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The Weather Channel’s new climate change video is … really intense

by SonGodson3899 Posted on April 10, 2019

“The Arctic — the fastest warming area on Earth,” Weather Channel meteorologist Jen Carfagno narrates in a new video as the camera speeds you under an iceberg arch, through the spray from a breaching whale, and past ice-capped peaks so realistic you can almost feel the Arctic chill. “Changes here are drastic, undeniable, and all too real.”

It’s the latest in a Weather Channel video series that uses immersive mixed reality technology to help you visualize extreme weather up close. The first video went viral last September, when meteorologist Erika Navarro was virtually transported from the studio to a flooded neighborhood street in North Carolina to demonstrate storm-surge projections for Hurricane Florence in person.

“For 30 years, weather presentation has been very consistent,” Michael Potts, the vice president of design at the Weather Channel, told New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. “Usually it’s a person in front of a map. We wanted to engage the audience more and find a way to go deeper into the science of weather.”

And, in this latest video, they do. Instead of regurgitating statistics or presenting another doomsday scenario, the video portrays global warming in a gripping yet realistic way, transporting you from a rooftop above flooded city streets to a rocky coast in front of a collapsing iceberg. Carfagno takes you from 1851 to 2100, visiting Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; and Greenland’s famous Jakobshavn Glacier — all in the span of under two minutes. How’s that for high-speed time travel?

Using an immersive graphics technique popular in video games to produce the clip, the Weather Channel hopes to turn climate change into a vivid experience for viewers.

“By engaging our senses of sight and sounds — and our tendency to focus on things that move — they earn our full attention, and are experienced more like real lived experience than like book learning,” Edward Maibach, director of George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication, told the Verge.

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The Weather Channel’s new climate change video is … really intense

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Republicans attack Puerto Rico’s plan to go 100 percent renewable: ‘It’s just unrealistic’

by RosellaSchmid Posted on April 10, 2019

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

Republicans on Tuesday pilloried Puerto Rico’s plan to stop burning imported fossil fuels to generate electricity, calling the proposal senseless and opening a new front in an increasingly bitter partisan battle over the storm-ravaged island’s struggle to recover.

At a House Natural Resources Committee hearing, GOP lawmakers dismissed the Puerto Rican legislature’s vote last month to approve an ambitious bill mandating 100 percent renewable power by 2050 as “political interference” and accused the territory’s legislators of squandering an opportunity to reap the spoils of the American fracking boom.

“It’s just unrealistic,” Utah Repbulican representative Rob Bishop said. “Yet there’s still legislation.”

The nine-term congressman, who’s received more from the oil and gas industry than any other donor since taking office, last month became the chief antagonist of Democrats’ Green New Deal resolution, which outlines the first climate proposal scientists say is on the scale of what’s needed to combat the global warming crisis. Bishop falsely claimed the Green New Deal banned hamburgers, and performatively gobbled one at a news conference. Later, he suggested the Green New Deal was tantamount to “genocide.”

Yet, on Tuesday, he blamed Puerto Rico lawmakers for playing politics with the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.

“PREPA has been hamstrung by political demands,” he said. “One of the problems of PREPA in the past is political interference when your primary goal is [to] provide abundant and affordable energy.”

At least 13 states have passed or are considering plans that set 100 percent clean-electricity targets, according to a report last month by the consultancy EQ Research. But Puerto Rico’s circumstance is unique. In September 2017, hurricanes Irma and Maria shredded the island’s aging electrical grid, leaving millions without power in the second-longest blackout in world history.

Puerto Rico imports oil and gas for more than 80 percent of its electricity needs, saddling ratepayers with prices roughly twice the American average and a toxic legacy of pollution. Renewables made up just 2 percent of the electricity mix as of two years ago.

To some, the disaster, widely seen as a glimpse of what’s to come as climate change worsens, presented an opportunity to equip Puerto Rico to harvest its plentiful sun and wind for power. But Republicans instead proposed a shock-doctrine approach that promised to make Puerto Rico a reliable market for U.S.-produced gas and oil.

At a November 2017 hearing before the same committee, Colorado Republican representative Doug Lamborn asked at the time “which environmental regulation waivers” were required to jump-start efforts to import more natural gas to Puerto Rico. Last July, Republican representative Tom McClintock  of California wondered why anyone would consider wind and solar favorable options for Puerto Rico at all.

