The Metronome, a famous art installation in Union Square that used to display the time of day, has been repurposed into a "Climate Clock" for Climate Week NYC. Zack Winestine
By Jessica Corbett
This story was originally published on Common Dreams on September 19, 2020.
Some advocates kicked off next week's Climate Week NYC early Saturday by repurposing the Metronome, a famous art installation in Union Square that used to display the time of day, as a massive "Climate Clock" in an effort to pressure governments worldwide to take swift, bold action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and rein in human-caused global heating.
<p><br/></p>
<p>"The clock is a way to speak science to power," project co-founder Andrew Boyd said in a statement. "The clock is telling us we must reduce our emissions as much as we can as fast as we can. The technology is there. We can do this—and in the process, create a healthier, more just world for all of us. Our planet has a deadline. But we can turn it into a lifeline."</p><p>Launched as people across the country are facing the deadly, devastating <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/18/climate-floods-climate-droughts-climate-fires-interactive-map-illustrates-how" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">impacts of climate change</a>—from <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/11/fires-ravaging-us-west-bellwether-future-says-oregon-governor-half-million-residents" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">historic wildfires</a> in western states to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/17/bolstering-calls-climate-action-mutant-sloth-hurricane-sally-leaves-major-mess-gulf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">slow-moving hurricanes</a> and the resulting floods on the Gulf Coast—the clock in New York City on Saturday warned that the international community only has seven years and 102 days to "undertake bold transformation of our energy system and economy" in hopes of keeping global temperature rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius.</p><p>"Climate Change is already here. This clock is not an alarm clock saying, in seven years it will ring and we need to wake up! It's more like a stopwatch already running that we have to keep pace with," explained Gan Golan, the project originator. "We need to take action today, tomorrow, and the day after that. Let's get moving. Every second counts. We need to act in time."</p>
<div id="0bde7" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="002ce26d8d0c627f76d752e14d234d6e"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1307397838884741121" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">LIVE: #ClimateClock about to go live at Union square replacing the atronomical clock, with a carbon countdown!… https://t.co/5OzxwUwWDf</div> — Greg Schwedock🌹(⧖) (@Greg Schwedock🌹(⧖))<a href="https://twitter.com/GregSchwedock/statuses/1307397838884741121">1600542909.0</a></blockquote></div><p>A mobile climate clock that Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg "now carries with her, as well as the larger Climate Clock project, was assembled by a team of artists, makers, scientists, and activists based in New York, and is part of the Beautiful Trouble community of projects," according to <a href="https://climateclock.world/" target="_blank">Climateclock.world</a>, which details the science behind the numbers displayed and how to install clocks in other cities.</p>
<div id="5160f" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="75ffdd348e9e589c32b324c77f650b1b"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1204581474218807296" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">LIVE: Greta Thunberg's worldwide #ClimateClock launches https://t.co/sglWCLwdsG</div> — act.tv (@act.tv)<a href="https://twitter.com/actdottv/statuses/1204581474218807296">1576029578.0</a></blockquote></div><p>"In an accompanying app, the artists include more detail about solutions," <em>Fast Company</em> <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90552230/manhattans-classic-digital-clock-is-now-counting-down-to-climate-disaster" target="_blank">reported</a> Saturday. "Another number tracks the current percentage of renewable energy in the world. An interactive tool shows how to 'flatten the climate curve' and how much difference it makes to invest more now, and to move more quickly. A DIY maker kit explains how to make a countdown clock of your own."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/19/massive-climate-clock-urging-governments-actintime-unveiled-metronome-new-york-city" target="_blank">Common Dreams</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
- 5 Virtual Events to Check Out This Climate Week NYC - EcoWatch ›
- Covering Climate Now Highlights Solutions for Earth Week - EcoWatch ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Solar geoengineering would involve injecting reflective aerosols from high-altitude planes into the layer of the upper atmosphere known as the stratosphere to reduce the amount of heat trapped by greenhouse gases. namoliang / Pixabay
By Betsy Mason
For decades, climate scientist David Keith of Harvard University has been trying to get people to take his research seriously. He's a pioneer in the field of geoengineering, which aims to combat climate change through a range of technological fixes. Over the years, ideas have included sprinkling iron in the ocean to stimulate plankton to suck up more carbon from the atmosphere or capturing carbon straight out of the air.
<p>Keith founded a company that develops technology to remove carbon from the air, but his specialty is solar geoengineering, which involves reflecting sunlight away from Earth to reduce the amount of heat that gets trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. The strategy hasn't been proven, but modeling suggests it will work. And because major volcanic eruptions can have the same effect, there are some real-world data to anchor the idea.</p><p>In the near future, Keith and his colleagues hope to launch one of the first tests of the concept: a high-altitude balloon that would inject tiny, reflective particles into the layer of the upper atmosphere known as the stratosphere. The place and time for the experiment are still to be determined, but it would be a baby step toward showing whether artificial stratospheric particles could help cool the planet the way eruptions do naturally.</p><p>But the idea of using a technological fix for climate change is controversial. Talking about — let alone researching — geoengineering has long been considered taboo for fear that it would dampen efforts to fight climate change in other ways, particularly the critical work of reducing carbon emissions. That left geoengineering on the fringes of climate research. But people's attitudes may be changing, Keith says. He argues that while geoengineering by itself cannot solve the problem of climate change, it could help mitigate the damage if implemented carefully alongside emissions reductions.</p><p>In 2000, Keith <a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.energy.25.1.245" target="_blank">published an overview of geoengineering research</a> in the <em>Annual Review of Energy and the Environment</em>, in which he noted that major climate assessments up until that point had largely ignored it. Earlier this year, he spoke in Seattle about the current state of the field at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. <em>Knowable Magazine</em> talked with Keith about how the scientific, technological and geopolitical landscape has changed in the intervening decades.</p><p><span></span>This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.</p>
<p><strong>Twenty years ago you called geoengineering "deeply controversial." How has the controversy changed since then?</strong></p><p>Back then it was something that a pretty small group of people who thought about climate knew about — and mostly agreed they wouldn't talk about. And that was it. Now it's much more widely discussed. I think the taboo is reduced, for sure. It's certainly still controversial, but my sense is that there has been a real shift. An increasing number of people who are in climate science or in public policy around climate or in environmental groups now agree that this is something we should talk about, even if many think it should never be implemented. There's even growing agreement that research should happen. It feels really different.</p><p><strong>Why was there a taboo against talking about geoengineering, and do you think was it valid?</strong></p><p>I think it's well-intentioned; people are right to worry that talking about geoengineering might reduce the effort to cut emissions. I don't think this concern about moral hazard is a valid reason not to do research. There were people who argued that we shouldn't allow the AIDS triple-drug cocktail to be distributed in Africa because it would be misused, creating resistance. Others argued against implementation of airbags, because people would drive faster. There is a long history of arguing against all sorts of potentially risk-reducing technologies because of the potential for risk compensation — the possibility that people will change behavior by taking on more risks. I think it's an ethically confused argument.</p><p>For me, the most serious concern is some entities — like big fossil-fuel companies that have a political interest in blocking emissions cuts — will attempt to exploit the potential of geoengineering as an argument against emissions cuts. This concern has likely been the primary reason that some big civil-society groups want to block or contain discussion of this stuff so it doesn't enter more widely into the climate debate. For me the concern is entirely justified, but I think the right answer is to confront it head-on rather than avoiding debate. I don't want a world where decisions are made by elites talking behind closed doors.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQyNDEzNy9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2Mjg3Mzg4OH0.GSB_7f7L144wE4rga4w1XPslOxI8DqRStp4uHqnaQtc/img.png?width=980" id="a58a6" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="5d73a752c69eb9af003518c4bf48cb4b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Solar geoengineering would involve injecting reflective aerosols from high-altitude planes into the layer of the upper atmosphere known as the stratosphere, which stretches between 10 to 50 kilometers (6 to 31 miles) above Earth's surface. The idea is that the aerosol particles would reflect a small amount of sunlight away from the planet, reducing the amount of heat trapped by greenhouse gases and mitigating some of the effects of climate change.
<p><strong>Has the amount of geoengineering research increased in the past two decades?</strong></p><p>Dramatically, even in the last couple of years. When I wrote that <em>Annual Reviews </em>paper in 2000, there was virtually zero organized research. There were a few researchers occasionally getting interested and putting in like 1 percent of their time.</p><p>Now there are little research programs almost everywhere you care to mention. There's a Chinese program that's pretty serious; there's an Australian one that's better funded than anything in the United States; there are several in Europe.</p><p><strong>What has been the biggest surprise over the past 20 years in how solar geoengineering might work?</strong></p><p>The big surprise has been recent results, including two studies I was involved in, showing that the effects of a global solar geoengineering program wouldn't be as geographically unequal as was feared. What matters for real public policy is who is made worse off.</p><p>For one paper <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0398-8" target="_blank">published last year in <em>Nature</em> <em>Climate Change</em></a>, we used a very high-resolution computer model, and we compared, over all the land surface, two worlds: one world where we have two times preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide and the other world where we have enough solar geoengineering to reduce the temperature change by half. For each of the 33 geographical study regions designated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we tried to look at whether solar geoengineering would move a particular climate variable back toward preindustrial levels, which we call "moderated," or move it further away from preindustrial, which we call "exacerbated."</p><p>We focused on some of the most important climate variables: change in extreme temperature, change in average temperature, change in water availability and change in extreme precipitation. And what we found seems almost too good to be true: There wasn't a single variable in a single region that was exacerbated. That was a surprise.</p><p>In a paper <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab76de" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">published in March in <em>Environmental Research Letters</em></a>, we did the same analysis with another model, and we found that with solar geoengineering, everything is moderated in all regions except four. But all four of those are dry regions that get wetter. So my guess is many residents of those regions would actually prefer that outcome because in general people are more worried about getting drier than wetter.</p><p><span></span>Now, what the model shows may or may not be true in the real world. But if there is a single reason to really look at these technologies and evaluate them in experiments, it's results like this that show you can reduce almost all or many of the major perturbations of climate without making any region significantly worse. That's quite a thing.</p>
<p><strong>How would your planned real-world experiment, known as the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), work?</strong></p><p><a href="https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/keutschgroup/scopex" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SCoPEx</a> is a stratospheric balloon experiment to put aerosols in the stratosphere and measure their interaction over the first hours and the first kilometer or so after release in a plume. It involves a high-altitude balloon that will lift a gondola carrying a package of scientific instruments to an altitude of 20 kilometers. It will release a very small amount of materials such as ice, calcium carbonate (essentially powdered limestone) or sulfuric acid droplets known as sulfates. The gondola will be fitted with propellers that were originally made for airboats so that it can fly through the plume of released materials to take measurements.</p><p>The amount of released material will be on the order of 1 kilogram, which is far too small to have any direct health or environmental impact once released. The goal is not to change climate or even to see if you can reflect any sunlight. The goal is simply to improve our models of the way aerosols form in the stratosphere, especially in plumes, which is very relevant for understanding how solar geoengineering would work. We hope to launch the experiment soon. But when and where that will happen depends on balloon availability and recommendations from an advisory committee.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQyNDEzOS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMjg2ODY3MH0.3U_DRbmIyhxI_P7IBUIZlP4SJcmoKsO3SZzW9pdLFvk/img.png?width=980" id="5406a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c6b45d397ea3f887b57d2e47565a1a23" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
The planned Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment will send a balloon carrying scientific instruments in a gondola into the stratosphere. The instruments will release a small amount of material — likely ice or mineral dust — to form a kilometer-long plume of aerosol particles (left). Modified airboat propellers will allow the gondola to maneuver above the plume (middle) and lower instruments into the plume to take repeated measurements of how the particles spread through the stratosphere (right). ADAPTED FROM J.A. DYKEMA ET AL / PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY A 2014
<p><strong>We know there are health risks related to sulfuric acid pollution in the lower atmosphere. Are there potential health risks from injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere?</strong></p><p>Anything we put in the stratosphere will end up coming down to the surface, and that's one of the risks we must consider. A full-scale solar geoengineering program might involve injecting around 1.5 million tons of sulfur and sulfuric acid into the stratosphere per year. This could be done using a fleet of aircraft; roughly 100 aircraft would need to continuously fly payloads up to about 20 kilometers (12 miles) altitude. You would not be wrong to think this sounds crazy. We know that sulfuric acid pollution in the lower atmosphere kills many people every year, so putting sulfuric acid into the stratosphere is obviously a risk. But it's important to understand how much 1.5 million tons a year really is.</p><p>The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, poured about 8 million tons of sulfur in one year into the stratosphere. It cooled the climate and had implications for all sorts of systems. Current global emissions of sulfur are about 50 million tons a year into the lower atmosphere, and that kills several million people every year from fine particulate air pollution. So the relative risk from solar geoengineering is fairly small, and it has to be weighed against the risk of not doing solar geoengineering.</p><p><strong>How quickly could a full-scale solar geoengineering program get off the ground?</strong></p><p>It could happen very fast, but all the ways it happens very fast are bad cases, basically where one country just jumps on it very quickly. It's obvious that what would be best is for countries not to just start doing it but to articulate clear plans and build in checks and balances and so on. </p><p>If there were much wider research over the next half-decade to decade — which is possible because attitudes really are changing — then it's plausible that some coalition of countries could begin to inch toward real implementation with serious, visible plans that can be critiqued by the scientific community starting by the end of this decade. I don't expect it will happen that fast, but I think it's possible.</p><p><strong>How does geoengineering fit in with other efforts to combat climate change such as reducing fossil-fuel emissions and removing carbon from the air?</strong></p><p>The first, and by far the most important, thing we do about climate change is decarbonizing the economy, which breaks the link between economic activity and carbon emissions. There's nothing I can say about solar geoengineering that changes the fact that we have to reduce emissions. If we do not do that, we're done.</p><p>Then carbon removal, which involves capturing and storing carbon that has already been emitted, could break the link between emissions and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Large-scale carbon removal really makes sense when emissions are clearly heading toward zero, and we're getting toward the harder chunk of the economy to mitigate. And then solar geoengineering is a thing that might partially and imperfectly weaken, but not break, the link between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and climate changes — changes in sea level, changes in extreme events, changes in temperature, etc.</p><p>So if you look at the curve of overall greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, you can think of emissions cuts as flattening the curve. Carbon removal takes you down the other side of the curve. And then solar geoengineering can cut off the top of the curve, which would reduce the risk of the carbon dioxide that is in the air already.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQyNDE0MS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NzYyNjc3Nn0.WhGB9DFe-ucsjzoLNjhzrOVdFc_qk8e-Klq11axhHq0/img.png?width=980" id="5c86a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4e8f4f3a17e517e8f3d154e7f4a280d9" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<p><em>This story originally appeared in</em> <em><a href="https://www.knowablemagazine.org/" target="_blank">Knowable Magazine</a> </em><em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>David Keith envisions using multiple approaches to combat climate change. The red line shows how the impacts of climate change would worsen with a business-as-usual scenario of unabated burning of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions. Aggressively cutting emissions bends that curve, and removing carbon from the atmosphere offers further cuts, but there are still consequences from the already high levels of carbon dioxide. In this scenario, solar geoengineering would lessen the impact from existing atmospheric carbon dioxide, effectively carving the top off the curve.
