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California’s battle against climate change is going up in smoke

by SheltonUPJ Posted on December 10, 2018

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This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Just a few months ago, climate activists in California were celebrating an impressive victory: New data showed that the state had brought greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels, four years earlier than planned. The win, a cut of emissions to 429.4 million metric tons (the equivalent of taking 12 million cars off the road) was the result of steady decreases in emissions most years.

“California set the toughest emissions targets in the nation, tracked progress and delivered results,” Governor Jerry Brown tweeted. The next step was to cut emissions another 40 percent by 2030 — “a heroic and very ambitious goal.”

But by November, skies across the state were gray. Wildfires were raging, including a blaze which would prove to be the deadliest and most destructive in state history. The conflagrations have set California back: The recent Camp and Woolsey Fires, officials say, have produced emissions equivalent to roughly 5.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, more than three times the total decrease in emissions in 2015. Recently, the Department of the Interior announced that new data shows the 2018 California wildfire season is estimated to have released emissions equal to about one year of power use.

California’s wildfire problem

Of course, wildfires are not new to the West Coast. But the kind of vast, devastating conflagrations seen in California in recent years — this fall’s Camp Fire decimated 153,000 acres in the Butte County area and destroyed almost 14,000 homes — are becoming more common. According to the state’s most recent climate assessment, California could see a 77 percent increase in the average area burned in wildfires by 2100.

All this is bad news for a state committed to decreasing its carbon footprint. But California’s official emissions score will not be affected by the extraordinary amount of carbon released during wildfires this year, because the agency that calculates emissions — the California Air Resources Board — considers wildfires to be a part of the earth’s natural carbon cycle. (The ARB is a regulatory body and, as agency spokesperson Dave Clegern noted, “can only regulate what can be controlled.”)

But the agency is looking into ways to better track carbon emissions from conflagrations. Right now, Clegern says, the ARB uses data including the size of the fire and the kind of fuel burned to estimate its carbon footprint. But, he said, scientists don’t currently have a good way to accurately calculate emissions from disasters like the Camp Fire, which burn residential and commercial properties. While those findings won’t be included in the state’s emissions tally, Clegern said it’s still important to gather the data: “We need to know what goes up in the air when these things happen. Our first mission is to protect public health.”

The increasing size of wildfires in California is driven by several factors linked to climate change, scientists say, including a shift in the jet stream that causes the state to suffer more hot, dry spells. The state’s seven-year drought has weakened forests and left millions of acres highly susceptible to lethal attacks from insects like bark beetle. In recent years, more than 100 million trees are estimated to have died statewide. Dry, dead forests are a fire hazard, and they pose a threat so severe that, in 2015, Governor Brown declared a state of emergency and created a task force to identify areas of particular risk. This January, scientists at the University of California-Berkeley reported that the situation was “compounded by the long-established removal” of naturally occurring, frequent, and low-intensity fires in the state’s forested areas, “a key ecosystem process” in hazardous wildfire prevention.

Aside from preventing deadly conflagrations, protecting forests also means preserving the state’s best tool for regulating carbon emissions. By removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it as carbon in soil, branches, and tree trunks, forest have historically worked as a “carbon sink” for the state. But research shows that between 2001 and 2010, tree die-off meant California’s forests emitted more carbon than they sequestered.

Wildfires accelerate this process. Conflagrations release carbon into the atmosphere as they burn and, once the smoke has cleared, leave fewer trees to sequester carbon. In the years following a fire, dead trees begin to release their stored carbon back into the atmosphere. And a recent study also showed that forests which burned at high severity suffered worryingly low regeneration rates. In some places, no trees grew back at all.

But the damage doesn’t end there. When a forest is burned for the first time, “between 5 and 20 percent of the carbon goes up,” explained Nic Enstice, regional science coordinator at the state’s Sierra Nevada Conservancy agency. That’s because even a high-severity fire will not incinerate every tree in a forest. But if a second wildfire ravages through an already-burned area, the dead trees are more readily consumed, resulting in even greater carbon release.

The fire season’s growing effect on the state gives scientists all the more reason to study its emissions. “That’s the kind of issue we’re wrestling with now,” Clegern said.

California’s best hope for reaching its ambitious climate goals may lie in technology and rebuilding the state’s dilapidated forests. The state is relying on energy companies like utility giant PG&E to increase purchases of renewable power and invest heavily in burgeoning industries like electric transportation over the next decade. (PG&E, meanwhile, could be on the hook for billions of dollars in fines if an investigation finds the company’s equipment ignited some of California’s recent conflagrations.) Plans are also underway to push harder on forest restoration efforts: In May, the state announced its Forest Carbon Plan, which included a pledge to double the rate of forest rehabilitation to an average 35,000 acres a year by 2020.