He doubled down on those queries on Tuesday.

“They’re intermittent,” McClintock said. “They require reliable generators that are running at ready status so that if a cloud passes over or the wind drops off, they can instantly come on.”

It’s an argument President Donald Trump routinely deploys, albeit in less sophisticated terms, to deride renewables. But renewables are typically paired with battery systems that store excess solar or wind power for use when the sky is dark or the air is still. Solar panels paired with batteries provided oases of electricity during Puerto Rico’s monthslong blackout. Indeed, the 100 percent renewables bill exempts energy storage systems from sales tax and eliminates rules that barred Puerto Ricans from installing battery units without permission from PREPA.

Yet batteries barely came up at the hearing, except when one lawmaker pointed out that the technology can be expensive.

The hearing came amid a renewed fight over Puerto Rican disaster relief. Trump repeatedly threatened to cut funding to the battered island, which is still struggling to rebuild as federal aid trickles in slowly. Last week, the president falsely claimed Puerto Rico received $91 billion in relief. In reality, of the $41 billion approved to aid Puerto Rico, only about $11 billion has flowed from federal coffers. Another $50 billion is expected to be delivered, but over a period the Associated Press said “could span decades.”

The Senate failed last week to advance two separate aid bills as Democrats demanded additional funding for Puerto Rico to which Republican leaders said Trump would never agree. Negotiations broke down Tuesday as Congress headed for a two-week recess.

Disaster funding hasn’t halted the natural gas industry’s progress. Last July, the Department of Energy proposed easing shipping rules for liquefied natural gas. By reclassifying tankers as “small scale,” the ships could circumvent more robust federal environmental reviews, according to a report by the watchdog site The Real News.

“The finalization of this rule will expedite the permitting of certain small-scale exports of natural gas,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in a press release at the time. “The so-called ‘small-scale rule’ will further unleash American energy by reducing the regulatory burden on American businesses while also providing significant benefits to our trading partners in the Caribbean, Central America and South America.”

There have been hiccups. In December, Texas-based Excelerate Energy abandoned plans to build a $400 million natural gas terminal on the southern shore of Puerto Rico.

But last month, New York-based New Fortress Energy signed a five-year deal with PREPA to supply natural gas to the utility’s power plant in San Juan. On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Energy Information Administration published its latest figures showing Puerto Rico’s liquefied natural gas imports bounced back to pre-storm levels as of late 2018.

Energy Department electricity chief Bruce Walker, a Trump appointee, testified Tuesday that attempting to rebuild Puerto Rico with non-fossil sources after the storm would have slowed the recovery.

“There are some significant engineering concerns,” he said. “It’s not technically possible today to convert that island to 100 percent renewable.”

PREPA CEO José Ortiz Vázquez agreed, but said the debate was over how heavily to invest in imported gas to carry the island through to its eventual goal of 100 percent clean electricity.

“Some groups favor going straight up with maximum capacity of renewables and keep burning natural gas to get us through to 2050, while other groups have a different opinion, where we should make a big bet now on natural gas and slowly work on the renewable issue,” he said.

Asked how long it would take to convert Puerto Rico’s entire electricity supply, a panel of experts in the second half of the hearing offered answers ranging from “within a decade” to 25 years to “well before the 2050 deadline,” if implemented “under a well-managed, professional system.”

There is a real disagreement over the feasibility of going 100 percent renewable on the national level. A paper published in 2017 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued a better plan was to aim for 80 percent renewables by the middle of the century, with nuclear plants and fossil fuel stations equipped with carbon capture and storage technology making up the rest. But studies released in 2015 made the case that the rapid strides in clean energy made it practical and financially sound to completely transition all 50 states and 139 countries to 100 percent renewable starting immediately.

Yet profits are at the heart of Puerto Rico’s dispute. Last year, the Puerto Rican legislature approved a plan to privatize PREPA. It’s a controversial decision that some say will help the bankrupt utility to dig itself out of debt and make the improvements it needs to lower electricity prices. But others fear a PREPA beholden to investors will lock in high rates and transfer control of a public good into the hands of the rich, establishing yet another way the downtrodden U.S. colony generates wealth for those back on the mainland.

“It’s not possible for PREPA to immediately convert to 100 percent renewable energy. There will be a transition period. We recognize that,” said Democratic representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who presided over Tuesday’s hearing as committee chairman. “But there are concerns that the current plan to focus on natural gas instead of maximizing and doing promotion around solar generation will lock us into an infrastructure that will soon be dated, an infrastructure that will be dependent on importation. Am I correct?”

