Articles include: Silent calamity: The health impacts of wildfire smoke; White House adviser and environmental justice advocate Catherine Coleman Flowers; Climate change increases renters’ risks; Why are there so many Atlantic named storms? Five possible explanations; Heavier downpours strain septic systems in some rural areas; Devastating disease in dolphins linked to extreme downpours, researcher says; Santa Fe women built homemade air purifiers to help protect people from wildfire smoke; Hundreds of coastal airports at risk from flooding, sea-level rise, study finds; Historic Portsmouth Village under threat from hurricanes and rising seas.
Category: Water
References in the articles to water issues, including pollution, flooding, and drought.
The Western Drought Is Bad. Here’s What You Should Know About It.
New York Times: The Western Drought Is Bad. Here’s What You Should Know About It. Answers to questions about the current situation in California and the Western half of the United States.
Much of the Western half of the United States is in the grip of a severe drought of historic proportions. Conditions are especially bad in California and the Southwest, but the drought extends into the Pacific Northwest, much of the Intermountain West, and even the Northern Plains.
Drought emergencies have been declared. Farmers and ranchers are suffering. States are facing water cutbacks. Large wildfires are burning earlier than usual. And there appears to be little relief in sight.
Experts with the United States Drought Monitor, a collaboration of several federal agencies and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, assess the severity of drought in a given area, ranking it from moderate to exceptional. They take many factors into account, including precipitation totals, snowpack, stream flows and soil moisture measurements, and use images from remote-sensing satellites to assess the health of vegetation.
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.
The Daily Climate, April 27, 2021
Articles include: California drought; underreporting GHGs; weather station in the Andes; 26,000 snakes; tools: graphics and climate change; deforesting Brazil; EPA and California air standards; pandemic and snow melt in SE Asia.
Report: As a hotter, drier climate grips the Colorado River, water risks grow across the Southwest
Arizona Central: As a hotter, drier climate grips the Colorado River, water risks grow across the Southwest. The water level of Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, has dropped more than 130 feet since the beginning of 2000, when the lake’s surface lapped at the spillway gates on Hoover Dam.
Twenty-one years later, with the Colorado River consistently yielding less water as the climate has grown warmer and drier, the reservoir near Las Vegas sits at just 39% of capacity. And it’s approaching the threshold of a shortage for the first time since it was filled in the 1930s.
The latest projections from the federal government show the reservoir will soon fall 7 more feet to cross the trigger point for a shortage in 2022, forcing the largest mandatory water cutbacks yet in Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.
Why the intense U.S. drought is now a megadrought
Mashable: Why the intense U.S. drought is now a megadrought.
Climate 101 is a Mashable series that answers provoking and salient questions about Earth’s warming climate.
The water keeps going down.
Almost the entire Southwest is mired in various stages of drought as of April 21, 2021, resulting in falling water levels at the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. The consequences could be unprecedented. For the first time in Lake Mead’s 85-year existence, water levels may drop below a point this summer that triggers water cuts in Arizona and Nevada. (This would largely mean cuts to farmers and agriculture.)
Geological and climate records show that sustained droughts, lasting decades, come and go in the Southwest. But the current prolonged drying trend, which started some 20 years ago, is exacerbated by a rapidly warming climate. This makes the current drought not just long, but especially intense.
Above the Fold – Children’s News, April 22, 2021
Articles include: Report: Lead in Pennsylvania water; tougher air pollution limits needed; Report: climate’s impact on children’s health and justice; Report: dogs and human fertility; Study: father’s drinking and children’s health; North Pole pollution; lead pipes in Buffalo, NY; climate change guide for kids; Study: forever chemicals and the immune system; school in Portland, OR, and munitions facility; PCBs in Vermont school; Study: tap water research; Study here and here: toxic nanotech graphene face masks.
There Are Massive Chemical Dumps In The Gulf We Know Almost Nothing About
Huffington Post: There Are Massive Chemical Dumps In The Gulf We Know Almost Nothing About. In the 1970s, the EPA allowed chemical companies to dump toxic waste into the deep sea. Now, oil giants are drilling right on top of it.
Seventy miles off the coast of Louisiana, among a maze of drilling platforms and seafloor pipelines, thousands of 55-gallon drums containing hazardous industrial chemicals litter a vast, dark swath of the ocean floor. They’ve been sitting there for nearly 50 years.
Charles McCreery was a few months into a new job as an oceanographer and water quality expert at the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management when he first learned of the dumping ground. It was 2014, and he was tasked with reviewing oil giant Shell’s exploration plans in an offshore leasing area known as Mississippi Canyon, in the north-central Gulf of Mexico. Deep in the document, he came across the company’s internal policy for steering clear of toxic waste barrels, and what to do should their operations puncture or disturb one.
“The content, and its toxicity, of each individual barrel is not known,” the Shell document reads. “Within the area there are/could be many hundreds of waste barrels. Many of the barrels may have released their contents over time.”
State Water Control Board turns down ‘speculative’ water permit request
Virginia Mercury: State Water Control Board turns down ‘speculative’ water permit request.
The Virginia State Water Control Board last week denied a proposal by the owners of Cranston’s Mill Pond in James City County to withdraw millions of gallons of water per day to sell to potential buyers, drawing a hard line against what state officials have cast as speculative use of a public good.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality “determined that issuing a permit this speculative would set an unwarranted precedent that would encourage the privatization of a public water resource,” Scott Kudlas, director of DEQ’s Office of Water Supply, told the board.
Pond owner Restoration Systems, however, has argued that although it has not secured an end user of the water, ongoing groundwater scarcity in the eastern portion of the state justifies the awarding of a water withdrawal permit.
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.