“We know that we have to increase the health of our forests pretty significantly over the coming years,” Enstice said.“What we saw in the Camp Fire, the Rim Fire, the King Fire — these are all out of the normal patterns.”

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California’s battle against climate change is going up in smoke

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Report: Climate change could flush your savings

by StephanWph Posted on December 10, 2018

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Businesses say risks to their bottom line from climate climate add up to tens of billions of dollars. That may seem like a lot, but their actual risks to business are at least 100 times higher, according to a study just published in Nature Climate Change. Trillions, instead of billions.

The mismatch between those numbers could liquify the money you’ve been saving for retirement. Company climate plans “give little inkling that up to 30 percent of manageable assets globally may be at risk,” researchers wrote.

Climate change could soon be “the defining issue for financial stability” according to Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England and former head of the Financial Stability Board, the international body established to make recommendations to prevent financial collapse. To take that out of econo-speak: Failure to fully comprehend climate risks — droughts, floods, heat waves — could lead to an economic crisis that makes the Great Recession look like a joyride.

The researchers had access to a treasure trove of data, environmental disclosures from 1,630 companies worth more than more than two-thirds of the world’s stock markets added together. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive study of this kind ever done. Some 83 percent of businesses said that they faced real risks from climate change, but only 21 percent had quantified those risks.

It’s fascinating to see how the one in five companies that have crunched the numbers anticipate climate change will affect their business. For example, Samsung estimated that if a cyclone shut down one of their semiconductor factories for a single day it would cost $110 million. And when monsoon floods stopped Hewlett-Packard’s hard drive manufacturing in Thailand, back in 2011, it cost the company $4 billion.

“It was just endlessly surprising, as I did the data analysis, to see all the ways that companies were being affected, and how they were adapting,” said Allie Goldstein a scientist at Conservation International and lead author on the paper.

Airlines are preparing plans to carry fewer passengers and cargo on extreme heat days, because warmer air temperature generate less lift for their planes. Rubber companies, concerned about droughts killing rubber trees, are investing in synthetic alternatives. The Colombian utility Celsia SA is planting thousands of trees upstream from its hydroelectric dams to improve the watershed and hedge against declining rainfall. The Japanese conglomerate Hitachi is installing anti-flood bulkheads in its factories.

“There’s a real thought and creativity going into this, and coming up with an amazing diversity of solutions,” said Will Turner, an executive at Conservation International who also worked on the study. “That’s the positive. The negative is that it’s all incremental progress — it represents just a nascent understanding of the risks.”

You might give less credence to a study like this, because it suggests a need for more action on climate change and comes from an environmental organization that pushes for more action on climate change. But the estimates of investor risk come from the Economist Intelligence Unit, academic research, and the World Economic Forum, not Conservation International. In this paper, the researchers simply tallied up all the adaptations companies are making.

“I always encourage people to be smart consumers of science and look at the methods and also who is doing it,” Goldstein said. “They will find that these findings are based on real data, and real results, not preconceived notions.”

It’s easy to think that average people have little influence over major companies But we have to think differently, if we want to prevent a financial meltdown as climate disasters begin to pile up, Goldstein said. “There’s a tendency to think that this is someone else’s problem, but if you are an employee, or a customer, or an investor, I’d encourage people to think of this as something they can influence themselves, by making a call or asking a question.”

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Here’s a way to fight climate change: Empower women

by LaraeMcDonagh Posted on December 9, 2018

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This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“Gender and climate are inextricably linked,” said environmentalist and author Katharine Wilkinson on stage at TEDWomen last week, a gathering of women thought leaders and activists in Palm Desert, California.

Women, she says, are disproportionately affected by climate change. When communities are decimated by floods or droughts, tsunamis or fire, the most vulnerable among them suffer the most. Because women across the world have fewer rights, less money, and fewer freedoms, in those moments of extreme loss, women are often hit the hardest. “There’s greater risk of displacement, higher odds of being injured or killed during a natural disaster. Prolonged drought can precipitate early marriage, as families contend with scarcity. Floods can force last-resort prostitution as women struggle to make ends meet. These dynamics are most acute under conditions of poverty,” she says.

With several new reports painting an increasingly bleak picture of the state of the world’s climate, Wilkinson is delivering her message at a time when leaders on the global stage are looking for solutions. As thousands of people gather this week at a major climate summit known as COP24, Wilkinson is making a plea to open people’s eyes to one fact: Women’s rights are Earth’s rights. “In my experience, to have eyes wide open is to hold a broken heart every day,” she says.

But she has hope. Though women feel the effects of climate the most, they also represent an opportunity. “To address climate change, we must make gender equity a reality. And in the face of a seemingly impossible challenge, women and girls are a fierce source of possibility,” Wilkinson says. She and her team at the nonprofit Project Drawdown have been studying the real-world steps people can take to fix climate change, resulting in a best-selling 2017 book highlighting the top 100 solutions to reverse warming.

