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Timefulness – Marcia Bjornerud

by Myrna Posted on January 1, 2019

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Timefulness
How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
Marcia Bjornerud

Genre: Earth Sciences

Price: $17.99

Publish Date: September 11, 2018

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Seller: Princeton University Press


Why an awareness of Earth’s temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet’s long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth’s atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. But spans of hundreds of years—the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere—approach the limits of our comprehension. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth’s deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future. Marcia Bjornerud shows how geologists chart the planet’s past, explaining how we can determine the pace of solid Earth processes such as mountain building and erosion and comparing them with the more unstable rhythms of the oceans and atmosphere. These overlapping rates of change in the Earth system—some fast, some slow—demand a poly-temporal worldview, one that Bjornerud calls “timefulness.” She explains why timefulness is vital in the Anthropocene, this human epoch of accelerating planetary change, and proposes sensible solutions for building a more time-literate society. This compelling book presents a new way of thinking about our place in time, enabling us to make decisions on multigenerational timescales. The lifespan of Earth may seem unfathomable compared to the brevity of human existence, but this view of time denies our deep roots in Earth’s history—and the magnitude of our effects on the planet.

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Timefulness – Marcia Bjornerud

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There’s a greater risk of ‘domino effect’ with planet’s tipping points, study says

by SuzanneForwood Posted on December 22, 2018

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

Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points, according to a study that shows 45 percent of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another.

The authors said their paper, published in the journal Science, highlights how overstressed and overlapping natural systems are combining to throw up a growing number of unwelcome surprises.

“The risks are greater than assumed because the interactions are more dynamic,” said Juan Rocha of the Stockholm Resilience Center. “The important message is to recognize the wickedness of the problem that humanity faces.”

The study collated existing research on ecosystem transitions that can irreversibly tip to another state, such as coral reefs bleaching and being overrun by algae, forests becoming savannahs, and ice sheets melting into oceans. It then cross-referenced the 30 types of shift to examine the impacts they might have on one another and human society.

Only 19 percent were entirely isolated. Another 36 percent shared a common cause, but were not likely to interact. The remaining 45 percent had the potential to create either a one-way domino effect or mutually reinforcing feedbacks.

Among the latter pairings were Arctic ice sheets and boreal forests. When the former melt, there is less ice to reflect the sun’s heat so the temperature of the planet rises. This increases the risks of forest fires, which discharge carbon into the air that adds to the greenhouse effect, which melts more ice. Although geographically distant, each amplifies the other.

By contrast, a one-way domino-type impact is that between coral reefs and mangrove forests. When the former are destroyed, it weakens coastal defenses and exposes mangroves to storms and ocean surges.

The deforestation of the Amazon is responsible for multiple “cascading effects” — weakening rain systems, forests becoming savannah, and reduced water supplies for cities like São Paulo and crops in the foothills of the Andes. This, in turn, increases the pressure for more land clearance.

Until recently, the study of tipping points was controversial, but it is increasingly accepted as an explanation for climate changes that are happening with more speed and ferocity than earlier computer models predicted. The loss of coral reefs and Arctic sea ice may already be past the point of no return. There are signs the Antarctic is heading the same way faster than thought.

Co-author Garry Peterson said the tipping of the west Antarctic ice shelf was not on the radar of many scientists 10 years ago, but now there was overwhelming evidence of the risks — including losses of chunks of ice the size of New York — and some studies now suggest the tipping point may have already been passed by the southern ice sheet, which may now be releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

“We’re surprised at the rate of change in the Earth system. So much is happening at the same time and at a faster speed than we would have thought 20 years ago. That’s a real concern,” said Peterson. “We’re heading ever faster towards the edge of a cliff.”

The fourth most downloaded academic research of 2018 was the Hothouse Earth paper, which considered how tipping points could combine to push the global climate into an uninhabitable state.

The authors of the new paper say their work goes beyond climate studies by mapping a wider range of ecological stress points, such as biodiversity loss, agricultural expansion, urbanization, and soil erosion. It also focuses more on what is happening at the local level now, rather than projecting geo-planetary trends into the future.

“We’re looking at things that affect people in their daily lives. They’re things that are happening today,” said Peterson. “There is a positive message as it expands the range of options for action. It is not just at an international level. Mayors can also make a difference by addressing soil erosion, or putting in place social policies that place less stress on the environment, or building up natural coastal defenses.”