<p>Some people think we should use it only as a get-out-of-jail card in an emergency. Some people think we should use it to quickly try to get back to a preindustrial climate. I'm arguing we use solar geoengineering to cut the top off the curve by gradually starting it and gradually ending it.</p><p><strong>Do you feel optimistic about the chances that solar geoengineering will happen and can make a difference in the climate crisis?</strong></p><p>I'm not all that optimistic right now because we seem to be so much further away from an international environment that's going to allow sensible policy. And that's not just in the US. It's a whole bunch of European countries with more populist regimes. It's Brazil. It's the more authoritarian India and China. It's a more nationalistic world, right? It's a little hard to see a global, coordinated effort in the near term. But I hope those things will change.</p>From Your Site Articles
- Geoengineering is Not the Answer to Climate Change - EcoWatch ›
- Can Geoengineering Tame Devastating Hurricanes? - EcoWatch ›
- World's Largest Geoengineering Study Triggers Major Controversy ... ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
New Zealand could be the first country in the world to require its major financial institutions to report on the risks posed by the climate crisis. Lawrence Murray / Wikimedia Commons / CC by 2.0
New Zealand could be the first country in the world to require its major financial institutions to report on the risks posed by the climate crisis.
<p>This means that about 200 of the country's biggest companies and banks would have to report on the impact that <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/extreme-weather" target="_self">extreme weather</a> events or climate polices will have on their business, <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/300107158/election-2020-financial-sector-will-have-to-report-on-climate-change-risk-in-worldfirst-move" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stuff explained</a>.</p><p>"Today is another step on the journey this Government is taking towards a low carbon future for Aotearoa New Zealand and a cleaner, safer planet for future generations," said Minister for Climate Change James Shaw Tuesday, <a href="https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA2009/S00127/new-zealand-first-in-the-world-to-require-climate-risk-reporting.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Scoop reported</a>.</p><p>The move builds on New Zealand's emerging legacy of climate action, such as its historic <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/new-zealand-zero-emissions-2641247378.html" target="_self">Zero Carbon Bill</a> that committed the country to honoring the goals of the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/paris-agreement" target="_self">Paris agreement</a> and achieving zero carbon emissions by 2050.</p>
<p>However, New Zealand's parliament is currently dissolved ahead of the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/new-zealand-ardern-renewable-energy-2647595133.html" target="_self">Oct. 17 election</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/15/new-zealand-minister-calls-for-finance-sector-to-disclose-climate-crisis-risks-in-world-first" target="_blank">The Guardian reported</a>. In order for it to enter into force, Shaw's party, the Green Party, would have to enter a coalition government after the election and the proposal would then have to pass parliament.</p><p>If it passes, every New Zealand bank, building society, credit union, insurer or Crown Financial Institution with more than $1 billion in assets will have to report annually on the risk climate change poses to its business or explain why it cannot, according to Stuff. That report would include what the risks are, how the institution is managing them and how it is working to address the impacts of climate change.</p><p>"Many large businesses in New Zealand do not currently have a good understanding of how climate change will impact on what they do," Shaw said. "The changes I am announcing today will bring climate risks and resilience into the heart of financial and business decision making. It will ensure the disclosure of climate risk is clear, comprehensive and mainstream."</p>
<p>Shaw said that Australia, Canada, UK, France, Japan and the European Union were developing some form of climate risk reporting, but New Zealand's plan was more ambitious because it included the whole financial system, according to Scoop. The institutions covered by the policy account for 90 percent of the assets controlled in New Zealand, Stuff reported.</p><p>If the proposal passes parliament, the climate reporting would begin in 2023.</p><p>Nobel Laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz praised the proposed plan, according to The Guardian.</p><p>"Once again, New Zealand is leading the world… It led the world in showing how democratic countries could manage the risks of Covid-19," he said. "And now, New Zealand is leading the way in showing how we can help manage the risk of climate change."</p>
Read More
Show Less
Support Ecowatch
Jacob Saylors, 11, walks through the burned remains of his home in Paradise, California on November 18, 2018. The family lost a home in the same spot to a fire 10 years prior. Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images
By Kenny Stancil
Potentially millions of people in the U.S. will be displaced as the climate crisis makes certain regions increasingly uninhabitable, prompting new migrations that will reshape the country, a new report shows.
<p>The story published Tuesday is the second installment in a <a href="https://features.propublica.org/climate-migration/model-how-climate-refugees-move-across-continents/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=river" target="_blank">series</a> on global climate migration that stems from a collaboration between <em>ProPublica</em> and the <em>New York Times</em>, with support from the Pulitzer Center.</p><p>While the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html" target="_blank">first article</a> in the series focused on the movement of climate refugees across international borders, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">latest story </a>focuses on how climate migration within the U.S. will reshape the country. </p><p>As report author Abrahm Lustgarten explains, "In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety."</p><p>But here in the U.S., many people have for years "avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards," he writes.</p><p>"The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature," Lustgarten adds in the report. "People have largely gravitated <em>toward</em> environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest."</p><p>In light of a summer in which millions of people have endured the devastating combined effects of a pandemic, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/09/entire-western-us-fire-region-faces-deadly-flames-compounded-heatwave-blackouts-and" target="_blank">wildfires</a>, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/28/poverty-and-petrochemicals-converge-hurricane-lauras-devastation-exposes-entire-gulf" target="_blank">hurricanes</a>, and <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/31/wake-lauras-devastation-and-amid-pandemic-and-heat-wave-calls-emerge-end-climate" target="_blank">heatwaves</a>, the journalist wonders: "Might Americans finally be<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/13/sanders-delivers-message-lawmakers-who-claim-us-cant-afford-green-new-deal-climate" target="_blank"> waking up</a> to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so—if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing—was it possible to project where we might go?" </p>
<div id="6c919" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="314566e38237ee026cda8cd215eaf35d"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1305795794478534656" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">New: Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation… https://t.co/O5Oftmfe2p</div> — ProPublica (@ProPublica)<a href="https://twitter.com/propublica/statuses/1305795794478534656">1600160952.0</a></blockquote></div>
<div id="72295" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a989b62473a1d30cf81a6cc43a159f1c"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1305906494681079809" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">America's climate crisis is here. And it will change how — and where — people live. Supported by @pulitzercenter,… https://t.co/IKiadqgXs1</div> — The New York Times (@The New York Times)<a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes/statuses/1305906494681079809">1600187345.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>Lustgarten argues that the U.S., where 162 million people—nearly one in two—will "most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment" in the coming years, is "a nation on the cusp of a great transformation."</p><p>"The changes could be particularly severe" for 93 million Americans, and "if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least four million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life," according to the analysis. </p><p>The story is accompanied by a set of <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/" target="_blank">maps </a>depicting likely shifts in the niche of human habitability, and the scenarios "suggest massive upheavals in where Americans currently live and grow food."</p><p>Several factors are driving changes in the suitability of different environments, researchers note. These include extreme heat and humidity—the collision of which will create what scientists call "wet bulb" temperatures that will "disrupt the norms of daily existence"—as well as larger and more frequent wildfires, rising sea levels, declining crop yields, and economic damages related to higher energy costs and lower labor productivity.</p><p>According to the analysis, the greatest climate risk exists in counties throughout the Southeast and the Southwest where the perils are likely to intermingle and generate "compounding calamities."</p><p>"The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting," the report states. Public officials in Florida "have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable," explains Lustgarten. Furthermore, "the nation's federal flood-insurance program is for the first time <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/climate/flooding-relocation-managed-retreat.html" target="_blank">requiring</a> that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country." </p>
<p>If "it will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo"—as Lustgarten argues it will—then what might we expect?</p><p>The author paints a grim picture of the possible consequences of mass relocations between now and 2070, arguing that such a population shift is:</p><blockquote>likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse.<br><br>Mobility itself, global migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.<br></blockquote><p>While a <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/31/despite-poll-showing-aggressive-climate-action-winning-issue-biden-boasts-i-am-not" target="_blank">growing number</a> of citizens consider climate change a top political priority, Lustgarten argues that "policymakers, having left America unprepared for what's next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save—often at exorbitant costs—and which to sacrifice." </p><p>Lustgarten devotes considerable attention to what he describes as the negative effects of the country's property insurance system, which has distorted perceptions of risk and incentivized real estate development in locations vulnerable to disasters. The experts he talked to anticipate shocks to the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/09/while-trump-commission-warns-climate-risk-financial-system-recommendations-fall" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">financial system</a> and the upending of "entire communities" once "all the structural disincentives that had built Americans' irrational response" to the threats posed by climate change begin "reaching their logical endpoint." </p>
<p>"Until now," the report notes, "market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as the costs rise—and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on—the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people."</p><p>"And that's when the real migration might begin," says Lustgarten.</p><p>Past experiences with socio-environmental disasters in the U.S. raise concerns about the welfare of people who are displaced as well as those who are left behind. When the Dust Bowl "propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people" from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri, "they were funneled into squalid shanty towns" in California, the author writes.</p><p>Experts told Lustgarten that similar problems are likely to arise in the 21st century, as hundreds of thousands of climate refugees move to cities already struggling with poverty, inequality, and "long-neglected" infrastructural systems "suddenly pressed to expand under increasingly adverse conditions."</p><p>In the 1930s, "Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees," the report notes. And "the places migrants <a href="https://www.ehs.org.uk/press/the-1930s-dust-bowl-new-evidence-of-the-long-term-human-toll-of-natural-disasters" target="_blank">left behind</a> never fully recovered."</p><p>Barring a reorientation of economic priorities and resources through far-reaching legislation like the Green New Deal, Lustgarten suggests that the decisions made by policymakers "will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/15/where-will-everyone-go-new-report-documents-how-climate-migration-could-reshape-us?cd-origin=rss" target="_blank"> Common Dreams.</a></em></p>From Your Site Articles
- Climate Change Forces 20 Million People to Flee Each Year, Oxfam ... ›
- Climate Change Is Already Driving Mass Migration Around the Globe ›
- UN Pact Acknowledges Climate Migration for the First Time ... ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
Trending
Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, aka the "Doomsday Glacier," is starting to crack. NASA / Wikimedia Commons
Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier has been called the "Doomsday Glacier." Thwaites and its neighbor, the Pine Island Glacier, are among those in West Antarctica most influenced by the climate crisis. If they melted, they could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has the potential to contribute about 10 feet to global sea level rise.