Her argument is that if women are empowered in three distinct ways, the downstream effects on the environment will make a huge difference in the fight for climate change. She argues that if women were treated more equally professionally, they’d have fewer kids and the land they farm would be more efficient, all of which would help save the planet.

“Women are the primary farmers of the world,” Wilkinson says. They produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in lower-income countries, she says, on small plots. These farmers are known as “smallholders.”

Yet due to local laws and entrenched biases, women farmers are given fewer resources and support from their governments, and they have fewer rights to their own land. For example, in some countries women are not allowed to own their own land, which makes it impossible for them to use the land as collateral for a loan to buy farming equipment. In other places, women are are not able to borrow money without a man’s signature. These restrictions hamper their ability to run their farms efficiently, leading to lower yields.

This is a problem not just for their earning potential, but for the Earth. Every year, humans clear-cut forests to create more agriculture land to grow crops to feed the world’s growing population. In turn, this deforestation increases the rate of climate change.

Instead of clear-cutting new land, why not work to make the existing farms run by women more efficient? “Close that gap and farm yields rise by 20 to 30 percent,” says Wilkinson. “Support women smallholders, realize higher yields, avoid deforestation, and sustain the life-giving power of forests.” If women’s farms yielded as much on average as farms run by men across the world, it would stop approximately 2 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere between now and 2050. “That’s on par with the impact household recycling can have globally,” she says.

Besides addressing inequality in agriculture, Wilkinson says giving women access to high-quality voluntary reproductive health care would have tremendous benefit for the climate.

“Curbing growth of our human population is a side effect,” she says — one that would reduce global emissions. Do that by making birth control and medical care more available to women across the world.

And do it by educating women. Wilkinson notes that more than 130 million women worldwide are denied access to school. Yet the more education a woman attains, the fewer children she has. From a conservation perspective, empowering women to have smaller families is an objectively positive outcome. “The right to go to school effects how many human beings live on this planet,” says Wilkinson.

With these three changes — empowerment of women farmers, increased global access to family planning, and the right to an education — Wilkinson and her team at Project Drawdown predict that by midcentury, improving gender equality could equal 1 billion fewer people on Earth.

“Gender equity is on par with wind turbines and solar panels and forests,” Wilkinson says, adding, “This does not mean women and girls are responsible for fixing everything. But we probably will.”

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Here’s a way to fight climate change: Empower women

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How to Fly Without Creating an Ounce of Trash

by KristiPulsford Posted on December 8, 2018

Air travel and?eco-conscious living are two things not often discussed together. It’s next to impossible to justify the vast amounts of fuel burned when flying and the airline industry is notorious for its wastefulness.

That said, traveling the globe is a part of modern day life. Sometimes, taking an airplane is simply unavoidable. Hopping a flight or two this year? Here are some personal steps you can take to minimize wastefulness.

When you pack

  1. Aim for solid beauty products in zero waste packaging. Think tooth powder, bars of soap, and solid shampoos and conditioners.
  2. Bring multipurpose products. For example, you can use baking soda as a toothpaste, deodorant and laundry detergent!
  3. Avoid buying or bringing disposables like q-tips and plastic razors. There are lots of better zero waste options out there.
  4. Pack a capsule wardrobe built around the essentials. Mix and match, launder frequently-worn items and hang them to dry.

When you arrive at the airport

  1. Bring only a carry-on. Checked bags automatically cause paper waste as they require sticker tags, which cannot be recycled.
  2. Go totally paperless. Download your airline, bus, train and metro line’s travel apps. They’ll allow you to purchase and display tickets from your phone!
  3. Refuse all paper receipts. They’re covered in carcinogenic BPA (gross!) and generate trash you don’t want.
  4. Stash TSA-approved snacks ahead of time so you won’t be tempted to shell it out for a bag of chips in the airport.

When you board

  1. Use your own earbuds to enjoy entertainment so you don’t end up having to purchase or use their plastic disposables.
  2. Say no to straws, napkins and free snacks. Airlines do not recycle! Instead, enjoy your own pre-packed snacks and fill your bottle before you get on the plane.
  3. Bring digital entertainment, rather than buying magazines. Any smartphone should have the capability to download TV shows or books ahead of time.
  4. Set a good example. The more people get used to seeing zero waste behavior around them, the more they’ll be likely to join the movement!

