Month: September 2020

The video origin of the myth that global warming is good for agriculture

Yale Climate Connections discusses the video origin of the myth that global warming is good for agriculture. Two ’90s-era coal-funded videos on CO2 featured government scientists who say their comments were misleadingly edited. How it all happened.

Misinformation is at the root of many scientific controversies, and fighting it can feel like a losing battle. But one effective method is to expose the mechanics of misinformation, to show tactics and deceptive processes in broad daylight.

And learning from the past can be key to combating persistent misinformation campaigns currently and, no doubt, again in the future. “Those who ignore history,” writer and philosopher George Santayana taught us, “are bound to repeat it.”

A pair of widely circulated climate misinformation videos from the 90s – “The Greening of Planet Earth,” and “The Greening of Planet Earth Continues” – were funded by the benignly named Greening Earth Society, whose membership consisted of coal interests. Featured in the video were U.S. government civil service scientists who had no idea they would land in the midst of a pro-pollution/pro-CO2 narrative. Special interests supporting use of fossil fuels used the inclusion of the scientists, which seemed to give the video credibility, to cast doubt on the idea that climate change would harm people and ecosystems.

At Climate Week, America’s Cascading Disasters Dominate

The New York Times discusses how, At Climate Week, America’s Cascading Disasters Dominate. This year’s events come amid a climate reckoning in the world’s richest country. Here are the takeaways.

It’s been a very different Climate Week in New York City this year, and not just because of social distancing. The annual gathering, meant to showcase efforts against global warming worldwide, came as climate disasters pummeled the host country.

There were fire tornadoes in the American West; a slow-moving hurricane drowned northwest Florida; children in Silicon Valley breathed a bit of the foul air that children in the shanties of Delhi grow up with.

A recent analysis conducted by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute found that around half of all the planet-warming gases produced between 1990 (when the first United Nations climate report was published) and 2015 (when the Paris climate accord was reached) came from the world’s richest 10 percent.

Study: Hurricanes near U.S. coast forecast to worsen and multiply due to global warming

The Washington Post discusses Hurricanes near U.S. coast forecast to worsen and multiply due to global warming. The 2020 hurricane season may be best remembered as the one that spawned so many storms that forecasters ran out of names and had to resort to Greek letters. But it is notable for another disquieting reason: the number of storms that developed in the mid-latitudes right off the U.S. coast. While this is not unheard of, it is unusual. And it may become more frequent as climate change alters hurricane behavior, according to a new study.

While it’s impossible to predict future trends from a single hurricane season, scientists can take historical and other data and run models to get a glimpse of what the future may bring. That’s what Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did in a new peer-reviewed study in the American Meteorological Society’s “Journal of Climate.”

[No link is provided, but a search at the American Meteorological Society’s site on hurricanes and global warming provides lots of interesting reading here.]

This finding builds on previous studies that drew similar conclusions.

Mountain Valley Pipeline regains permit to cross streams, wetlands

The Roanoke Times discusses Mountain Valley Pipeline regains permit to cross streams, wetlands.

A path across nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands was cleared Friday for the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reissued three permits for the natural gas pipeline being built in Virginia and West Virginia, nearly two years after they were invalidated by a federal appeals court.

“Effective immediately, you may resume all activities being done in reliance upon the authorization” first given in January 2018, William Walker, chief of the Army Corps’ regulatory branch in Norfolk, wrote in a letter to Mountain Valley.

As fossil fuel jobs falter, renewables come to the rescue

CBS News discusses As fossil fuel jobs falter, renewables come to the rescue.

In 2011, Don Williams made the long trip from Michigan to North Dakota hoping to capitalize on the Bakken oil boom — to, as he says, “chase oil and make quick cash.” It paid off; for years Williams worked in operations on the oil fields, watching over production and maintaining pump jacks.

To say that Williams worked hard would be an understatement. Putting in 12-hour days, 7 days a week — 84-hour work-weeks were typical. And the work was lucrative. The money flowed as fast as the oil did — until it didn’t. In May, Williams was laid off, along with most of the Bakken workforce, when boom went bust.

But within a week, he made a huge career leap — 300 feet up, to be exact — ascending from the firm grounds of the Bakken Oil Fields to the top of a giant wind turbine to take part in a 12-week training course to become a wind energy technician. In his words, he no longer wanted to “ride the oil waves, the highs and lows,” anymore.

