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Humans have been causing record-breaking heat since 1937

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A frightening record: Carbon dioxide levels show biggest-annual jump

by RoyceAkin515 Posted on March 9, 2016

A frightening record: Carbon dioxide levels show biggest-annual jump

By Rebecca Leberon 9 Mar 2016comments Share

Recently, we’ve had more reason than usual to be optimistic on climate change — the world reached its first truly global climate agreement in December, there are a lot of signs that China is getting serious about its emissions, and coal is facing economic collapse in the U.S. But there’s just as much news to sour this outlook, particularly when you look at what’s happening to carbon dioxide.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has reported the biggest 12-month jump in carbon dioxide concentrations since record-keeping began, based on preliminary data from its Earth Science Research Lab in Mauna Loa. From February 2015 to 2016, the global concentration of carbon in the atmosphere rose a record 3.76 parts per million (ppm), to over 404 ppm. The last record-holder was 1997-1998, when carbon dioxide rose 3.70 ppm. We’ve broke other records this past year, too: The 2015 calendar year also posted the biggest-annual rise in carbon levels, while NOAA reported last May that carbon stayed above an average 400 ppm for the entire month, a first in millions of years.

Meanwhile, 2015 was the hottest year on record.

Mauna Loa’s data looks at the big picture of carbon in the atmosphere and not just emissions from the energy sector and industry. It includes deforestation’s impact on CO2, as well as El Niño, which boosts wildfires that release even more carbon. The previous record, 1997-1998, was also during El Niño.

“Carbon dioxide concentrations haven’t been this high in millions of years,” NASA carbon and water cycle research scientist Erika Podest said in a statement on breaking another carbon milestone last year. “Even more alarming is the rate of increase in the last five decades and the fact that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.”

Well then. The world’s work is just beginning.

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Surprise! A third of Congress members are climate change deniers

by AlmaFaircloth6 Posted on March 9, 2016

Surprise! A third of Congress members are climate change deniers

By Katie Herzogon 8 Mar 2016comments Share

An annual tally of climate deniers in Congress just came out, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news: You’re smarter than 34 percent of Congress. The bad news: You’re smarter than 34 percent of Congress.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund found that there are 182 climate deniers in the current Congress: 144 in the House and 38 in the Senate. That means more than six in 10 Americans are represented by people who think that climate change is a big ‘ol liberal hoax — including some leaders at the highest levels of government, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch “I Am Not a Scientist” McConnell and senator and presidential candidate Marco “I Am Not a Scientist” Rubio. (And those are just the members of Congress who are out-and-out deniers, so it doesn’t include the many more who kinda sorta admit that something might be going on with the climate but still don’t want to do anything about it.)

Not surprisingly, many of these same climate deniers have been handsomely rewarded by the fossil fuel industry. In total, these climate-denying congresspeople have received more than $73 million in contributions from oil, gas, and coal companies over the course of their careers. To get the specifics, check out this handy interactive map, which breaks down exactly who in each state is a climate change denier — and exactly how much cash they’ve gotten from dirty energy.

Take Oklahoma, for example, where five out of seven of the current crop of congresspeople are climate deniers. Sen. James Inhofe, who holds the dubious distinction of being the most infamous denier in Congress, has received more than $2 million from fossil fuel interests. He not only called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” he actually threw a snowball on the Senate floor last year in a hilarious attempt to disprove climate change. He did not disprove climate change, but perhaps the stunt earned him an extra check from Oklahoma’s natural gas industry.

Dylann Petrohilos / ThinkProgress

If there’s a silver lining to this dark news, it’s this: Even though a healthy portion our nation’s leaders continue to perpetuate the dangerous myth that climate change isn’t real, the people know better. Nearly 70 percent of Americans support climate change action, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund — and that includes many Republicans. Last year, a survey conducted by Republican pollsters found that even most conservative Republicans both believe climate change is real and support clean energy.

The problem is, not the ones in office.

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Bloomberg stays out of presidential race to prevent President Trump

by ClintR79dfxybm Posted on March 8, 2016

Bloomberg stays out of presidential race to prevent President Trump

By Katie Herzogon 7 Mar 2016comments Share

Mike Bloomberg, the eighth-richest person in America and former mayor of New York, announced Monday that he will not be entering the presidential race as a third-party candidate, despite some speculation. Bloomberg joins a long list of figures who will not be running for president this year, including Al Gore, Ross Perot, and Frank Underwood. Now, this isn’t because he doesn’t think he’d make a great president — he does — but because Bloomberg, unlike some people, knows he just can’t win.

