Tag Archives: planet

How fast will you need to flee from the heat? There’s a word for that.

Ocean creatures are finding themselves in hot water as the world warms. To stay cool, they’re relocating to deeper parts of the ocean, and it’s throwing ecosystems all out of whack.

A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculated how fast different layers of the ocean are heating up. Species are swimming to deeper waters to escape the heat at different rates, and the researchers warn that many sea dwellers like tuna, which rely on plankton at the water’s surface for food, might struggle to adapt.

The study brought a new phrase into the news: climate velocity. It’s basically the speed and direction that a given species will need to shift as their corner of the world heats up. Climate velocity has been in use in academic circles for more than a decade, but the study marks the first time the phrase made the headlines.

As climate change reshuffles life on earth, climate velocity applies up here on the surface, too. Warmer weather will drive animals seeking new homes into encounters with species they don’t normally meet — sort of like how grizzlies have been showing up in polar bears’ dwindling territory, leading to the emergence of grolar bears (or pizzlies?). And it’s not just flora and fauna. Humans, too, will have to move to survive.

Global warming will make large swaths of the Earth too hot for humans, as David Wallace-Wells memorably described in The Uninhabitable Earth, a book that features a grisly account of how the body breaks down in sweltering heat. That’s just one of many interesting challenges in store. The rising ocean is already submerging coasts, and changing weather patterns are helping to create new deserts. (The Sahara is expected to keep swallowing up more land as the planet warms.) Researchers estimate that the climate crisis could displace between 25 million and 1 billion people by 2050. For perspective, the most commonly cited number — 200 million — means that one in every 45 people would be displaced by mid-century.

Warmer weather and changing weather patterns are already altering how people grow food. In Alaska, for instance, rising temperatures mean that farmers can farm potatoes on the previously inhospitable tundra. Greenlanders are harvesting strawberries and tomatoes. In California, farmers are planting orchards, crossing their fingers that the fruit and nut trees they’re planting today will be able to make it in the hotter, drier world that the coming decades will bring.

Migration is inevitable. The fish are definitely in trouble. But our climate velocity, the pace at which people will be forced to abandon their homes and relocate, is largely TBD. One reason estimates of the number of people who will be displaced varies so widely is that it’s hard to predict human behavior. If governments decide to pull the plug on fossil fuel emissions soon, it will slow climate velocity and save human lives — and probably rescue a bunch of cute marine species, too.

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How fast will you need to flee from the heat? There’s a word for that.

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A Splintered History of Wood – Spike Carlsen

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A Splintered History of Wood

Belt-Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats

Spike Carlsen

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 6, 2009

Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


In a world without wood, we might not be here at all. Without wood, we wouldn't have had the fire, heat, and shelter that allowed us to expand into the colder regions of the planet. If civilization somehow did develop, our daily lives still would be vastly different: there would be no violins, baseball bats, chopsticks, or wine corks. The book you are now holding wouldn't exist. At the same time, many of us are removed from the world where wood is shaped and celebrated every day. That world is inhabited by a unique assortment of eccentric craftsmen and passionate enthusiasts who have created some of the world's most beloved musical instruments, feared weapons, dazzling architecture, sacred relics, and bizarre forms of transportation. In A Splintered History of Wood, Spike Carlsen has uncovered the most outlandish characters and examples, from world-champion chainsaw carvers to blind woodworkers, the Miraculous Staircase to the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and many more, in a passionate and personal exploration of nature's greatest gift.

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A Splintered History of Wood – Spike Carlsen

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Here’s why the coronavirus pandemic has the U.S. oil industry feeling ill

Weeks before most Americans were aware that a pandemic would grind the United States economy to a halt, the Energy Information Administration released its short-term energy outlook. The federal agency predicted that carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. energy generation would fall by 2 percent this year and decrease another 1.5 percent in 2021. The decreases would bring emissions down to where they were before a 3 percent spike in 2018 — attributed to heavy use of air conditioning during a scorching summer and heating systems throughout a frigid winter.

That was in mid-January. On Tuesday, the Energy Information Administration, or EIA, put out a very different forecast.

