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

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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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Leaked Email: President Trump’s Modeling Agency Is Shutting Down

Mother Jones

One of President Donald Trump’s favorite businesses will go the way of Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Airlines, and Trump Magazine: his embattled New York modeling firm, Trump Model Management, has officially told its business associates around the world to prepare for its closure, according to an email obtained by Mother Jones.

Over the weekend, Corinne Nicolas, president of Trump Models, informed industry colleagues of the pending closure of the 18-year-old agency, in which Trump owns an 85 percent stake (according to his most recent financial disclosure). “The Trump Organization is choosing to exit the modeling industry,” Nicolas wrote in the email. “On the heels of the recent sale of the Miss Universe Organization, the company is choosing to focus on their core businesses in the real estate, golf and hospitality space.” (The Trump Organization sold the Miss Universe Organization, which also runs the Miss USA beauty pageant, to the talent agency WME-IMG about 18 months ago, following a controversy over then-candidate Trump’s remarks about Mexican immigrants.)

Mother Jones reported last week that the firm was on the brink of collapse, and the New York Post confirmed on Friday that Trump’s agency was indeed shutting down.

In her email, Nicolas did not provide a specific date on which operations will cease. Trump Models employees had assured Mother Jones as recently as last Wednesday that it was operating as normal and that the company was “of course” open for new business.

“Trump Models, during its 18-year run, was an amazing success and we are immensely proud of the opportunities that we have provided to so many talented individuals,” Nicolas wrote.

Mother Jones reported before the election that Trump’s modeling agency had a history of employing foreign models who said they violated immigration rules by working in the United States without work visas. That investigation also detailed how Trump Models forced its recruits to pay sky-high rent to live in crammed living quarters, while levying a dizzying number of fees and expenses on its talent that left some models in deep debt to the agency.

Former Trump model Rachel Blais appeared in this Elle fashion spread, published in September 2004, while working for Trump’s agency without a proper visa. Read Mother Jones‘ complete investigation here. Elle

Since Trump’s election, models and staff members have been fleeing his agency. Industry sources told Mother Jones last week that this was a direct result of Trump’s divisive politics, which have made his brand toxic in the modeling world.

Recent departures include modeling stars Katie Moore and Mia Kang and veterans Shirley Mallmann and Maggie Rizzer. The rest of Trump Models’ talent must now find new representation at other agencies. Nicolas promised business partners she would “be here to assist you throughout the process.”

Trump founded his modeling agency in 1999, augmenting his business brand with what would become one of the top modeling agencies in the country. Since his election, ethics experts and others have focused on how Trump might use the presidency to benefit his businesses. At least in the case, his presidency appears to have had the opposite effect.

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Leaked Email: President Trump’s Modeling Agency Is Shutting Down

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Donald Trump Once Again the Target of Malicious Gossip From Haters and Losers

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal reports:

The company that owns the National Enquirer, a backer of Donald Trump, agreed to pay $150,000 to a former Playboy centerfold model for her story of an affair a decade ago with the Republican presidential nominee, but then didn’t publish it, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the matter.

The tabloid-newspaper publisher reached an agreement in early August with Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playmate of the Year….Ms. McDougal expected her story about Mr. Trump to be published, people familiar with the matter said. American Media didn’t intend to run it, said another person familiar with the matter. Ms. McDougal didn’t return calls for comment.

….A contract reviewed by the Journal gave American Media exclusive rights to Ms. McDougal’s story forever, but didn’t obligate the company to publish it and allowed the company to transfer those rights. It barred her from telling her story elsewhere. The company said it also would give her monthly columns to write and would put her on magazine covers.

Trump and the Enquirer deny everything, so this is probably just idle gossip. It doesn’t really seem like him anyway, does it? Anyway, this was all back in 2006, when Trump was only 60 years old and didn’t know he’d run for president someday. I’m sure he’s given up cheating on his wife since then.

And speaking of Melania, I guess we finally got the goods on her. Apparently she did paid modeling jobs in the United States seven weeks before she got a work permit:

The details of Mrs. Trump’s early paid modeling work in the U.S. emerged in the final days of a bitter presidential campaign in which her husband, Donald Trump, has taken a hard line on immigration laws and those who violate them.

….The documents obtained by the AP show she was paid for 10 modeling assignments between Sept. 10 and Oct. 15 of 1996, during a time when her visa allowed her generally to be in the U.S. and look for work but not perform paid work in the country. The documents examined by the AP indicate that the modeling assignments would have been outside the bounds of her visa.