Rocha has spent 10 years building a database of tipping points, or “regime shifts” as he calls them. He urges policymakers to adopt a similar interdisciplinary approach so they can better grasp what is happening.

“We’re trying to connect the dots between different research communities,” said Rocha. “Governments also need to look more at interactions. They should stop compartmentalizing ministries like agriculture, fisheries, and international relations and try to manage environmental problems by embracing the diversity of causes and mechanisms underlying them. Policies need to match the scale of the problem.”

“It’s a little depressing knowing we are not on a trajectory to keep our ecosystem in a functional state,” Rocha continued, “but these connections are also a reason for hope; good management in one place can prevent severe environmental degradation elsewhere. Every action counts.”

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There’s a greater risk of ‘domino effect’ with planet’s tipping points, study says

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4 ways the melting Arctic is wreaking havoc near you

by LorieStruthers Posted on December 13, 2018

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The Arctic is in the throes of what sea-ice scientist Peter Wadhams called a “death spiral.” As the region’s once abundant ice melts, giving way to a less reflective surface, the Arctic heats up faster — now at a rate that is double the rest of the planet.

“The ice is much thinner and lighter and broken and kind of slushy,” Jennifer Francis, a scientist who focuses on the Arctic at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Grist. “It’s been described as rotten.”

The Arctic is heading toward irreversible melting and ecosystem destruction, according to the annual Arctic Report Card released on Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The researchers found that the Arctic has lost nearly 95 percent of its oldest ice. On top of that, the once-pristine region is becoming quite dirty: In addition to a growing toxic algae problem, the Arctic Ocean now has the highest concentration of microplastics of any ocean on Earth. (The tiny, barely visible plastics pose a threat to any seabirds or marine life that accidentally eat them.)

For people living up north, the warming Arctic has immediate effects. Coastal Arctic communities, including indigenous peoples, are literally losing land as coastal ice (also called “shorefast ice”) melts. “The decline of shorefast ice is exposing communities to increased storm surge, coastal flooding, and loss of shoreline,” Donald Perovich, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth and a contributor to the report, said in a press conference.

For Americans in the continental United States, though, these changes in the Arctic can feel far away. It’s hard to imagine they’ll have much effect on daily life here. However, the implications are far-reaching. We’re not just talking sea-level rise: The melting Arctic is disturbing Earth’s weather system, causing profound changes to weather beyond the North Pole.

“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” said Judah Cohen, an MIT climatologist who wasn’t involved in the report.

Drought, heatwaves, and wildfires

Warning: You’re about to learn a lot about the polar jet stream, a river of wind that travels around the Northern hemisphere. The air in the north wants to flow to the south, where the layer of air is hotter and thicker (hot air expands, remember?). The now-warmer Arctic makes it so there’s less of a pressure difference, so what once was a mountain in the sky becomes a gentle hill.

OK, OK, so the atmospheric hill in the sky is less steep. So what? Like a river moving down a soft incline, the jet stream moves more slowly and more erratically. In the United States, these changes in the jet stream are linked to a persistent “ridge” — like a hump in the sky. The “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge,” as it’s come to be known, causes weather patterns to linger, “perpetuating drought, heatwaves, and extensive wildfires across much of western North America,” according to the report.

Nor’easters and severe cold

A strong jet stream ridge is often associated with a trough, an elongated low pressure system. The trough in the eastern United States may have earned itself a new nickname. “I figured the trough should have a name too, because it’s very persistent,” Francis said. “So I call that the Terribly Tenacious Trough.”

Francis likens the trough to leaving the refrigerator door open. It allows “frigid Arctic air to plunge southward, bringing misery to areas ill-prepared to handle it,” Francis wrote in an article in The Conversation. This phenomenon, according to the NOAA report, brought a “parade of destructive nor’easters along the eastern seaboard” in the winters of 2013-14 and 2017-18. Most notably, it led to what has been dubbed the “bomb cyclone,” an intense blizzard along the East Coast in January 2018.

Hurricanes

When a ridge becomes very sharp, it can break off and form an eddy that runs counter to the ridge’s current. This phenomenon is known as “atmospheric blocking,” and it locks weather systems in place. “It’s like a traffic jam and in the air,” Cohen said.

Atmospheric blocking brings all kind of severe weather, including the slower, more intense hurricanes we’ve seen of late. Harvey and Florence, which hovered over the coast for days and dumped trillions of gallons of water, were dangerously stuck in place thanks to a “block.”