When you land

  1. Choose to carbon offset your flight. It won’t stop global warming, but it’s the best option you have for retroactively reducing your carbon footprint.
  2. Eat at sit-down restaurants rather than fast food joints, and use real plates and silverware.
  3. Carry a lightweight utensil set, to-go container and bottle so that you never have to use plastic disposables for street food while you travel.
  4. Eat and drink local as much as possible. Businesses that strive to source local produce will have a smaller carbon footprint and likely have more sustainable items on offer.
  5. Walk as much as possible. This will help you avoid?unnecessary transport tickets and receipts.
  6. Be mindful of your consumption in hotels. Don’t let your towels and linens be laundered without cause, keep the heat or AC down, and refuse single-use tea bags, water bottles and snacks.

Remember: easy changes like this can make a huge difference in the long run. Be mindful, act intentionally and you’ll be able to fly without creating trash, promise. Have a good flight!

Related Stories:

How to Lead a Nearly Zero Waste Life
How to Keep a Zero Waste Pet
How to Keep Your Holiday Shopping Zero Waste

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How to Fly Without Creating an Ounce of Trash

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Bernie Sanders is the reason why a pro-coal senator is about to take over a powerful energy post

by TandyChavers Posted on December 8, 2018

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This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a strange twist of fate, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who once fired a shotgun at a climate bill, is expecting to be promoted to a leadership position in a key Senate committee that conducts environmental oversight.

Progressive environmental groups have pressured Minority Leader Charles Schumer (a Democrat from New York) to pick someone, anyone, else to be ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Schumer isn’t the real reason Manchin is next-in-line, though. If filling the position had proceeded through the normal line of succession, it would go to the most senior senator on the committee, and four other senators outrank him. But in the fray of the post-midterms jostling for committee assignments, none of them want the position.

Washington state’s Maria Cantwell, the current top Democrat, has indicated she wants to replace departing Senator Bill Nelson (a Democrat from Florida) as ranking member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation panel. Senators Ron Wyden (a Democrat from Oregon) and Debbie Stabenow (from Michigan) want to keep their ranking slots on the Finance and Agriculture committees respectively.

And then there’s Bernie Sanders, who just organized a climate change town hall at the start of a likely presidential bid. He could be ranking member on a committee that oversees the Energy and Interior departments and debates issues related to public lands, energy infrastructure, and the nation’s electrical grid, but he refuses to move from his post on the powerful Budget Committee, where he can stay focused on economic priorities.

“I am proud of the work I have done on the Budget Committee over the last 12 years,” Sanders said in an emailed statement to Mother Jones. “As Ranking Member I have helped fight for budget and national priorities, which represent the needs of working families and not just the 1 percent. I look forward to continuing the fight in the new session for social, racial, economic, and environmental justice.”

Thus far, Sanders hasn’t faced much public pressure to prevent Manchin from getting the post, potentially because the most outspoken groups protesting Manchin have had long standing ties with Sanders going back to his 2016 presidential campaign. Bill McKibben, co-founder of environmental group 350.org, has campaigned for Sanders and spoke at his town hall Monday night. Instead, these groups have done an end run to Schumer and pressured him directly to block Manchin’s promotion.

On Monday, members of the Sunrise Movement, a left-leaning environmental advocacy group, protested outside Schumer’s New York office, calling on him to reject “those who are in the pockets of the fossil fuel CEOs” from overseeing environmental policy. “We’re asking people to do something that’s admittedly difficult but we really want Schumer to step up and do the right thing for his party and these issues,” 350.org policy director Julian Noisecat said.

Democratic donor Tom Steyer and Washington Governor Jay Inslee, both 2020 presidential hopefuls, have also spoken out against Manchin. Inslee, whose campaign would center in part around climate change, is organizing a petition that lays out the argument: “Look, Joe Manchin has been a champion for affordable health care for every American. He’s been a leader on issues you and I care deeply about. But on climate, he’s simply wrong.”

As a leader on Energy and Natural Resources, Manchin would work with Chair Lisa Murkowksi (a Republican from Alaska) who has not been shy about noticing the impacts of climate change in her home state. Even if global warming itself has not been a primary focus of the committee’s interests of late, that could change next year, when Murkowski has said she expects the committee to lead “a rational conversation” on the topic.

Since 2012, the committee has not held a single hearing fully devoted to climate change, in contrast to 2009 when it held nine in that year alone. Most major climate bills, including cap-and-trade legislation, have gone through either the Finance committee or Environment and Public Works, which considers nominees to the Environmental Protection Agency and convenes hearings on topics like air pollution and toxic waste.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration’s most controversial initiatives, like a draft proposal to subsidize coal and nuclear plants, did not come directly before the Energy panel. But it still dominated the committee’s debate over whether to advance the nomination of Bernard McNamee, an ex-DOE staffer who helped develop the idea, to a position on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Manchin, who has voted in line with Trump’s policies 60.8 percent of the time, originally voted for McNamee’s nomination to advance out of committee, but then switched course and opposed him on the Senate floor. The controversial nominee was ultimately confirmed by one vote.

