This was another year of bleak climate news. Record heat waves baked the Pacific Northwest. Wildfires raged in California, Oregon, Washington and neighboring states. Tropical cyclones rapidly intensified in the Pacific Ocean. And devastating flash floods inundated Western Europe and China. Human-caused climate change is sending the world hurtling down a road to more extreme weather events, and we’re running out of time to pump the brakes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in August (SN: 9/11/21, p. 8).

The world needs to dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, and fast, if there’s any hope of preventing worse and more frequent extreme weather events. That means shifting to renewable sources of energy — and, importantly, decarbonizing transportation, a sector that is now responsible for about a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

But the path to that cleaner future is daunting, clogged with political and societal roadblocks, as well as scientific obstacles. Perhaps that’s one reason why the electric vehicle — already on the road, already navigating many of these roadblocks — swerved so dramatically into the climate solutions spotlight in 2021.

Just a few years ago, many automakers thought electric vehicles, or EVs, might be a passing fad, says Gil Tal, director of the Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California, Davis. “It’s now clear to everyone that [EVs are] here to stay.”

Globally, EV sales surged in the first half of 2021, increasing by 160 percent compared with the previous year. Even in 2020 — when most car sales were down due to the COVID-19 pandemic — EV sales were up 46 percent relative to 2019. Meanwhile, automakers from General Motors to Volkswagen to Nissan have outlined plans to launch new EV models over the next decade: GM pledged to go all-electric by 2035, Honda by 2040. Ford introduced electric versions of its iconic Mustang and F-150 pickup truck.

Consumer demand for EVs isn’t actually driving the surge in sales, Tal says. The real engine is a change in supply due to government policies pushing automakers to boost their EV production. The European Union’s toughened CO₂ emissions laws for the auto industry went into effect in 2021, and automakers have already bumped up new EV production in the region. China mandated in 2020 that EVs make up 40 percent of new car sales by 2030. Costa Rica has set official phase-out targets for internal combustion engines.

In the United States, where transportation has officially supplanted power generation as the top greenhouse gas–emitting sector, President Joe Biden’s administration set a goal this year of having 50 percent of new U.S. vehicle sales be electric — both plug-in hybrid and all-electric — by 2030. That’s a steep rise over EVs’ roughly 2.5 percent share of new cars sold in the United States today. In September, California announced that by 2035 all new cars and passenger trucks sold in the state must be zero-emission.

There are concrete signs that automakers are truly committing to EVs. In September, Ford announced plans to build two new complexes in Tennessee and Kentucky to produce electric trucks and batteries. Climate change–related energy crises, such as the February failure of Texas’ power system, may also boost interest in EVs, Ford CEO Jim Farley said September 28 on the podcast Columbia Energy Exchange.

“We’re seeing more extreme weather events with global warming, and so people are looking at these vehicles not just for propulsion but for … other benefits,” Farley said. “One of the most popular features of the F-150 Lightning is the fact that you can power your house for three days” with the truck’s battery.

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Although the EV market is growing fast, it’s still not fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement goals, the International Energy Agency reported this year. For the world to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 — when carbon emissions added to the atmosphere are balanced by carbon removal — EVs would need to climb from the current 5 percent of global car sales to 60 percent by 2030, the agency found.

As for the United States, even if the Biden administration’s plan for EVs comes to fruition, the country’s transportation sector will still fall short of its emissions targets, researchers reported in 2020 in Nature Climate Change. To hit those targets, electric cars would need to make up 90 percent of new U.S. car sales by 2050 — or people would need to drive a lot less.

And to truly supplant fossil fuel vehicles, electric options need to meet several benchmarks. Prices for new and used EVs must come down. Charging stations must be available and affordable to all, including people who don’t live in homes where they can plug in. And battery ranges must be extended. Average ranges have been improving. Just five or so years ago, cars needed a recharge after about 100 miles; today the average is about 250 miles, roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to New York City. But limited ranges and too few charging stations remain a sticking point.

Today’s batteries also require metals that are scarce, difficult to access or produced in mining operations rife with serious human rights issues. Although there, too, solutions may be on the horizon, including finding ways to recycle batteries to alleviate materials shortages (SN: 12/4/21, p. 4).

EVs on their own are nowhere near enough to forestall the worst effects of climate change. But it won’t be possible to slow global warming without them.

And in a year with a lot of grim climate news — both devastating extreme events and maddeningly stalled political action — EVs offered one glimmer of hope.

“We have the technology. It’s not dependent on some technology that’s not developed yet,” Tal says. “The hope is that now we are way more willing to [transition to EVs] than at any time before.”

A recent study found that the total indirect emissions from the supply of chain of electric vehicles pale in comparison to the same indirect emissions from fossil fuel-powered vehicles.

As the Arctic and the oceans warm due to climate change, understanding how a rapidly changing environment may affect birds making annual journeys between the Arctic and the high seas is vital to international conservation efforts. However, for some Arctic species, there are still many unknowns about their migration routes. Using telemetry to solve some mysteries of three related seabird species -- the pomarine jaeger, parasitic jaeger and long-tailed jaeger -- scientists discovered they took different paths across four oceans from a shared central Canadian high Arctic nesting location.

