Climate Change / Global Warming Discussion

[mspohr]

‘It’s a miracle crop’: the pioneers pushing the powers of seaweed

In addition to bolstering the state’s floundering maritime industries, the brown, fibrous sea vegetable is effective at absorbing carbon, in addition to fighting ocean acidification. Scientists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Red Sea Research Center estimate that coastal habitats and wetlands absorb five times more carbon than terrestrial forests.

Although scientists are elated about kelp’s capacity as a carbon sink, the atmosphere only nets a benefit if the kelp is harvested and used. If the seaweed stays in the sea it disintegrates in the summer sun, releasing the carbon and nitrogen it has absorbed from the ocean to dissolve back into the water. Enter: kelp as food. Many consumers are already familiar with nori seaweed in sushi rolls, and seaweed salads, but there is a widening interest in kelp from top chefs, and health food grocery stores stocking products such as kelp cubes which can be added to scones or pasta sauces, cookies or soups. Akua debuted a kelp burger earlier this year, and it had many climate activists thinking this could be the new shift.

 

[DrLOAC]

‘It’s a miracle crop’: the pioneers pushing the powers of seaweed

In addition to bolstering the state’s floundering maritime industries, the brown, fibrous sea vegetable is effective at absorbing carbon, in addition to fighting ocean acidification. Scientists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Red Sea Research Center estimate that coastal habitats and wetlands absorb five times more carbon than terrestrial forests.

Although scientists are elated about kelp’s capacity as a carbon sink, the atmosphere only nets a benefit if the kelp is harvested and used. If the seaweed stays in the sea it disintegrates in the summer sun, releasing the carbon and nitrogen it has absorbed from the ocean to dissolve back into the water. Enter: kelp as food. Many consumers are already familiar with nori seaweed in sushi rolls, and seaweed salads, but there is a widening interest in kelp from top chefs, and health food grocery stores stocking products such as kelp cubes which can be added to scones or pasta sauces, cookies or soups. Akua debuted a kelp burger earlier this year, and it had many climate activists thinking this could be the new shift.

Certain seaweeds can be used in cattle feed (~1% by weight if I recall) and it cuts methane emissions by over 60%.

 

[mspohr]

‘I’ve never said we should plant a trillion trees’: what ecopreneur Thomas Crowther did next

Thomas Crowther understands more than most the danger of simple, optimistic messages about combating the climate crisis. In July 2019, the British ecologist co-authored a study estimating that Earth had space for an extra trillion trees on land not used for agriculture or settlement. Its implications were intoxicatingly hopeful. By restoring forests in an area roughly the size of China, the press release accompanying the paper suggested two-thirds of all emissions from human activities still present in the atmosphere could be removed.

In May 2020, the study’s authors made three corrections, including an acknowledgment that they were incorrect to state “tree restoration is the most effective solution to climate change to date”, and clarifying that new forests could absorb about half as much carbon from the air as the paper initially appeared to suggest. They had already issued a lengthy response to criticisms in the journal Science, explaining that they did not mean reforestation was a potential magic bullet or a substitute for reducing fossil fuel use. Reforestation was a potent tool for climate crisis mitigation, just less so than initially suggested, and certainly not a replacement for decarbonisation.

 

[mspohr]

To Save Lake Tahoe, They Spared No Expense. The Fire Came Over the Ridge Anyway. To Save Lake Tahoe, They Spared No Expense. The Fire Came Over the Ridge Anyway.

The blazes in Sierra forests have exposed the domino effects of climate change on firefighting challenges: Frequent heat waves and overall higher temperatures have desiccated West Coast flora, making it more vulnerable to large fires. Droughts have weakened trees, encouraging insect infestations that have contributed to the deaths of close to 150 million trees. This creates more fuel for fires.

Scientists say there is also a correlation between global warming and the increased wind conditions that have fanned fierce wildfires across the state. And they point to a need for better forest management, thinning out some of the thickest woods.

 

[mspohr]

Gizmodo: Utility That Blacked Out New Orleans Was Too Busy Fighting Climate Regulations. Utility That Left New Orleans in the Dark Has History Fighting Climate and Resilience Rules

Entergy has known for decades—including longer than almost any of the general public who are suffering through Ida and its aftermath—that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, that climate change causes more extreme weather, and that these effects would create vulnerabilities for the electric grid,” David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, said in an email. “Despite that knowledge, Entergy has used deception, bullying and political power only available to monopolies to continue burning fossil fuels and to delay or kill efforts that might have made its customers become more resilient to climate change.”