Marla Pérez Lugo, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, said the question captured “the essence of the problem.”

“We’re still thinking that what’s good for PREPA is good for Puerto Rico,” she said. “And that is not necessarily so.”

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Republicans attack Puerto Rico’s plan to go 100 percent renewable: ‘It’s just unrealistic’

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Amazon accused of abandoning 100 percent renewable energy goal

by IndiraRxm3 Posted on April 9, 2019

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

Amazon has been accused of abandoning a much-publicized goal of running its data centers on 100 percent renewable energy — instead focusing its attention on winning business from the oil and gas industry.

According to a Greenpeace report released earlier this year, some of Amazon’s most important data centers in Virginia, where the company has committed to building its second HQ, are powered by only 12 percent renewable energy. Across the company as a whole, Amazon reached 50 percent renewable usage in 2018, and has not issued any updates since.

This week, a report from the tech news site Gizmodo suggested one reason for the slowdown was Amazon’s increasing focus on bringing on board large oil and gas companies as Amazon Web Service customers.

The figures represent slow progress towards the goal, first announced in 2014, to power the entire company using renewables, and have led some to accuse Amazon of abandoning the goal entirely.

Alongside the organization’s report, Greenpeace’s Elizabeth Jardim said: “Despite Amazon’s public commitment to renewable energy, the world’s largest cloud computing company is hoping no one will notice that it’s still powering its corner of the internet with dirty energy.

“Unless Amazon and other cloud giants in Virginia change course, our growing use of the internet could lead to more pipelines, more pollution and more problems for our climate.”

Gizmodo’s report cited Andrew Jassy, the AWS chief executive, who told an oil and gas conference in Houston last month: “A lot of the things that we have built and released recently have been very much informed by conversations with our oil and gas customers and partners.”

Gizmodo contrasted his statement with another, reported in December, from the AWS executive Peter DeSantis, who “told colleagues inside the company that renewable energy projects are too costly and don’t help it win business.”

Amazon’s renewables record is in stark contrast to some of its competitors, most notably Google, which reported success in reaching 100 percent renewables use in 2017. “Our engineers have spent years perfecting Google’s data centers, making them 50 percent more energy-efficient than the industry average,” the company’s head of technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, said at the time.

“But we still need a lot of energy to process trillions of Google searches every year, play more than 400 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute and power the products and services that our users depend on. That’s why we began purchasing renewable energy – to reduce our carbon footprint and address climate change. But it also makes business sense.”

A year later, Apple declared its “retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries” were powered by 100 percent clean energy. Facebook has committed to do the same by 2020.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Amazon accused of abandoning 100 percent renewable energy goal

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The Midwest braces for yet another major storm

by LadonnaClune Posted on April 8, 2019

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It’s been less than a month since a bomb cyclone hovered over parts of the Midwest, dumping a mix of snow, sleet, and rain on the region. The system wreaked havoc on people, animals, infrastructure, and destroyed over $440 million in crops in Nebraska alone. Now, a similar weather event is headed that way again.

Wyoming and Colorado will get a healthy coating of snow in the mountains tonight and tomorrow, but the storm won’t get really worked up until it moves into the central portion of the country midweek.

Forecasters aren’t yet sure if we can call this storm bomb cyclone 2.0, but it will bring snow, high winds, and possibly thunderstorms to the Plains and Upper Midwest starting on Wednesday. Winter storm watches are in effect in six states. Folks in the High Plains, Northern Plains, and upper Midwest are bracing for what could amount to more than 6 inches of snow, though models show the heaviest band of snow potentially delivering upwards of 30 inches in some places.

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While the snowstorm itself is certainly cause for concern, it’s the snowmelt that will occur after the system dissipates that’s truly troubling for a region still struggling to recover from the March deluge.

Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. has experienced twice the usual amount of precipitation. More than 50 flood gages — devices that monitor water levels — across the country are at moderate or major flood stages. Many of those are located in the Midwest. (For reference, moderate flooding as defined by the National Weather Service is when some buildings, roads, and airstrips are flooded or closed.) April temperatures will quickly melt snow brought in by the storm, adding more water to already-saturated areas.

“This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities,” Ed Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, told CBS News.