In 1721, a Norwegian missionary set sail for Greenland in the hopes of converting the Viking descendants living there to Protestantism. When he arrived, the only traces he found of the Nordic society were ruins of settlements that had been abandoned 300 years earlier.

There is no written record to explain why the Vikings left or died out. But a new simulation of Greenland’s coastline reveals that as the ice sheet covering most of the island started to expand around that time, sea levels rose drastically, researchers report December 15 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.

These shifting coastlines would have inundated grazing areas and farmland, and could have helped bring about the end of the Nordic way of life in Greenland, says Marisa Borreggine, a geophysicist at Harvard University.

Greenland was first colonized by Vikings in 985 by a group of settlers in 14 ships led by Erik the Red, who had been banished from neighboring Iceland for manslaughter. Erik and his followers settled across southern Greenland, where they and their descendants hunted for seals, grazed livestock, built churches and traded walrus ivory with European mainlanders.

The settlers arrived during what’s known as the Medieval Warm Period, when conditions across Europe and Greenland were temperate for a handful of centuries (SN: 7/24/19). But by 1350, the climate had started taking a turn for the worse with the beginning of the Little Ice Age, a period of regional cooling that lasted well into the 19th century.

Researchers have long speculated that a rapidly changing climate could have dealt a blow to Greenland’s Norse society. The island probably became much colder in the last 100 years of Norse occupation, says paleoclimatologist Boyang Zhao at Brown University in Providence, R.I, who was not involved in the new research. Lower temperatures could have made farming and raising livestock more difficult, he says. 

These lower temperatures would have had another impact on Greenland: the steady expansion of the island’s ice sheet, Borreggine and colleagues say.

Though rising sea levels usually go hand in hand with ice melting from ice sheets, oceans do not rise and fall uniformly in every place, Borreggine says. Around Greenland, sea level tends to rise when the ice sheet there grows.

This is for two main reasons: First, ice is heavy. The sheer weight of the ice sheet pushes the land it rests on down, meaning that as the ice sheet grows, more land is submerged. Second is gravity. Being massive, ice sheets exert some gravitational pull on nearby water. This makes the seawater around Greenland tilt upward toward the ice, meaning that water closer to the coast is higher than water in the open ocean. As the ice sheet grows, that pull becomes even stronger, and sea level close to the coast rises further.

Simulating the impact of the weight of the ice and its tug on Greenland’s waters, Borreggine and their colleagues found that sea level rose enough to flood the coast by hundreds of meters in some areas. Between the time the Vikings arrived and when they left, there was “pretty intense coastal flooding, such that certain pieces of land that were connected to each other were no longer connected,” they say.  

Today, some Viking sites are being inundated as a result of the overall rise in global sea level from climate change, which is being only marginally offset around Greenland by its melting ice sheet. Something similar could have happened back in the 14th and 15th centuries, destroying land that the Norse relied on for farming and grazing, Borreggine says.

“Previous theories about why Vikings left have really focused on the idea that they all died because it got really cold, and they were too dumb to adapt,” Borreggine says. But they say that archaeological digs have revealed a far more nuanced story, showing that Greenland’s Norse people did change their lifestyle by increasingly relying on seafood in the last century of their occupation.

But learning to adapt may have been too difficult in the face of an increasingly harsh landscape. The idea that rising sea levels may have been one of these challenges has merit, Zhao says, noting that the reasons why the Vikings disappeared from Greenland is nuanced.

As the climate changed, for example, these people may have also found themselves increasingly cut off from trade routes as the season for thick sea ice extended. And by the mid-14th century, the Black Plague was tearing through Europe, cutting into the Vikings’ biggest market for walrus ivory.

“Norse people came and left,” Zhao says. “But there are still a lot of unsolved questions,” including why exactly they left, he says.

The last written record of this society is a letter describing a wedding in 1408. A few years later, that couple moved to Iceland and started farming. Why the pair chose to leave is lost to history, but, as the new research suggests, sea level rise may have been part of the equation. 

By Ayurella Horn-Muller (Climate Central). With reporting and news segment by Amber Strong (Newsy)

Massive bee hives can be found on the grounds of Mount St. Scholastica, a 158-year-old Benedictine monastery in Atchison, Kansas. Image Credit: Stephanie Sandoval/ Newsy

ATCHISON, KAN. — Nearly 100 sisters make up Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery in a city of 10,000 in northwestern Kansas, where acres of rolling fields surround a chapel. Inside, sisters teach about the moral and spiritual call to live sustainably. 

This is the third story in Faith for Earth. First story: ‘Preach now or mourn in the future’: How Key West faith leaders are confronting climate change Second Story: As flooding amplifies along the East Coast, Buddhist and Jewish faith leaders join the climate fight

“Over the years, we really have been trying to reduce our carbon footprint, how we can be less dependent on fossil fuels,” said Elizabeth Carillo, a Benedictine sister at the monastery working towards a graduate degree in religion and ecology. 