<p>Now, a new study has found that the ice shelves supporting the two crucial glaciers are beginning to fissure and crack.</p><p>"These ice shelves are in the early phase of disintegration," study leader and Delft University of Technology satellite expert Stef Lhermitte told <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/15/weather/antarctica-pine-island-thwaites-glacier-climate-intl-hnk/index.html" target="_blank">CNN</a>. "They're starting to tear apart."</p><p>The research, published in the <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/08/1912890117" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</a> Monday, looked at satellite images taken between 1997 and 2019 to document the ice shelves' increasing damage. The images show crevices and fissures in the glaciers, according to a Delft <a href="https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2020/tu-delft/antarctica-cracks-in-the-ice/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">press release</a>.</p>
<div id="9e0ea" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="307392311f755bed5cb3a21f52e3dbc1"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1305597446182051841" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">We use satellite imagery to show how the shear margins of both @AntarcticPIG and @ThwaitesGlacier have weakened. He… https://t.co/nKn0nGLU9V</div> — Stef Lhermitte (@Stef Lhermitte)<a href="https://twitter.com/StefLhermitte/statuses/1305597446182051841">1600113662.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>Ice shelves are important for a glacier's stability because they provide support, similarly to how flying buttresses support a cathedral, International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration lead principle researcher Brent Goehring <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-images-show-deterioration-antarctica-glaciers-lead-rising/story?id=72985182" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">told ABC News</a>. Goehring was not involved with the paper.</p><p>The damage is occurring in the glaciers' shear zones, parts of the ice shelves where the fast-moving ice on top connects with the slower-moving ice or rock beneath, CNN explained. That damage significantly increased in 2016.</p><p>The researchers think that the damage they observed to the ice shelves will only beget more damage, Lhermitte explained in a <a href="https://twitter.com/StefLhermitte/status/1305599311091240963" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Twitter thread</a>. This is for three reasons:</p><ol><li>The damage undermines the structural integrity of the ice shelves.</li><li>The damage weakens the ice shelves and makes them more vulnerable to warming air and <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/ocean" target="_self">ocean</a> temperatures.</li><li>The damage creates a feedback loop, leading to more weakening and more damage.</li></ol>
<p>Because of this, the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/scientists" target="_self">scientists</a> suggested that the damage be accounted for in climate models to better predict how Antarctic ice melt will contribute to sea level rise.</p><p>Sea levels are currently rising by around 3.5 millimeters a year, and the Thwaites Glacier accounts for four to five percent of that, Goehring told ABC News.</p><p>"If those glaciers would destabilize, a lot of neighboring areas would also fall apart, causing a widespread collapse," Indrani Das, a co-principle researcher on an International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration project, told ABC News. "It would cause a huge sea level rise."</p><p>However, Das did not think it likely that the collapse would take place this century.</p>
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
Green projects like the High Line in New York City have prompted similar concerns of accelerated gentrification, despite their original goals of neighborhood revitalization. espiegle / Getty Images
By Shelia Hu
The cycle is all too familiar: Affluent residents move into lower-income neighborhoods in cities and make their mark on the area's character and culture. Property values and the cost of living rise in tandem. While the process of gentrification may revitalize under-resourced neighborhoods, the skyrocketing costs of living displace longtime residents and businesses, leaving a new demographic to enjoy the benefits.
<p>As climate change starts to play a more significant role in where we live, it has become a trigger for gentrification and displacement in its own right. Coastal cities that lie on the frontlines of global warming have seen an influx of investments to improve <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/issues/climate-resilient-cities" target="_blank">climate resilience</a>. The efforts to redevelop or build new structures that can withstand the impacts of intensifying storms, flooding, erosion, and sea-level rise may inadvertently pose new threats to low-income communities of color.</p><p>On the other hand, the lack of equitable investment in low-income communities leaves people even more at risk for climate change impacts when the development model maintains a do-nothing status quo. The same consequence can happen when high-income households relocate from flood-prone coastal properties to higher-elevation cities, displacing the residents there. Extreme weather events fueled by global climate change can also rapidly reshape a city's identity and people's cultural connections to places they call home.</p><p>There are a few ways you can look at the causes of climate gentrification. <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sasha-forbes-aicp" target="_blank">Sasha Forbes</a>, a senior program advocate in Natural Resources Defense Council's (NRDC) Healthy People & Thriving Communities Program, breaks them down.</p>
The Lure of Higher Ground
<p>Increasingly, high-income households are moving away from coastal properties to avoid threats like sea-level rise and erosion. The lurking impacts of the climate crisis "are pushing people inland onto communities that have been rooted there and have endured disinvestment, racism, and inequality and are now under the threat of gentrification and displacement," Forbes explains. Meanwhile, even owners of more-resilient coastal properties are eyeing properties farther from the shore due to expenses associated with climate change, such as the <a href="https://publicintegrity.org/environment/flood-insurance-climate-change-risk-inequality/" target="_blank">rising cost of flood insurance</a>.</p><p>Residents of Liberty City in Miami are among those now <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/stories/has-climate-gentrification-hit-miami-city-plans-find-out" target="_blank">facing the ramifications</a> of climate gentrification. Sitting at a higher elevation than the rest of Miami, Liberty City is less vulnerable to the expected sea-level rise of <a href="https://southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-Compact-Unified-Sea-Level-Rise-Projection.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">14 to 26 inches by 2060</a>—and this has caught the attention of real estate developers.</p><p>A <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabb32" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2018 study</a> shows that real estate sitting on higher elevation in Miami has appreciated at a faster rate than anywhere else in the country. This value appreciation has not been leveraged to collectively benefit the predominantly Black residents of Liberty City who have been fighting for more resources for their community. Not only are they seeing a shift in their neighborhood, but these residents are also under pressure from developers to sell their homes.</p>Evacuation from Extreme Weather
<p>Natural disasters can also accelerate gentrification. "A large part of the reality is that Black- and brown-owned property is undervalued by the market, so in times of disasters—and we can include COVID-19 in this as well—predatory investors and developers take advantage of even cheaper property and land values than existed prior to a disaster," Forbes says.</p><p>Recent studies have shown that Black communities are undervalued <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/devaluation-of-assets-in-black-neighborhoods/" target="_blank">by an average of $48,000</a>. The recovery and redevelopment period presents "a mix of residents trying to maintain or recoup what might be left of their homes; residents who have lost their jobs and are on the verge of being evicted with no option for affordable housing elsewhere; land grabs; and cities engaging in redevelopment processes that might tout equity but still create intentional strategies to attract more higher-income residents without enough emphasis on supporting existing low-income residents—all of which can lead to gentrification and displacement," says Forbes.</p><p>Climate-related disasters in 2018 alone displaced more than <a href="https://www.internal-displacement.org/expert-opinion/displacement-and-housing-affordability-in-the-united-states" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1.2 million people</a>. These extreme weather events—which will only <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/stories/global-warming-101#weather" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">increase in frequency</a> as climate change worsens—can spur immediate gentrification in under-resourced communities. In 2017, when Hurricane Harvey swept through Houston, one in six families receiving assistance from the Houston Housing Authority saw their home battered or destroyed. After the city's many displaced families returned to seek new accommodations, <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/stories/climate-change-worsening-houstons-housing-crisis" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">they found skyrocketing rents across the city</a>. And one year later, Houston still wouldn't commit to rebuilding or replacing all of the lost subsidized housing.</p><p>The rebuilding of New Orleans, which bore the brunt of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, remains perhaps the starkest example of climate gentrification of a city in U.S. history. It is estimated that <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-katrina-anniversary/ten-years-on-hurricane-katrinas-scars-endure-for-black-new-orleans-idUSKCN0QB2AS20150806" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">100,000 Black New Orleans residents</a> have been permanently displaced from their homes due to the destruction of affordable housing following the storm. This included the razing of some developments that saw no significant damage as part of the city's rebuilding strategy.</p><p>Researchers have since concluded that hurricane damage was <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/new-orleans-gentrification-tied-to-hurricane-katrina" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">positively associated</a> with the likelihood of a New Orleans neighborhood having gentrified 10 years after Katrina. This suggests that natural disasters can sometimes pave the way for gentrification, uprooting existing populations en masse and wiping out infrastructure. Developers can swoop in afterward and invest in properties at lower prices and build higher-end projects meant to attract a wealthier population.</p>Green—but Inequitable—Investments
<p>Forbes also points to cities' efforts to implement eco-friendly infrastructure as a potential trigger for displacement. <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/experts/ramya-sivasubramanian/tackle-green-gentrification-parks-and-affordable-housing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Green gentrification</a>, such as the building of large-scale green spaces in neighborhoods, can inadvertently push out residents from the surrounding areas as it increases property values.</p><blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bww18E0AQiL/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="12" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:540px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"><div style="padding:16px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bww18E0AQiL/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" background:#FFFFFF; line-height:0; padding:0 0; text-align:center; text-decoration:none; width:100%;" target="_blank"> <div style=" display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;"> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;"> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 100px;"></div> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 60px;"></div></div></div><div style="padding: 19% 0;"></div> <div style="display:block; height:50px; margin:0 auto 12px; width:50px;"><svg width="50px" height="50px" viewBox="0 0 60 60" version="1.1" xmlns="https://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><g stroke="none" stroke-width="1" fill="none" fill-rule="evenodd"><g transform="translate(-511.000000, -20.000000)" fill="#000000"><g><path d="M556.869,30.41 C554.814,30.41 553.148,32.076 553.148,34.131 C553.148,36.186 554.814,37.852 556.869,37.852 C558.924,37.852 560.59,36.186 560.59,34.131 C560.59,32.076 558.924,30.41 556.869,30.41 M541,60.657 C535.114,60.657 530.342,55.887 530.342,50 C530.342,44.114 535.114,39.342 541,39.342 C546.887,39.342 551.658,44.114 551.658,50 C551.658,55.887 546.887,60.657 541,60.657 M541,33.886 C532.1,33.886 524.886,41.1 524.886,50 C524.886,58.899 532.1,66.113 541,66.113 C549.9,66.113 557.115,58.899 557.115,50 C557.115,41.1 549.9,33.886 541,33.886 M565.378,62.101 C565.244,65.022 564.756,66.606 564.346,67.663 C563.803,69.06 563.154,70.057 562.106,71.106 C561.058,72.155 560.06,72.803 558.662,73.347 C557.607,73.757 556.021,74.244 553.102,74.378 C549.944,74.521 548.997,74.552 541,74.552 C533.003,74.552 532.056,74.521 528.898,74.378 C525.979,74.244 524.393,73.757 523.338,73.347 C521.94,72.803 520.942,72.155 519.894,71.106 C518.846,70.057 518.197,69.06 517.654,67.663 C517.244,66.606 516.755,65.022 516.623,62.101 C516.479,58.943 516.448,57.996 516.448,50 C516.448,42.003 516.479,41.056 516.623,37.899 C516.755,34.978 517.244,33.391 517.654,32.338 C518.197,30.938 518.846,29.942 519.894,28.894 C520.942,27.846 521.94,27.196 523.338,26.654 C524.393,26.244 525.979,25.756 528.898,25.623 C532.057,25.479 533.004,25.448 541,25.448 C548.997,25.448 549.943,25.479 553.102,25.623 C556.021,25.756 557.607,26.244 558.662,26.654 C560.06,27.196 561.058,27.846 562.106,28.894 C563.154,29.942 563.803,30.938 564.346,32.338 C564.756,33.391 565.244,34.978 565.378,37.899 C565.522,41.056 565.552,42.003 565.552,50 C565.552,57.996 565.522,58.943 565.378,62.101 M570.82,37.631 C570.674,34.438 570.167,32.258 569.425,30.349 C568.659,28.377 567.633,26.702 565.965,25.035 C564.297,23.368 562.623,22.342 560.652,21.575 C558.743,20.834 556.562,20.326 553.369,20.18 C550.169,20.033 549.148,20 541,20 C532.853,20 531.831,20.033 528.631,20.18 C525.438,20.326 523.257,20.834 521.349,21.575 C519.376,22.342 517.703,23.368 516.035,25.035 C514.368,26.702 513.342,28.377 512.574,30.349 C511.834,32.258 511.326,34.438 511.181,37.631 C511.035,40.831 511,41.851 511,50 