An April storm on the heels of a March downpour isn’t just a bad coincidence. Research shows that spring flooding is one of climate change’s many disastrous side effects. As warmer springtime temperatures arrive earlier in the year, the risk of damaging floods worsens. Case in point: Over the past 60 years, “the frequency of heavy downpours has increased by 29 percent over the past 60 years” across the Great Plains, my colleague Eric Holthaus writes.

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The Midwest braces for yet another major storm

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Climate activists have their next target: The DNC debates

by TINStefanpc Posted on April 8, 2019

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

No city better embodies the challenges of climate change than the setting for the first Democratic debate in June. At least 10 candidates who meet the DNC’s set of polling and grassroots fundraising criteria will take the stage in Miami, a city that will face the threat of encroaching seas on a daily basis in the next 25 years. Many of the climate activists who have spent their time recently urging presidential hopefuls to embrace the Green New Deal and reject donations from fossil fuel industries are preparing for their next battle: pushing for a future presidential debate focused entirely on climate.

Environmental and progressive groups including 350.org, Greenpeace, Sunrise movement, Credo Action, and Friends of the Earth plan to ramp up campaigns in the coming weeks and months calling on the Democratic National Committee, as well as the major networks and individual 2020 candidates, to dedicate one of the dozen official debates to a subject that has never gotten its due in primetime.

“We’re seeing a shift in people’s consciousness,” Janet Redman, Greenpeace USA’s climate program manager, told Mother Jones. “We need to see that starting to be reflected in our politics—that it’s not an isolated set of incidents or phenomenon. The public is craving politicians to have a conversation on this. They want to know real solutions.”

It’s not the first cycle activists have tried to persuade the DNC to give climate change some attention in the debates. The DNC itself doesn’t control the questions that are asked—that’s up to the networks that wind up partnering with for the events—but there have been debates focused on broad themes like national security and the economy. But through a combination of bird-dogging, protests, online campaigning, and the increasing prevalence of climate in the national conversation—not to mention burgeoning scientific evidence of its severity and grave consequences—activists have become more ambitious, seeking to have a full 90 minutes focused on the finer points of climate action.

The hyperpartisan nature of the climate debate tends to obscure the fact that there is a huge spectrum of proposed solutions for addressing the problem. “It’s like saying we shouldn’t have a debate on health care because all Democratic candidates agree more people should have access to health care,” says Evan Weber, political director of Sunrise Movement. In the past, when candidates are asked about this at all, the questions tend to be about whether a candidate believes in climate change, thinks of it as a priority, or has any plan for action.

Even now, it’s easy to imagine how candidates will express their commitment to a Green New Deal and deflect specifics with some applause line about climate change as an existential threat, a national security threat, or an opportunity to show American leadership. Moderately talented politicians could avoid addressing the many challenges and paths forward on climate. For instance, beneath the generally universal enthusiasm for the Green New Deal vision, there are huge fractures about whether the traditional gold standard of a carbon tax championed by economists should be included, or how to handle nuclear power, or how to handle fracking and the continued leasing of lands for fossil fuels.

“My fear is there will be some softball climate questions that aren’t specific, aren’t digging deep, [and] therefore make it hard for us to make any candidate who is elected accountable,” Redman says. “What we’re trying to do by focusing on primaries is pulling the entire field of candidates to bolder positions.”

One of those bolder positions would be to force candidates to take a clear stand on where fossil fuel leasing and production fits into their climate plans. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have taken definitive positions saying they would reject new leasing on public lands, but Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris have not shared their opinion on the future of natural gas despite voicing their support for the Green New Deal. Another question would be how climate fits into the candidates’ priorities. Should Washington Governor Jay Inslee make the stage, he is likely to ask other candidates to demonstrate that this is a priority by promising specific action during their first 100 days in office.

Climate has always faced an unnaturally high bar to make it to the debate stage, considered in the past as a niche issue rather than a central concern, despite tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes to fires, mudslides, and floods. That was clear in 2012 when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama appeared at the CNN debate and its moderator replaced a question “for all you climate change people” with one about the national debt. There were no direct questions on solving the climate crisis that cycle, nor were there any questions in the general election debates in 2016 (the Democratic primary featured a little more debate centered around fracking).