Even more climate change

As the warming Arctic sloughs off more layers of ice, it threatens to release stored carbon into the atmosphere — thus contributing to global warming and making extreme weather even worse.

This begins on a micro level: When the ground thaws, it activates microbes in the soil. “They start breathing out carbon dioxide or methane, depending on the situation,” said Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It’s a feedback because if you put more of that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that warms up things further. Right now the question is, ‘OK, is when does that kick in?’”

The Arctic as we know it is slipping away, and there are still a lot of unknowns about what that means for all of us. “Exactly how the northern meltdown will ‘play ball’ with other changes and natural fluctuations in the system presents many questions that will keep scientists busy for years to come,” Francis wrote in the report, “but it’s becoming ice-crystal-clear that change in the far north will increasingly affect us all.”

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4 ways the melting Arctic is wreaking havoc near you

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Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps

by WillardFuerst Posted on December 11, 2018

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Our current rate of warming will quickly lead us back to a climate that predates the evolution of modern humans, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That kind of rapid change has no direct comparison in all of Earth’s multi-billion year history.

“The only thing that comes to mind is a meteorite impact,” says co-author Jack Williams, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The researchers analyzed the current, near-past, and near-future climates for every part of the planet, and then compared them to what likely existed during similar warming periods of the distant past. The results were shocking, even to Williams.

“We are creating a geological-scale climate event,” Williams says. “These things don’t happen that often, and we don’t know how humans will do through it.”

Without rapidly reducing emissions, we’ll quickly go back to a climate similar to somewhere between the Pliocene and Eocene — geological epochs that occurred about 3 million, and about 56 million years ago, respectively. Both would have hellish consequences and likely reshape human civilization permanently.

During the Pliocene period, global temperatures were about 2-4 degrees Celsius warmer than today and sea levels eventually stabilized about 60 feet higher than current levels. It was a world largely inconsistent with natural ice formation.

By 2030, under a business-as-usual scenario, Pliocene-like conditions become the closest match for most land areas, according to the study. Under a moderate climate action scenario, like the lax pledges of the Paris Agreement, that could be extended out to 2040. Only a drastic, economy-wide makeover within the next decade, consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, would avoid the transition.

“This is coming up pretty fast,” Williams says.

An even more worrying period in Earth history was the Eocene, about 56 million years ago. The warmest part of this period — the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum — lasted around 200,000 years and was one of the warmest times in Earth history. The 8 degrees C-warmed world triggered a deep-sea mass extinction event and rainstorms so intense they scoured away the land surface at a continent scale. Humans are currently releasing carbon into the atmosphere at approximately 50 times the rate of the volcanic eruptions that led to the Eocene warm period.

According to Williams and his team, the Earth could tip toward Eocene-like conditions in just 120 years, based on current emissions trajectories. Millennials’ grandchildren would likely still be alive. Over the long haul, such conditions would be consistent with Greenland transforming from a mile-thick ice sheet to a marshy swamp, similar to Louisiana or Florida.

In 250 years from now on our current path, about 9 percent of the Earth’s land surface — mostly in East and Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and the coasts of the Americas — would transform into climates beyond the Eocene with no known precedent in all of Earth history, at least since life first formed.

But with rapid, near-term emissions reductions, those kinds of unprecedented and unknown climates can be almost entirely avoided, Williams says. Understanding the urgency and the scale of the choices currently facing humanity requires “balancing hope and despair,” he says.

“We’ve been talking about these challenges for years and there’s not been much measurable progress in stabilizing our greenhouse emissions,” Williams says. “We’ve built our cities and our societies for the current climate.” As a scientist and a concerned citizen, he said that observing the nations of the world not taking urgent action is like watching “a slow-motion train wreck.”

The challenge, according to Williams, is that “our options narrow as time goes forward.” The longer we wait to institute radical changes in society, the more likely the climate will become radically and irreversibly different, during the lifetimes of people alive today.

Talking about the choice we currently face as a civilization is perhaps the most important thing that any of us can do. The choice between a liveable world and a world completely unknown in all of Earth history, as Williams and his colleagues uncovered, is one of the starkest talking points yet.