Yet in the intervening years, Entergy has consistently opposed efforts to get off oil and gas and efforts to make the grid more resilient. Last year, it announced a plan to reach net zero by 2050... by expanding the use of carbon-polluting natural gas. The previous year, the firm pushed to gut a plan to pay customers for excess solar energy that they sell back to the grid, and according to emails obtained by Energy and Policy Institute, Entergy’s president of utility operations Rod West baselessly accused the “solar lobby” of stoking a “class war.”

 

[mspohr]

Even Oilprice sees the problem.

OilPrice.com: The One And Only Way To Avoid A Climate Crisis. The One And Only Way To Avoid A Climate Crisis | OilPrice.com

It is a dangerous idea to use a ‘technological will fix all’ approach to justify the pursuit of continuous growth. Instead, we need to start to wrestle with the idea of Degrowth. According to The Absolute Impact 2021 report by Carbon Tracker Initiative, at the current rate of emission, i.e. 41.5GtCO2 per year, we only have 22 years before we see global temperatures rise by 1.75 degrees. That gives an idea as to how quickly the world needs to deal with its emissions problem.

 

[eevee-fan]

Gizmodo: Utility That Blacked Out New Orleans Was Too Busy Fighting Climate Regulations. Utility That Left New Orleans in the Dark Has History Fighting Climate and Resilience Rules

Entergy has known for decades—including longer than almost any of the general public who are suffering through Ida and its aftermath—that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, that climate change causes more extreme weather, and that these effects would create vulnerabilities for the electric grid,” David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, said in an email. “Despite that knowledge, Entergy has used deception, bullying and political power only available to monopolies to continue burning fossil fuels and to delay or kill efforts that might have made its customers become more resilient to climate change.”

Yet in the intervening years, Entergy has consistently opposed efforts to get off oil and gas and efforts to make the grid more resilient. Last year, it announced a plan to reach net zero by 2050... by expanding the use of carbon-polluting natural gas. The previous year, the firm pushed to gut a plan to pay customers for excess solar energy that they sell back to the grid, and according to emails obtained by Energy and Policy Institute, Entergy’s president of utility operations Rod West baselessly accused the “solar lobby” of stoking a “class war.”

Another Darwin award winner!

 

[eevee-fan]

Hm... when was the last time this happened?

 

[jimm01]

The “headwind” caused by climate change will only become stronger, says Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, one of the study’s authors. Their research found that the sensitivity of agricultural productivity increases as temperatures rise. In other words, each additional fraction of a degree is more detrimental to food production than the last. That is especially bad news for food producers in places, such as the tropics, that are already warm. Another study predicts that for every degree that global temperatures rise, mean maize yields will fall by 7.4%, wheat yields will fall by 6% and rice yields will fall by 3.2%. Those three crops supply around two-thirds of all the calories that humans consume.

In the coming decades there will be more mouths to feed. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an American research group, guesses that the global population will rise from around 7.8bn to 9.7bn by 2064 (after which it will fall). Growing middle classes in many developing countries are demanding a wider variety of food, and more of it.

Climate change will alter where many crops are grown

That means gains for some people, but losses for more

www.economist.com

 

[mspohr]

Climate crisis likely creating extreme winter weather events, says report

The climate crisis has not only been leaving deadly heatwaves and more destructive hurricanes in its wake, but also probably creating extreme winter weather events, according to a new report released on Thursday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science.

The new report, titled Linking Arctic variability and change with extreme winter weather in the United States, has helped to clarify that connection. Its authors argued that this type of Arctic change actually increased the chances of tightly spinning winds above the North Pole, known as the Arctic stratospheric polar vortex, being stretched and thus boosting the chances of extreme weather events in the US and beyond.

 

[mspohr]

Corporate America Is Lobbying for Climate Disaster Opinion | Corporate America Is Lobbying for Climate Disaster

Why does Mickey Mouse want to destroy civilization? OK, that’s probably not what Disney executives think they’re doing. But the Walt Disney Company, along with other corporate titans, including ExxonMobil and Pfizer, is reportedly gearing up to support a major lobbying effort against President Biden’s $3.5 trillion investment plan — a plan that may well be our last chance to take serious action against global warming before it becomes catastrophic.

