Month: February 2019

Great Barrier Reef coral at risk of bleaching from Queensland flood waters

This article discusses how the Great Barrier Reef coral are at risk of bleaching from Queensland flood waters. Marine park authority fear freshwater bleaching after scientists report ‘extensive’ flood plumes and drop in water salinity.

Freshwater bleaching of corals could occur this year as a result of flood waters from Queensland’s overflowing rivers pouring into the Great Barrier Reef, the marine park authority has warned.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority told Senate estimates hearings in Canberra on Monday that there is a chance corals hit by mass bleaching in 2016 or 2017 could be damaged again by one of several impacts from the flooding disaster.

Bruce Elliot, the authority’s acting chief executive, said scientists were out monitoring flood plumes on the reef and it was possible that freshwater bleaching could affect inshore reefs.

Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions

This article discusses how a massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. New findings suggest trees are ‘our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change’, says scientist.

Replenishing the world’s forests on a grand scale would suck enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cancel out a decade of human emissions, according to an ambitious new study.

Scientists have established there is room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees to grow in parks, woods and abandoned land across the planet.

If such a goal were accomplished, ecologist Dr Thomas Crowther said it would outstrip every other method for tackling climate change – from building wind turbines to vegetarian diets.

Study: Climate Change Isn’t Just Frying the Planet—It’s Fraying Our Nerves

This article discusses how Climate Change Isn’t Just Frying the Planet—It’s Fraying Our Nerves.

Forty percent of Americans reported hearing about climate change in the media at least once a month in 2015, and about half said they were worried about the topic that year, making it “a powerful environmental stressor,” according to a 2016 federal report. And that’s not the only way global warming causes psychological problems: A recent report from the American Psychological Association and Washington-based nonprofit ecoAmerica details some of the effects of natural disasters on mental health, including social disruption, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide. Research suggests that heat waves affect our neural regulation, weakening our ability to regulate our emotions, and that people are more aggressive and less empathetic during warm periods. As Stanford University researcher Sanjay Basu put it to me, “We kind of lose our cool.”

Extinction and Species Survival – an island rat and Louisiana oysters

This article discusses the first climate change-caused mammal extinction. The Morrison government has formally recognized the extinction of a tiny island rodent, the Bramble Cay melomys – the first known demise of a mammal because of human-induced climate change.’Our little brown rat is extinct on Bramble Cay, a tiny Torres Strait island near Papua New Guinea.

This article discusses how climate change is hurting Louisiana’s oysters and shrimp.

Look at Past and Future Climate Change in Less Than a Minute

This article discusses a set of videos that show past and future climate change in less than a minute.

Two new videos visualize how drastically global temperatures have changed since 1900 — and how much worse they will get by the end of this century. The data visualizations, created by Antti Lipponen, a research scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, depict 200 years of climate change in each of the world’s 191 countries in less than a minute.

“Rapid global warming really exists, has been global in the past, and has affected all the countries in the world,” Lipponen told Yale Environment 360. “Unfortunately, the future does not look different — temperatures will continue rising rapidly and all countries will be affected by climate change.”

The videos are updates of previous visualizations by Lipponen, now with future temperature projections from the latest climate model scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in which greenhouse gas emissions peak around 2040 and then start to decrease. Despite some climate change mitigation efforts since the Paris Agreement in 2015, global emissions are still rising, reaching a record high 37.1 billion tons of CO2 in 2018.

Lipponen has shared his videos using Flickr’s Creative Commons, which encourages people to copy, adapt, and build on the material.

Study: A Summer of Storms and Smog Is Coming

This article discusses climate projections for this coming summer. Climate change has made urban pollution more dangerous and thunderstorms more destructive.

Air pollution is the sixth-biggest killer worldwide—more than alcohol use, kidney failure or too much salt. The cause, as we all know, is the burning of fossil fuels, which generates soot and other airborne particles that hang in the atmosphere.

In a new example of the vicious cycles spun up by climate change, research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests for the first time that pollution is lingering longer over cities and summer storms are becoming more powerful.

The study, published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also states that these weaker extratropical cyclones may be contributing to longer heat waves, too. The study is based on temperature and precipitation data going back to 1979, the beginning of satellite monitoring.

Study: Arctic Bogs Hold Another Global Warming Risk That Could Spiral Out of Control

This article discusses how arctic bogs hold a global warming risk that could cause significant problems for us. As warming brings earlier spring rains in the Arctic, more permafrost thaws, releasing more methane in a difficult-to-stop feedback loop, research shows.

Increasing spring rains in the Arctic could double the increase in methane emissions from the region by hastening the rate of thawing in permafrost, new research suggests.

“Our results emphasize that these permafrost regions are sensitive to the thermal effects of rain, and because we’re anticipating that these environments are going to get wetter in the future, we could be seeing increases in methane emissions that we weren’t expecting,” said the study’s lead author, Rebecca Neumann, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Washington. The study appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Use these tools to help visualize the horror of rising sea levels

This article discusses a set of tools that help people understand the effects of sea level rise.

By now, everyone knows: the climate is changing, sea levels are rising, and the crises are likely to happen sooner than expected. Still, it’s one thing to know, and another thing to really see these potential disasters. Luckily (or unluckily), there’s no lack of tools to help the apathetic develop a visceral sense of what could be at stake.

First, Information Is Beautiful has used data from NASA, Sea Level Explorer, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to create the aptly named “When Sea Levels Attack,” which shows how many years are left until major cities are underwater.

Next, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers a tool that helps visualize “community-level impacts from coastal flooding or sea level rise” up to 10 feet above average high tides.

The Mapping Choices tool from Climate Central does essentially the same thing with an extra level of guilt because it shows you two scenarios and asks which sea level we will lock in.

The EarthTime sea level rise tool goes one step further and shows not only different major world cities, but scenarios under the Paris Accord and you can watch the changes happen before your eyes.

And then there’s a new map that lets users peer 60 years into the future of North American cities. San Jose becomes like a city in LA County, and North Carolina will seem more Florida.

If all that has you down, The New York Times has created an interactive that shows what different countries are doing to cut carbon emissions and how adopting each of those policies could be helpful for the US. It’s a much more hopeful view.

Soil ecologist challenges mainstream thinking on climate change

This article discusses a soil ecologist’s challenge to mainstream thinking on climate change.

How cropland and pastures are managed is the most effective way to remedy climate change, an approach that isn’t getting the attention it deserves, according to a leading soil ecologist from Australia who speaks around the world on soil health.

“Water that sits on top of the ground will evaporate. Water vapor, caused by water that evaporates because it hasn’t infiltrated, is the greenhouse gas that has increased to the greatest extent since the Industrial Revolution,” said Christine Jones, while speaking at the No Till on the Plains Conference in Wichita in late January.

“It’s a scientific fact that water vapor accounts for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect, whereas at most 3 percent of the carbon dioxide is a result of burning fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide only makes up .04 percent of the atmosphere anyway,” she continued. “So how can a trace gas be changing the global climate?”