Coming from West Virginia, Manchin’s close ties to the coal industry are a given. Since his arrival in the Senate eight years ago, Manchin has taken nearly $750,000 in donations from the mining industry and more than $419,000 from oil and gas firms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. His voting scorecard from the League of Conservation Voters, which assigns a rating based on a lawmaker’s voters for or against environmental legislation, is lower than all other Democratic senators but higher than all but one Republican.

Manchin’s office declined to comment to Mother Jones, and when confronted by reporters at the Capitol this week, he avoided any mention of the controversy. “Come in and talk to me, the door’s open,” he said. “I want to do whatever I can to help my country and my state.”

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Progressive freshman lawmakers like incoming New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have expressed concern with West Virginia’s senior senator being granted a leadership role on environmental issues, but some of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate have closed ranks around the nominee, downplaying Manchin’s record and the damage he could do to climate priorities. “I think Joe gets and understands we need to move forward on a diverse set of energy needs,” Cantwell told Bloomberg‘s Ari Natter.

“On climate, we’re going to make decisions collectively as a caucus. Nobody in our caucus has a veto over climate policy — whether they’re a ranking member on a committee or not,” Senator Chris Murphy (a Democrat from Connecticut) told Politico.

But activists argue there’s a lot at stake, especially if Democrats were thinking beyond the immediate legislative session.

“It would be an even bigger concern looking ahead if we do take back the senate in 2020 or in the future,” Noisecat says. “I don’t think that anyone who’s looking at the current makeup of Congress right now believes we can get ambitious climate legislation through both chambers of Congress. [But] Manchin is a huge problem if you want to do that in the long term.”

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Bernie Sanders is the reason why a pro-coal senator is about to take over a powerful energy post

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China is both the best and worst hope for clean energy

by leoratulk31488 Posted on December 8, 2018

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This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In Katowice, Poland, delegates from around the world have gathered to discuss how to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. The intent is to meet the goals that emerged from the 2015 Paris United Nations Climate Summit. But this year there’s a new top dog at the table.

The United States, led by a president who doesn’t believe in climate change or the scientists who study it, will take a back seat at this month’s climate summit, known as COP24. Meanwhile China, with its massive economy and growing green energy sector, has become the world’s climate leader.

That might seem like a good thing if it weren’t for a couple of problems. China is the world’s biggest carbon polluter, and its emissions won’t start easing for many years. Chinese leaders are also exporting dirty energy around the world through their “belt and road” development program, which is spurring economic growth throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. A construction boom in coal-fired power plants has accompanied that growth in places like Vietnam, Pakistan, and Kenya, for example.

So having China as the big power at a climate summit doesn’t bode well for any new get-tough-on-carbon deals between now and the end of the meeting on December 14, experts say. “The negotiations abhor a vacuum,” says Andrew Light, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and a former climate negotiator in the Obama administration. “The U.S. is not showing leadership, so China steps in.”

The latest round of climate negotiations (held in the capital of Poland’s coal-producing region of Silesia) are focused on the technical issues of how best to measure and verify each country’s stated emissions reductions. Even though the negotiations are held under the flag of the United Nations, there’s no real carbon police out there. So it’s up to each country to self-report their carbon dioxide emissions from factories, automobile tailpipe emissions, and other sources that end up forming a warming blanket in the Earth’s atmosphere. Those numbers are then fact-checked by other nations and NGOs.

A major report released in October by a panel of the world’s leading scientists says that the planet will experience severe environmental damage — wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and floods — that could top $54 trillion by 2040 unless there’s a big downward shift in carbon dioxide emissions. That’s going to require every nation to make changes, as well as individual cities, states, and businesses.

“It will require things that are more aggressive, like shutting down existing power plants, and by 2030, we probably need to reduce global coal power production by 70 or 80 percent,” says Nathan Hultman, director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland.

Hultman, who worked on climate issues in the Obama White House, says the solutions may be politically impossible for now. “Are we doing enough quickly enough?” he said. “The answer is probably no. At the same time, we have to ask, how do we ramp up contributions toward limiting emissions.”

Still, Hultman and others see progress, and they see China as both a cause of the problem and a potential solution. China burns half the world’s coal and has added 40 percent of the world’s coal capacity since 2002. More than 4.3 million Chinese people work in coal mines, compared to 76,000 in the U.S. (that’s fewer employees than work at Arby’s or in radio).

While China is gaga for coal, it also is more green than anyone else. China owns half the world’s electric vehicles and 99 percent of the world’s electric buses. One quarter of its electricity comes from renewable power like solar or wind. Its cheap silicon panels have driven down the price of solar energy worldwide, and Chinese manufacturers are now starting to export EV batteries to automakers in Europe, Asia, and the U.S.

