Articles include: lumber shortage; disabilities and natural disasters; California wildfire season; Study: cut methane emissions quickly; flooding in Michigan; climate vote in Senate; Study: poor communities affected by climate change; low carbon fuel standard; money to modernize grid; Fukushima; Ford making electric vehicles; Study: sea level rise and budgets.
Tag: forests deforestation
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: 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.”
Study: Climate Crisis & Food Production
The Hill: Effective and profitable climate solutions are within the nation’s farms and forests. America’s farmers, ranchers and forest managers work with the earth every day, not on just Earth Day. And natural and working lands underpin our national economy — sustaining our food supply, generating timber and providing wildlife habitat, recreation resources and environmental benefits. But we also believe these stewards of our lands and forests can — and must — find better, more productive ways to address the risks that climate change poses to our future. More innovative federal farm, forest and climate policies must help in that process. Right now, climate change poses significant risks for farmers and our forests. These include warmer temperatures and extreme weather events that can directly increase the frequency and severity of many types of disturbances, including drought, wildfire and blowdowns, as well as exacerbate pests, diseases and other agents that further increase stress on ecosystems.
Sentient Media: Climate Groups Finally Recognize the Link Between Factory Farming and Climate Change. We’re celebrating our second Earth Day in the midst of a global pandemic, which, in just one year, has redefined the word “normal” for us all. Yet COVID-19’s disruption has also afforded us an opportunity to hit the reset button and establish a resilient, sustainable new normal. We’ve long counted on environmental groups to model what this sustainable future looks like—one where single-use plastics are rare and electric vehicles are business as usual. But what about our fragile food system, which has all but crumbled under the pandemic’s weight? Does the way the climate movement eats line up with its own sustainable values?
Crucially, a global shift away from meat, eggs, and dairy isn’t just a nice gesture to the planet; it’s essential for a livable future. The EAT-Lancet Commission warns that even if net-zero carbon is achieved for every other industry by 2050 if the food system remains unchanged, we will still fail to achieve the Paris Agreement. Fortunately, a new study in Nature revealed that a worldwide plant-forward food system could likely keep us within a 1.5 ºC temperature rise because of increased “carbon sequestration through ecosystem restoration.”
Study: Forests – 2 articles
Apple News: Where have our forests gone? 15-year-old Indian student Vanya Sayimane writes about how climate change has affected her home in the Western Ghats. I was born in the middle of dense forests in the Western Ghats, a chain of mountains that runs along the western coast of India. The lives of my community here are woven between the valleys, forests and mountains. The Western Ghats protect our people from floods and other natural calamities that affect coastal areas. I love the greenery and liveliness of Western Ghats. They are very special to me. But over the past few years, I’ve seen climate change threaten everything I love. The Western Ghats and the futures of the people who live there are now at stake due to flooding, drought, deforestation and the building of dams and nuclear power plants.
Phys.org: Why forests in the Andes are crucial to fighting climate change. Andean forests sequester a significant amount of carbon from the atmosphere. Trees and forests play a huge role in the carbon cycle, or the movement of carbon dioxide through the atmosphere. Thanks to activities like deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, there is now 2.5 times the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere than there was before industrialization. Without forests, says Francisco Cuesta, an ecologist at La Universidad de las Américas in Ecuador, we would be dealing with even more CO2. A study out this month in the journal Nature Communications, authored by a team of 28 scientists including Cuesta, looks at how the carbon cycling process is playing out in the tropical and subtropical forests of the Andes.
There’s a Booming Business in America’s Forests. Some Aren’t Happy About It
New York Times: There’s a Booming Business in America’s Forests. Some Aren’t Happy About It. The fuel pellet industry is thriving. Supporters see it as a climate-friendly source of rural jobs. For others, it’s a polluter and destroyer of nature.
In 2013, Kathy Claiborne got a noisy new neighbor. That’s when a huge factory that dries and presses wood into roughly cigarette-filter-sized pellets roared to life near her tidy home in one of the state’s poorest counties. On a recent afternoon in her front yard, near the end of a cul-de-sac, the mill rumbled like an uncomfortably close jet engine.
“I can’t even recall the last time I had a good night’s sleep,” said Ms. Claiborne, who in 2009 moved to the neighborhood, which is majority African-American. She wears a mask outdoors, she said, because dust from the plant can make it hard to breathe.
The Daily Climate, April 19, 2021
Articles include: forests cut for fuel; immigration driven by climate change; infrastructure funding and orphan wells; Greta Thunberg and Congress; ALEC fighting climate change science; bottom trawling fishing; US and China; climate guide for kids; drought in the western US & Mexico; methane & old wells; Louisiana oil haven; allergies worsened by climate change.
What a 1,600-year-old New Zealand tree can tell us about climate change
Vox: What a 1,600-year-old New Zealand tree can tell us about climate change. Buried in mud for millennia, some of the hulking kauri trees in rural Northland are portals to the past, present, and future of Earth’s climate.
This story is part of Down to Earth, a new Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.
In February 2019, Mark Magee was scraping the bucket of his 45-ton excavator through a hillside when it hit something 30 feet down that wouldn’t budge.
It was high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Magee, a construction foreman, was clearing a platform for a new geothermal power plant near Ngāwhā, a tiny community in New Zealand’s Northland region, the long peninsula that stretches from the city of Auckland to the country’s northern tip.
He called in additional digger drivers to help. Gradually, as the machines peeled away the mudstone encasing the obstinate object, they realized it was a tree — and not an ordinary tree. More and more of it appeared, a seemingly endless log. When it lay uncovered, complete with a medusa-like rootball, it measured 65 feet long and 8 feet across, and weighed 65 tons.
Tool: Yale Climate Connections, April 16, 2021
Articles include: 12 books on repairing our relationship with our only planet; How addressing climate change can also improve public health; Researchers examine how world-apart ice sheets influence each other; New York City group retrofits apartments without displacing residents; Trees planted along Colorado’s Yampa River will help protect it in hot, dry weather; What can you do with old wind turbine blades? One option: Upcycle them; Managers of Assateague Island prepare for more sea-level rise, worsening storms; Online tool helps people make their homes energy efficient.
The Daily Climate, April 8, 2021
Articles include: Marine life can’t survive at the equator; Black climate agenda; Biden to court – dismiss children’s lawsuit; ghost forests and sea level rise; Enbridge pipeline & Michigan; handling the climate crisis; nuclear heating plant; lightning & the Arctic; Report: Canadian wood pellet industry; EPA reverses trump; polar bears’ food plight; PayPal net-zero pledge.