Month: September 2018

The High Cost of Preserving Vulnerable Beaches – a never-ending commitment

This article discusses “The High Cost of Preserving Vulnerable Beaches – it is a never-ending commitment. In the wake of hurricanes like Florence, the U.S. government pays to dump truckloads of sand onto eroding beaches, in a cycle that is said to harm ecosystems and disproportionately benefit the rich.

As lawmakers consider disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Florence, projects to rebuild North Carolina’s shrunken shorelines are likely to get a healthy chunk of government money.

To their advocates, these so-called beach nourishment initiatives are crucial steps in buffering valuable oceanfront properties from storm damage and boosting local economies that rely on tourism.

But such projects replenish the same vulnerable areas again and again, and disproportionately benefit wealthy owners of seaside lots.

Moreover, pumping millions of cubic yards of sand onto beaches can cause environmental damage, according to decades of studies. It kills wildlife scooped up from the ocean floor and smothers mole crabs and other creatures where sand is dumped, said Robert Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University.

Study: Scientists prove human activity is the top cause of warming Antarctic waters

This article discusses how, for the first time, scientists prove human activity is the top cause of warming Antarctic waters.

t the time, Swart thought of himself as a volunteer helping further “someone else’s science.” He didn’t expect that 13 years later, the data he collected would allow him and a team of researchers to identify human activity as the number one cause of rising water temperatures in the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean.

“It’s kind of nice to see it come full circle,” Swart, now a researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told National Observer in an interview.

Along with other scientists from the department, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, Swart found that changes seen in Southern Ocean temperature are directly tied to ozone depletion and human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to regular temperature variations or responses to natural climate changes, such as volcanic eruptions or changes in the sun.

Their findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience on Monday.

Global Warming Is Destabilizing Mountain Slopes, Creating Landslide Risks

This article discusses how Global Warming Is Destabilizing Mountain Slopes, Creating Landslide Risks. As more permafrost thaws and water seeps deeper into mountains crags, extreme storms can trigger dangerous landslides and rockfalls.

It’s not just the atmosphere and the oceans that are heating up. An ever-denser blanket of greenhouse gases is also sending warmer air and water deeper into the planet’s rocky bones.

In the mountains of Switzerland, scientists have measured startling temperature increases, with jumps of as much as half a degree Celsius in just a decade 20 feet deep into the rocks. On Svalbard, an Arctic island north of Norway, similar warming has been measured more than 100 feet deep in the permafrost.

Tracking these changes is critical to assessing growing threats to people, said Bjørn Samset, research director at the CICERO climate research center in Oslo.

The only logical response is to declare a climate emergency

This article discusses that when we look at the climate crisis rationally, the only logical response is to declare a climate emergency. So why are we not doing so?

People engaged in the climate debate are often bewildered by society’s lack of response. How can we ignore such overwhelming evidence of an existential threat to social and economic stability?

Given human history, we should never have expected anything else. Humans have a consistent tendency that when change is uncomfortable we delay action until a threat becomes a crisis. The scale of the threat or the existence of powerful evidence makes little difference.

There are countless examples – personal health issues, a business’ declining success, or global financial and credit risks. Historically, though, World War Two (WWII ) remains the best analogy.

The evidence of the threat posed by Hitler was overwhelming and the case for action crystal clear. However, many were still deeply resistant to acting. Only when the threat became overwhelming – until it was accepted as an imminent crisis – was Britain triggered into action. When it was, Winston Churchill led the critical shift in thinking, arguing that no matter how uncomfortable, expensive or challenging to the status quo, sometimes you just have to do what is necessary. Not your best, or what you can afford, or what’s “realistic” – but what is necessary. In his case, that was going to war and assuming victory was possible.

Study: Human-Driven Climate Change Is Literally Making Earth ‘Wobble’

This article discusses how Human-Driven Climate Change Is Literally Making Earth ‘Wobble’. As the planet warms, ice loss at the poles—especially in Greenland—is having an effect on polar motion.

Human-driven climate change is intensifying Earth’s natural wobble, according to a new study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

A team led by Surendra Adhikari of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) suggests that humans are exacerbating polar motion—the wobble of Earth along its North-South axis—with activities such as fossil fuel consumption, which releases greenhouse gases that warm the planet and melt glaciers.

Back from the brink: the global effort to save coral from climate change

This article discusses coral reefs – Back from the brink: the global effort to save coral from climate change. Underwater nurseries offer glimmer of hope for endangered ecosystems, encouraging growth of coral fragments on fiberglass structures anchored to the seabed.

As an ocean early warning system, coral reefs have been sounding the alarm for years. They have been bleached white by marine heatwaves and killed off en masse by a combination of factors including pollution, overfishing, acidification and climate change.

But now scientists in Florida, and other tropical locations worldwide, are attempting to stop the rot by creating coral “nurseries” in which young populations can be raised in controlled conditions before being planted on denuded reefs.

 

Study: Climate change is destroying our national parks at an alarming rate

This article discusses the environmental disaster occurring to many US National Parks because of global warming.

By 2100, visitors walking the grounds of California’s Joshua Tree National Park may view exhibits showing what will have been lost — the spiky yucca palms that inspired the park’s name, dwindled to a few rare husks.

Climate change could kill most of the park’s iconic trees, wildfires may transform the towering conifer forests at Yellowstone National Park into scarred grasslands, and once-mighty ice sheets in the north will probably melt and flow into the sea, making Glacier National Park both an obsolete name and a hard lesson about environmental degradation.

A new study published Monday has warned that climate change has adversely and uniquely affected many of the 417 national parks spread across the United States and its territories, according to scientists from the University of California at Berkeley and University of Wisconsin.

Study: When will a warming Earth copy the greenhouse effect of Venus?

This article discusses looking at what happened to Venus as a result of the Greenhouse effect. Modelling finds the precious equilibrium between temperature and radiation breaks down beyond a certain point, spelling big trouble.

Climate models show a warming Earth radiates more heat into space, but when pushed too far, and this release valve shuts down, temperatures skyrocket to potentially Venusian levels.

Anyone familiar with a cooker knows that the hotter it gets the more heat it radiates. So too with the Earth. Remarkably for such a complex system, however, the heat radiating from the planet is in linear relation with the temperature increase of its surface – a mysteriously simple arrangement known to scientists since the 1950s.

Now, climate models published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, calculated by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), have revealed why this linear relation holds – and when it may break down to the detriment of all life.

New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World

 This article discusses a new climate debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World. Researchers are now thinking about the potential for a complete collapse of the earth’s climate, to the point where only a few will survive. They are thinking about how to prepare for it.

The fact that we are actually beginning to discuss this issue means that if we do nothing about climate change, this mass scale extinction we are heading towards, could occur, and include humans.

 At the end of 2016, before Puerto Rico’s power grid collapsed, wildfires reached the Arctic, and a large swath of North Carolina was submerged under floodwaters, Jonathan Gosling published an academic paper asking what might have seemed like a shrill question: How should we prepare for the consequences of planetary climate catastrophe?
Propelling the movement are signs that the problem is worsening at an accelerating rate. In an article this summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 climate scientists from around the world argued that the planet may be much closer than previously realized to locking in what they call a “hothouse” trajectory—warming of 4C or 5C (7F or 9F), “with serious challenges for the viability of human societies.”