For Chinese leaders, boosting global green energy isn’t a moral issue, it’s an economic one, according to Jonas Nahm, assistant professor of energy, resources, and environment at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “It doesn’t come from an altruistic place,” Nahm said. “They are doing this as an economic development strategy.”

Nahm has been studying the disconnect between green energy targets announced by party leaders in Beijing, and the actions of local leaders in China’s far-flung provinces. He found that up to 40 percent of renewable energy is wasted because there’s no national power market in China. That means that wind and solar power generated in one province can’t be sent to an adjacent province, so more coal plants are fired up even if there’s cheaper green energy next door.

But China’s reliance on dirty coal has come back to haunt its own citizens, according to Nahm. “The air pollution crisis is a reason to get away from coal,” he said. “That’s the first environmental crisis that’s pushed the government to act, and then the impact of climate change. There’s desertification, water shortages, giant dust storms, and some of these problems are getting more severe.”

Nahm and the other experts believe that China is headed in the right direction on climate change, but its economy is so big and so dependent on coal that it takes a while to get there. As for the climate summit in Poland, it’s possible that China might try to wiggle out of meeting even tougher new climate commitments, even as it becomes the biggest nation supporting the U.N. Paris agreement goals. President Trump said he plans to walk away from the Paris agreement; the earliest he can do that is in 2020.

There’s also the issue of checking up on each country’s measurements. Before the Paris agreement, China was considered a “developing” nation subject to less stringent reporting requirements. That changed after 2015. But without a strong U.S. influence to check it today, China might try to loosen the bookkeeping, says Samantha Gross, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“What will the reporting requirements be and how will they be verified,” said Gross. “That’s what the negotiators will be duking out in Poland. I’m curious to see how far they get.”

As for China, Gross says they hold the cards for the world’s climate future. “We’re all gonna fry if they don’t do something.”

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China is both the best and worst hope for clean energy

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The Glass Universe – Dava Sobel

by Myrna Posted on December 8, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Glass Universe
How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
Dava Sobel

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: December 6, 2016

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, t he “inspiring” ( People ), little-known true story of women’s landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR,  The   Economist, Smithsonian, Nature,  and NPR’s   Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award “A joy to read.” — The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women’s colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe  is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

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The Glass Universe – Dava Sobel

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Pantone’s color of the year might vanish from nature by 2040

by AlisiaSell4583 Posted on December 7, 2018

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Every December, experts at the Pantone Color Institute comb through the world’s Rolodex of hues to determine the color of the next year. 2019, they have decreed, is the year of “Living Coral.” The “living” part is important: Dead coral is white, which hasn’t even earned a spot on the color wheel, let alone color of the year.

The announcement, much awaited by those fashionable enough to care, comes a little over a month after a monumental United Nations climate report found that the world’s coral reefs may experience a mass die-off as soon as 2040. Already, half of Australia’s 1,400 mile-long Great Barrier Reef has perished in bleaching events. Coral reefs are the bedrock of diverse coastal ecosystems, so a massive coral wipeout could also lead to the disappearance of other rare colors found among aquatic species.

What’s the purpose of memorializing the hues of a dying planet? As Slate’s Christina Cauterucci pointed out, the selection “feels like a troll directed at a planet rapidly growing inhospitable to the many organisms that call it home.”

Pantone’s announcement states, “In its glorious, yet unfortunately more elusive, display beneath the sea, this vivifying and effervescent color mesmerizes the eye and mind.” Living Coral’s retreat from the real world might be exactly why some find it so vivifying. The choice carries a whiff of ecotourism — the word for when travelers flock to the world’s disappearing landscapes, such the quickly melting glaciers of Glacier National Park.

The selection also feels like a throwback to a time when colors were valued for their elusiveness in nature. Before colors could be made synthetically, dyes were derived from natural sources, and the hard-to-find hues were considered more valuable. The original purple, for example, was obtained from a small mollusk found the Phoenician trading city of Tyre. As only the rich could afford it, this delicacy of a color became associated with royalty.

There’s a critical difference between Living Coral and the purple of mollusks: Coral isn’t meant to be so rare.

The color has a long history. “By the late 14th century it was recognized as a shade of red, from coral that was found in the Red Sea,” says David Kastan, an English professor at Yale and the author of the book On Color. “Shakespeare, for example, several times refers to ‘coral lips’ or a ‘sweet coral mouth.’”

Now that history may be nearing its end. While Pantone may have immortalized Living Coral in 2019’s most fashionable throw pillows and sweaters, crowning it color of the year seems unlikely to help the actual living coral that spans the sea.