In a statement on BloombergView, a website that is not normally about Bloomberg’s views, the former mayor writes:

[W]hen I look at the data, it’s clear to me that if I entered the race, I could not win. I believe I could win a number of diverse states — but not enough to win the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to win the presidency.

In a three-way race, it’s unlikely any candidate would win a majority of electoral votes, and then the power to choose the president would be taken out of the hands of the American people and thrown to Congress. The fact is, even if I were to receive the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, victory would be highly unlikely, because most members of Congress would vote for their party’s nominee. Party loyalists in Congress — not the American people or the Electoral College — would determine the next president.

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As the race stands now, with Republicans in charge of both Houses, there is a good chance that my candidacy could lead to the election of Donald Trump or Senator Ted Cruz. That is not a risk I can take in good conscience.

Bloomberg then goes on to discuss Trump, who, he writes, “appeals to our worst impulses” by campaigning on platform of racism, xenophobia, and fear. “We cannot ‘make America great again’ by turning our backs on the values that made us the world’s greatest nation in the first place,” Bloomberg writes. “I love our country too much to play a role in electing a candidate who would weaken our unity and darken our future — and so I will not enter the race for president of the United States.”

Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg, for not increasing the likelihood of a president who believes that climate change is a giant, homosexual agenda–level hoax. Maybe he listened to our own Ben Adler, who wrote a post a month ago headlined, “If Mike Bloomberg really cares about climate change, he won’t run for president.”

Because, even though Bloomberg is an unfettered capitalist who trampled on the rights of protesters and subjected black and Latino men to racial profiling and aggressive policing when he was mayor, he does in fact really care about climate change. He’s far more passionate and engaged on the issue someone who definitely is running for president, Hillary Clinton.

So is it unequivocally a good thing that he’s out? A candidate Bloomberg might have elevated climate change as a critical issue, and pushed other candidates to discuss it in more depth, particularly if he got himself into general election debates with the Democratic and Republican nominees. As it is now, the Republican debates have neglected climate change almost entirely: Donald Trump’s dick has gotten more airtime than the most pressing challenge of our era. But more conversation wouldn’t do much good if the ultimate outcome were a hardline denier in the White House.

As it is, we’ll never find out if Bloomberg’s run would have jumpstarted a national conversation on climate change or paved the way for President Trump. For now, Bloomberg has declined to endorse a candidate, so we don’t even know where he’ll be putting his vote instead — or, for that matter, his money.

Bloomberg ends his essay with a note on the importance of voting, and he urges all voters to demand “the honest and capable government we deserve.” Unfortunately, we probably deserve Trump, as we can’t seem to shut up about him. Let’s hope we get one better.

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Here’s why Whole Foods’ pre-peeled oranges might not be as absurd as they sound

by AnnisWillard Posted on March 7, 2016

Here’s why Whole Foods’ pre-peeled oranges might not be as absurd as they sound

By Katie Herzogon 7 Mar 2016comments Share

Whole Foods Market felt the wrath of a thousand tweeters last week after Londoner Nathalie Gordon posted an image of a new store product.

It’s an orange, but an upgraded, 2.0 version that is both more wasteful and, at $6 a pound, a hell of a lot more expensive than the regular kind.

Four days after Gordon tweeted this image, it has gotten nearly 100,000 retweets, almost as many likes, and its own hashtag — #orangegate — inspired by the maelstrom. The media has widely covered the controversial new product, with headlines like “Whole Foods’ Pre-Peeled Oranges Are the Ultimate in Bourgeois Laziness” (Eater), “Whole Foods Sells Peeled Oranges In Plastic Containers, World Revolts” (Huffington Post), and my personal favorite, “Nach Shitstorm geschälte Orange in Plastikpackung vom Markt genommen,” or, “After Shitstorm, Peeled Orange in Plastic Pack Removed From the Market,” from German site Netzfrauen.

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The overwhelming response to #orangegate has been, “WTF, Whole Foods?” In reaction, the company wasted no time pulling the product from its shelves, blaming a few experimental stores, and then making a rather astute joke about the whole thing.

It makes you wonder: Would the outcry have been so loud had the pre-peeled oranges been sold in cute little Mason jars?

Whether plastic or glass, #orangegate brings to mind another recent Whole Foods scandal, #asparaguswatergate, in which a store in California was busted selling three stalks of asparagus in a bottle of tap water. For $6. But unlike #asparaguswatergate, #orangegate has seen a vocal contingent of consumers defending Whole Foods. No, these aren’t lobbyists for the plastic industry or hoarders of to-go containers. They’re folks with arthritis and other disabilities.

