The Narwhal discusses ‘A lost run’: logging and climate change decimate steelhead in B.C. river. When zero fish showed up for a winter count in the Gold River on Vancouver Island, their absence hinted at a much larger story of how and why this species is disappearing throughout the province.
Month: November 2020
Studies: Increased COVID-19 Transmission Linked To Poultry Plants Allowed To Operate Faster
Ohio Valley Resource discusses Study Links Increased COVID-19 Transmission To Poultry Plants Allowed To Operate Faster.
A study published Thursday in a prestigious scientific journal links significant increases in COVID-19 transmission rates to meatpacking plants, especially those facilities that the federal government has allowed to speed up processing lines. Researchers found evidence that linked meatpacking plants to a “high potential for community spread” in the surrounding areas. The findings have implications for the Ohio Valley, where Tyson Foods plants in western Kentucky and southern Indiana received waivers this spring to increase work line speed even as dozens of workers were falling ill to the virus.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, found that counties with poultry processing plants that received line speed waivers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have double the rate of COVID-19 cases compared to counties with poultry plants that did not receive these waivers. Researchers found an even stronger connection with waivers given to processing plants this year.
A report from ProPublica earlier this year revealed through emails how meatpacking companies fought with local health agencies over measures to reduce COVID-19 spread, including a health department leader in western Kentucky worrying about reports of plant management forcing symptomatic employees to continue working.
Yale Climate Connections, November 27, 2020
Study: Environmental Health News, November 26, 2020
Major oil and gas companies join program to cut methane emissions
The Daily Climate discusses how Major oil and gas companies join program to cut methane emissions. 62 oil and gas companies from around the world signed on to a UN-led partnership aimed at bolstering monitoring and reductions of the potent climate-warming gas.
Dozens of the top oil and gas companies in the world—including Shell, BP and Total—agreed this week to better track and reduce their methane emissions.
The initiative—called the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership and led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the European Commission and Environmental Defense Fund—was launched in 2014 as a voluntary effort to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas. This week that partnership was updated—now the 62 participating companies will look beyond their own methane emissions and include any joint venture emissions, as well as emissions from transportation and downstream refining that companies could have potentially left out of reporting.
“Our aim is to bring companies to report their emissions from all assets at an unprecedented level of accuracy and granularity,” Manfredi Caltagirone, a UNEP program management officer, told EHN, “because you cannot manage what you do not measure.”
Across the globe, about 596 million tons of methane are emitted a year, according to the Global Carbon Project, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. There are natural methane emissions from sources such as wetlands, lakes, volcanoes and permafrost, but about 60 percent comes from human activities. While agriculture is the top human-caused source of methane, fossil fuels is second.
G.M. Drops Its Support for Trump Climate Rollbacks and Aligns With Biden
The New York Times discusses how G.M. Drops Its Support for Trump Climate Rollbacks and Aligns With Biden. General Motors said it would no longer back President Trump’s effort to strip California of the power to set fuel economy standards.
General Motors turned its back Monday on the Trump administration’s legal fight to nullify California’s strict fuel economy rules, signaling that it was ready to work with President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to reduce climate-warming emissions from cars and trucks.
The decision by Mary Barra, the General Motors chief executive, to withdraw her company’s support for Trump administration efforts to strip California of its ability to set its own fuel efficiency standards was a striking reversal. It was also a signal that corporate America is moving on from President Trump.
Study: Climate Change Is Sending Some Species the Wrong Way
Hakai Magazine discusses how Climate Change Is Sending Some Species the Wrong Way. Not every animal has the power to migrate to cooler climes.
As the oceans warm, many marine species are heading poleward in search of cooler water. But in the northwest Atlantic, researchers have discovered that some invertebrates are shifting the wrong way—their range is moving into warmer, less hospitable water. It’s a head-scratcher with important implications for our changing world.
Heidi Fuchs, a marine biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says she was studying the changing distributions of two species of snails on the east coast of the United States when she realized they had shifted into shallower water.
This migration is baffling because shallow water is often warmer, and warmer water can be lethal for these invertebrates. If they’d simply stayed put, the cooler water offshore should have provided a refuge from temperature increases. Working to figure out what was going on, Fuchs found that while the snails’ spawning habits are changing because of climate change, their adaptations are actually making things worse.
Temperatures in the Arctic are astonishingly warmer than they should be
CBS News discusses how Temperatures in the Arctic are astonishingly warmer than they should be.
t’s been happening for several years now, especially in the autumn, but it never ceases to unsettle meteorologists like myself: Temperatures in the Arctic are astonishingly warmer than they should be.
According to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanlayzer, this weekend the Arctic Circle was an average 12 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. This is not just one location, but the average of all 7.7 million square miles. That is a huge area, nearly double the size of the entire United States, being on average 12 degrees above normal.
Now, it’s far from toasty warm in the Arctic; temperatures are near zero in many places. But as you can see in the image below, which illustrates departures from normal, the bright red shaded patches indicate that temperatures are greater than 20 degrees Celsius (30-40 degrees F) above where they should be at this time of year.
Study: 6,000 years of arrows emerge from melting Norwegian ice patch
National Geographic discusses 6,000 years of arrows emerge from melting Norwegian ice patch. The record-setting discovery of 68 projectiles from the Neolithic to the Viking Era also upends ideas on how ice both preserves and destroys archaeological finds.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS IN NORWAY have discovered dozens of arrows—some dating back 6,000 years—melting out of a 60-acre ice patch in the county’s high mountains.
Expeditions to survey the Langfonne ice patch in 2014 and 2016, both particularly warm summers, also revealed copious reindeer bones and antlers, suggesting that hunters used the ice patch over the course of millennia. Their hunting technique stayed the same even as the weapons they used evolved from stone and river shell arrowheads to iron points.
Now the research team is revealing the finds in a paper published today in the journal Holocene. A record-setting total of 68 complete and partial arrows (and five arrowheads) were ultimately discovered by the team on and around the melting ice patch–more than archaeologists have recovered from any other frozen site in the world. Some of the projectiles date to the Neolithic period while the most “recent” finds are from the 14th century A.D.
A Power Company’s Quiet Land-Buying Spree Could Shield It From Coal Ash Cleanup Costs
ProPublica discusses how A Power Company’s Quiet Land-Buying Spree Could Shield It From Coal Ash Cleanup Costs. Georgia Power paid top dollar to buy land from residents living near waste sites at its power plants. Environmentalists fear it’s a tactic to forestall the cleanup bill from new regulations for coal ash.
Over the past several years, utility giant Georgia Power has embarked on an unusual buying spree, paying top dollar for people’s property in places where cheap land was easy to find.
In 2016, it bought a veterinarian’s 5-acre lot in the rolling hills of northwest Georgia for roughly double the appraised value. The following year, it acquired 28 acres of flood-prone land in southwest Georgia’s pecan belt for nearly four times what the local tax assessor said it was worth. By the year after that, it had paid millions of dollars above the appraised value for hundreds of acres near a winding gravel road in a central Georgia town with no water lines and spotty cellphone service.