C511,58.147 511.035,59.17 511.181,62.369 C511.326,65.562 511.834,67.743 512.574,69.651 C513.342,71.625 514.368,73.296 516.035,74.965 C517.703,76.634 519.376,77.658 521.349,78.425 C523.257,79.167 525.438,79.673 528.631,79.82 C531.831,79.965 532.853,80.001 541,80.001 C549.148,80.001 550.169,79.965 553.369,79.82 C556.562,79.673 558.743,79.167 560.652,78.425 C562.623,77.658 564.297,76.634 565.965,74.965 C567.633,73.296 568.659,71.625 569.425,69.651 C570.167,67.743 570.674,65.562 570.82,62.369 C570.966,59.17 571,58.147 571,50 C571,41.851 570.966,40.831 570.82,37.631"></path></g></g></g></svg></div><div style="padding-top: 8px;"> <div style=" color:#3897f0; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:550; line-height:18px;"> View this post on Instagram</div></div><div style="padding: 12.5% 0;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; margin-bottom: 14px; align-items: center;"><div> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(0px) translateY(7px);"></div> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; height: 12.5px; transform: rotate(-45deg) translateX(3px) translateY(1px); width: 12.5px; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 14px; margin-left: 2px;"></div> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(9px) translateY(-18px);"></div></div><div style="margin-left: 8px;"> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 20px; width: 20px;"></div> <div style=" width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 2px solid transparent; border-left: 6px solid #f4f4f4; border-bottom: 2px solid transparent; transform: translateX(16px) translateY(-4px) rotate(30deg)"></div></div><div style="margin-left: auto;"> <div style=" width: 0px; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-right: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(16px);"></div> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; flex-grow: 0; height: 12px; width: 16px; transform: translateY(-4px);"></div> <div style=" width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-left: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(-4px) translateX(8px);"></div></div></div></a> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bww18E0AQiL/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_blank">Low-income communities often face disproportionate environmental burdens, like higher levels of pollution and a dire lack of green spaces. But when investments into these communities are made, rents can skyrocket—displacing longtime residents. We can begin to address this green gentrification by advocating for genuine community collaboration, affordable housing, tenant protections, and a living wage. Because clean air, safe water, and green spaces should not be a luxury. Learn more by clicking the link in our bio! - #environmentaljustice #greengentrification #pollution #greenspaces #cleanair #safewater #affordablehousing #tenantprotections #livingwage</a></p> <p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A post shared by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/nrdc_org/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;" target="_blank"> NRDC</a> (@nrdc_org) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2019-04-27T14:59:09+00:00">Apr 27, 2019 at 7:59am PDT</time></p></div></blockquote> <script async src="//www.instagram.com/embed.js"></script><p>"While it is good that cities adopt green interventions to increase climate resilience, the greening can lead to gentrification and displacement, given our racially and structurally unjust planning practices and policies, which don't focus enough on keeping people in place if they so choose, <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sasha-forbes-aicp/keeping-renters-their-homes-through-collective-action" target="_blank">especially renters</a>," says Forbes.</p><p>These eco-friendly amenities may only end up benefiting wealthy residents—<a href="https://www.nrdc.org/stories/restoring-river-all-angelenos" target="_blank">which is what's in danger of happening along the Los Angeles River</a>, where profiteering developers are taking advantage of a restoration project intended to benefit surrounding ecosystems and riverside communities. One of two large projects proposed along the river, north of downtown L.A., would disrupt habitat restoration efforts and place a commercial development atop riverside land that the city had previously envisioned as part of a contiguous public park. The other proposed project features luxury housing in L.A.'s Chinatown and has already led to reports of landlords evicting long-term residents.</p><p>Other projects like the High Line in New York City, <a href="https://www.chicagoreporter.com/green-gentrification-and-lessons-of-the-606/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the 606</a> in Chicago, and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-10/runaway-gentrification-in-the-path-of-atlanta-s-beltline" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the Atlanta BeltLine</a> have prompted similar concerns of accelerated gentrification, despite their original goals of neighborhood revitalization. Forbes explains that there needs to be proactive strategies and policies tied to such projects that not only focus on anti-displacement measures but also allow low-income communities and communities of color to access the new amenities for their well being.</p>
<p>"Programs and policies for community ownership, cultural programs, income and workforce development that support communities should be implemented months or years<em> ahead </em>of the groundbreaking of any major development, as well as <em>after</em> the development is completed," Forbes says. "The continued failure to do so is as dangerous as the 'unintended consequences' of projects that are implemented to make things better. We don't account enough for inaction." Urban planning and zoning are key forces driving gentrification as a whole, Forbes adds, with local governments playing a significant role in regulating these practices.</p><p>Given that reality, Forbes and national and local partners with the <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/resources/strong-prosperous-and-resilient-communities-challenge-sparcc" target="_blank">Strong, Prosperous, and Resilient Communities Challenge</a> (SPARCC) say that community-led investment and self-determination by low-income communities and people of color are fundamental to any city's revitalization projects and to determining what happens to local land. Toward that end, SPARCC collaborates with community partners and amplifies local efforts to <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sasha-forbes-aicp/principles-parks-and-equitable-development" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">promote equitable and sustainable development practices</a>—not just for housing protection but also for access to public transportation, cultural preservation, and parks.</p><p>"We must have increased voice, power, and access to adaptive financial resources, especially for community-led organizations, to make sustainable, healthy, and equitable development a reality," Forbes says. This can vary depending on the specific needs of the neighborhood. In the Bay Area, for example, <a href="https://www.sparcchub.org/communities/ba4a/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">64 percent of low-income residents</a> living near transit are at risk of displacement due to rising housing costs. To help mitigate this risk, SPARCC partners have focused on supporting the region's community land trusts—local nonprofit organizations that ensure long-term housing affordability in a neighborhood—and have succeeded in <a href="http://www.sparcchub.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/sparcc-year-three-evaluation.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">acquiring several single-family homes</a> in collaboration with residents, lenders, and developers.</p><p>We already know that climate justice, housing justice, racial equity, and economic opportunity are <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/experts/marissa-ramirez/research-displacement-face-climate-change" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">interconnected</a>. To begin working through these issues and avoid the pitfalls of gentrification, cities need to ensure that they recalibrate their inequitable planning and economic development practices of the past and bring the decision-making table to those experiencing the issues firsthand.</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-climate-gentrification" target="_blank">NRDC</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
- Sustainable Cities Need More Than Parks, Cafes and a Riverwalk ... ›
- Some Northern Cities Could Be Reborn as 'Climate Havens ... ›
- Climate Change Is Creating an Affordable Housing Crisis in Miami ... ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
As a hurricane reaches the coast, it pushes a huge volume of ocean water ashore, known as a storm surge. Jerry Coli / Pixabay
By Anthony C. Didlake Jr.
Of all the hazards that hurricanes bring, storm surge is the greatest threat to life and property along the coast. It can sweep homes off their foundations, flood riverside communities miles inland, and break up dunes and levees that normally protect coastal areas against storms.
But what exactly is storm surge?
<p>
<br/>
</p>
What Storm Surge Looks Like From Shore
<p>As a hurricane reaches the coast, it pushes a huge volume of ocean water ashore. This is what we call storm surge.</p><p>This surge appears as a gradual rise in the water level as the storm approaches. Depending on the size and track of the hurricane, storm surge flooding can last for several hours. It then recedes after the storm passes.</p><p>Water level heights during a hurricane can reach 20 feet or more above normal sea level. With powerful waves on top of it, a hurricane's storm surge can cause catastrophic damage.</p>What Determines How High a Storm Surge Gets?
<p>Storm surge begins over the open ocean. The strong winds of a hurricane push the ocean waters around and cause water to pile up under the storm. The low air pressure of the storm also plays a small role in lifting the water level. The height and extent of this pile of water depend on the strength and size of the hurricane.</p><p>As this pile of water moves toward the coast, other factors can change its height and extent.</p><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4aad41892c2bbd9d82864f56b59611cd"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TbHO1mWHKq4?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p> The <a href="https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/surge/" target="_blank">depth of the sea floor</a> is one factor.</p><p>If a coastal area has a sea floor that gently slopes away from the coastline, it's more likely to see a higher storm surge than an area with a steeper drop-off. Gentle slopes along the Louisiana and Texas coasts have contributed to some devastating storm surges. Hurricane Katrina's surge in 2005 broke levees and flooded New Orleans. Hurricane Ike's <a href="https://www.hcfcd.org/Additional-Resources/Flooding-and-Floodplains/Storm-Center/Hurricane-Ike-2008" target="_blank">15- to 17-foot storm surge</a> and waves swept hundreds of homes off Texas' Bolivar Peninsula in 2008. Both were large, powerful storms that hit in vulnerable locations.</p><p>The shape of the coastline can also shape the surge. When a storm surge enters a bay or river, the geography of the land can act as a funnel, sending the water even higher.</p>
Other Factors That Shape Storm Surge
<p>Ocean tides – caused by the gravity of the moon and sun – can also strengthen or weaken the impact of a storm surge. So, it's important to know the timing of the local tides compared to the hurricane landfall.</p><p>At high tide, the water is already at an elevated height. If landfall happens at high tide, the storm surge will cause even higher water levels and bring more water further inland. The Carolinas saw those effects when Hurricane Isaias hit at close to high tide on Aug. 3. Isaias brought a storm surge of about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/08/03/isaias-path-carolinas-northeast/" target="_blank">4 feet at Myrtle Beach</a>, South Carolina, but the water level was <a href="https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/waterlevels.html?id=8661070&units=standard&bdate=20200802&edate=20200804&timezone=GMT&datum=MLLW&interval=6&action=" target="_blank">more than 10 feet</a> above normal.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDI5NDU5MS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwNTMxMTAyNX0.136LZQwJEu9IF4eS8iWWFSe99sxiLBpFMxeIvrSr3To/img.jpg?width=980" id="63d28" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9dc9135513bb5741147c57d580dfdc32" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<p>
<em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/anthony-c-didlake-jr-1151458" target="_blank">Anthony C. Didlake Jr.</a> is an </em><em>Assistant Professor of Meteorology, Pennsylvania State University.</em>
</p><p>
<em>Disclosure statement: </em><em>Anthony C. Didlake Jr. receives funding from the National Science Foundation.</em>
</p><p>
<em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-hurricane-storm-surge-and-why-is-it-so-dangerous-145369" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>.</em>
</p><iframe height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/145369/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" width="1"></iframe>How a storm surge and high tide add up to coastal flooding. The COMET Program/UCAR and National Weather Service
<p><a href="https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sea level rise</a> is another growing concern that influences storm surge.</p><p>As water warms, <a href="https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/global-sea-level/thermal-expansion" target="_blank">it expands</a>, and that has slowly raised sea level over the past century as <a href="https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/global-temperatures" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">global temperatures have risen</a>. Freshwater from melting of ice sheets and glaciers also adds to sea level rise. Together, they <a href="https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/12/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">elevate the background ocean height</a>. When a hurricane arrives, the higher ocean means storm surge can bring water further inland, to a more dangerous and widespread effect.</p>From Your Site Articles
- Rising Seas May Bring More Superstorms - EcoWatch ›
- How Climate Change is Influencing Storm Surge - EcoWatch ›
- 'Unsurvivable Storm Surge' Expected as Hurricane Laura Hits Gulf ... ›
- Hurricane Sally Makes Landfall Slowly With 'Life-Threatening' Flooding Expected - EcoWatch ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
NASA image shows locations of wildfires in red and plumes of smoke across the Western U.S. NASA
By Jeff Berardelli
This story was originally published on CBS News on September 9, 2020. All data and statistics are based on publicly available data at the time of publication.