Its latest outlook forecasts energy-related carbon emissions will fall by 7.5 percent this year due to the COVID-19 crisis. For an idea of how dramatic that is, consider this: Energy-related carbon emissions fell 7.1 percent in the wake of the financial crisis more than a decade ago. And that was the largest decrease in 19 years. The newly predicted emissions free fall can be attributed to an economy that’s suddenly in lockdown with millions of people staying home every day and industrial activity slowed.

On top of the new emissions forecast, the Energy Department has bad news for oil producers: U.S. officials will likely have to stop referring to the country as a net-exporter of oil, stymying a years-long march to become an international force in the crude oil game. The EIA estimates that U.S. oil production will drop by more than one million barrels per day due to the novel coronavirus. Americans will consume 9 percent less gasoline to fuel motor vehicles when compared to 2019, and jet fuel consumption will fall by 10 percent year over year. As a result, the agency estimates that the country will begin importing more oil than it exports sometime over the summer.

Back in February, Grist staff writer Naveena Sadasivam noted that in his State of the Union, President Trump took credit for the nation becoming energy independent. The U.S. officially became a net-exporter of oil products in November 2019. Sadasivam warned that with his claim the president ignored “the fact that the country is still subject to the global oil market.” Well, it still is, and a combination of plummeting demand due to coronavirus-influenced economic shutdowns and the inability of global oil powers to make a deal on oil production cuts are likely to blow that feather right out of his MAGA cap.

Oil isn’t the only fuel affected by an economy in the throes of a pandemic. The EIA expects coal generation to fall 20 percent in 2020, after previously projecting it would decline a more modest 16.9 percent. The natural gas industry may have the most on the line. Natural gas output is expected to drop 4.4 percent in 2021, the biggest dip since records began in 1998.

Renewables are still projected to outpace all other electricity types this year in terms of growth. But the EIA says annual additions to solar and wind capacity  are now likely 5 and 10 percent lower, respectively, than they were in the agency’s prior assessment.

The projected declines in oil and coal production and energy-related carbon emissions might seem like a major win for the planet, but alas, they’re not permanent. The EIA says emissions will rise 3.6 percent in 2021 (from 2020 levels) — the largest year-over-year growth in a decade — as the threat of coronavirus dissipates, and the economy roars back.

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Here’s why the coronavirus pandemic has the U.S. oil industry feeling ill

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Don’t be April fooled, Google did not just swear off funding climate deniers

Congratulations! After an approximately 4 billion year–long March, we’ve made it to April 1st. Under normal circumstances, this day would be filled with jolly fun, like cars covered in plastic wrap, sugar in the salt shaker, fake product launches, and of course, the infamous annual Google prank.

But after days or weeks of being shut in our homes, washing our hands to oblivion, eyes glued to charts and maps showing the coronavirus spreading around the country and the number of cases and deaths ticking upward, pranks don’t have much appeal right now. Out of respect for the essential workers who are risking their lives to get us through this, Google officially called off its annual joke.

But it did appear to make a big announcement today. A very convincing statement from CEO Sundar Pichai appeared at the address agreenergoogle.com today, with an exciting message: The company will stop funding climate change deniers.

“In lieu of our normal April Fools’ joke, today we’re getting serious,” it says. The site goes on to list eight organizations that Google has funded or otherwise worked with that have opposed measures to fight climate change like the Paris Agreement and Obama’s Clean Power Plan. It includes an apology for “putting profits over the planet” and for stalling on changing its ways for so long. COVID-19 has forced the company to reckon with the perils of ignoring science, it says.

Sigh, if only that were the case. The site is a prank put out by the New York City arm of the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion. While not everyone will appreciate the group using a global health crisis to further its mission, the message is more sobering than funny. There are more truths on the page than jokes: Google has made substantial contributions to major climate deniers in Washington, including the eight groups listed on the site. It has also been criticized by its own workers for not doing enough to cut its carbon footprint. Despite being a carbon neutral company, the company’s operations still run on fossil fuels, which it makes up for by buying renewable energy and carbon offsets.

As the prank highlights, Google’s funding of climate denial is dangerous. We’re now experiencing something similar to the climate crisis but at “warp speed” and seeing the fatal consequences when people in power fail to heed scientists’ warnings and then downplay the seriousness of a global public health threat. Dumb April Fools’ Day jokes aside, misinformation kills.

