National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

End fracking exemptions, a threat to maternal and public health

StatNews: End fracking exemptions, a threat to maternal and public health.

The adoption of safe, clean, renewable energy is an essential element for sustaining the U.S. economy and maintaining the health of its citizens. There are many paths to these goals. Hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, is not one of them.

To protect communities across the country today — from the Santa Maria Basin in California to the Appalachian Mountains in northern New York — as well as future generations, the country must rapidly phase out harmful fracking.

Fracking involves injecting pressurized water mixed with chemicals and sand into shale formations to break up bedrock and release the oil they hold. Environmental pollutants caused by fracking are known risk factors for congenital heart defects, hormonal disruption, maternal stress, and preterm birth. Fracking rigs have become so abundant in the U.S. that their flares can now be seen from NASA satellites. An estimated 17 million Americans live within 1 mile of a fracking site.

Study: NASA measures direct evidence humans are causing climate change

CBS News: NASA measures direct evidence humans are causing climate change. It may come as a surprise, given the extensive body of evidence connecting humans to climate change, that directly-observed proof of the human impact on the climate had still eluded science. That is, until now.

In a first-of-its-kind study, NASA has calculated the individual driving forces of recent climate change through direct satellite observations. And consistent with what climate models have shown for decades, greenhouse gases and suspended pollution particles in the atmosphere, called aerosols, from the burning of fossil fuels are responsible for the lion’s share of modern warming.

In other words, NASA has proven what is driving climate change through direct observations — a gold standard in scientific research.

Study: New way to measure Antarctic snowfall helps predict the ice sheet’s survival

National Geographic: New way to measure Antarctic snowfall helps predict the ice sheet’s survival. A new satellite finds a surprise: Atmospheric rivers of moisture can dump huge amounts of snow over Antarctica, and now we can track it incredibly closely.

A new way of studying Antarctica’s weather, not from Earth’s surface but from space, is revealing a phenomenon that could help determine how quickly the enormous ice sheet melts in a warming world.

The study, published on Tuesday in Geophysical Research Letters, focuses on “atmospheric rivers,” huge belts of water vapor that form over tropical and subtropical oceans, then ride the winds that encircle the planet, delivering sometimes copious amounts of rain and snow. One famous atmospheric river, called the Pineapple Express, is responsible for much of the water supply for the West Coast of the United States.

Using data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission, launched into orbit in late 2018, a team of researchers found that atmospheric rivers were a major driver of precipitation, mostly snowfall, across West Antarctica in 2019, helping to replenish mass that the ice sheet is quickly losing. With warming seas expected to send bigger, longer-lasting atmospheric rivers to Antarctica’s shores in the future, the research points to an understudied and little-understood process that could help to slow the ice sheet’s meltdown—or accelerate it, depending on the timing of the storms.

Biden Moves to Dial Down America’s Soaring Methane Emissions

The Revelator: Biden Moves to Dial Down America’s Soaring Methane Emissions. Experts say the new administration can jumpstart climate protections by taking on rising methane emissions, but it won’t be easy or quick.

On his first day in office, President Biden signed a sweeping executive order that stops the Keystone XL pipeline and pauses oil lease sales in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But behind these headlines, the order also requires a thorough review of the Trump administration’s rollbacks on methane pollution. The action signals that the new president may agree with experts who say one of our biggest environmental challenges could also be one of our best opportunities to tackle climate change.

Methane — an invisible and odorless gas — makes up just a tiny trace of the Earth’s atmosphere and survives in the air for only about 10 years before degrading. Yet NASA scientists say this humble molecule has driven one-quarter of human-caused global warming to date.

“Methane is the second–most important heat-trapping pollutant after carbon dioxide, but it packs a bigger wallop in the near term,” says David Doniger, senior strategic director of Climate and Clean Energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and a former member of White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Studies: Earth is now losing 1.2 trillion tons of ice each year. And it’s going to get worse

Washington Post: Earth is now losing 1.2 trillion tons of ice each year. And it’s going to get worse. Ice is melting faster worldwide, with greater sea-level rise anticipated, studies show.

Global ice loss has increased rapidly over the past two decades, and scientists are still underestimating just how much sea levels could rise, according to alarming new research published this month.

From the thin ice shield covering most of the Arctic Ocean to the mile-thick mantle of the polar ice sheets, ice losses have soared from about 760 billion tons per year in the 1990s to more than 1.2 trillion tons per year in the 2010s, a new study released Monday shows. That is an increase of more than 60 percent, equating to 28 trillion tons of melted ice in total — and it means that roughly 3 percent of all the extra energy trapped within Earth’s system by climate change has gone toward turning ice into water.

There is good reason to think the rate of ice melt will continue to accelerate. A second, NASA-backed study on the Greenland ice sheet, for instance, finds that no less than 74 major glaciers that terminate in deep, warming ocean waters are being severely undercut and weakened.

The Plan to Build a Global Network of Floating Power Stations

Wired: The Plan to Build a Global Network of Floating Power Stations. A lot of thermal energy is trapped in the ocean. An ex-NASA researcher has figured out how it might generate unlimited clean power for aquatic robots.

EARLY LAST YEAR, just a few weeks before the pandemic brought life in the United States to a standstill, Yi Chao and a small team of researchers dropped a slender metal tube into the Pacific Ocean off the Hawaiian coast. After nearly two decades as an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Chao had left the space agency to commercialize a seafaring generator that can harness the limitless thermal energy trapped in the world’s oceans. His company, Seatrec, is based just down the road from his old NASA stomping grounds in Pasadena, but Chao regularly travels to Hawaii to test hardware in the tranquil, cerulean waters around the Big Island. On this trip, Chao and his team planned to push their invention deeper than it had ever gone before.

Yale Climate Connections, November 20, 2020

Articles include: Books, reports for jump-starting U.S. climate action in 2021; ‘blunt’ talk on climate; October 2020 was fourth-warmest October on record, NOAA and NASA report; Energy-efficient homes and power outages; Arctic wildfires; electric vehicles from burdening the grid; tracking flooding in real time; Identifying climate risks can help businesses become more resilient.

Climate scientists on Earth’s two futures.

CBS News discusses Climate scientists on Earth’s two futures. The worst effects of climate change don’t have to happen, scientists say. But humans’ actions in the near future will determine if they do. For more than three decades, climate scientists have accurately forecast how carbon emissions would cause a global rise in temperatures. Now they’re looking ahead at the decades to come.

When it comes to predicting the future, scientists do not see just one possible outcome. Rather, they say the actions humans take in the near-term will have a major effect on how Earth changes for generations beyond.

“We need to change our course in the next few years because it’s still possible, I think, to avoid the worst outcomes,” Former NASA scientist James Hansen told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

Michael Mann, a geophysicist whose work has shown today’s elevated rate of warming began with the industrial revolution, sees this bit of good news through the climate models scientists work from today. Current projections create a more comprehensive look at how the climate responds to carbon dioxide, including how the ocean and plants can absorb some of the carbon humans have released into the atmosphere.

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.

Study: Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration

ProPublica discusses how Climate Change will force a new American migration. Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?

August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.

The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (A detailed analysis of the maps is available here.)

One influential 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone.

research from Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread.

Given that a new study projects a 20% increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence.

Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers.

By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20%.

The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10%.