Right on the heels of arguably the West Coast's most intense heat wave in modern history comes the most ferocious flare-up of catastrophic wildfires in recent memory. Meanwhile, just a few hundred miles east, a 60-degree temperature drop over just 18 hours in Wyoming and Colorado was accompanied by an extremely rare late-summer dumping of up to 2 feet of snow.
It's not coincidence, it's climate change.
<p>These kinds of <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-heat-wave-wildfires-hurricanes-derecho/" target="_blank">dystopian weather events</a>, happening often at the same time, are exactly what scientists have been warning about for decades. While extreme weather is a part of the natural cycle, the recent uptick in the ferocity and frequency of these extremes, scientists say, is evidence of an acceleration of climate impacts, some of which were underestimated by climate computer models.</p><p>"This is yet another example of where uncertainty is not our friend," says Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State. "As we learn more, we are finding that many climate change impacts, including these sorts of extreme weather events, are playing out faster and with greater magnitude than our models predicted."</p><p>On Wednesday NOAA released its latest <a href="https://www.noaa.gov/news/summer-2020-ranked-as-one-of-hottest-on-record-for-us" target="_blank">State of the Climate Report</a>, which finds that just during the month of August the U.S. was hit by four different billion-dollar disasters: two hurricanes, huge wildfires and an extraordinary <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/derecho-storm-100-mph-winds-hits-midwest/" target="_blank">Midwest derecho</a>.</p><p>Just one such extreme event can strain emergency resources — a situation West Coast firefighters find themselves in now. However, in two dramatic cases this summer, the nation was hit simultaneously with concurrent catastrophes, some of which had no precedent in modern history. It's a concept scientists call <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0156-3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">compound events</a>, and it is necessary to factor these confluences into future projections to properly estimate risk, response and resources.</p>
<p>In mid-August the West suffered through an extended heat wave which saw Death Valley surge to <span style="background-color: initial;"><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/death-valley-records-highest-temperature-107-years-heat-wave/" target="_blank">130 degrees</a></span>, the hottest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth. The tinderbox conditions caused by the heat, along with a rare lightning outbreak, sparked the first round of major wildfires in California this season, escalating into three of the four largest fires in state history. At about the same time a powerful <span style="background-color: initial;"><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iowa-storm-derecho-seeking-4-billion-dollars-disater-aid/" target="_blank">derecho</a></span> caused billions of dollars in damage in Iowa and Illinois, and <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/hurricane-laura-storm-category-2-track-path-forecast-today-2020-08-27/" target="_blank">Hurricane Laura</a> plowed into the Gulf Coast of Louisiana as a Category 4 with 150 mph winds and 16 feet of storm surge.</p><p>Just three weeks later, and here we are again. This past weekend California experienced an <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/record-heat-wave-hits-southern-california-latest-forecast-temperatures-2020-09-06/" target="_blank">even more intense heat wave</a>, with the southern part of the state hitting 121 degrees west of the mountains for the first time in record-keeping history. Predictably, fires flared back up due to the severe heating and drying, and then <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/video/hundreds-rescued-as-raging-california-wildfires-decimate-towns/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">went into overdrive</a> as a wicked early-season cold front — which is also bringing heavy snow to the Rockies — brought a wind event through the mountains and valleys of the intermountain west. </p><p><span></span>In Washington state, an estimated <span style="background-color: initial;"><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/malden-washington-fire-destroys-town-post-office-city-hall-fire-station-homes/" target="_blank">330,000 acres burned</a></span> across the state on Monday, more than the total in each of the last 12 fire seasons. California has seen a record 2.3 million acres burn so far this year — more than 3 times the normal for an entire season (typically July through November), and 7 times the normal year to date.</p><p>If it were just this fire season, one could chalk the extremity up to mere coincidence. But scientists say this is part of an ongoing upward trend, made clear by the data and well understood by science.</p><p><span></span>"There is little doubt that we're witnessing an acceleration of fire activity in the West - be it in terms of burned area, number of large fires, fire growth, and of course direct and indirect impacts to people," explains Dr. John Abatzoglou, climate professor at the University of California Merced.</p>
<p>The acceleration has been dramatic. Fire season is now two to three months longer than it was just a few decades ago across much of the West. Since the 1970s, California has experienced a five-fold increase in annual burned area and an eight-fold increase in summer forest fire extent. At least 17 of California's top 20 <a href="https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/11416/top20_acres.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">largest wildfires</a> have burned since 2000.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDIxODc2Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1OTI2NTkzM30.fyyGv2awtTdnhiuk0BC6iyzzYx59KTsDq2EirOYfczM/img.jpg?width=980" id="3870b" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7892ef72035f37ab78595e441311d88b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Increase in California areas burned by wildfires, 1975 to 2015. WILLIAMS, ABATZOGLOU ET AL., EARTH'S FUTURE
<p>Abatzoglou makes clear that there are many factors — not just climate change — that contribute to the escalation of fire activity. These include the increased settlement of people in fire-prone lands and a legacy of fire suppression in many lower-elevation forests, which led to years of heavy growth of trees and brush.</p><p>"We can focus on the bad fortune of the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lightning-siege-hits-california-with-nearly-12000-strikes-in-a-week-2020-08-22/" target="_blank">lightning siege</a> around the San Francisco Bay Area, or the multitude of <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gender-reveal-fire-party-california-wildfire/" target="_blank">stupid human tricks</a> that materialized in large wildfires, but the confluence of long-term and short-term environmental factors set the table for the 2020 fire season," he said. </p><p>In other words, though climate change does not cause the heat waves or fires, it sets the stage so that when conditions are ripe, like the summer and fall of 2020, heat waves are more intense and fires burn more fiercely. </p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDIxODgxMi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMjUwNTk0OH0.oTMiV-ZX237LsRjfk9kxhQi7W49p4hqfvz1JTxGeKTg/img.jpg?width=980" id="687d6" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="240814e4da9042815fc1dd34b2509b2d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
CLIMATE CENTRAL
<p>This summer has been extremely hot and dry in the West. According to NOAA, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah each had their <a href="https://www.noaa.gov/news/summer-2020-ranked-as-one-of-hottest-on-record-for-us" target="_blank">warmest August</a> on record. Research has found that heat waves are now larger, getting more intense and lasting longer than decades ago. Specifically in California, extreme heat waves — like the ones of recent weeks — are now <a href="https://crd.lbl.gov/assets/Uploads/Wehner/California-heatwave-attribution-and-projection.pdf" target="_blank">3 to 4 degrees</a> Fahrenheit warmer due to climate change. By 2080, that same study finds such heat waves will intensify by another 3 to 5 degrees.</p><p>This week's NOAA report also finds that the same general area in the West also experienced one of its driest Augusts on record. This short-term dry and hot pattern is mainly due to natural cycles in weather, and from season to season has the biggest impact on the amount of area burned because it determines how dry the forests and brush are.</p><p>"Across the Western U.S. forests, we find that climatic measures of fuel dryness explain about ¾ of the year-to-year variability in the burned area — highlighting that climate very strongly enables big fire seasons in warm-dry summers and inhibits widespread fire activity in cool-wet summers," explains Abatzoglou.</p><p>But over the long term, human-caused climate change has been gradually drying out the atmosphere and the fuel. "The observed changes in fuel dryness [plus the] number of days of high fire danger have been particularly stark in the American West over the past half-century," says Abatzoglou.</p><p>Since the 1970s the warm season in the West has heated up by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit. This extra heat has increased the evaporation of moisture from the surface. While atmospheric moisture has also increased some, it has not increased nearly as fast as the temperature. That has caused a long-term "moisture deficit" and has accelerated the rate of foliage drying. This is part of the reason why, according to research, the West has entered into one of the worst <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-drought-california-western-united-states-study/" target="_blank">megadroughts</a> in the past 1,200 years.<br> <br>A <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019EF001210" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">recent study</a>, co-authored by Abatzoglou, found a direct link with <em>nearly all</em> of the increase in summer forest-fire area during the period from 1972–2018 driven by the increased moisture deficit. To illustrate just how impactful the moisture deficit is, right now, as <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-wildfire-overruns-14-firefighters-rugged-mountains/" target="_blank">unprecedented wildfires</a> burn out of control, the deficit is at record low levels in the majority of the Western U.S.</p><div id="3778e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="fc604b137ce9da1717a09d6b10a2e3b9"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1303464019261444097" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Absurd atmospheric aridity (+ other factors) is enabling the ongoing fire outbreak – synchronized downslope winds… https://t.co/ohibdi2X5x</div> — John Abatzoglou (@John Abatzoglou)<a href="https://twitter.com/climate_guy/statuses/1303464019261444097">1599605014.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>Another <span style="background-color: initial;"><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-has-doubled-extreme-fire-weather-days-in-california-2020-04-07/" target="_blank">recent study</a></span> from this spring found that the frequency of autumn days with extreme fire weather conditions has more than doubled since the 1980s, fueled by a combination of less rainfall and warmer temperatures.</p><p>But many scientists believe that there is more at play contributing to this extreme weather than simply the direct effects of warming and drying. One of those mechanisms is the indirect impacts of global warming on the most influential weather-maker on day-to-day conditions: the jet stream. </p><p>The speed and orientation of the jet stream — a river of fast-moving air currents in the atmosphere — determines the track, intensity and forward speed of most storm systems and also how cold or hot the weather is. The attributes of the jet stream at any given moment are determined largely by the placement of hot and cold air masses and the strength of the gradient between them. Because the Arctic has been warming at three times the rate of the rest of the globe, climate scientists know human-caused climate change is throwing the jet stream off-kilter. But how and to what extent is not totally understood.</p><p>A number of climate scientists believe that a warmer Arctic is slowing down the jet stream during certain times of year, resulting in a more <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/1/014005" target="_blank">wavy jet stream</a>. As shown below, a wavy jet stream can catapult warm air northward into the Arctic and drive cold air far southward. This is exactly what happened during the catastrophic <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/midwest-flooding-perfect-storm-of-extreme-weather-climate-change-drove-deadly-flooding-in-nebraska-and-iowa/" target="_blank">Midwest floods in 2019</a> and is also the kind of pattern we have right now, which is causing record low temperatures and extremely early season snow in the Rockies and Plains. A wavy jet stream is a normal part of nature, but climate change may be making it more amplified, resulting in more extremes.</p>
<p>"I think it's a triple whammy — heat and drought, which are favored by climate change, and the extra added ingredient is the slower, wavier jet stream," explains Mann. But he says the wavier jet stream <a href="https://t.co/OH2yfWkEPW?amp=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">isn't well resolved</a> by current models, thus they underestimate the extremity of weather events enhanced by climate change.</p><p>As a result, when scientists dig into the causes of an extreme event, Mann says the studies underestimate the influence of human-caused climate change. "So if anything, climate attribution studies are likely to under-attribute the role that climate change is playing with these persistent extreme weather events," he said.</p><p>As for future fire seasons, Abatzoglou says we should expect extreme fires seasons like 2020's to become the rule rather than the exception. </p><p>"While the extent of the ongoing fire siege is beyond what most have seen in the West, the alignment of ingredients for such fire seasons is becoming more favorable as a result of climate change and land-use practices," he said. "We should expect, adapt, and prepare for similar years moving forward."</p>
<p><em>This story originally appeared in</em><em><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/" target="_blank"> CBS News</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
- 14 Extreme Weather Events Linked to Climate Change - EcoWatch ›
- What's in Wildfire Smoke, and How Bad Is It for Your Lungs ... ›
- A Gender-Reveal Party Started a Wildfire That Burned Nearly ... ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
Trending
Climate Explained: Methane Is Short-Lived in the Atmosphere but Leaves Long-Term Damage
13 September
Science
Emitting methane will always be worse than emitting the same quantity of carbon dioxide, no matter the time scale.
