oceans – No Fricking Fracking

Offshore Wind Farms Show What Biden’s Climate Plan Is Up Against

New York Times: Offshore Wind Farms Show What Biden’s Climate Plan Is Up Against. The U.S. has fallen way behind Europe partly because of an old shipping law and opposition from homeowners and fishing groups.

A constellation of 5,400 offshore wind turbines meet a growing portion of Europe’s energy needs. The United States has exactly seven.

With more than 90,000 miles of coastline, the country has plenty of places to plunk down turbines. But legal, environmental and economic obstacles and even vanity have stood in the way.

President Biden wants to catch up fast — in fact, his targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions depend on that happening. Yet problems abound, including a shortage of boats big enough to haul the huge equipment to sea, fishermen worried about their livelihoods and wealthy people who fear that the turbines will mar the pristine views from their waterfront mansions. There’s even a century-old, politically fraught federal law, known as the Jones Act, that blocks wind farm developers from using American ports to launch foreign construction vessels.

Studies: Plastics and oceans – 4 articles

Futurity: DISCARDED COVID MASKS AND GLOVES ARE REALLY BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. When it comes to COVID-19 masks, gloves, and disinfectants, the transformation from protection to pollution happens quickly, but the damage can last for centuries.

Vox: Why 99% of ocean plastic pollution is “missing”. A lot of it is probably hiding in plain sight. All of this plastic consumption — and the world’s inadequacy at containing it — means an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year. It is remarkably difficult to track all of this plastic, but in 2019, a group of researchers affiliated with the Ocean Cleanup published a study about plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They excavated plastic from it and, using what they found, made a model showing what is likely floating in each of the five (at least) ocean garbage patches around the world. They also estimated that what’s floating on the surface of the water accounts for only 1 percent of what we put into the ocean.

National Geographic: Plastic gets to the oceans through over 1,000 rivers. Scientists used to think 20 rivers at most carried most plastic into the oceans, but now they know it’s far more, complicating potential solutions. New research published today in Science Advances has turned that thinking on its head. Scientists found that 80 percent of plastic waste is distributed by more than 1,000 rivers, not simply 10 or 20. They also found that most of that waste is carried by small rivers that flow through densely populated urban areas, not the largest rivers.

CNN: ‘The ocean is our life-support system’: Kerstin Forsberg on why we must protect our seas. After finishing her degree, the Peruvian biologist began working on a sea turtle protection project in the north of the country. Two years later, in 2009, Forsberg founded “Planeta Océano,” an organization that aims to empower local communities to look after the ocean. Its work with giant manta rays led to Peru’s government granting the species legal protection.

Report: We can avoid the worst effects of climate change, but we’re still in for a fight

Popular Science: We can avoid the worst effects of climate change, but we’re still in for a fight. We may still be able to reverse some of the major effects if we cross the crucial threshold.

It’s easy to get disheartened about climate change. To keep global warming within the safe threshold of 1.5ºC adopted by the Paris Agreement, we need to have declines in carbon emissions on par with those of 2020, a year in which a global pandemic forced transportation and industry to slow down. As economies rev back up, it’s understandable to be anxious that things will return back to “normal,” a planet-wrecking status quo.

But even if the odds of global leaders shifting gears to focus on mitigating climate change are low, it’s not cause for climate doomerism. Every bit of warming we ward off helps. A new review in the journal Nature illustrates that even if we overshoot a global warming threshold, it won’t necessarily destabilize crucial Earth systems—including ice sheets, ocean currents, and tropical forests—right away. “If you change [the course of emissions] fast enough, you can avoid certain consequences that might be otherwise irreversible,” says Valerio Lucarini, a physicist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the study. “I think the paper does a good job in making this clear.”

Global warming targets like 1.5ºC are based on what researchers think is needed to avoid setting off powerful and irreversible changes to the biosphere that could devastate humans and ecosystems. But Paul Ritchie, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter who led the study, says that a common misconception is that once we cross a climate threshold, all is lost—that processes like ice melt will spin out of control until the Earth equilibrates at a new, hotter normal. “You often hear that we are very close to the threshold now [for ice sheet collapse]—some say we’ve already crossed it—and that means, apparently, that we’re committed to suffering a large [amount of] ice melt,” he says. “That’s not necessarily the case.”