Take disability studies scholar Kim Sauder, who wrote on her blog:

As a person with limited hand dexterity, I look at this and see an easier way to eat healthy food. I actively avoid eating oranges, not because I dislike them (they are definitely tasty) but because I have so much difficulty peeling them. Any attempt to peel an orange is likely to result in an unappetizing mess because I’ve squeezed the orange to hard while trying to maneuver it for peel removal.

I don’t have access to peeled oranges from my grocery store though I’d probably take advantage of them if I did. I do buy precut vegetables all the time because it is more convenient and safer for me to do so. …

Anything that helps make my regular acts of daily life safer and more convenient is always a plus. So I was one of a number of disabled people who pushed back against the wholesale shaming of preprepared foods.

Now, Sauder isn’t naive: She doesn’t think that Whole Foods came up with pre-peeled oranges in order to ease the lives of folks with disabilities. Whole Foods is a business, after all, and while the company may have slightly better core values than, say, Walmart, it’s still a capitalist enterprise — one that often prizes the bottom line over human suffering. But still, she has a point, and one that environmentalists must consider: Just as for too long the green movement ignored the effects of environmental degradation on minority and poor populations, they — we — have also ignored the disabled.

Whole Foods sells a lot of shit in plastic boxes, from pre-packaged salads to cut watermelon to that guacamole that costs a week’s pay but is kind of worth it. But, for the most part, we don’t bitch and moan about those. And it’s not just Whole Foods: Tons of stores use excess packaging. Take Trader Joe’s. Do those green peppers really need to be shrouded in plastic? And how are you supposed to get a feel for your heirloom tomatoes if they’re stuck in a vegetable coffin? It’s maddening. I’ve actually seen bananas wrapped in plastic — in the peel — at my neighborhood Harris Teeter before, something that enraged me so much that I stopped eating bananas. So while Whole Foods might be guilty, it’s hardly guilty alone.

We have a packaging problem in this country. That’s clear. But we also have a problem with dismissing the needs of minority populations because, too often, we don’t even see them. Whole Foods needs to do better, but the rest of us need to do better too.

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China’s greenhouse emissions might already have peaked

by YukikoQ52ojac Posted on March 7, 2016

China’s greenhouse emissions might already have peaked

By James Weston 7 Mar 2016comments Share

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

China is the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, the heat-trapping pollution that is causing global warming. So what China spews into the air — how much, and when — is crucial to the planet’s future.

There might be some optimistic news on that front today.

For years, experts have expected China’s greenhouse gas emissions to continue growing over the next couple decades. But according to a new study, Chinese emissions may have actually peaked in 2014 — and could soon begin a steady decline. And if those emissions didn’t peak in 2014, researchers say, they definitely will by 2025, years ahead of China’s official 2030 goal. (Researchers say the pace and scale of change in China’s economy make it hard to pinpoint the exact year emissions will peak — or to say for sure if they already have.)

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The new findings appear in a paper released Sunday night by the U.K.’s Center for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. It was authored by Fergus Green and the famous climate change research economist, Nicholas Stern.

China’s current peak-emissions target of 2030 was enshrined in the historic U.S.-China climate agreement reached at the end of 2014. That deal paved the way for the global Paris agreement late last year.

But there has been a growing body of research suggesting that China could reach that goal much sooner. The new analysis is based on economic forecasts that take into account the shifting and contracting nature of the Chinese economy, which is moving away from energy-intensive industries like construction and steel-making and towards service-related sectors. The Chinese government has instituted a three-year moratorium on approving new coal mines, and is scrambling to alleviate the country’s air pollution crisis.

The study follows Chinese statistics published last week showing the country’s coal consumption dropping 3.7 percent in 2015, marking the second year in a row that the country has slashed coal use and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as news the country will close 1,000 coal mines this year alone.

As part of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan — a blueprint used by the Chinese government to lay out economic and social priorities — China announced last week it will attempt to reduce its carbon dioxide intensity by 18 percent between now and 2020, according to the Washington Post.

The new research is putting pressure on Chinese officials to do even more to fight climate change.

“China’s international commitment to peak emissions ‘around 2030’ should be seen as a highly conservative upper limit from a government that prefers to under-promise and over-deliver,” the report says.

China was put in an awkward position Monday when it was forced by news of Green and Stern’s report to say its emissions were, in fact, still growing, in order to defend its 2030 target as appropriate. Chinese leaders are famously sensitive about the country’s slowing economy, and fearful that scrutiny of its economic and environmental policies could lead to widespread discontent.