What might be politically feasible — just — is a set of more targeted measures, in particular an effort to decarbonize electricity generation. Generation is, in economic terms, a relatively soft target, because near-miraculous declines in the cost of renewable energy mean that we already have the technology needed to move away from fossil fuels fairly cheaply. And electricity generation isn’t just directly responsible for about a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions; if electricity becomes a clean power source, that would open the door to large reductions in emissions from vehicles, buildings and industry via widespread electrification.

 

[mspohr]

Earth’s tipping points could be closer than we think. Our current plans won’t work | George Monbiot

Current plans to avoid catastrophe would work in a simple system like a washbasin, in which you can close the tap until the inflow is less than the outflow. But they are less likely to work in complex systems, such as the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere. Complex systems seek equilibrium. When they are pushed too far out of one equilibrium state, they can flip suddenly into another. A common property of complex systems is that it’s much easier to push them past a tipping point than to push them back. Once a transition has happened, it cannot realistically be reversed.

The old assumption that the Earth’s tipping points are a long way off is beginning to look unsafe. A recent paper warns that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – the system that distributes heat around the world and drives the Gulf Stream – may now be “close to a critical transition”. This circulation has flipped between “on” and “off” states several times in prehistory, plunging northern Europe and eastern North America into unbearable cold, heating the tropics, disrupting monsoons.

 

[mspohr]

Forget plans to lower emissions by 2050 – this is deadly procrastination | Peter Kalmus

The world has by and large adopted “net zero by 2050” as its de facto climate goal, but two fatal flaws hide in plain sight within those 16 characters. One is “net zero.” The other is “by 2050”. These two flaws provide cover for big oil and politicians who wish to preserve the status quo. Together they comprise a deadly prescription for inaction and catastrophically high levels of irreversible climate and ecological breakdown.

Meanwhile, “net zero” is a phrase that represents magical thinking rooted in our society’s technology fetish. Just presuppose enough hypothetical carbon capture and you can pencil out a plan for meeting any climate goal, even while allowing the fossil fuel industry to keep growing.

But it’s now apparent that even the current 1.1C of global heating is not a “safe” level. Climate catastrophes are arriving with a frequency and ferocity that have shocked climate scientists. The fact that climate models failed to predict the intensity of the summer’s heatwaves and flooding suggests that severe impacts will come sooner than previously thought. Madagascar is on the brink of the first climate famine, and developments such as multi-regional crop losses and climate warfare even before reaching 1.5C should no longer be ruled out.

Due to the decades of inaction dishonestly engineered by fossil fuel executives, the speed and scale now required is staggering. There is no longer any incremental way out. It’s time to grow up and let go of the fantasy that we can get out of this without big changes that affect our lives. Policy steps that seem radical today – for example, proposals to nationalize the fossil fuel industry and ration oil and gas supplies – will seem less radical with each new climate disaster. Climate emergency mode will require personal sacrifice, especially from the high-emitting rich. But civilizational collapse would be unimaginably worse.

 

[jimm01]

Mapping Methane Emissions in California

Using precision instruments and new mapping and machine-learning tools, a research team has been pinpointing sources of the greenhouse gas.

 

[mspohr]

Walmart has a plan to tackle the climate crisis. Can it pull it off?

Walmart is attempting to erase its huge climate footprint while continuing to sell tens of millions of low-priced products

www.theguardian.com

 

[CyberGus]

Why a Warming Arctic Has the U.S. Coast Guard Worried About the Rest of the Country

As the Arctic warms it impacts the globe, creating more work for the U.S. Coast Guard, and worsening weather disasters nationwide.

time.com

 

[CyberGus]

Rain fell on Greenland's ice sheet for the first time ever known. Alarms should ring | Kim Heacox

Climate scientists believe that if Greenland continues to rapidly melt, tens of millions of people around the world could face yearly flooding and displacement by 2030

www.theguardian.com

 

[eevee-fan]

Scientists potty train cows to use 'MooLoo' to help the environment

Turns out cows can be potty trained as easily as toddlers. Maybe easier.

www.marketwatch.com

 

[eevee-fan]

 

[JRP3]

Turns out cows can be potty trained as easily as toddlers. Maybe easier.

Maybe we shouldn't eat them then if they're smarter than toddlers...