Алексей Филатов / Getty Images
Алексей Филатов / Getty Images
By Zebedee Nicholls and Tim Baxter
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.
If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz
Methane is a shorter-lived greenhouse gas - why do we average it out over 100 years? By doing so, do we risk emitting so much in the upcoming decades that we reach climate tipping points?
<p>The climate conversation is often dominated by talk of carbon dioxide, and rightly so. <a href="https://www.livescience.com/58203-how-carbon-dioxide-is-warming-earth.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Carbon dioxide</a> is the climate warming agent with the biggest overall impact on the heating of the planet.</p><p>But it is not the only greenhouse gas driving climate change.</p>Comparing Apples and Oranges
<p>For the benefit of policy makers, the climate science community set up several ways to compare gases to aid with implementing, monitoring and verifying emissions reduction policies.</p><p>In almost all cases, these rely on a calculated common currency - a carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO₂-e). The most common way to determine this is by assessing the global warming potential (<a href="https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">GWP</a>) of the gas over time.</p><p>The simple intent of GWP calculations is to compare the climate heating effect of each greenhouse gas to that created by an equivalent amount (by mass) of carbon dioxide.</p><p>In this way, emissions of one gas - like methane - can be compared with emissions of any other - like carbon dioxide, nitrous dioxide or any of the myriad other greenhouse gases.</p><p><span></span>These comparisons are imperfect but the point of GWP is to provide a defensible way to compare apples and oranges.</p>Limits of Metrics
<p>Unlike carbon dioxide, which is relatively stable and by definition has a GWP value of one, methane is a live-fast, die-young greenhouse gas.</p><p>Methane traps very large quantities of heat in the first decade after it is released in to the atmosphere, but quickly breaks down.</p><p>After a decade, most emitted methane has reacted with ozone to form carbon dioxide and water. This carbon dioxide continues to heat the climate for hundreds or even thousands of years.</p><p>Emitting methane will always be worse than emitting the same quantity of carbon dioxide, no matter the time scale.</p><p>How much worse depends on the time period used to average out its effects. The most commonly used averaging period is 100 years, but this is not the only choice, and it is not wrong to choose another.</p><p>As a starting point, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/anthropogenic-and-natural-radiative-forcing/" title="IPCC AR5 Ch. 8" target="_blank">Fifth Assessment Report</a> from 2013 says methane heats the climate by 28 times more than carbon dioxide when averaged over 100 years and 84 times more when averaged over 20 years.</p>Many Sources of Methane
<p>On top of these base rates of warming, there are other important considerations.</p><p>Fully considered using the 100-year GWP and including natural feedbacks, the IPCC's <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/anthropogenic-and-natural-radiative-forcing/" title="IPCC AR5 Ch. 8" target="_blank">report</a> says fossil sources of methane - most of the gas burned for electricity or heat for industry and houses - can be up to 36 times worse than carbon dioxide. Methane from other sources - such as livestock and waste - can be up to 34 times worse.</p><p>While <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018GL079826" title="Understanding Rapid Adjustments to Diverse Forcing Agents" target="_blank">some uncertainty remains</a>, a <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL071930" title="Radiative forcing of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide: A significant revision of the methane radiative forcing" target="_blank">well-regarded recent assessment</a> suggested an upwards revision of fossil and other methane sources, that would increase their GWP values to around 40 and 38 times worse than carbon dioxide respectively.</p><p>These works will be assessed in the IPCC's upcoming <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/" target="_blank">Sixth Assessment Report</a>, with the physical science contribution due in 2021.</p><p>While we should prefer the most up to date science at any given time, the choice to consider - or not - the full impact of methane and the choice to consider its impact over 20, 100 or 500 years is ultimately political, not scientific.</p><p>Undervaluing or misrepresenting the impact of methane presents a clear risk for policy makers. It is vital they pay attention to the advice of scientists and bodies such as the IPCC.</p><p>Undervaluing methane's impact in this way is not a risk for climate modellers because they rely on more direct assessments of the impact of gases than GWP.</p>Tipping Points
<p>The idea of climate tipping points is that, at some point, we may change the climate so much that it crosses an irreversible threshold.</p><p>At such a tipping point, the world would continue to heat well beyond our capability to limit the harm.</p><p>There are <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252" title="Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene" target="_blank">many tipping points</a> we should be aware of. But exactly where these are - and precisely what the implications of crossing one would be - is uncertain.</p><p>Unfortunately, the only way we can be sure of where these tipping points are is to cross them. The only thing we know for sure about them is that the impact on lives, livelihoods and the places we love would be beyond catastrophic if we did.</p><p>But we cannot ignore disturbing impacts of climate change that are already here.</p><p>For example, damage to the landscape from the Black Summer bushfires <a href="https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(20)30171-3" title="After the Megafires: What Next for Australian Wildlife?" target="_blank">may be irreversible</a> and this represents its <a href="https://ecos.csiro.au/a-changing-climate-could-challenge-our-understanding-of-bushfires-as-carbon-neutral-events/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">own form of climate tipping point</a>.</p><p>The scientific understanding of climate change goes well beyond simple metrics like GWP. Shuffling between metrics - such as 20-year or 100-year GWP - cannot avoid the fact our very best chance of avoiding ever-worsening climate harm is to massively reduce our reliance on coal, oil and gas, along with reducing our emissions from all other sources of greenhouse gas.</p><p>If we do this, we offer ourselves the best chance of avoiding crossing thresholds we can never return from.</p>
<p>
<em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/zebedee-nicholls-365241" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Zebedee Nicholls</a> is a </em><em>PhD Researcher at the Climate & Energy College, University of Melbourne.</em>
</p><p>
<em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/tim-baxter-133963" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tim Baxter</a> is a </em><em>Fellow - Melbourne Law School; Senior Researcher - Climate Council; Associate - Australian-German Climate and Energy College, University of Melbourne.</em>
</p><p>
<em>Disclosure statement: </em><em>Zebedee Nicholls is affiliated with The University of Melbourne's Climate & Energy College. He is funded by the Australian Government via the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP). </em><em><em>Tim Baxter is employed by the Climate Council, a non-profit organisation providing independent, authoritative information on climate change and its solutions to the Australian public and has previously been employed under various Australia Research Council grants.</em></em>
</p><p>
<em><em></em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-methane-is-short-lived-in-the-atmosphere-but-leaves-long-term-damage-145040" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>.</em>
</p><iframe height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/145040/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" width="1"></iframe>From Your Site Articles
- Methane Emissions From Onshore Oil and Gas Equivalent to 14 ... ›
- EPA Expected to Allow More Methane Emissions From Oil and Gas ... ›
- Methane Levels Dramatically Increase in U.S. - EcoWatch ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
The Community Flood Watch Project is collecting resident reports of flooding in Jamaica Bay, Queens. Bjoertvedt / Wikimedia Commons / CC by 3.0
Many of New York City's coastal residents are plagued by flooding – during storms and on sunny days.
<iframe style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/15824204/height/45/theme/standard/thumbnail/yes/direction/backward/" height="45" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>"There are certain times of the year associated with the new and full moons where it brings higher-than-normal high tides. And with that, those tides can bring flooding into communities," says Helen Cheng, a former coastal resilience extension specialist with <a target="_blank" href="https://seagrant.sunysb.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer">New York Sea Grant</a> and with the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.srijb.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Science and Resilience Institute</a>.</p><p>She says in the Jamaica Bay watershed, flooding can block access to the subway station that people need to get to work from day to day.</p><p>"Even services, sometimes – you know, the delivery of mail – can get impacted by water on the streets."</p>
<p>Cheng says tidal flooding is getting worse as sea levels rise, and it's important to know how people are affected. So as part of the Community Flood Watch Project, residents document and report flooding.</p><p>"There's a lot of value in on-the-ground information and community data, right? Because they're living in these places and experiencing these events 24/7," she says.</p><p>Cheng says the data improves flood warnings and sea-level-rise predictions, and it helps city leaders understand how flooding affects people's lives.</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/09/new-york-city-residents-document-sea-level-rise-in-coastal-neighborhoods/" target="_blank">Yale Climate Connections.</a></em></p>From Your Site Articles
- NYC Sea Wall Halted After Trump Says it's 'Costly, Foolish' - EcoWatch ›
- New York City Spends Billions on Flood Protection - EcoWatch ›
- MTA Launches NYC Flood Control Tests, States 'Climate Change Is ... ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
Trending
States Are Doing What Big Government Won’t to Stop Climate Change, and Want Stimulus Funds to Help
10 September
Politics
Towns like Breckenridge, Colorado, are part of a national organization, Mountain Towns 2030, that's swapping ideas about how to meet a goal of net-zero carbon emissions within a decade. 12019 / Needpix
By James Bruggers
In Maine, state officials are working to help residents install 100,000 high efficiency heat pumps in their homes, part of a strategy for electrifying the state. In California, an in-demand grant program helps the state's largest industry—agriculture, not technology—to pursue a greener, more sustainable future. Across Appalachia, solar panels are appearing on rooftops of community centers in what used to be coal towns.
