Month: July 2018

From drinking water to farms, drought’s effect creeping across Missouri

This article discusses how climate change is bringing drought to Missouri.

As a light rain fell on Missouri’s capital city Thursday, a task force assembled to assess the state’s drought met for the first time.

“It’s a little ironic that we convened this meeting in the middle of a rainstorm. But don’t let it deceive you,” Missouri Department of Natural Resources Director Carol Comer told more than three dozen in attendance.

Fifty-two of Missouri’s 114 counties are now affected by the lingering lack of precipitation, up from 47 last week when Gov. Mike Parson activated the panel to monitor the drought. Eleven counties have slipped into a more extreme category of drought since July 19.

In all, nearly 2.6 million people live in drought-affected areas.

The most updated drought map, released Thursday, places St. Charles County and a swath of southwestern St. Louis County within the abnormally dry category.

Climate change is here, and the world is burning

This opinion piece focuses on how climate change is causing significant harm to our planet.

Here are some places that have experienced unprecedented wildfires in the last half-decade or so: Western Canada including, currently, the Okanagan. Ontario, Quebec and, almost continuously, the Western United States. Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, China and Russia.

European countries that have been hit include Portugal, France, Italy and, right now, Greece, where dozens have died and heat levels have been high enough to melt cars. Particularly worrying at the moment are wildfires in Sweden, which has been dealing with temperatures of more than 30 C above the Arctic Circle.

These are the places that Lori Daniels, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, listed off the top of her head. She’s one of three Canadian forest fire experts I got in touch with this week, to discuss whether my sense that the whole world was on fire was paranoia or reality.

Lake Tahoe is warming because of climate change

This article discusses how the pristine color of Lake Tahoe is being damaged by climate change.

Climate change is gradually warming Lake Tahoe, clouding its clarity and threatening its fabled “blueness,” scientists at UC Davis warned Thursday.

In its annual “State of the Lake” report, the university’s Tahoe Environmental Research Center said surface water temperatures in July 2017 spiked to an average 68.4 degrees. That was the highest since researchers began taking Tahoe’s temperature in 1968, and 6 degrees higher than the year before.

Geoffrey Schladow, director of the Tahoe center, said the 2017 temperature readings may have been a fluke. But there’s little doubt the lake’s waters are getting heated by global warming, he said.

This Summer’s Heat Wave Has Fueled Natural Disasters Around the World.

This article discusses how climate change is causing disasters across the planet.

This has been a summer of soaring temperatures and catastrophic fires. It has been so hot all over the world that even the Arctic is getting scorched: Temperatures in Deadhorse, Alaska, which is along the Arctic Coast, reached 80 degrees Wednesday—the average high for July is 56 degrees. And Europe saw its second-hottest June on record.

In fact, June had higher than normal temperatures across the globe. The average temperature worldwide was the fifth-hottest on record for the month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The ten warmest Junes on record have occurred since 2005.

Scientists have no doubts that climate change is driving the searing temperatures. “There’s no question human influence on climate is playing a huge role in this heatwave,” Myles Allen, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, told the Guardian this week.

Breeding Arctic shorebirds thwarted by Greenland’s stubborn spring snow

This article discusses how climate change is affecting birds in Greenland.

When the fog lifted on June 14, Jeroen Reneerkens’ small chartered plane could finally land on the tundra of northeast Greenland. The Dutch avian ecologist, who has a special passion for the small wading birds, especially the ubiquitous sanderlings, quickly realized that something was wrong on the ground.

By mid-June, the region’s shorebirds would normally have been brooding on nests and feeding on recently hatched arthropods—ground-dwelling insects and spiders—but this year’s landscape was still covered by snow

Study: Much of the US electric grid could go the way of the landline phone.

This article discusses the impact that renewable energy is having on the current electric grid.

IF YOU’RE OLD enough to remember landlines, maybe you remember the feedback loop that turned them from must-haves to luxury items. As customers started switching to mobile, the phone companies had to raise rates on the cord keepers to cover the cost of their telephone lines. That only pushed more people to defect, exacerbating the problem—and increasing the cost.

It’s this sort of feedback loop that worries Sonny Garg. He’s the head of energy research for Uptake Technologies and spearheaded the data analytics firm’s new report showing that over the past two decades, the investor-owned utilities that represent nearly half the US grid’s electrical load saw the effective cost of generating one megawatt of electricity rise 74 percent.

Study: Pennsylvanians who live near fracking are more likely to be depressed

This article discusses a study of Pennsylvania residents who live near fracking sites. Stress and depression are higher among those living closest to more and bigger wells.

People who live near unconventional natural gas operations such as fracking are more likely to experience depression, according to a new study.

For the study, which is the first of its kind and published today in Scientific Reports,researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University looked at rates of depression in nearly 5,000 adults living in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale region in 2015.

Study: Mountaintop Mining Is Destroying More Land for Less Coal

This article discusses how more and more environmental damage is occurring to mine less and less coal. Using satellite images, researchers tracked the scars spreading across Appalachia. They found 3 times more land being stripped per ton of coal than in the 1980s.

Strip mining across the mountaintops of Appalachia is scarring as much as three times more land to get a ton of coal than just three decades ago, new research shows.

The data and a series of new maps that track the spread of surface mining across the region suggest that even as the industry has declined, what continues likely has an oversized impact on people and the environment.

If mining companies have to do more blasting and digging for the same amount of coal, that means more dust in the air and more pollution in streams, said Appalachian Voices Programs Director Matt Wasson, who worked on the study with researchers from Duke University, West Virginia University, Google and SkyTruth.

The study, published online in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed journal, also provided what Duke researcher Andrew Pericak described as the first year-by-year mapping showing the spread of mountaintop mining across the region.

The team is making the data publicly available for other researchers, including those looking into the health and environmental effects of mining

Top Interior officials ordered parks to end science policy, emails show

This article discusses the Trump Administration’s attempts to ignore science in dealing with US parks and forests.

As deputy director of the National Park Service, Michael Reynolds played a key role in developing a sweeping new vision for managing national parks. The new policy, enacted in the final weeks of the Obama administration, elevated the role that science played in decision-making and emphasized that parks should take precautionary steps to protect natural and historic treasures.

But eight months later, as the first acting director of the Park Service under President Donald Trump, Reynolds rescinded this policy, known as Director’s Order 100. Newly released documents suggest that top Interior Department officials intervened, ordering Reynolds to rescind it.

A memo addressed to Reynolds states: “Pursuant to direction from (Interior) Secretary (Ryan) Zinke, I hereby instruct you to rescind Director’s Order #100.”

Reynolds, now the superintendent of Yosemite National Park, did not respond to requests for an interview.

The emails were among 170 pages of documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Union of Concerned Scientists, an activist group.

Science Says: Record heat, fires worsened by climate change

This article discusses how climate change is increasing the number of wildfires and heat waves.

So far this month, at least 118 of these all-time heat records have been set or tied across the globe, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The explanations should sound as familiar as the crash of broken records.

“We now have very strong evidence that global warming has already put a thumb on the scales, upping the odds of extremes like severe heat and heavy rainfall,” Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh said. “We find that global warming has increased the odds of record-setting hot events over more than 80 percent of the planet, and has increased the odds of record-setting wet events at around half of the planet.”

Climate change is making the world warmer because of the build-up of heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil and other human activities. And experts say the jet stream — which dictates weather in the Northern Hemisphere — is again behaving strangely.