Fact check: Photos show no change in sea level over 99 years but don’t disprove climate change

USA Today: Fact check: Photos show no change in sea level over 99 years but don’t disprove climate change.

Just a few days before Earth Day 2021, a Facebook post claimed to show climate change is a hoax based on two photos taken a century apart.

The post reads, “99 years of sea level rise — Palm Beach Sydney,” and includes images labeled as being from 1917 and 2016. They show the water level at a similar point both years.

“For years they called it Global Warming. But they were proven over and over that no such thing is happening,” says the April 19 post, which was shared thousands of times in various forms. “Then they started calling it Climate Change. Again it is a hoax.”

Study: Changes to giant ocean eddies could have ‘devastating effects’ globally

The Guardian: Changes to giant ocean eddies could have ‘devastating effects’ globally. Researchers fear increasing energy in these eddies could affect ability of Southern Ocean to absorb C02.

Swirling and meandering ocean currents that help shape the world’s climate have gone through a “global-scale reorganisation” over the past three decades, according to new research.

The amount of energy in these ocean currents, which can be from 10km to 100km across and are known as eddies, has increased, having as yet unknown affects on the ocean’s ability to lock-away carbon dioxide and heat from fossil fuel burning.

One expert said the changes described in the research could affect the ability of the Southern Ocean, one of the world’s biggest natural carbon stores, to absorb CO2.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, analysed the temperature and height of the ocean with the help of data from altimeters on satellites from 1993 until 2020.

Studies: Humanity’s greatest ally against climate change is the Earth itself

Washington Post: Humanity’s greatest ally against climate change is the Earth itself. Ecosystems can draw down carbon and buffer us from the worst effects of climate change — but only if we protect them.

A 2020 analysis in the journal Nature Sustainability found that better soil stewardship could reduce emissions by at least 5.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year — about 15 percent of current annual emissions.

In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they concluded natural climate systems are capable of storing almost 24 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year — roughly two thirds of what people emit. About half of that sequestration would be cost-effective, meaning enacting the necessary protections would cost less than the consequences of keeping that carbon in the air.

The Daily Climate, April 23, 2021

Articles include: GHG commitments from Biden; Miami sea level rise costs; Steel company and GHG goals; Texas and clean energy; clean energy loan risks; humanity’s friend against climate change; bitcoin and the environment; Canada’s biggest banks missing from net-zero pledge; Study: dangerous toxins in Alaska’s algae; Study: ocean currents are changing; farmers and climate change; homelessness in America.

The Daily Climate, April 20, 2021

Articles include: Exxon & carbon capture; offshore wind; glaciers melting in the Andes; coal financing; cities hardest hit by climate change; Biden trying to reinstate US climate change leadership; shrinking sea meadows and GHGs; Canadian budget; Euro lawsuits derail clean energy; DOI heads towards clean energy; climate change and coffee; melting Arctic & Russia.

Above the Fold – Week’s Best & Covid

Environmental Health News puts out weekend ‘summary’ emails, in addition to their daily emails.

EHN Week’s Best: April 16, 2021: forever chemicals on paper straws; Piney Point pollution; jails and environmental justice; DDT; PFAS; drought’s impact on farming water; rechargeable batteries – real cost; Mexico and coal; heavy metals in children’s food; Japan dumping Fukushima’s radioactive water into the ocean.

EHN Covid: April 16, 2021: facemask garbage; underserved communities & J&J vaccine halt; green spaces & housing justice; loosing women scientists; how to stop a pandemic.

The Daily Climate, April 7, 2021

Articles include: Gretta Thunberg; racism; green goals and the power grid; old batteries & electric vehicles; outdated rainfall data; Canadian coal mine; sea meadows; Chevron climate goals; Antarctic ice shelves collapse; Florida & sea level rise.