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Pantone’s color of the year might vanish from nature by 2040

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Americans have planted so much corn that it’s changing the weather

by NatishaConnah Posted on December 7, 2018

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This story was originally published by Atlas Obscura and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Corn farmers in eastern Nebraska have long claimed weather patterns are changing, but in an unexpected way.

“It’s something I’ve talked about with my dad and granddad many times,” says fifth-generation corn farmer Brandon Hunnicutt. Along with his father and brother, the 45 year old lives in the 400-person village of Giltner and grows about 2,000 acres of corn each year. From above, the area looks like a blip of homes surrounded by an expansive grid of circular fields. Though Brandon’s grandfather is retired, he takes an active interest in the business. “Contrary to what you’d think should be happening, both him and my dad swear up and down [that] droughts used to come more often and be a lot worse,” says Hunnicutt. “Considering it’s been 30 years since we had a really bad one, I’ve started kind of taking them at their word.”

This is not the only noticeable development — University of Nebraska climatologists say the growing season has gotten 10-14 days longer since 1980. Hunnicutt now waits until the first weeks of November to pilot his 40-foot-wide, dump-truck-sized combine through the farm’s widely arching, seemingly endless rows of corn — enough to cover 800 city blocks.

Though subtle, the Hunnicutts have noticed these changes and more.

“To be successful in this business, you’ve got to pay close attention to the weather,” explains Brandon. In the past 20 years, on top of the above, he’s noted a gradual decrease in 100-degree days during the summer. “That missing digit isn’t something you overlook,” he asserts with a laugh. “High temperatures create a lot of anxiety. If they go on long enough, they’ll scorch your corn and put a hurtin’ on your bottom line!”

A 2018 report issued by climate researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims to have solved the mystery and verified farmers’ suspicions: Namely, that large-scale corn production has changed the weather.

Over the past 70 years, farmers in America’s midwestern Corn Belt have made vast leaps in production. From 1950 to 2010, annual harvests increased by more than 400 percent, jumping from 2 billion to 10 billion bushels. In addition to making the area the world’s most productive agricultural region, climate scientists at MIT say the boom has created its own weather patterns.

“We studied data from the past 30 years and found that the intensification of corn production has increased average summer rainfalls by about 35 percent and decreased [average summer] temperatures by as much as one degree Celsius,” says former MIT researcher Ross E. Alter, now a research meteorologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Alter was the lead author of a 2018 report published in the journal of the American Geophysical Union that demonstrated how land use has impacted the region’s climate more than greenhouse gas emissions. “What makes these findings so fascinating is that, while global temperatures have risen, areas like eastern Nebraska have actually cooled,” continues Alter, referring to yearly averages. “We think it’s likely heavy agriculture counteracted rising summer temperatures that might have otherwise resulted from increasing greenhouse gases.”

In other words, the human-made shift has been helpful. By increasing yields, farmers have unintentionally created weather patterns that seem to be protecting their crops and helping them grow more corn. (Of course, burning fossil fuels to plant, cultivate, harvest, process, and ship farm products has been shown to be a major contributor to rising levels of greenhouse gases.)

Though similar effects have to some degree been observed in the rice-growing regions of eastern China, the report marks the first time the effects of agriculture on regional climate change in the central U.S. have undergone comprehensive analysis. The findings document the most significant human-made regional climate shift in world history.

“On a global level, this research is important because it proves the influence of agricultural intensification is really an independent problem from greenhouse gas emissions,” explains Alter.

By comparing observed historical trends in the Corn Belt’s climate to those predicted by a variety of global simulations used by the World Climate Research Program, which coordinates climate research sponsored by various international organizations, the report showed the models were inaccurate for the region (they predicted summer temperatures would rise and rainfall would increase by just four percent). Though the WCRP models accounted for greenhouse gas emissions and other human and natural factors, they did not consider agricultural intensification.

“Our findings are a bit different from what people thought about the mechanisms of climate change,” says Alter. He believes that accurately simulating and understanding climate change at the local level will require a look at cases of agricultural intensification like Nebraska’s corn boom.

But how, specifically, has growing more corn changed the climate? Associate Nebraska State Climatologist Al Dutcher says it’s complicated.

On one hand, it has to do with what Hunnicutt and other farmers refer to as “corn sweat.” This happens when photosynthesis boosts the amount of water vapor in the air.

“When a plant’s pores, called stomata, open to allow carbon dioxide to enter, they simultaneously allow water to escape,” writes Kimberly Hickok, who covers climate change for Science Magazine and reviewed the report. Known as transpiration, the process cools the plant and surrounding air, and increases the amount of water going into the atmosphere and returning as rainfall. As Hickok notes, “the cycle may continue” as that additional rainwater evaporates back into the atmosphere and causes rainfall on other farms and towns downwind.