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Don’t be April fooled, Google did not just swear off funding climate deniers

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Some Assembly Required – Neil Shubin

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Some Assembly Required

Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

Neil Shubin

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: March 17, 2020

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life on Earth–a new view of the evolution of human and animal life that explains how the incredible diversity of life on our planet came to be. Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened. We have now arrived at a remarkable moment—prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multibillion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention. In Some Assembly Required, Neil Shubin takes readers on a journey of discovery spanning centuries, as explorers and scientists seek to understand the origins of life's immense diversity.

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Some Assembly Required – Neil Shubin

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It’s official: Climate change made Australia’s wildfire season more likely

Australia has always had nasty wildfires. In 2005, the Eyre Peninsula bushfire crisped a wide swath of South Australia’s wheat belt on a day now known as Black Tuesday. In 2009, the Black Saturday fires led to 173 fatalities in Victoria. But this season was different in terms of scale, if not lives lost. Extreme fires have charred nearly 55 million acres of land and killed at least 34 people. Climate change, many suspected, was to blame for the ferocity of the fires.

Now we have evidence. On Wednesday, researchers have confirmed that climate change made Australia’s unprecedented wildfire season of 2019 and 2020 more likely. How much more likely? About 30 percent — and that’s a conservative estimate, the scientists say. That’s pretty significant, but the most concerning conclusion of the study, published by World Weather Attribution (a group of international researchers specializing in climate change, disaster preparedness, and atmospheric sciences), is that conditions for future fire seasons will be even worse.

To get their results, which have not been peer-reviewed yet, the researchers compared conditions in 1900 (before greenhouse gas emissions from human activity started heating up the planet) to conditions during the peak burning period in December 2019 and January 2020 according to the Fire Weather Index — a tool that calculates fire risk in a particular area by assessing weather conditions in addition to other climatic factors like humidity and wind. The researchers did not look at non-weather factors like ignition sources. They found that the index values for the most recent fire season in southeastern Australia were super high, and calculated that those high numbers are 30 to 80 percent more likely to pop up now than they were before 1900.

That’s more or less in line with what climate modelers say is possible on a planet that has warmed 1 degree C above pre-industrial levels, as our planet has. “These observed trends over southeast Australia are broadly consistent with the projected impacts of climate change,” the authors write. And things will start getting really dire when the planet warms an additional degree or more, at which point fires like the ones Australia saw this season will be four to eight times more likely. As such, “it is crucial to prioritize adaptation and resilience measures to reduce the potential impacts of rising risks,” they say.

Curiously, the four models used by researchers to assess wildfire risk showed that the dry conditions across Australia that many blamed for the proliferation of wildfires in the 2018-2019 season weren’t caused by climate change. Climate change did, however, double the chances of heatwaves during that period.

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It’s official: Climate change made Australia’s wildfire season more likely

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The Future We Choose – Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

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The Future We Choose

Surviving the Climate Crisis

Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Climate change: it is arguably the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced. How we address it in the next thirty years will determine the kind of world we will live in and will bequeath to our children and to theirs. In The Future We Choose , Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac–who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015–have written a cautionary but optimistic book about the world's changing climate and the fate of humanity. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster.

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The Future We Choose – Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

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The EU is doing what the US won’t: kicking coal to the curb

The European Union has undergone a pretty dramatic transformation as of late — and we’re not talking about Brexit. The group of member states, which pledged as a collective to become carbon neutral by 2050 as part of Europe’s Green Deal, cut carbon emissions from electricity by a whopping 12 percent in 2019, according to a report compiled by the European thinktanks Agora EnergieWende and Sandbag. Coal use, in particular, plummeted by about 25 percent.

“What surprised us most was the magnitude of the collapse of coal and the accompanying decrease in CO2 emissions,” said report coauthor Fabian Hein. “The speed of it was impressive.”