But this year is likely to be different. After another year of record wildfires and extreme weather, capped off by alarming headlines from the normally staid Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Democratic primary voters have never been more concerned about climate. According to a Des Moines Register, CNN, and Mediacom poll in March, 80 percent of those polled said candidates should spend “a lot” of time talking about climate change, placing this issue only second to concerns about health care. And the vision for the Green New Deal, when stripped of partisan context, has polled at astoundingly high rates across partisan lines.

Thus far, the DNC has no plans for any issue-specific debates, other than providing a “platform for candidates to have a vigorous discussion on ideas and solutions on the issues that voters care about, including the economy, climate change, and health care,” DNC spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa emailed Mother Jones. Unlike Republicans stuck in climate denial, “Democrats are eager to put forward their solutions to combat climate change, and we will absolutely have these discussions during the 2020 primary process.”

Greenpeace’s Redman counters that promise “absolutely falls short.”

“I think it’s night and day,” says Brandy Doyle, climate campaign manager for the progressive advocacy organization Credo Action. Grassroots activists and climate campaigners “worked really hard to inject the idea of climate change in the conversation in 2016, to even push for a question on climate change in the debates.”

For activists, the key to forcing these debates is to be able to hold the nominee accountable if he or she wins, which becomes impossible within a general election that will be entirely about drawing a contrast to Trump. “If you can’t articulate the urgency of the climate crisis and your vision for addressing it,” Doyle says, “you’re not qualified for president.”

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Climate activists have their next target: The DNC debates

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Are you biased against nuclear power? Yup, say scientists

by GenaRadcliffe Posted on April 8, 2019

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In the 1970s, you couldn’t escape the Pepsi Challenge on TV. Blindfolded men and women took sips of Pepsi and its better-known archrival without knowing which was which and — surprise, surprise — more people preferred Pepsi Cola. The message was clear: Judge the soda on its merits not its reputation.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, San Diego recently did something like this but not with soda. In this blind taste test, they gave a bunch of random people accurate information about the benefits and risks that go along with different power sources. When they hid the labels (solar, coal, etc), people showed a greater preference for nuclear power..

On its most basic level, this study demonstrates a well-known fact: Fear of nuclear power looms far larger than the risks. But this didn’t lead the researchers to the conclusion that everybody just needs to be more rational. (If humans were convinced by calls to rationality, we would be well on our way to eliminating carbon emissions by now.) They came up with some suggestions for accepting the reality of nuclear dread, and building it into projections for the future.

Here’s how the study went. Researchers set up a simple online game, where people were asked to come up with a new electricity mix for the United States. As players tried to cut carbon emissions, the game gave them feedback about how many people might die from pollution or power-plant disasters. Using sliders, they picked the amount of electricity they’d like to see coming from solar, wind, coal, coal with carbon capture technology, nuclear, and natural gas. In about half the games, the researchers labeled these energy options as “Technology 1, Technology 2,” and so on, removing the labels and all the associations we have with them. When the names of the power plants were hidden, the players opted to build the equivalent of 40 more nuclear reactors, then the players who could read the labels.

The mini-game researchers designed.Abdulla, et al.

Other researchers might have used these findings as an opportunity to shame people for being scientifically illiterate, or seen this fear of nuclear as a reason to design even safer reactors. But these researchers noted previous studies suggesting that neither approach would work. Pummeling people with facts, or engineering safety tweaks does very little to dispel raw dread. Two of the study’s authors, Ahmed Abdulla and Parth Vaishnav, told me they were just as interested in the squishy social science on how people think about risk as on the hard facts.

“We are both very concerned about the blinders scientists sometimes impose on themselves,” Abdulla said.

Once you take off those blinders, you can see it may be impossible to bridge that gap between the actual risks of nuclear power and the dread it evokes. Accept that dread as a given and it points you toward a more nuanced, but useful path. So, for instance, if you figured out that the cheapest way to slash U.S. carbon emissions was by building 100 nuclear power plants, this finding suggests that you should trim that number by 40 percent, down to 60 plants, to account for the fear factor.

“That suggests that we should be a little less black and white when modeling energy paths, Vaishnav said. “In a lot of the literature researchers say, ‘OK, people don’t like nuclear, let’s model without it.”

But their finding implies that a binary, all or nothing thinking is the wrong approach. Despite their fears, people didn’t abandon nuclear energy altogether. They simply wanted to use less of it.