We can all let this go, right? It’s bad enough being married to Donald. She doesn’t deserve any more grief.

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Donald Trump Once Again the Target of Malicious Gossip From Haters and Losers

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Sen. Barbara Boxer Slams Donald Trump Over MoJo’s Report on His Modeling Agency

Mother Jones

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As Donald Trump was landing in Mexico City for a last-minute meeting with the Mexican president, Sen. Barbara Boxer unleashed a tweetstorm on the Republican nominee, based on Mother Jones‘ report on his modeling agency’s use of foreign models who worked illegally in the US.

Boxer, a vocal critic of Trump, took to social media on Wednesday with the following:

Since launching his presidential campaign last summer, Trump has routinely issued inflammatory statements against undocumented workers, especially Mexicans, vowing to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States and build a massive wall across the US-Mexico border if he were to become president. But in recent days, there have been conflicting reports about whether Trump was planning to soften his previous positions on immigration. On Wednesday night, Trump is slated to deliver a speech in Arizona clarifying his official position on the issue.

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Sen. Barbara Boxer Slams Donald Trump Over MoJo’s Report on His Modeling Agency

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The Alberta wildfire is dumping mercury into the atmosphere

The Alberta wildfire is dumping mercury into the atmosphere

By on May 19, 2016Share

Alberta’s massive wildfire is sending more than just smoke into the air.

The Fort McMurray fire, which merged with another smaller wildfire last week, has displaced residents and cleared nearly everything in its path, including swaths of the region’s dense boreal forests. The combined blaze has already released the equivalent of 5 percent of Canada’s annual carbon dioxide emissions and is expected to continue to burn for the next few months. The fires have also filled Fort McMurray’s air with dangerous contaminants, ozone, and nitrogen dioxide, pushing its air pollution to off-the-charts levels. Along with all that carbon, the fires are releasing mercury into the atmosphere.

When a huge fire rages through a boreal forest, it is probably going to hit some peatlands, 80 percent of which are located in high latitudes. Peat contains more mercury than other soils, accumulated in layers that can build up over thousands of years. Peatlands are largely stable sinks for mercury — until a wildfire comes along.

“All of a sudden, you have this big release in a fire,” said Christine Wiedinmyer, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling Lab. “The mercury that before was staying in one place is now in the atmosphere, and can be transported downwind, adding more mercury in places where we don’t necessarily want it.”

And mercury may be able to travel far away from its source. By some estimates, mercury in the atmosphere can travel around the Earth for about a year before being deposited on land or water.

“The mercury level in rain is not only from us — the sources are also global, like when it gets released Europe and Asia and deposited down,” said Yanxu Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University who studies mercury and other pollutants. “It has the capability for long-range transport, which makes it harder to control and combat.”

Mercury exposure can cause insidious effects even at low levels, worsening health problems that already exist. It depends on the dose and the type of mercury, and there are three types: elemental, which can cause neurological damage; salts, industrial pollution causing kidney problems; and organic, the type that gets into the food chain and causes birth defects and is why pregnant women are advised against eating fish.

“In a lot of cases, mercury has a lasting impact — but the degree to which that resonates is something we don’t understand yet,” said Dave Krabbenhoft, a research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey who’s been studying mercury contamination for 28 years.

The 2012 U.S. mercury and air toxics rule, meant to clean up the industrial kind of mercury pollution from power plants, is expected to prevent some 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, and 130,000 asthma attacks every year, saving up to $70 billion in healthcare costs annually.

Boreal fires could roll back some of those numbers. Since these fires take place in less-populated areas, they are often left to burn longer, releasing more mercury. This problem will only be exacerbated by the increasing intensity and frequency of boreal fires due to climate change.

We don’t yet know exactly how much mercury Alberta’s fires are releasing — and we might not know for years, until scientists can complete a post-mortem review. But one thing’s for sure: Those plumes of smoke aren’t healthy for you.

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The Alberta wildfire is dumping mercury into the atmosphere

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We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

By on 24 Apr 2015commentsShare

Humans have gotten very good at causing earthquakes. Humans who work for the oil and gas industry, that is. They’ve gotten so good, in fact, that the U.S. Geological Survey has decided that it needs to start forecasting human-caused earthquakes in addition to the natural ones that it’s been forecasting for decades.