Study: Ocean Heat Waves Are Directly Linked to Climate Change

The New York Times discusses how Ocean Heat Waves Are Directly Linked to Climate Change. The “blob” of hotter ocean water that killed sea lions and other marine life in 2014 and 2015 may become permanent.

Six years ago, a huge part of the Pacific Ocean near North America quickly warmed, reaching temperatures more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Nicknamed “the blob,” it persisted for two years, with devastating impacts on marine life, including sea lions and salmon.

The blob was a marine heat wave, the oceanic equivalent of a deadly summer atmospheric one. It was far from a solitary event: Tens of thousands have occurred in the past four decades, although most are far smaller and last for days rather than years. The largest and longest ones have occurred with increasing frequency over time.

On Thursday, scientists revealed the culprit. Climate change, they said, is making severe marine heat waves much more likely.

The study, published in the journal Science, looked at the blob and six other large events around the world, including one in the Northwest Atlantic in 2012. Human-caused global warming made these events at least 20 times more likely, the researchers found.

Trump Administration Releases Plan to Open Tongass Forest to Logging

The New York Times discusses how the Trump Administration Releases Plan to Open Tongass Forest to Logging. The effort to open the Alaskan wilderness area, the nation’s largest national forest, has been in the works for about two years.

The Trump administration on Friday finalized its plan to open about nine million acres of the pristine woodlands of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and road construction.

The administration’s effort to open the Tongass, the nation’s largest national forest, has been in the works for about two years, and the final steps to complete the process have been widely expected for months. They come after years of prodding by successive Alaska governors and congressional delegations, which have pushed the federal government to exempt the Tongass from a Clinton-era policy known as the roadless rule, which banned logging and road construction in much of the national forest system.

Emails Show How Pesticide Industry Influenced U.S. Position in Health Talks

The New York Times discusses how Emails Show How Pesticide Industry Influenced U.S. Position in Health Talks. The U.S. insisted that new international guidelines on combating drug resistance omit any mention of fungicides — a demand that the industry made but that ran counter to science.

Ray S. McAllister, a policy official at the trade association CropLife America, urged U.S. agriculture officials to fight any effort to include the words “crops” or “fungicides” in the guidelines — a position that would run counter to growing international consensus that the overuse of antifungal compounds is a threat to human health by contributing to drug resistance and should be monitored.

Study: Drinking Water Problems – 2 articles

The Guardian discusses How Americans stopped trusting their water. Many residents of Martin county, Kentucky, won’t drink their tap water, a legacy of years of mismanagement. She’s not alone: 96% of residents rely primarily on bottled water for drinking, and only 56% use tap water for cooking, according to a recent study by the University of Kentucky.

Circle of Blue discusses how One Michigan County Tells the Story of a Nation Plagued By Water Pollution. Borrello has been monitoring the Pine River for nearly two decades, so he is attuned to the marks of a healthy ecosystem. He and his team of students and community members test water samples from the 103-mile-long river and its tributaries for an array of pollution indicators: nitrogen and phosphorus, bacteria and dissolved oxygen. Since he began the project in 2003, Borrello said contamination in the watershed has only gotten worse.  To Borrello, the source of the problem seems obvious. “The river is loaded with nutrients, it’s loaded with bacteria,” he told Circle of Blue. “We see it upstream and downstream, we can look at where it’s coming from. It’s coming from application sites of manure, and it’s coming from Concentrated Agricultural Feeding Operations (CAFOs) themselves.”

The problem with recycling? One word: Plastics

Politico discusses the problem with recycling? One word: Plastics. No matter how well we sort, much of what we throw away cannot be reused.

You separate your trash, leave it to be collected and then it gets sorted in a waste facility, after which it’s turned into new things — that’s how recycling works, right?

Turns out it’s not that easy, especially when it comes to plastic.

Most experts agree that recycling is an important way to reduce waste and to recover valuable materials, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and conserving significant amounts of energy and water. And yet, of the 2.3 billion tons of waste generated in the EU each year, only 37 percent gets recycled.

Some materials, such as aluminum cans, glass and paper, are relatively easy to repurpose (Nearly three-quarters of this type of waste sees a new life as a consumer product.)