Author Archives: KeiraFoulds

20 Percent of Plant Species Could Go Extinct

by KeiraFoulds Posted on May 13, 2016

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Climate change, deforestation, and pollution are wreaking havoc on the Earth’s vegetation. djgis/Shutterstock One out of every five plant species on Earth is now threatened with extinction. That’s the disturbing conclusion of a major report released this week by scientists at Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. The planet’s vegetation—from grasslands to deserts to tropical rainforests—is being hit hard by human activity. And deforestation, pollution, agriculture, and climate change are all playing a role. The sliver of good news, though, is that some researchers are hopeful that people will be able to act in time to avert the worst of the impending crisis. “I am reasonably optimistic,” said Kathy Willis, Kew’s science director, in an interview with our partners at the Guardian. “Once you know [about a problem], you can do something about it. The biggest problem is not knowing.” But others take a darker view. “Regardless of what humans do to the climate, there will still be a rock orbiting the sun,” said University of Hawaii scientist Hope Jahren in a recent interview with Indre Viskotas on the Inquiring Minds podcast. Jahren is a geobiologist—she studies how the earth (“geo”) and life (“bio”) come together to shape our world. “I’m interested in how the parts of the planet that aren’t alive—rocks and rivers and rain and clouds—turn into the…parts of the world that are alive: leaves and moss and the things that eat those things,” she explains. And what she’s seeing isn’t good. “We are already seeing extinctions,” she says. “We’re already seeing the balance of who can thrive and who can’t thrive in…the plant world radically shifted. In a lot of ways, I think that train has passed.” You can listen to her full interview below: Jahren, who is the author of a new book called Lab Girl, was recently included onTime magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people. She’s also an outspoken voice for gender equality and the fight against sexual harassment and assault in the scientific community. Part of Jahren’s work has focused on reconstructing the climate of the Eocene, the geologic epoch that lasted from about 56 million years ago to about 34 million years ago. In the middle of that period, about 45 million years ago, the world was so warm that massive deciduous forests were growing above the Arctic Circle—despite the fact that, as Jahren points out, the region saw little-to-no sunshine for part of the year. Jahren and her colleagues study fossilized plant tissues left over from these ancient forests in order to understand how the climatic factors of the time—light levels, atmospheric composition, water, etc.—combined to “make possible this life in the darkness.” She compares her work to investigating a crime scene. “Almost anything you come upon could have information in it,” she says. Jahren’s description of a lush Arctic full of plants and animals is striking. Imagining that world, she says, is “a really neat thing to do when you’re…juxtaposing that image against that fact that you’re near the North Pole, and there’s not a soul in sight for thousands of miles, and there’s not a green thing in sight for hundreds of miles.” That may be one of the reasons why she speaks so passionately about environmental destruction in the present day. “The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree,” she says. “It’s so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it’s worth interrogating every time we do it.” In the end, though, Jahren isn’t sure that science will lead humanity to make better decisions about the planet. Instead, she says, “I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.” Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes orRSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow, like us on Facebook, and check out show notes and other cool stuff on Tumblr.

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20 Percent of Plant Species Could Go Extinct

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20 Percent of Plant Species Could Go Extinct

Posted in bamboo, Brita, eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, global climate change, LAI, Landmark, Monterey, ONA, OXO, Paradise, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 20 Percent of Plant Species Could Go Extinct

China, Coal. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

by KeiraFoulds Posted on June 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Guardian

Our Climate Desk partners at the Guardian have published a beautiful—and terrifying—multimedia story from deep inside China’s coal belt. It’s the third installment in the paper’s ongoing “carbon bombs” series: investigations into giant fossil fuel projects from around the world that are super-charging global warming, or that have the potential to do so. Today’s deep-dive into China’s ravenous use of coal is eye-opening not only because it explores the long-lasting impact of burning coal on the nation’s health, but also because it illustrates the country’s outsized impact on global climate change through coal-related emissions. Here are some highlights from the Guardian story (which you should also check out for the gorgeous video and graphics):

1. “Chinese miners last year dug up 3.87bn tonnes of coal, more than enough to keep all four of the next largest users—the United States, India, the European Union and Russia—supplied for a year.” I’m always amazed by just how much coal China produces and consumes. Here’s how China’s coal production compared to other countries:

The Guardian

2. “Air pollution in China, from its factories and power stations, has got so bad that it kills over half a million people a year.” The impact of coal on China’s air is something my colleague Jaeah Lee and I witnessed first-hand when we traveled to through China for our investigation into China’s fracking boom. Potentially lethal smog stalked us everywhere we went, but especially bad was the coal belt around Shijiazhuang, where smog reaches emergency levels one out of every three days each year—twice as often as in Beijing.

If nothing is done to slash the levels of toxic smog in China’s air, some 257,000 Chinese people could die over the next decade from pollution-related diseases, according to a study released in February by Peking University and Greenpeace. According to a separate Greenpeace study, 90 percent of 360 Chinese cities surveyed failed to meet the country’s national air quality standard in the first quarter of this year. Forty percent of the cities registered air pollution levels that were twice the national standard. Toxic smog billowing from China’s coal-fired power plants is even making snowstorms in the US worse.