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Are you biased against nuclear power? Yup, say scientists

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Climate change drives collapse of baby corals in Great Barrier Reef

by ChristopherJami Posted on April 4, 2019

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

The deadly back-to-back bleaching events that hammered Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017 led to a collapse in the recruitment of new corals, severely affecting the ecosystem’s ability to recover from the devastation.

That’s according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, which found that the number of juvenile corals that settled across the entire Great Barrier Reef in 2018 was 89 percent lower than historical averages before major bleaching events. The loss of so many mature adults during the climate-change-driven ocean heat waves left the ecosystem — the largest living structure on the planet — largely unable to replenish itself.

The report highlights the plight of corals in a warming world.

Along with an overall shortage of offspring, the study documents an alarming shift in the makeup of coral larvae. Dominant branching staghorn corals and table corals, the species that provide most of the habitat on the reef, produced fewer offspring than less-common stony corals. It’s a change that is likely to reduce the diversity of the reef, leaving it less resilient to future warming.

“The whole way that the Great Barrier Reef is behaving has changed,” Terry Hughes, the study’s lead author and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said by phone. “The mix of adult species is different. The mix of baby species is radically different. And the way it’s interconnected has shifted.”

The Great Barrier Reef has been hit by four mass bleaching events since 1998. Nearly 30 percent of the reef died off in 2016 alone. Scientists at the time described the damage at places like Lizard Island, in the northern part of the reef, as “so, so sobering” and warned that “something akin to a train crash” was about to occur.

Hughes said that under normal conditions, it would take about 10 years for coral recruitment to bounce back.

“The adult population will need to reassemble,” he said. “There’s a dearth of large, highly productive corals in the system. It will take some time to regroup so the production of larvae gets back up to normal levels.”

But with climate change forecast to drive more frequent extreme heat waves, Hughes said, “the big question is whether we’ve got the luxury of a decade for that recovery to fully unfold.”

Coral bleaching is a phenomenon in which heat-stressed corals turn white after expelling their algae, which provide most of the coral polyps’ energy. If not allowed to recover free of stressors, the corals can perish. The most recent bleaching event, which lasted from June 2014 to May 2017, was the “longest, most widespread, and possibly the most damaging coral bleaching event on record,” Coral Reef Watch said.

Scientists say failing to cut global greenhouse gas emissions would spell doom for reefs around the globe. A U.N.-backed study published in 2017 predicted that “annual severe bleaching” will affect 99 percent of the world’s reefs within the century. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a dire report late last year that the world’s tropical reefs could decline by 70 to 90 percent with an average global rise of 1.5 degrees C from preindustrial temperatures ― the upper limit that is the goal of the Paris Climate Accord. At 2 degrees C warming, 99 percent of reefs could be lost. And the latest federal climate assessment, released by the Trump administration in November, concluded that the loss of unique coral reef ecosystems “can only be avoided by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”

Hughes said that the Great Barrier Reef is undergoing rapid change and is in serious trouble but that it’s not too late to save it from total destruction.

“It still has a pulse,” he said. “I think if we can hold global warming to 1.5 degrees C, we will certainly still have a Great Barrier Reef, but the mix of species will be quite different from today.”

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Climate change drives collapse of baby corals in Great Barrier Reef

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Hurricane season 2019 is almost here. Here’s a preview.

by AbbieBenes Posted on April 4, 2019

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The official start to hurricane season is still two months away, but forecasters released their first previews of the season this week.

Both forecasts, from Colorado State University and AccuWeather, anticipate roughly near-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin. Although that might sound good, it’s actually a bit of a surprise given the building El Niño, which typically dampens hurricane formation off the coastline of the eastern United States.

“A near normal season can be devastating,” CSU meteorologist Philip Klotzbach said in an interview with Grist. “Even a below normal season like 1992 can cause huge problems.”

That year, Category 5 Hurricane Andrew made landfall in South Florida. At the time, Andrew was the most damaging hurricane in U.S. history. Since then, five hurricanes have topped it, including three since 2017 — Harvey, Maria, and Irma. Last year, Hurricanes Florence and Michael both caused billions of dollars of damage in the Carolinas and Florida, respectively.

This year, forecasters expect 12 to 14 named storms, of which five to seven will become hurricanes, and two or three will grow into major hurricanes with sustained wind speeds exceeding 110 mph. That’s roughly in-line with long-term averages, though scientists think climate change is generally making stronger hurricanes more common.