Clayton Aldern / Grist

The dramatic drop in CO2 — the equivalent of cutting the U.S. state of Georgia’s annual carbon emissions — can be linked to both the E.U.’s commitment to making Europe “the first carbon-neutral continent” and a steep increase in the market price of carbon, which drove the cost of polluting to its highest level since 2008. Aggressive onboarding of wind and solar also helped renewables overtake coal for the first time as the largest contributor to the electricity sector.

While that’s good news for the planet, the numbers don’t guarantee Europe will continue to make steady progress toward its goal of a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. A milder-than-usual winter last year helped lower the demand for electricity slightly across every country included in the 2019 report. And a closer look at the data shows that while coal power is falling fast, natural gas use has actually crept back up since hitting a low point in 2014. Not all E.U. nations are making the same progress in renewable development. Many Eastern European countries continue to fall far behind their wealthier neighbors, like Germany, the U.K, or the Netherlands.

The E.U. still has a lot of work to do to hit its 2030 benchmarks, including rapid improvements in energy efficiency and transportation. But in a speech about the challenges Europe still faces in its energy transition, Frans Timmermans, executive vice president of the European Commission and the head of the European Green Deal, singled out power generation as a reason to believe the E.U.’s can achieve its larger climate goals.”

That is one area at least in which progress is “go[ing] much faster than anybody had anticipated,” Timmermans said.

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The EU is doing what the US won’t: kicking coal to the curb

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New Scientist: The Origin of (almost) Everything – New Scientist, Graham Lawton, Stephen Hawking & Jennifer Daniel

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New Scientist: The Origin of (almost) Everything

from the Big Bang to Belly-button Fluff

New Scientist, Graham Lawton, Stephen Hawking & Jennifer Daniel

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $15.99

Publish Date: October 25, 2016

Publisher: Quercus

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


From what actually happened in the Big Bang to the accidental discovery of post-it notes, the history of science is packed with surprising discoveries. Did you know, for instance, that if you were to get too close to a black hole it would suck you up like a noodle (it’s called spaghettification), why your keyboard is laid out in QWERTY (it’s not to make it easier to type) or why animals never evolved wheels? New Scientist does. And now they and award-winning illustrator Jennifer Daniel want to take you on a colorful, whistle-stop journey from the start of our universe (through the history of stars, galaxies, meteorites, the Moon and dark energy) to our planet (through oceans and weather and oil) and life (through dinosaurs to emotions and sex) to civilization (from cities to alcohol and cooking), knowledge (from alphabets to alchemy) ending up with technology (computers to rocket science). Witty essays explore the concepts alongside enlightening infographics that zoom from how many people have ever lived, to showing you how a left-wing brain differs from a right-wing one…

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New Scientist: The Origin of (almost) Everything – New Scientist, Graham Lawton, Stephen Hawking & Jennifer Daniel

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Storm Surge – Adam Sobel

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Storm Surge

Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future

Adam Sobel

Genre: Environment

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 14, 2014

Publisher: Harper Wave

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


A renowned scientist takes us through the devastating and unprecedented events of Hurricane Sandy, using it to explain our planet’s changing climate, and what we need to do to protect ourselves and our cities for the future. Was Hurricane Sandy a freak event—or a harbinger of things to come?  Was climate change responsible?  What connects the spiraling clouds our satellites saw from space, the brackish water that rose up over the city’s seawalls, and the slow simmer of greenhouse gases? Why weren't we better prepared? In this fascinating and accessible work of popular science, atmospheric scientist and Columbia University professor Adam Sobel addresses these questions, combining scientific explanation with first-hand experience of the event itself. He explains the remarkable atmospheric conditions that gave birth to Sandy and determined its path. He gives us insight into the sophisticated science that led to the forecasts of the storm before it hit, as well as an understanding of why our meteorological vocabulary failed our leaders in warning us about this unprecedented storm—part hurricane, part winter-type nor’easter, fully deserving of the title “Superstorm.” Storm Surge brings together the melting glaciers, the shifting jet streams, and the warming oceans to make clear how our changing climate will make New York and other cities more vulnerable than ever to huge storms—and how we need to think differently about these long-term risks if we hope to mitigate the damage. Engaging, informative, and timely, Sobel’s book provokes us to rethink the future of our climate and how we can better prepare for the storms to come.

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Storm Surge – Adam Sobel

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