Between 1973 and 2008, the average number of earthquakes of magnitude 3 or more in the central and eastern U.S. was 21. Between 2009 and 2013, that number was 99. And last year alone, there were 659.

Cumulative number of earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or larger in the central and eastern United States, 1973-2014. The rate of earthquakes began to increase starting around 2009 and accelerated in 2013-2014.USGS

Scientists attribute this rise to “induced” earthquakes caused when we inject wastewater from gas and oil extraction sites into disposal wells.

“These earthquakes are occurring at a higher rate than ever before and pose a much greater risk to people living nearby. The USGS is developing methods that overcome the challenges in assessing seismic hazards in these regions in order to support decisions that help keep communities safe from ground shaking,” Mark Peterson, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Modeling Project, said yesterday in a press release.

Traditionally, the USGS has put out a map every six years showing which parts of the country are most likely to experience earthquakes within 50 years, but those maps have never included induced earthquakes. Here’s the latest, which came out in 2014:

2014 USGS National Seismic Hazard Map, displaying intensity of potential ground shaking from an earthquake in 50 years (which is the typical lifetime of a building).USGS

Last November, the USGS and the Oklahoma Geological Survey gathered more than 100 academics, industry representatives, and government officials to discuss the growing prevalence of induced earthquakes and how best to incorporate them into the USGS forecasting models.

Representatives from the meeting released a report yesterday, detailing the group’s initial findings. They found, for example, that certain parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas are now particularly susceptible to induced earthquakes:

Research has identified 17 areas in the central and eastern United States with increased rates of induced seismicity. Since 2000, several of these areas have experienced high levels of seismicity, with substantial increases since 2009 that continue today.USGS

The group also concluded that induced earthquake forecasts would likely have to be issued once per year (if not more frequently) in order to account for changes in industrial activity.

According to the USGS website, most induced earthquakes are either magnitude 3 or 4, and they’ve never reached 6, meaning they’re often strong enough for people to feel but not usually strong enough to cause damage. Two induced quakes did cause some damage and injuries in 2011, though — a 5.3 in Colorado and a 5.6 in Oklahoma.

But don’t underestimate the oil and gas industry — they’re endlessly inventive and might soon figure out how to cause bigger earthquakes more often.

Source:
New Insight on Ground Shaking from Man-Made Earthquakes

, USGS.

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We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

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Fracking won’t fix the climate

Fracking won’t fix the climate

WCN 24/7

The claim that natural gas is saving the climate is revealed as hot air.

Perhaps you’ve heard the claim that the natural-gas boom made possible by fracking is reducing America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The logic underpinning this claim is that natural gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal, and hydraulic fracturing has produced a surfeit of cheap natural gas. Ergo, fracking is helping power plants switch from coal to natural gas, helping the climate along the way.

But that’s only half the story.

A Stanford-led study, which was produced with input from 50 academic, government, and private-sector experts, concludes that natural gas is having only “modest impacts” on carbon dioxide emissions.

Yes, natural gas is helping to dig a grave for coal. It’s the lesser of two fossil-fuel evils. But natural gas’s low price is also slowing down the country’s shift toward climate-friendly solar and wind power. From the Stanford report [PDF]:

Shale development has relatively modest impacts on carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions, particularly after 2020. Since 2006, electricity generation has become less carbon intensive as its natural gas share increased from 16 to 24 percent and its coal share decreased from 52 to 41 percent. Over future years, this trend towards reducing emissions becomes less pronounced as natural gas begins to displace nuclear and renewable energy that would have been used otherwise in new powerplants under reference case conditions.

Meanwhile, the study concludes that fracking is helping to slightly expand America’s economy — but not nearly to the extent that the industry would like us to think:

Shale development also boosts the economy by $70 billion annually over the next several decades. Although this amount appears large, it represents a relatively modest 0.46 percent of the US economy. Today total natural gas expenditures represent about one percent of GDP within this country.

Joe Romm of ClimateProgress points out that the International Energy Agency recently warned that the low price of natural gas is also hampering efforts to improve energy efficiency, which is bad news for greenhouse gas emissions.

“From a climate perspective, then, the shale gas revolution is essentially irrelevant,” argues Romm, “and arguably a massive diversion of resources and money that could have gone into deploying carbon-free sources.”


Source
Changing the game?: Emissions and market implications of new natural gas supplies, Energy Modeling Forum, Stanford University
Major Study Projects No Long-Term Climate Benefit From Shale Gas Revolution, ClimateProgress

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

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