Should El Niño strengthen more than currently forecast, wind patterns in the upper atmosphere might become increasingly unfavorable for stronger hurricanes, which could provide a much-needed break to regions that are still recovering from the last two disastrous hurricane seasons.

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Hurricane season 2019 is almost here. Here’s a preview.

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5 facts to make you smarter than the president on Puerto Rico

by SylviaGodley297 Posted on April 2, 2019

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The fact-checking bar was already pretty low for Donald Trump, but the president’s untrue Twitter rant this morning regarding how much relief aid the U.S. has sent to Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria has still managed to shock and anger many of the island’s advocates.

When Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico in September 2017, it left mass devastation in its wake. It also left a train of misinformation, including the number of deaths associated with the storm, the amount of help that’s come from the government, and the relationship between the island’s residents and the mainland.

To (once again) clear the air, we’ve compiled a list of actual truths about Puerto Rico and its post-storm recovery:

Puerto Ricans are Americans

Despite Trump’s continued antagonism toward the island and a White House aide’s recent comment calling Puerto Rico “that country,” Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and its residents are U.S. citizens. More than 3 million people reside on the island.

Puerto Rico’s death toll associated with Hurricane Maria is about 3,000 people

A report commissioned by the Puerto Rican government estimated that 3,000 Puerto Ricans perished in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. In the first week after the storm, the government initially announced an official death toll of 16. That estimate then jumped to 64 but was updated when the report was released in August 2018 by George Washington University.

Puerto Rico has received about $1.5 billion in U.S. aid for storm recovery

The storm incurred around $91 billion in damages to the island. The island has received only about $1.5 billion in federal aid, out of a larger pot of aid funding previously approved by Congress. Puerto Rico is still waiting to receive most of the approximately $40 billion in relief funds which have been allocated to the territory.

Puerto Rico did not receive more recovery aid for Hurricane Maria than mainland states did for Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 affected more than a million people across three states, cost the federal government more than $120 billion in recovery efforts. About $76 billion of that aid went to Louisiana projects. In comparison, Puerto Rico has only received about $1.5 billion in storm aid so far.

Most Puerto Ricans are not happy with Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria

Despite Trump’s tweet this Tuesday that “The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump,” a poll conducted last year found more than half of Puerto Ricans felt Trump and his administration had done a poor job responding to the Hurricane Maria. That may not be surprising considering that earlier this year, the White House called Puerto Rico food stamp program “excessive and unnecessary.”

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5 facts to make you smarter than the president on Puerto Rico

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How U.S. recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

by AdriannMitten Posted on April 1, 2019

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

“This facility is our version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”

That’s how Eileen Kao described Montgomery County, Maryland’s recycling center on a tour. Kao, who is chief of waste reduction and recycling in the county’s Department of Environmental Protection, pointed out how machines in the facility help sort recyclables. As she described how the machines worked, a magnet separated steel and tin cans into a storage silo while a shaker table collected pieces of glass that were too small to be sorted. Dozens of workers hand-sorted at certain steps along the process.

The county’s recycling center in Derwood, Maryland, processed more than 31,000 tons of commingled material and more than 45,000 tons of mixed paper last year. At this building, commingled material (bottles, cans, and containers) is sorted. Mixed paper, including cardboard, is sorted in another facility nearby.

Over recent months, news coverage has depicted China’s National Sword policy as a crisis for recycling in municipalities all over the United States. Since early 2018, China has banned many scrap materials and has not accepted others unless they meet an extremely strict contamination rate of 0.5 percent. (Contamination rates of U.S. recyclables before sorting vary from place to place, but can reach 25 percent or higher.) The decision reflects China’s desire to recycle more of its domestic waste. Previously, China had been the destination for about 40 percent of the United States’ paper, plastics, and other recyclables.

National Sword sent waves through the global recyclables market. The changes in China diverted many materials to Southeast Asian countries, whose ports were not prepared to receive them in such high volume. Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia have begun to enact their own restrictions.

Meanwhile, many municipal recycling programs in the United States have suffered. As of January, Philadelphia was sending half of the recyclables it collects straight to the incinerator. Minneapolis stopped accepting black plastics. Marysville, Michigan, will no longer accept eight of 11 categories of items (including glass, newspaper, and mixed paper) for curbside recycling, in order to cut costs. Deltona, Florida, stopped curbside pickup altogether.

