Month: April 2018

Forced to Move: Climate Change Already Displacing U.S. Communities

This article discusses the impact on communities that climate change is having.

Extreme drought pushes rural inhabitants of a Middle Eastern nation into the cities, leading to social stressors and a devastating civil war. Decades of drought conditions and war send African migrants into neighboring countries by the tens of thousands. Residents of a small Alaskan village decide to vote in favor of relocating their entire population, as their living area crumbles around them due to storm surges.

These scenarios aren’t cribbed from a dystopian novel, or the plot of an apocalyptic big-budget movie; it’s real life. And it’s happening – now.

McKibben: Hiroshima, Kyoto, and the Bombs of Climate Change

This article is by climate scientist Bill McKibben. It is scary stuff.

With climate change, it’s different. The explosion of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders every minute of every day just doesn’t induce the same tremble. True, Trump is alone among world leaders in dismissing global warming, but most of his peers might as well agree: they’ve done very little of what’s required even to begin addressing this issue. As a result, the explosions go off constantly. Scientists estimate that, each day, our added emissions trap the heat equivalent of four hundred thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs, which is why the Arctic has half as much ice as it did in the nineteen-eighties, why the great ocean currents have begun to slow, why we see floods and storms and fires in such sad proportion. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only atomic bombs we ever dropped; climate bombs rain down daily, and the death toll mounts unstoppably.

I can think of several explanations for this difference in attitude. The most important, probably, lies in the power of the fossil-fuel industry, which has spent billions of dollars defending the precise practices now wrecking the planet. The industry’s disinformation and lobbying campaigns—the details of which have slowly come to light, though the broad outlines have been clear for decades—have been spectacularly effective.

Study: The risk of sea level rise is chipping away at Miami home values

This article discusses the impact on Florida real estate from climate change and sea level rise.

Creeping flood waters driven by sea rise have yet to reach the doors of most homes in Miami-Dade, but research shows the looming threat from climate change is already affecting their value. And not in a good way.

New data from Harvard University and the University of Colorado suggests that homes in lower elevations are selling for less and gaining value slower than similar ones at higher elevations. Researchers see that as sign that some buyers are factoring climate risks into their offers and investments — a trend that could have major implications for a state with more coastal real estate at risk than any other.

 

Learning to Speak Shrub

This is an interesting article that discusses how plants are trying to cope with climate change.

Entomologist Richard Karban knows how to get sagebrush talking. To start the conversation, he poses as a grasshopper or a chewing beetle—he uses scissors to cut leaves on one of the shrubs. Lopping off the leaves entirely won’t fool the plants. So he makes many snips around the edges and tips of the leaves—“a lot of little bites.”

A few months later, Karban, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies plant defense communication, returns to the sagebrush and examines its leaves, many of which now have damage from real grasshoppers or beetles. However, within about two feet of the branches he clipped, leaves have been spared the worst ravages of the hungry insects. That’s because Karban’s cuttings convinced those damaged leaves they were under insect attack, so they sent chemical alarms into the air. Neighboring leaves intercepted and deciphered the code messages, and began prepping their own defenses against the bugs.

 

Can the world kick its fossil-fuel addiction fast enough?

This article discusses the need to change from fossil fuels to renewable energy, as quickly as possible.

Clean energy is growing quickly. But time is running out to rein in carbon emissions.

The bottom line is hardly encouraging: by and large, governments are falling well short of their commitments, both collectively and individually. Many countries are likely to miss the emissions targets that they made in 2015, and the world is on track for more than 3 °C of warming by the end of the century (see ‘Plotting the future’).

The military paid for a study on sea level rise. The results were scary.

This article discusses a new study, commissioned by the US military.

More than a thousand low-lying tropical islands risk becoming “uninhabitable” by the middle of the century — or possibly sooner — because of rising sea levels, upending the populations of some island nations and endangering key U.S. military assets, according to new research published Wednesday.

The threats to the islands are twofold. In the long term, the rising seas threaten to inundate the islands entirely. More immediately, as seas rise, the islands will more frequently deal with large waves that crash farther onto the shore, contaminating their drinkable water supplies with ocean saltwater, according to the research.

Study: Within Decades, Floods May Render Many Islands Uninhabitable

This article discusses how many island nations will cease to exist if sea level rise is not stopped.

Wave-induced floods—abetted by rising seas—could ruin the water supplies of thousands of islands, a new study claims.

For the Marshall Islands, climate change isn’t some distant, future danger: It is already wreaking havoc across the Pacific country’s more than 1,100 low-lying atolls.

Now, a new study claims that climate change may soon deal the country’s water supplies a death blow. As sea levels rise around the islands, bigger waves will flood farther inland than ever before. If enough of these waves hit in succession, flooded saltwater will irreparably taint the islands’ freshwater supplies.

Outside researchers say that the study, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, is best viewed as a worst-case scenario. That said, researchers praised the study for its modeling—and the grave warning it gives.

Google joins Apple in condemning the repeal of the Clean Power Plan

This article discusses the comments submitted by Google condemning the US withdrawal from the Clean Power Plan.

Google filed a public comment today criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to roll back the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era policy that aims to cut power plant pollution. With its comment, Google joins Apple in arguing that keeping the policy is a good deal for the US.

Google’s comment, which it shared with The Verge, lays out what it called “a strong economic case for the Clean Power Plan.” It says that the plan would encourage utilities and companies like Google to keep investing in renewable energy — which Google says is getting cheaper, is desired by both consumers and investors, and is a good source of jobs.

GOP Tax Law Bails Out Fracking Companies Buried in Debt

This article points out just how bad an investment fracking is. Without tax help, most drilling is not financially viable.

EOG Resources is one of the top companies in the fracking industry, and thanks to the new tax bill passed by Republicans and President Donald Trump at the end of last year, EOG had an exceptionally strong year compared to 2016.

In 2017, the company reported a net income of $2.6 billion. The previous year? A loss of $1.1 billion. That financial turnaround seems very impressive until you realize that $2.2 billion, or about 85 percent, of its 2017 income was the result of the new tax law. Without that gift from the GOP and Trump, EOG would have lost approximately $700 million between those two years. Instead they are $1.5 billion ahead of the game.