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Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps

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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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Climate change caused the “Great Dying,” aka the planet’s worst extinction

by IndianaBrewster Posted on December 6, 2018

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The “Great Dying” was just as bad as it sounds. In the planet’s worst mass extinction 252 million years ago, up to 80 percent of all species died out, including up to 96 percent of ocean species. Trilobites, sea scorpions, and spiny sharks disappeared forever. The rapid reorganization of life on Earth spawned all kinds of unimaginably nasty things, like a giant burp of toxic hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere released from decaying marine animals.

For the first time, a new study in Science draws parallels between the cause of this horrific, planet-changing event and the global warming we’re experiencing today. “It is beyond deniable that climate change is linked to extinction,” lead author Justin Penn said in an interview with Grist.

In the Great Dying, global temperatures rose by more than 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees F) over the span of a few thousand years — a blink of an eye in geologic terms. Human activity has “only” warmed the planet about 1 degree Celsius over the past 150 years, and we’re on course for about 3 degrees (5.4 F) of total warming by 2100.

Penn and his University of Washington colleagues found that, should we continue unabated fossil fuel use, we could unavoidably kick off another crisis like the Great Dying by about 2300. Fast forward another thousand years, and we could be looking at all of the extinction, just much, much faster.

Here’s how the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history went down: A series of massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia emitted huge quantities of greenhouse gases, rapidly warming the planet. When water warms, its capacity to retain oxygen is reduced. Think of the air bubbles that form on the bottom of a pot being heated on the stove and then escape. The same thing, hypoxia, happened to the oceans 252 million years ago on a massive scale.

The researchers found that during the Great Dying, the oceans lost about 76 percent of their oxygen. So far, modern oceans have lost only about 2 percent of oxygen, but with continued rapid warming, that is going to quickly worsen, according to Penn’s findings.

Earlier this year, a different study projected how blowing past Paris Agreement goals would change our oceans. The researchers had to extend their modeling effort far beyond 2300 — the furthest out most climate models go — because they found that the impact was still getting worse.

That study found that ocean oxygen will keep declining until about the year 3000, even if fossil fuel emissions cease in the next few decades, because our current rapid phase of warming is causing ocean circulation to slow down. Beyond that, it could take about 6,000 years for ocean oxygen to recover to a new equilibrium state. Going that long without oxygen “would mean quite dramatic things for marine life,” says Gianna Battaglia, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and the lead author of the paper earlier this year.

For Penn, who hasn’t yet finished his PhD, his work on this latest study has renewed his desire to publicly communicate the dire urgency of climate change. “I’m pretty optimistic in my view of life in general,” he says. “Even though we’ve shown the direct connection between warming and mass extinction, we’ve also identified the solution to that problem. There is a way out.”

According to his coauthor and PhD advisor, Curtis Deutsch, that way out looks like a massive mobilization on the biggest problems facing the ocean and humanity.

“To portray this slow-motion ecological collapse as fundamentally a climate problem bothers me,” Deutsch says. “Climate change is not the problem, climate change is a symptom of the problem.” To truly solve the problem of mass extinction would take fixing other problems like overfishing, plastic pollution, and other stressors on the marine environment, Deutsch says.

Studies such as this one are like a time machine, propelling us first backward, to reckon with a reality that has already occurred, and then forward, projecting the known consequences of our current actions.

What happens in the next decade really, really matters. New data on Wednesday showed that, as of 2018, humanity’s carbon emissions are still accelerating upwards — tracking more or less with the worst-case scenario envisioned nearly a decade ago by climate scientists. In addition to jeopardizing human civilization, the results from Penn and his colleagues show we are setting a course of ecosystem annihilation that will play out over thousands and millions of years.

Some people frame climate change as a problem that’s bad for humanity, but ultimately the Earth will pull through. Sarah Myhre, a climate scientist who works in the same University of Washington lab group as the authors, is uncomfortable with that line of thought.

“This is not just about temperature. It’s about changing the biological, chemical, and physical identity of the planet forever,” she says of the study. “It’s about changing the Earth in a way that has no precedent, and it’s permanent.”

It’s entirely within our control to steer the planet on a different path away from the brink. Reading about this may make you may feel powerless, but collectively, our choices are the most powerful geological force in our planet’s history.

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Climate change caused the “Great Dying,” aka the planet’s worst extinction

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The U.N.’s climate report has something to piss everyone off

by VedaK723351 Posted on October 9, 2018

If bikes are your thing, great. If you’re a vegan crusader, bully for you. If you’re a solar-power enthusiast, way to go.