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Put another way: More corn means more transpiration. Which, in turn, produces slightly cooler temperatures and increased precipitation. The fact that corn is a non-native species boosts the effect.

“The predominant native vegetation in central and eastern Nebraska is grass,” explains Dutcher. Farmers have replaced the area’s vast seas of grass with more than 9 million acres of corn, which transpires at a rate 20 percent higher than indigenous grasses. “Agriculture is literally funneling moisture into the atmosphere, and all that humidity has created a kind of protective bubble against rising temperatures.”

Dutcher and Hunnicutt say growing more corn — and thus, creating more transpiration — would have been impossible without advances in farming efficiency. The introduction of high-yielding varieties, better irrigation, and soil management techniques, along with the ability to use computer sensors to closely monitor field conditions, have all contributed to soaring yields.

“One of the biggest factors is the widespread use of cover crops, crop residue management, and no-till farming methods,” writes University of Nebraska-Lincoln Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources extension engineer Paul Jasa. Together, the practices have erased the need for conventional tillage, dramatically increased organic matter in the soil, reduced evaporation and runoff, and lowered summer surface temperatures. “With time, the [native clay-based] soil has become much healthier and better at retaining water,” Jasa continues. “This has made crops more resilient to traumatic weather events and, in general, much more productive.”

Hunnicutt says automated irrigation has helped boost overall production and allowed him to grow corn in pivot corners where his grandfather could not. Upward of 340 acres that formerly yielded nothing now contribute as much as 180 bushels per acre. In his tenure as a farmer, full-field yields have grown by more than 50 bushels an acre.

“I can get minute-to-minute weather predictions and tell you moisture levels anywhere in our fields just by glancing at my phone,” says Hunnicutt. “In the 1950s, my grandad was using a Farmers’ Almanac. Back then, if they thought the soil was too dry, they just dumped water on it. Now, I know exactly what my plants need and when to apply it.”

As might be expected, Alter’s report has a dark side. And that dark side has global implications.

“In terms of the Corn Belt, the degree of agricultural intensification we’ve seen in the last 30 years isn’t sustainable,” he says. “It’s projected to soon come to an end and may even decline.” And if that happens, the mitigating effect of agriculture will disappear, and global temperatures will rise even faster.

Though studies have yet to be conducted around the world, Alter says that areas that have experienced substantial agricultural intensification have likely experienced similar benefits: more rainfall and cooler average temperatures during the summers. Like Nebraska, the effects have probably masked negative changes and will eventually be overwhelmed.

“I know some of the anti-climate change folks will probably poo-poo this, but it’s something my family takes very seriously,” says Hunnicutt. “We’ve been in this business for five generations, and I hope to see my children and grandchildren carry on that tradition. We’re doing everything we can to reduce fuel consumption and increase efficiency. Our hope is these [mitigatory effects] will give us enough of a window to make adjustments and prepare for what’s coming.”

In the meantime, he hopes the world gets its act together and curbs emissions before it’s too late.

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Americans have planted so much corn that it’s changing the weather

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The EPA airbrushed away 6 million cars to make your gas mileage worse

by IngeborgTeague Posted on December 7, 2018

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When President Donald Trump’s administration argued last August that they were going to save 1,000 lives a year by axing gas mileage rules, you pretty much knew it was BS. Now the same expert the administration relied on to make the claim has helped dismantle the argument in hilarious detail.

Let’s be honest here: Everything below will only confirm your initial impression that the administration’s arguments were hollow. Still, it’s satisfying to see what happened when experts took the time to scrutinize them.

The lead author of this critique — just published in Science — is the economist the EPA cited most frequently in making the case for rolling back the fuel standards, Antonio Bento, a professor at the University of Southern California. Bento and ten other researchers found that the administration’s justification “has fundamental flaws and inconsistencies,” and “is misleading.” For instance, they found that the EPA simply wished away 6 million cars, which made the regulatory rollback look at least $90 billion cheaper for Americans.

To grasp how nutty this is, you have to understand that the Trump administration’s basic argument was that fuel economy standards raise the price of new cars. So instead of buying new ones, people keep driving their old cars longer. That risks lives, they claimed, because new cars have better safety features. But if we scrapped fuel standards, people would be more likely to buy new cars, and therefore less likely to die.

To make the numbers support this line of argument, the EPA had to say that rolling back the standards would lead to 6 million fewer cars on the road by 2029. But the idea that making cars cheaper will lead to fewer cars on the road is, as the experts put it, “simply inconsistent with basic economic theory.”

(If you want to get into the weeds, there are more eyerollers in the full study.)

As it happens, Politico reported this week that EPA staffers disputed the agency’s analysis and that the agency will revise its estimates.

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The EPA airbrushed away 6 million cars to make your gas mileage worse

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