<p>The Trump administration may have pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, but most states and many rural areas in America have developed their own plans for reducing carbon emissions and moving away from fossil fuels as they maneuver—often aggressively—to address the threat of climate change.</p><p>"Even if the U.S. government has decided to leave the Paris Agreement, we see in the U.S. an enormous movement in favor to climate action," United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in an interview with Covering Climate Now on Monday. "We see companies, we see cities, we see states, we see the civil society fully mobilized."</p><p>Many state and local officials, including those in rural areas, hope stimulus funds aimed at helping rebuild economies ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic will support renewable energy and other "climate smart" initiatives that cut carbon emissions, while often creating more jobs in emerging industries than traditional infrastructure spending.</p><p>The plans for decarbonizing America have been sown and exist like seeds in a parched field, waiting for a drenching rain. </p><p>Here are five examples. </p>
In Maine, Federal Funding 'Would Make a Big Difference'
<p>The fingerprints of climate change are all over the state of Maine, from the invasion of temperate species into the rapidly warming Gulf of Maine to summers that are now two weeks longer than they were a century ago. But despite all this change, one thing will stay the same: Winter in Maine will still be cold.</p><p>In a state that uses more home heating oil per capita than anywhere in the nation, Maine's climate hawks are looking to make a major change in the way people heat their homes, and help mitigate climate change at the same time.</p><p>In 2019, Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill with the goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps into homes in Maine by 2025. This would represent nearly a fifth of the homes in the state. </p><p>"It's clearly the electrification strategy," said Hannah Pingree, the state's director of the Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future. "Electrify homes, electrify transportation. That's a strong theme of the Climate Council."</p><p>Maine's Climate Council—a group of scientists, industry leaders, local and state officials and residents—is charged with figuring out how Maine will meet a <a href="https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/news/governor-mills-signs-major-renewable-energy-and-climate-change-bills-law-2019-06-26" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">trio of ambitious goals</a>: reducing emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and at least 80 percent by 2050; increasing the state's renewable energy portfolio standard to 80 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050; and making the state carbon neutral by 2045. </p><p>Heat pumps—which also cool homes—draw in air from outside and use the difference in temperature between inside and outside air to keep a home comfortable. They are run on electricity, and can be paired with clean energy sources like solar or wind power to eliminate the carbon footprint of home heating.</p><p>Mills' plan offers incentives for installing the pumps, thanks to state funding that's being supplemented by some federal low-income housing funds. The program is up and running, but it's something that Pingree said could benefit from an infusion of federal funds.</p><p>"The governor's heat pump program is already ambitious and innovative, but to really get to the full scale and take it even further, federal investment would make a big difference," said Pingree, who co-chairs the Climate Council. "Especially when it comes to people's homes, investments in transportation and housing stock, the federal government's participation is extremely helpful and it helps put people to work."</p><p>The heat pump program is part of a bigger picture of state and local governments working to get consumers to move away from using fossil fuels for heating. <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12122019/natural-gas-ban-cities-legal-cambridge-brookline-massachusetts-state-law-berkeley-california" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Some local governments</a> in other states are banning natural gas hookups for new construction, and some electric utilities and clean energy advocates are asking California regulators to enact a <a href="https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/california-nears-tipping-point-on-all-electric-building-regulations" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">statewide ban</a> as part of the next update of the state's building code.</p><p>Heat pumps are just one part of Maines's strategy, which will likely include a massive expansion of offshore wind and community solar projects and a push to electrify the transportation sector. At a meeting earlier this summer, more than 230 people from six working groups presented ideas to the council—more than 300 actions in all—which are being weighed now.</p><p>"If you look at the recommendations from the working groups, one of the cross-cutting ones is finance. We do need to raise revenue, and we also need the federal government to step up," said David Costello, the clean energy director of the Natural Resource Council of Maine. "It's going to be hard for Maine to implement many of the actions that we'd like to implement without increased funding."</p>California's Grants for 'Climate Smart Agriculture' Are Successful—and Threatened
<p>To say California farm country is central to its ambitious plans to combat climate change seems redundant. The $50 billion agricultural sector is a pillar of the state's economy, the world's fifth largest, encompassing 70,000 farms and ranches. </p><p>With such a vast and vital industry (which includes parts of every county in the state), California has created a suite of "climate smart agriculture" programs. The first-of-their-kind programs, launched in 2014 and expanded in 2017, are <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25062020/california-farmers-coronavirus-emissions-climate-change" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">helping farms become more resilient </a>to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, conserve land and protect ecosystems and communities. </p><p>The programs provide grant funds and technical assistance to farms in four key areas: conserving agricultural land against non-farm development; increasing on-farm water efficiency; improving soil health and managing manure to mitigate its climate impacts. The programs, popular with farmers, are receiving at least twice as many applications as there are grants.</p><p>They are also popular with nonprofit environmental and agricultural advocacy organizations. The California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN), evaluated the programs' climate benefits and found impressive results. To date, the programs collectively have funded more than 1,250 climate smart agriculture projects and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 1.1 million metric tons of CO2 e (carbon dioxide equivalent) over the life of the projects, the equivalent of removing 67,000 passenger vehicles from the road for a year. The water efficiency programs have saved more than 110,000 acre feet of water (the equivalent of more than 50,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools).</p><p>They are also affordable, costing between $43 and $100 per metric ton of CO2 reductions. In a pre-pandemic California, one with a budget surplus and climate policy priorities, the programs would be expanding. Instead, climate smart agriculture funding is in jeopardy. The state, still partially wracked by the coronavirus, is in a worsening recession. Supporters of climate smart agriculture programs worry the state will spend its funding on other priorities.</p><p>This at a time when the coronavirus has exposed the need for greater investment in farm country, said Jeanne Merrill, CalCAN's policy director. "We're seeing the pandemic impacts on farmers is clearly a major disruption," she said, "and it's a disruption that can point to weaknesses in our current system. We're taking the lessons learned from the pandemic and applying that to how we can prepare for greater climate extremes. Investing in resilient farming is key."</p>Across Appalachia, a New Post-Coal Economy Beckons
<p>Coal mining jobs have been crashing for decades in eastern Kentucky, from roughly 30,000 in 1984 to about 3,000 now, undercutting what has long been among the most impoverished regions of the country.</p><p>For a long time, elected leaders <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24092019/mitch-mcconnell-coal-miners-pensions-fund-appalachia-senate-campaign" target="_blank">held</a> what turned out to be false hope that the coal industry would come back.</p><p>But a nonprofit based in Berea, Kentucky, the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, has been working toward a post-coal economy since 1976. </p><p>Among its programs: training entrepreneurs and providing low-interest loans to small businesses. In the past dozen years, MACED added energy efficiency and solar power to its mix of programs, saving clients money and cutting carbon emissions at the same time.</p><p>It's an ironic twist that rural Appalachian counties that helped power the nation with cheap—though dirty and climate warming—coal have seen residents' electricity bills <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14082018/coal-energy-prices-appalachia-mining-electric-bill-kentucky-economy-aep-rates" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">skyrocket</a> as coal has given way to cheaper natural gas and increasingly competitive wind and solar. Utility customers have been shouldering the costs of shuttering old coal-burning power plants and cleaning up the toxic messes they leave behind, while the power companies doubled down on more expensive coal.</p><p>Since May 2015, <a href="https://maced.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">MACED</a> has helped with 30 solar installations, saving almost $400,000 in energy costs, said Ivy Brashear, MACED's Appalachian transition director. And since 2008, MACED has helped hundreds of homes and businesses reduce their energy bills by scrutinizing them for errors and helping to pay for energy efficiency retrofits, she said. She added that it included, for example, helping a grocery store stay in business to prevent a rural area from becoming a food desert.</p><p>"We listen and collaborate with people who are living and working in these communities, and help advance that new economy in ways that are really just and really equitable," Brashear said.</p><p>In solar work, MACED has focused on Letcher County, with a population of about 22,000, where businesses, faith communities and nonprofits are <a href="https://www.letcherculture.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">tapping</a> their cultural strengths to create a new economy. </p><p>Whitesburg-based Appalshop, the 50-year-old arts and education nonprofit, for example, partnered with MACED to put solar panels on its new outdoor performance <a href="https://appalshop.org/solar" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">pavilion</a>, which opened a year ago, to power its headquarters building and reduce electricity bills.</p><p>"In the last decade, our energy costs have gone up by 50 percent and were expected to keep rising," said Alexandra Werner-Winslow, Appalshop communications director. "That was not sustainable."</p><p>MACED, she said, "was tremendously helpful with our construction," and with the low-interest loan. At the same time, Appalshop sees solar development and energy efficiency as an important economic engine for eastern Kentucky.</p><p>MACED's funding includes grants from government and philanthropic foundations. With Congress weighing further ways to help the nation recover from an economic recession caused by the novel coronavirus, it could further a transition to cleaner energy and energy savings in rural areas through targeted investments and tax rebates, said Peter Hille, president of MACED.</p><p>"Anything that can (bring) down the front-end cost makes a big difference since that also reduces interest cost on financing over the life of the loan," he said.</p>Mountain Towns in the West Hope for a 'Green Pathway' Stimulus
<p>Jessie Burley is the sustainability director for the town of Breckenridge, Colorado, a posh, outdoorsy community in the Tenmile Range. Not only is Breckenridge a member of the statewide Colorado Communities for Climate Action but the town is also part of a national organization, Mountain Towns 2030, that's swapping ideas about how to meet a goal of net-zero carbon emissions within a decade, and one of many tourist towns focused on clean energy long before the coronavirus pandemic.</p><p>And the resulting economic downturn hasn't changed the goal, said Burley. Sustainability-minded communities recognize that jobs and businesses ought to be a focus of the Covid-19 recovery, since the pandemic has revealed how exposed existing economic systems are, she said.</p><p>"Whether it's a virus or whether it's global warming or whether it's some other kind of disaster, we are more susceptible," she said. "We also can't lose sight of the fact that going back to business as usual is not going to be enough."</p><p>Members of a Mountain Towns 2030 task force on Covid-19 are pressing for any new stimulus package to include provisions supporting "green pathway" programs, such as green infrastructure, electric vehicle charging or renewable energy jobs. In that spirit, although Breckenridge has suffered steep, pandemic-related revenue losses, a community solar program is pressing forward this year, its grants scaled back from 25 to 20.</p><p>Similarly, in Montana, where revenue from natural resource industries makes up 12 percent of the state's general fund and paychecks for 1.2 percent of the workforce, a task force is finalizing a statewide climate change plan this month, said Mark Haggerty, an economist with Bozeman-based Headwaters Economics and a member of the governor's climate task force. Planning is still underway to decarbonize Montana's electricity sector by 2035 and to decarbonize Montana's economy by 2050, he said.</p><p>"A lot of this needs to be done in recognition of the fact that [the energy transition] is already happening," said Haggerty, noting that the task force is diverse, including everyone from conservationists to energy officials.</p><p>"It is a broad-based challenge, and everyone is affected regardless of where you live or what your political affiliation is," he said of the new climate goals in a world also dealing with Covid-19's economic fallout. "But, also, we need everyone to buy into and ultimately benefit from the changes that we can enact and that will benefit the entire state."</p>Virginia is the South's First State to Commit to Carbon-Free Energy
<p>In the wake of a political upheaval that put Democrats firmly in control of state government, Virginia in 2020 became the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/virginia-becomes-the-first-southern-state-with-a-goal-of-carbon-free-energy/2020/04/13/4ef22dd6-7db5-11ea-8013-1b6da0e4a2b7_story.html" target="_blank">first state in the South</a> to commit to 100 percent carbon-free energy and to join the northeast's <a href="https://www.rggi.org/sites/default/files/Uploads/Press-Releases/2020_07_08_VA_Announcement_Release.pdf" target="_blank">Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.</a></p><p>Most of the state's coal power would have to shut down by 2024 under the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which also lays the groundwork for a burst of new renewable energy construction. Lawmakers declared large amounts of solar and wind energy and energy storage to be "in the public interest," sweeping aside the regulatory barriers to new renewable energy projects.</p><p>This transition to renewable energy already has a footprint in the Hamptons Roads area, where the state plans to develop a wind industry hub to be overseen by a newly created state agency aimed at fostering offshore wind farms. The bill that created the agency stated Virginia's opposition to offshore drilling. </p><p>About 25 miles east, Virginia Beach is considering an array of plans to protect homes and businesses from increased climate-related flooding, storm surges and sea level rise, hoping for either state or federal funds to do everything from buying out flood prone homes to possibly building large floodgates to protect its shoreline. </p><p>In Norfolk, the state is supporting construction of new reefs using crushed concrete and granite that can serve as a habitat for the eastern oyster and also help shield the city against storm surges and erosion. The effort enabled state officials last year to declare the Lafayette River fully restored under the Chesapeake Bay Watershed agreement. </p><p>The Legislature, meanwhile, considered, but rejected, the idea of a Virginia "Green New Deal" public works-style program. Instead, lawmakers opted for a business-friendly approach that had the support of the state's big utilities, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power, by the time the legislation was<a href="https://www.governor.virginia.gov/newsroom/all-releases/2020/april/headline-856056-en.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> signed into law</a> by Gov. Ralph Northam on April 11. </p><p>The new Clean Economy Act makes it easier for rooftop solar to spread across Virginia, by expanding "net metering" for households—giving electricity customers credit for the excess solar energy they produce and sell back to the grid. It enables Virginians for the first time to save money on their monthly electric bills by going solar.</p><p>If utilities fall short on their obligations to cut carbon energy and expand renewables, they will be subject to penalties that will go into an account to fund job training, with priority given to historically disadvantaged communities, veterans and individuals in Virginia's coalfield regions. Some critics note that this set-up means there is no assured funding for worker transition programs, which could be provided by stimulus programs from the federal government.</p><p>Virginia already has more solar jobs (<a href="https://www.thesolarfoundation.org/solar-jobs-census/factsheet-2019-va/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">4,489</a>) than coal jobs (<a href="https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/pdf/table18.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2,730)</a>, and the latter are concentrated in the rural southwestern part of the state, a Republican stronghold which has lost political power to the state's burgeoning northern suburbs. Diverse, highly educated and tech-heavy communities in the northern part of the state helped Democrats take full control of Virginia's Legislature in 2019, paving the way for passage of Northam's clean energy agenda. A chief challenge in implementing the law will be ensuring that the Republican-dominated, fossil fuel-dependent rural regions that have been resistant to change don't get left behind.</p>
Read More
Show Less
Earth May Temporarily Pass Dangerous 1.5℃ Warming Limit by 2024, Major New Report Finds
09 September
Science
This first overshoot beyond 1.5℃ would be temporary, however, it casts new doubt on whether Earth's climate can be permanently stabilized at 1.5℃ warming. ronniechua / Getty Images
By Pep Canadell and Rob Jackson
The Paris climate agreement seeks to limit global warming to 1.5℃ this century. A new report by the World Meteorological Organization warns this limit may be exceeded by 2024 – and the risk is growing.