The greenest among are often evangelists for our favorite causes. But according to the blockbuster report out this week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it’s not enough to stick to your thing, or even to take up all of the causes environmentalists love. If we want to prevent the likely consequences of climate change — food shortages, forest fires, and mass extinctions — we’ll need to deploy the popular solutions as well as the some of the unpopular ones, the report concludes.

That means turning off coal plants and building lots of renewables, but also devoting more acres to growing biofuels. It means reducing consumption (fly less, drive less, and eat less meat) but also increasing our use of nuclear power.

The danger is so great, in other words, that the IPCC’s team of 91 scientists and policy experts suggest we consider all of the above. Whatever works. They came up with 90 different mixes of solutions that would keep warming limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but none of them work without biofuels, atomic energy, and reigning in consumerism.

Here are three unpopular ideas that the report says we’ll need to embrace, and two that are still up for debate.

The must-do list:

Less stuff: Every scenario for keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius requires reducing per capita consumption. The scenarios range from shrinking world energy demand 15 percent by 2030 to constraining it to a 17 percent increase. Either way would mean less power for anyone rich enough to read this on a computer (if poorer people get more stuff under constrained growth, it means the richer people are going to have to make some lifestyle changes).

Some of this would come from efficiency, but it would also require “behavioural changes.”

The report does offer some “high overshoot” scenarios that don’t require giving up creature comforts. But in those scenarios the world zips past the 1.5 degree mark, then reels it back in with “negative emissions.” That would rely on growing huge tracts of forest that suck up carbon before the trees are logged; then burning the wood for energy and capturing the carbon. But it might not work.

Biofuel: Every scenario laid out by the IPCC relies on ethanol, biodiesel and other biofuels to some extent, and projects an increase in farmland devoted to growing fuel. We could really use biofuels to replace jet fuel and gasoline, but it’s controversial. There are good scientists who say corn ethanol has a bigger carbon footprint than gasoline. Others say burning ethanol is already carbon negative and getting better all the time. It seems impossible to tell who is right. If you are cutting down rainforests for palm oil, that’s definitely a climate catastrophe. If you can get algae in a tank to turn sunlight to fuel, well, that’s awesome.

Nuclear power: All scenarios have nuclear providing a greater share of our electricity through 2050. Right now, nuclear power provides 11 percent of the world’s electricity. In one 1.5 degree scenario, the IPCC report has the world doubling the percentage of electricity it gets from nuclear by 2030, and quintupling it by 2050. The most “degrowthy” scenario, with dramatically decreasing energy demand, doesn’t require building new atomic plants but does require keeping the ones we have open.

Up for debate:

Carbon capture: Most scenarios to limit warming rely on fossil-fuel power plants capturing their carbon as long as they’re still running, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. There’s a bunch of plants already doing this around the world, but it’s pretty expensive. The businesses that capture carbon affordably are usually injecting the carbon into the ground in a way that squeezes out more oil for them to sell. Many environmentalists dislike carbon capture because it opens up a way for the fossil fuel industry to survive and thrive.

There’s no carbon capture required if global energy demand declines 15 percent between 2010 and 2030, but that’s looking more and more unlikely: Since 2010, energy demand has gone up, up, up.

Geoengineering: Imagine high-altitude airplanes constantly spraying reflective dust into the air to bounce sunlight back into space. Or fertilizing the ocean to allow a million carbon-sucking algal blooms. Technology to the rescue!

Except it’s all in your imagination. None of this whizbangery has been modelled enough to tell how it would affect the scenarios in this report. There’s just not enough science on geoengineering to say something substantive about it, according to the IPCC.

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The U.N.’s climate report has something to piss everyone off

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Nitrogen pollution is a problem as big as climate change. Science might have a fix.

by JoellenPr Posted on August 16, 2018

Some think nitrogen pollution may be the greatest danger we face. The Stockholm Resilience Center, an organization that examines the largest threats to natural life-support systems, considers our overuse of nitrogen a more extreme risk to life on Earth than climate change.

But a new paper, published in the journal Nature this week, uncovered a way that we could keep millions of tons of nitrogen fertilizer from evaporating into  the atmosphere and running into the oceans.