“You asked whether our emissions had peaked in 2014 — certainly not,” said Xie Zhenhua, the country’s top climate change envoy, according to Reuters. “In fact, our carbon dioxide emissions are still increasing.”

Last week, America’s own top climate official, Todd Stern, told reporters in Beijing that there could be international pressure if China’s targets appeared to be too easy to achieve. “It will be up to the Chinese government whether they increase their target but there will obviously be a lot of international opinion looking forward to additional measures — whether it is China or anyone else,” he said, according to Reuters.

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Hillary Clinton has a new tune on fracking

by GonzaloTen93 Posted on March 7, 2016

Hillary Clinton has a new tune on fracking

By Rebecca Leberon 6 Mar 2016comments Share

A college student asked Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton a simple question at the Flint, Mich., debate on Sunday night: “Do you support fracking?”

And Bernie Sanders had a simple answer: “No, I do not support fracking.”

Hillary Clinton, though, needed more time to outline three conditions in a more nuanced answer on fracking. She’s against it “when any locality or any state is against it,” “when the release of methane or contamination of water is present,” and “unless we can require that anybody who fracks has to tell us exactly what chemicals they are using.”

Until those conditions are met, “we’ve got to regulate everything that is currently underway, and we have to have a system in place that prevents further fracking.”

“By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place,” she added.

Clinton offered qualified support for fracking well before Sanders even registered in the presidential race. Addressing the National Clean Energy Summit in 2014, Clinton said, “we have to face head-on the legitimate, pressing environmental concerns about some new extraction practices and their impacts on local water, soil, and air supplies. Methane leaks in the production and transportation of natural gas are particularly troubling. So it’s crucial that we put in place smart regulations and enforce them, including deciding not to drill when the risks are too high.”

Yet, she sounded much more rosy on natural gas and fracking years ago than she does now. “With the right safeguards in place, gas is cleaner than coal. And expanding production is creating tens of thousands of new jobs,” she said in 2014. “And lower costs are helping give the United States a big competitive advantage in energy-intensive energies.”

As secretary of state in 2010, Clinton argued in favor of gas as “the cleanest fossil fuel available for power generation today,” and said that “if developed, shale gas could make an important contribution to our region’s energy supply, just as it does now for the United States.” Her office, meanwhile, promoted fracking in developing nations.

After leaving the Obama administration in 2014, Clinton still emphasized the benefits of fracking, implying that strict limits on fracking should be the exception to the rule. In 2016, Clinton has flipped her emphasis, as Sanders has gained an edge from his anti-fracking stance: Now, she suggests it will be a rare, unlikely case when fracking should be allowed.

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A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah

by TiaZABcztkkghe Posted on March 5, 2016

Mud flats sit where water used to be next to the Great Salt Lake Marina. REUTERS/George Frey

A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah

By Laura Blisson 5 Mar 2016 7:00 amcomments Share

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

The Great Salt Lake is drying up, thanks to 150 years of human diversions from the rivers that feed it. That’s the takeaway of a white paper released by a team of Utah biologists and engineers. And if those diversions continue ramping up, as a bill working its way through the Utah legislature proposes, the waterbody may face a withering fate similar to other dried-up salt lakes around the world.

The namesake of Utah’s capital city, the Great Salt Lake is the the state’s defining geographic feature and one of its economic anchors. A 2012 report by the Great Salt Lake Council estimated that the total economic output of the waterbody at $1.32 billion, between mineral extraction from the lake, brine shrimp egg production (used in aquaculture all over the world), and recreation that takes place in and around it. It also serves as an essential migration flyway for millions of birds each year.

But the lake, which approached record-low water levels last year, is under threat. According to the Utah researchers’ calculations, since the mid-19th century, consistent reductions from the rivers that feed the lake have caused the lake’s elevation to drop by 11 feet, lose roughly half its volume, increase the lake’s salinity, and expose approximately 50 percent of the lake bed.

Those numbers are unrelated to natural fluctuations over wet and dry periods, including the current drought. Since the lake is a closed basin, the only way water leaves it is through evaporation. That makes it fairly simple to calculate just how much water has been lost to agriculture and urban growth.

Utah State University

Currently, the Utah Senate is debating a bill that would fund a number of water infrastructure projects, including the controversial Bear River Development Project, which would dam and divert more water from one of the Great Salt Lake’s main feeds. Supporters of the project say it’s designed to support the state’s growing population and water consumption needs. But the researchers estimate that the project would lead to an additional 8.5 inch drop in the Great Salt Lake’s elevation, and another 30 square miles of exposed lake bed.