Many recycling and solid-waste organizations, as well as the U.S. EPA, have dedicated resources and staff to “identify solutions to be able to help support recycling here in the U.S.,” according to Dylan de Thomas, vice president of industry collaboration at the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that gives grants to and works with communities to improve their recycling programs. The EPA, which has typically left leadership on recycling to local governments, held its first-ever recycling summit in November 2018.

While recycling centers have been closing down in some places, like in greater Birmingham, Alabama, and around California, programs elsewhere are stepping up their efforts to decrease contamination levels in the recycling bin by educating residents about their role in the recycling process. This emphasis on outreach suggests a heavier onus on citizens to stop tossing items absentmindedly into the bin, and start disposing of them in a more informed, deliberate way.

Take plastic bags, for example. Whereas most grocery chains accept plastic bags for recycling, most municipal recycling programs do not. Still, plastic bags are frequently found in recycling bins. The mistake is so pervasive that Washington, D.C., mailed postcards to residents instructing them not to put plastic bags in the recycling bin. (D.C. only prints two types of mailers each year for recycling, one an overview and another focused on a particular issue.)

D.C. also did a pilot program with the Recycling Partnership to provide curbside feedback for residents. On one route, staff left a note behind for residents who had plastic bags in their recycling bin. Another route was the control, and staff did not leave tags. The route that gave residents feedback in the form of tags saw a 19-percent drop in plastic bags over the course of two weeks. The control route? An increase in bags of 2 percent.

“What we’re suggesting … is being very strategic and consistent with your tagging,” said Cody Marshall, the Recycling Partnership’s chief community strategist officer. “You have to go to the same houses over and over again four to five times with the tagging messages to really have an impact.”

Systematic tagging is an important strategy in the toolbox, according to Marshall, because it’s a targeted intervention to decrease the high contamination levels plaguing many municipalities as they try to bring their bales of recyclables to market. Recycling programs in central Virginia, El Paso, Tampa Bay and Orange County, Florida, and Phoenix are all tracking the impact of tagging on contamination.

The need for systematic approaches to reduce contamination is clear. Even though Americans recycle more now than ever, they’re not always sure what their local recycling program accepts. Increasingly, those mistakes can be costly for municipalities that are trying to sell the recyclables in bales. And, of course, to ensure that even more materials don’t end up in the landfill or incinerator.

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Recycling and Composting Rates, 1960 to 2015

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Many Americans are either aspirational recyclers,” said David Biderman, the executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), “or they’re confused recyclers. Just because it’s made of plastic doesn’t mean it can be recycled.”

What can and cannot be recycled, as well as how recyclables are separated, differs based on where you live. Montgomery County, for example, has a dual-stream model. Residents have to sort their recyclables into two groups: commingled materials (bottles, cans, and containers) and mixed paper (cardboard and paper). Under a single-stream approach, by contrast, residents throw all household recyclables into one bin, separate only from non-recyclable trash. D.C. has a single-stream system.

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While dual-stream recycling allows the sorting process to begin before waste reaches the facility, single-stream recycling is convenient because people can put everything in the same bin. Between 2005 and 2014, the single-stream model went from being used by 29 percent of American communities to 80 percent, according to one survey. It may lead to people putting fuller bins out to be collected, but the uptake of single-stream recycling has also meant higher contamination rates.

Some communities are switching back to dual-stream in an attempt to bring down contamination. Otherwise, they’re hoping citizens can make better recycling decisions. Ecomaine, a nonprofit that processes recycling for more than 70 communities in Maine on a single-stream model, recently hired a new educator to inform residents about what’s recyclable, what’s not, and why.

“It has certainly been a tough year-and-a-half to two years,” said Ecomaine’s communications manager, Matt Grondin. “But in the end, that landfill storage is forever storage, and to abandon recycling programs for a year or two of a down market really is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem.”

Back in Maryland, China’s policy hasn’t led Montgomery County to stop recycling anything. It continues to generate revenues from all the materials it recycles, Kao said, except mixed-color, broken glass, which it pays to recycle because it has little value. The county sells the majority of its bales domestically. In fact, one silver lining to China’s crackdown is a growing domestic market in the United States. More than a dozen North American paper mills have announced new capacity to process recycled paper, although it will be a few years before all of it comes online.

In any case, there are strategies that local programs can use, either separately or in combination, to find their way back to health and continue recycling waste. China’s policy change may not represent the much-feared “end of recycling” in the United States so much as an inflection point.

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How U.S. recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

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