This video we produced during our investigation attempts to capture some of the consequences of China’s extraordinary dependence of coal and its impact on air quality and health:

3. “The fuel China dug up last year alone will produce around 9bn tonnes of carbon dioxide as it burns, more than all the coal used around the world in 1990.” Constituting 70 percent of China’s energy supply, coal has allowed China to become the world’s second-largest economy in just a few decades, hauling millions of people out of poverty. But the cost is being felt around the world in the staggering amount of carbon pollution China generates. Again, here’s a Guardian graphic showing just how much China outstrips the rest of the world in terms of carbon emissions, driven by its addiction to coal:

The Guardian

4. There was a drop in Chinese coal demand last year for the first in more than a decade. But China won’t be making permanent cuts to its coal use for years. Instead, the Chinese government has proposed slowing the growth of its coal use by 2020. That promise followed the historic climate deal between the US and China announced in November last year, in which China promised to peak its emissions around 2030.

5. The Chinese government accepted the scientific evidence for global warming years ago. This might seem like a small point, but it’s significant when you consider just how much climate denial has a grip on US politics. No such political resistance exists in China, and that means China “is pushing harder on more fronts than any other government on Earth to develop other sources” of energy, according to Atlantic China expert James Fallows, who spoke to us as part of our fracking investigation. China has an enormous amount to gain from throwing everything at solving the problem—and a lot to lose if it attempts fail, including the goodwill of its people, who are fed up with putrid air and the health impacts on their kids. The results of China’s embrace of the scientific consensus about climate change can be seen most clearly in its booming solar industry, as our peak inside one of the world’s biggest solar company reveals:

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China, Coal. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, global climate change, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on China, Coal. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

We export carbon emissions to China, get smog back in return

by KeiraFoulds Posted on January 21, 2014

We export carbon emissions to China, get smog back in return

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Barack Obama recently warned supporters at a fundraiser that the U.S. will be “four feet under water” if China and India start consuming energy the way Americans do, The New Yorker reports.

The comment reflects growing international angst over the swelling carbon footprints of the two developing countries — each of which is home to more than a billion people, many of them understandably eager to emulate Western lifestyles.

But in a draft report, the U.N. is reminding Western countries that the carbon footprints of developing countries are oversized in part because they are manufacturing so much of our junk for us. From The Guardian:

The world’s richest countries are increasingly outsourcing their carbon pollution to China and other rising economies, according to a draft [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report.

Outsourcing of emissions comes in the form of electronic devices such as smartphones, cheap clothes and other goods manufactured in China and other rising economies but consumed in the US and Europe. …

Much of that rise was due to the burning of coal, the report says. And much of that coal was used to power factories in China and other rising economies that produce goods for US and European consumers, the draft adds.

The heavy reliance on coal by China, India, and the like, combined with the transportation of raw materials and finished goods, actually makes the problem of global warming worse than if we had manufactured our own consumer goods.

And factories in Asia aren’t just pumping out CO2 that’s warming the whole planet. They’re also pumping out air pollutants that cause smog and make people sick, and those pollutants are coming to U.S. shores, according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s The New York Times on the study’s findings:

Filthy emissions from China’s export industries are carried across the Pacific Ocean and contribute to air pollution in the Western United States, according to a paper published Monday by a prominent American science journal. …

The movement of air pollutants associated with the production of goods in China for the American market has resulted in a decline in air quality in the Western United States, the scientists wrote, though less manufacturing in the United States does mean cleaner air in the American East.

Here’s more on the study from U.C. Irvine, where one of its authors is based:

Los Angeles experiences at least one extra day a year of smog that exceeds federal ozone limits because of nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide emitted by Chinese factories making goods for export, the analysis found. On other days, as much as a quarter of the sulfate pollution on the U.S. West Coast is tied to Chinese exports. All the contaminants tracked in the study are key ingredients in unhealthy smog and soot.

China is not responsible for the lion’s share of pollution in the U.S. Cars, trucks and refineries pump out far more. But powerful global winds known as “westerlies” can push airborne chemicals across the ocean in days, particularly during the spring, causing dangerous spikes in contaminants. Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins in California and other Western states.

Black carbon is a particular problem: Rain doesn’t easily wash it out of the atmosphere, so it persists across long distances. Like other air pollutants, it’s been linked to a litany of health problems, from increased asthma to cancer, emphysema, and heart and lung disease.

Karma’s a bitch.


Source
Going the distance: On and off the road with Barack Obama, The New Yorker
CO2 emissions are being ‘outsourced’ by rich countries to rising economies, The Guardian
China Exports Pollution to U.S., Study Finds, The New York Times
Made in China for us: Air pollution as well as exports, U.C. Irvine

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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We export carbon emissions to China, get smog back in return

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We export carbon emissions to China, get smog back in return