<p>This first overshoot beyond 1.5℃ would be temporary, likely aided by a major climate anomaly such as an El Niño weather pattern. However, it casts new doubt on whether Earth's climate can be permanently stabilized at 1.5℃ warming.</p><p>This finding is among those just published in a report titled <a href="https://public.wmo.int/en/resources/united_in_science" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">United in Science</a>. We contributed to the report, which was prepared by six leading science agencies, including the <a href="https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Global Carbon Project</a>.</p><p>The report also found while greenhouse gas emissions declined slightly in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they remained very high – which meant atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have continued to rise.</p>
Greenhouse Gases Rise as CO₂ Emissions Slow
<p>Concentrations of the three main greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O), have all increased over the past decade. Current concentrations in the atmosphere are, respectively, 147%, 259% and 123% of those present before the industrial era began in 1750.</p><p>Concentrations measured at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory and at Australia's Cape Grim station in Tasmania show concentrations continued to increase in 2019 and 2020. In particular, CO₂ concentrations reached 414.38 and 410.04 parts per million in July this year, respectively, at each station.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzg0MDgzNC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MjkzMDg1MH0.e4zqCoSy25OUxUDXXIZAr1ean1E0fA4f_G_ldkc8FR4/img.png?width=980" id="d77d7" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f2e32f2e254053d45401842536eb0171" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂0) from WMO Global Atmosphere Watch.
<p>Growth in CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel use slowed to around 1% per year in the past decade, down from 3% during the 2000s. An unprecedented decline is expected in 2020, due to the COVID-19 economic slowdown. Daily CO₂ fossil fuel emissions declined by 17% in early April at the peak of global confinement policies, compared with the previous year. But by early June they had recovered to a 5% decline.</p><p>We estimate a decline for 2020 of about 4-7% compared to 2019 levels, depending on how the pandemic plays out.</p><p>Although emissions will fall slightly, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations will still reach another <a href="https://theconversation.com/carbon-dioxide-levels-over-australia-rose-even-after-covid-19-forced-global-emissions-down-heres-why-144119" target="_blank">record high</a> this year. This is because we're still adding large amounts of CO₂ to the atmosphere.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzg0MDg5MS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMDY3MzQyOH0.GRT7pQPLC0t8GbDl5PeBoyaItfesVVTTwpqcDpoh7As/img.png?width=980" id="2b24a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="1095250846b6bc1cf2dd96aece3e6388" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Global daily fossil CO₂ emissions to June 2020. Updated from Le Quéré et al. 2020, Nature Climate Change.
Warmest Five Years on Record
<p>The global average surface temperature from 2016 to 2020 will be among the warmest of any equivalent period on record, and about 0.24℃ warmer than the previous five years.</p><p>This five-year period is on the way to creating a new temperature record across much of the world, including Australia, southern Africa, much of Europe, the Middle East and northern Asia, areas of South America and parts of the United States.</p><p>Sea levels rose by 3.2 millimeters per year on average over the past 27 years. The growth is accelerating – sea level rose 4.8 millimeters annually over the past five years, compared to 4.1 millimeters annually for the five years before that.</p><p>The past five years have also seen many extreme events. These include record-breaking heatwaves in Europe, Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, major bushfires in Australia and elsewhere, prolonged drought in southern Africa and three North Atlantic hurricanes in 2017.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzg0MTA4MC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NzU5MDk0NH0.jlf6tIgtZolfcHT1tuEcY-2IKB5sdAhFLeKFUph-CBo/img.png?width=980" id="e5010" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="73e0a6c1336e03055dde6bb6c6056963" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Left: Global average temperature anomalies (relative to pre-industrial) from 1854 to 2020 for five data sets. UK-MetOffice. Right: Average sea level for the period from 1993 to July 16, 2020. European Space Agency and Copernicus Marine Service.
1 in 4 Chance of Exceeding 1.5°C Warming
<p>Our report predicts a continuing warming trend. There is a high probability that, everywhere on the planet, average temperatures in the next five years will be above the 1981-2010 average. Arctic warming is expected to be more than twice that the global average.</p><p>There's a one-in-four chance the global annual average temperature will exceed 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels for at least one year over the next five years. The chance is relatively small, but still significant and growing. If a major climate anomaly, such as a strong El Niño, occurs in that period, the 1.5℃ threshold is more likely to be crossed. El Niño events generally bring warmer global temperatures.</p><p>Under the Paris Agreement, crossing the 1.5℃ threshold is measured over a 30-year average, not just one year. But every year above 1.5℃ warming would take us closer to exceeding the limit.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzg0MTE1MS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0MDI3NjU1MX0.IRPU1NxnSbpfZl_nNVW0PTVIaroDEMyA2wXjty-9pOA/img.png?width=980" id="0e056" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="8460dfeba271f5a7c050670a6ba7080b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Global average model prediction of near surface air temperature relative to 1981–2010. Black line = observations, green = modelled, blue = forecast. Probability of global temperature exceeding 1.5℃ for a single month or year shown in brown insert and right axis. UK Met Office.
Arctic Ocean Sea-Ice Disappearing
<p>Satellite records between 1979 and 2019 show sea ice in the Arctic summer declined at about 13% per decade, and this year reached its lowest July levels on record.</p><p>In Antarctica, summer sea ice reached its lowest and second-lowest extent in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and 2018 was also the second-lowest winter extent.</p><p>Most simulations show that by 2050, the Arctic Ocean will practically be free of sea ice for the first time. The fate of Antarctic sea ice is less certain.</p>Urgent Action Can Change Trends
<p>Human activities emitted 42 billion tons of CO₂ in 2019 alone. Under the Paris Agreement, nations committed to reducing emissions by 2030.</p><p>But our report shows a shortfall of about 15 billion tons of CO₂ between these commitments, and pathways consistent with limiting warming to well below 2℃ (the less ambitious end of the Paris target). The gap increases to 32 billion tons for the more ambitious 1.5℃ goal.</p><p>Our report models a range of climate outcomes based on various socioeconomic and policy scenarios. It shows if emission reductions are large and sustained, we can still meet the Paris goals and avoid the most severe damage to the natural world, the economy and people. But worryingly, we also have time to make it far worse.</p>From Your Site Articles
- Scientists Share Why Keeping Warming Under 1.5 Degrees Celsius ... ›
- Groundbreaking Study Shows Limiting Warming to 1.5 Degrees Is ... ›
- Tens of Thousands of Species at Risk if Warming Exceeds 1.5°C ... ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less
First-of-its-Kind Report Finds Climate Change Poses 'Major Risk' to U.S. Financial System
09 September
Politics
This is the first federal government report of its kind to focus on the effects of climate change on financial markets. Robertogfena / Wikimedia Commons / CC by 4.0
A massive, first-of-its-kind report, commissioned by Trump appointees and compiled by dozens of analysts from firms across the economy, says "climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy."
<p>The findings themselves are not entirely new, but the fact that they were published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulatory body charged with overseeing the complex financial instruments that set the prices of commodities like corn, wheat, and oil, carries significant importance. </p><p>This is the first federal government report of its kind to focus on the effects of climate change on financial markets. </p>
<p>"It was shocking when they asked me to do this," Robert Litterman, the chairman of the panel that produced the report and a founding partner of Kepos Capital, told the New York Times. </p><p>"This is members of the entire community involved in financial markets saying with one voice, 'This is a serious problem, and it has to be addressed.'"</p>
<p><strong>For a deeper dive:</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/climate/climate-change-financial-markets.html?smid=em-share&utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=94874373&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_GWMht0msr3FV1Xf2nU0JyUKXAS4oLv4vz-Om82vxLSIJbO6g-Hoc4abyHF9XN68ZiNzPLz3GJs657bT7E3Dtk5St26yOIWAAzaMt1BKv9HGhaf5Q&utm_content=94874373&utm_source=hs_email" target="_blank">New York Times</a>, <a href="https://login.politicopro.com/?redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fsubscriber.politicopro.com%2Farticle%2F2020%2F09%2Fcftc-report-climate-change-poses-serious-risk-to-financial-system-1990308%3Futm_campaign%3DHot%2520News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=94874373&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--5bZHK86iwDFjQm-C_voC50lMzypE62jS7nTaMFKPrXvqcTy3T7DbCBTSEpjEv-PL2zJ0uGlwEc3tEsZh1nqtDdo8Bc0UgwJhcpAH9MjnF7lUwj_I&utm_content=94874373&utm_source=hs_email" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Politico Pro</a>, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-market-risks/u-s-regulator-homes-in-on-climate-risks-to-u-s-markets-idUSKBN1YF2D5?utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=94874373&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--H0EH387MWUZNZ8k4V8X9XvPYIxdUCRvU_IKbt6eJ3maA7w4YflYSUN9IC-5pw7lXb7_M-EJDPnvgVCNa6xc5NDwAsVELfja-Q-JOP9kjcqYNMyxE&utm_content=94874373&utm_source=hs_email" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Reuters</a>, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/federal-doc-warns-of-financial-disaster-of-climate-change.html?utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=94874373&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8OrmxZVuEqVClJXfDHCIqGPv4HR3Z7xfE55UbC8Q6E0hbOlfbSe3kmjcAfOnoG3UBgA7DkdJkgbqdP41PMUH2oQzCiFwutTj-ZhcvzYaNzlHbUnJQ&utm_content=94874373&utm_source=hs_email" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">New York Magazine</a><br/></p><p><em>For more </em><a href="http://ecowatch.com/climate-change-news/" target="_blank"><em>climate change</em></a><em> and </em><a href="http://ecowatch.com/business/renewables/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>clean energy</em></a><em> news, you can follow Climate Nexus on </em><a href="https://twitter.com/ClimateNexus" target="_blank"><em>Twitter</em></a><em> and </em><a href="https://www.facebook.com/ClimateNexus/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Facebook</em></a><em>, and sign up for daily </em><a href="http://climatenexus.us4.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=d1f5797e59060083034310930&id=7c84c08aaa" target="_blank"><em>Hot News</em></a><em>. </em></p>From Your Site Articles
- Elizabeth Warren's Climate Risk Disclosure Act Tries to Do What the ... ›
- Climate Change Named Biggest Global Threat in New WEF Risks ... ›
- 13 Must-Read Climate Change Reports for 2020 - EcoWatch ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read More
Show Less