ----- #msg-134648450
Charity Navigator
https://www.charitynavigator.org/
Disaster Assistance
https://www.disasterassistance.gov/
Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Waste Dump
http://www.stopthegreatlakesnucleardump.com/
http://www.sosgreatlakes.org/news-1/2016/6/21/its-time-to-speak-up-let-your-voice-be-heard
http://www.sosgreatlakes.org/
https://twitter.com/sosgreatlakes
https://twitter.com/stopthenukedump
https://www.facebook.com/Stop-The-Great-Lakes-Nuclear-Dump-488484027858649/
Earth Focus
https://www.linktv.org/shows/earth-focus
Environment Integrity
http://www.environmentalintegrity.org/
Alternet Environment
http://www.alternet.org/environment
Seeker Earth / Climate
https://www.seeker.com/earth/climate
Ecowatch
https://www.ecowatch.com/
NY Times - Climate & Environment
https://www.nytimes.com/section/climate?action=click&contentCollection=Climate®ion=TopBar&module=HomePage-Title&pgtype=Multimedia
UCS - Uniion of Concerned Scientists
http://www.ucsusa.org/?_ga=2.259145421.693311558.1506879949-1069869955.1506879949#.WdEp5rpFzmI
Harvard - School of Public Health
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/
The Climate Report
https://www.sapiens.org/columns/the-climate-report/
Climate Desk
http://www.climatedesk.org/
https://twitter.com/ClimateDesk
https://www.facebook.com/theclimatedesk/
BBC Science and Environment
http://www.bbc.com/news/science_and_environment
British Antarctic Survey
https://www.bas.ac.uk/
Scientific Committee on Antarctic research
https://www.scar.org/
Climate Research AWI
https://www.awi.de/en.html
Global Carbon Project
http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/
Center for International Climate Research
https://www.cicero.uio.no/en
River of Souls
https://riveroflostsouls.com/
The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/us/environment
Zero Hour
http://thisiszerohour.org/
SECURING THE LEGAL RIGHT TO A SAFE CLIMATE
https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/
Mother Earth Project™A Global Environment-Saving Initiative Creating and Activating Sustainable Communities
https://motherearthproject.org/
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