Not only does that spell trouble for the lake’s economic and ecological importance, a dried-up lake would ramp up dust storms in the Salt Lake City area, which already suffers some of the worst air pollution in the country. It doesn’t take much searching to find an example of how damaging such withered lakes are for the people around them. In nearby California, the researchers write:

Diversions from the Owens River for the city of Los Angeles desiccated Owens Lake by 1926, causing it to become one of the largest sources of particulate matter (PM10) pollution in the country. This dust affects about 40,000 permanent residents in the region, causing asthma and other health problems.

Lake Urmia in Iran and the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are other examples of how massive water diversions from closed basins for human uses can create environmental health disasters.

To meet the needs of a growing population, and to protect their future health, the researchers stress that Utah policymakers should focus on taking less water, not more, from the Great Salt Lake — especially when it comes to agriculture, which consumes the majority of all that diverted water. Like so many states throughout the arid American West, Utah has to weigh its future against a history of overdrawn resources.

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Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

by WadeHardwick864 Posted on March 4, 2016

Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

By Suzanne Jacobson 4 Mar 2016comments Share

It’s usually best to avoid listicles. No one needs to know the top 10 popsicle flavors from 1997 or the 25 worst celebrity tweets about peanuts. But a ranking of how well countries are doing to protect the environment? Now that’s a listicle we can get behind here at Grist.

Yale’s 15th annual Environmental Performance Index comparing 180 countries’ performance on “high priority environmental issues in two areas: protection of human health and protection of ecosystems” just came out, and it’s mostly what you’d expect: Countries up top tend to be heavily Nordic; countries at the bottom tend to be heavily unstable.

The top five are Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Slovenia. Finland already gets two-thirds of its electricity from renewables or nuclear power and plans to get 38 percent of its total energy from renewables by 2020. Iceland gets 85 percent of its energy from renewables and has great air quality. Sweden has great water quality and plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. And Denmark has great water quality, as well as high marks for biodiversity.

But Slovenia? The central European nation might seem out of place in the top five, but it’s apparently kind of a boss when it comes to biodiversity. And with the third largest forest-to-land ration in the European Union, it’s doing a bang-up job of forest preservation.

The next five on the list are Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Malta, and France. The U.S. is way down at 26 — right below Canada, which is precisely where we like to be.

The bottom five countries are Afghanistan, Niger, Madagascar, Eritrea, and Somalia for a lot of the reasons you might expect: illegal hunting and poaching, poor air and water quality, deforestation, failure to protect biodiversity, over-fishing.

Check out this write-up by some of the researchers over at Scientific American for more details on the best and worst performing countries. Or go watch this nice little video. Then, I promise, you can go read that listicle about whether or not your relationship is doomed.

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Norway is building a billion-dollar bicycle superhighway

by JaymeCarvosso Posted on March 4, 2016

Norway is building a billion-dollar bicycle superhighway

By Katie Herzogon 4 Mar 2016comments Share

There’s goes Norway, making the rest of us look like lazy, gas-guzzling, emission-belching, planet-wrecking Neanderthals again.

The country announced last week that they will be investing 8 billion Kroner — or nearly $1 billion — in an extensive network of superhighways. For bikes.

The system, as CityLab reports, will include 10 two-lane bike roadways around Norway’s largest cities, designed for both in-city travel and long distance trips. While the new bike infrastructure will surely be good for growing strong lungs and tights buns in Norway, the investment is more about addressing climate change than encouraging exercise: The Norwegian government wants to increase the annual number of bike trips by up to 20 percent by 2030 as part of their plan to reduce the transportation sector’s carbon emissions by half.

There, is however, some resistance: Cycling is less common in Norway than it is in most of Scandinavia, not in small part due to the climate (frigid) and the landscape (mountainous), and some leaders say bikeways are a waste of good Kroner that should be spent rebuilding the nation’s road and rail systems. Besides, much of the country is pitch black and covered in ice for most of the year.

Regardless of the cost, Norway is making moves to invest in infrastructure for the future. The country’s massive fossil fuel industry has been hit by the global downturn in the price of crude oil, leading to a devaluation of their currency and an unbalanced economy. Since oil prices plummeted, fossil fuel employers in Norway have cut 30,000 jobs, and investment in the economy has dropped by a third. Norway, according to economists, must diversify their revenue sources to avoid collapse. And with the investment in biking, they’re diversifying their transit options, too.

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