Nitrogen is a basic building block of our food, so farmers spread tons of the stuff — in the form of manure, compost, and synthetic fertilizer — on their fields. But only half of this nitrogen makes it into plants. The rest gets chewed up by hungry soil bacteria and turned into a greenhouse gas 300 times worse than carbon dioxide, or gets washed into waterways where it fuels an explosion of algae growth that turns into lakes and oceans into gloopy, oxygen-starved dead zones.

It’s a massive problem that doesn’t get enough attention. If the Earth were a spaceship [eds note: isn’t it?], the control panel’s nitrogen light would be flashing red.

The Stockholm Resilience Center’s estimation of planetary boundariesF. Pharand-Deschênes/Globaïa

Humans accelerated the nitrogen disaster during the “green revolution” of the 1960s with the worldwide adoption of fertilizer-hungry crops. These replaced strains of wheat, rice, and other grains that grew more slowly and conservatively. Grain harvests more than doubled in two decades, but clouds of pollution spread into the air and water. It seemed like a vicious tradeoff.

But this new research suggests that crops can be nitrogen-hoarding and high-yielding at the same time. Before this study came out, it seemed like we had to choose between frugal crops that grow slowly and hoard nitrogen, and spendthrift crops that grow quickly require extravagant nitrogen.

What had looked like a trade-off may simply have been a mistake. The scientists identified a gene that inhibits nitrogen absorption in rice, which had become hyperactive in high-yielding strains, and figured out how to counteract it. This gene (metaphorically) shouts, “Don’t suck up nitrogen!” Through breeding, scientists were able to turn down the volume of this shout to a whisper. The result is high-yielding rice that needs less fertilizer.

A rice-breeding program to bring this breakthrough to farmers is underway in China, where nitrogen pollution is especially bad. It will take about five years before we really know if this works for farmers outside of greenhouses and test plots. If it does, it might change that nitrogen warning on spaceship earth’s dashboard from red to yellow.

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Nitrogen pollution is a problem as big as climate change. Science might have a fix.

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Scott Pruitt might be on the wrong end of a Trump tweet soon. Here’s why.

by KennethDetwiler Posted on April 3, 2018

Common guesses include China, which is spending trillions to clean up transit, power plants, and factories. Or Germany, which has gone all-in on renewable energy. But the best answer might be the United Kingdom.

China’s emissions are still rising, and Germany’s are down 23 percent since 1990. Meanwhile, Britain has driven down its emissions by 43 percent since 1990, according to provisional data released Thursday. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Scott Burger helpfully turned the data into a graph:

So, has the U.K. simply moved its emissions to China by closing down the Sheffield steel plants and buying imported steel? Not quite — its overall emissions based on import consumption are down as well. (Though it’s true that the country’s traditional manufacturing sector has taken a hit, as you would know if you’ve seen The Full Monty.)

Of course, having low carbon emissions in the first place is better than polluting a bunch and making big improvements after the fact. All rich countries have pumped more than their share of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But the Brits have provided a model for maintaining all the modern creature comforts while kicking their carbon habit.

How did they do it? Basically, clean energy replaced a lot of coal, industry put a lid on super pollutants, and dumps captured more methane.

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Scott Pruitt might be on the wrong end of a Trump tweet soon. Here’s why.

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Hopi and Navajo miners protest the closure of the largest coal plant in the West.

by JerryKeynes8 Posted on February 7, 2018

Which, by the way, is melting.

“This discovery is a game-changer,” said Paul Schuster, lead author of a new study that quantified the total mercury in the Arctic’s frozen permafrost.

And it’s a lot of mercury! To be precise, 793 gigagrams — more than 15 million gallons — of the stuff is currently locked up in frozen northern soils. That’s by far the biggest reservoir of mercury on the planet — almost twice the amount held by the rest of the world’s earth, oceans, and atmosphere combined.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the permafrost stayed, well, permanently frosty. But, as previous research has outlined, it’s not.

Mercury is a toxin that can cause birth defects and neurological damage in animals, including humans. And mercury levels accumulate as you go up the food chain, which is why king-of-the-jungle species like tuna and whale can be unsafe to eat in large quantities.

As thawing permafrost releases more mercury into the atmosphere and oceans, the implications for human health are troubling. Locally, many northern communities rely on subsistence hunting and fishing, two sources of possible mercury contamination. Globally, the toxin could travel great distances and collect in distant ecosystems.

As if we didn’t already have enough reasons to want permafrost to stay frozen.

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Hopi and Navajo miners protest the closure of the largest coal plant in the West.

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