Through collaborations involving Climate Central, Southerly and Newsy, this three-part series led by reporters Ayurella Horn-Muller and Amber Strong investigates ways in which religious leaders and faith-based communities across the U.S. are responding to climate change.

At Mount St. Scholastica, some like Carillo not only make the faith-based case for action in the face of worsening climate change, they live by what they advocate. A 150-kilowatt solar system helps power the site. The sisters reduce water usage, capture and use rainwater, and sow native plants to preserve biodiversity and feed pollinators. 

The Benedictine sisters at Mount St. Scholastica are among the Catholic communities in the rural Midwest preaching and living by the principles of sustainability in the face of the climate crisis. 

Faith-based institutions like these across the world are increasingly vocal in making religious cases for climate action by promoting environmental sustainability, deploying their own clean energy solutions and even advocating for climate-friendly legislation. 

Theological ethicist and Kansas’ Saint Paul School of Theology associate professor Joshua Bartholomew says local faith leaders' mobilizing for climate-friendly policies could bring about regional political and social change. “I can tell that religion is a huge part of the culture here,” said Bartholomew, who is new to the Midwest. 

(Newsy)

According to the Christian ethicist, religious groups in rural areas advocating for better climate policy and living sustainably, like the Benedictine sisters in Atchison, are “great examples” of the ways faith-based institutions can engage their communities with climate change. 

“It would be a dream for this [to] become sort of a center in this area for sustainable living,” Carillo said, describing how she aims for the monastery to attract community members looking to learn how to live more sustainably. 

Judith Sutera is another sister at Mount St. Scholastica thinking about combating climate change and the faith-based role in environmental action. 

“I think water and drought is becoming much more of an issue in this part of the country,” said Sutera, explaining the ways people living in the Midwest are experiencing the effects of the climate crisis.

Rising temperatures, drier soils and increasing water scarcity are weighty consequences of the warming climate in a state where 40% of the economy is associated with agricultural production. 

Climate change is starting to drive ranges of plants, insects and other animals northward and to higher altitudes, worsening risks of crop failures and yield declines.

The combination of increasing heat and humidity caused by pollution was recently projected by scientists at Columbia University to reduce yields of major crops by 5 percent globally during the second half of this century, with Kansas and adjacent states identified as global hotspots for impacts. Kansas corn and soybean yields could decline by 20% to 30% this century, an economic analysis of the projections shows, potentially costing some Midwestern counties more than $50 million annually.

Mount St. Scholastica’s grounds house a garden for organic vegetables, and a small apiary where some of the sisters act as beekeepers. The European insects are a crucial tool in agriculture; pollinating crops, increasing the amount harvested, and serving as the foundation of the $9 billion honey industry. 

Climate change is among the threats to pollination by native species — a 2021 United States Department of Agriculture study found that warming temperatures and increased rain and snow are among some of the biggest contributors to the decline of wild bees. 

To Sutera, the impacts of worsening climate change in the Midwest are clear, and the case for action is a spiritual responsibility to protect and preserve the world around us. 

“If there is no planet, there will be no other right to life issues,” Sutera said. “I mean, that's pretty basic.”

Greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels and other industrial activities has driven temperatures up more than 2.1°F (1.1°C) globally so far, worsening storms, heat waves, wildfires, droughts and flooding. Scientists warn unchecked emissions are on track to drive global temperatures beyond the international goal of 2.7°F (1.5℃) within two decades. 

Unless fossil fueled energy systems are urgently swapped out for renewables, temperature projections for 2100 show some of the strongest warming in the nation will be in the Midwest, heightening deluges, flooding, heat streaks and crop failures.

In Atchison, the sisters at the monastery have turned to pursuing better global, federal and local climate policies to try to ward off these threats. They're members of the Benedictine Coalition for Responsible Investment, a coalition that invests in public companies to drive changes by exercising shareholder rights.

Involvement in climate advocacy by faith-based communities could have powerful implications for curbing carbon emissions, according to Nadia Ahmad, an associate law professor at Barry University in Florida and visiting associate professor at Yale. 

“We’ve seen historically that faith leaders have been at the forefront of social justice issues, whether it's immigrant justice, climate justice or even looking at racial equality,” Ahmad said. 

In rural parts of Kansas, where a state legislature has historically avoided acknowledging human-induced climate change, let alone acting on it, and some policymakers continue to be misleadingly skeptical of the accuracy of climate science, the political sway of local religious leaders could have far-reaching ramifications.

Sister Carillo believes all religious people have a responsibility for “caring for creation,” or environmental stewardship as a means of “respecting God.” 

“These are dire circumstances and so much of it is an emphasis on upholding the dignity of human life,” said Carillo. “It’s like, when the planet’s dying, how much more of a life issue is there?”

Sister Elaine Fisher maintains the hives at Mount St. Scholastica, which is part of the Midwestern monastery's efforts to live a life of sustainability. Image Credit: Stephanie Sandoval/ Newsy    

The ethical component of the faith-based case for climate action is critical when considering who is most affected by rapidly warming temperatures and rising seas. Across the U.S., those that suffer the most from climate change’s impacts belong to Black, Indigenous and Latinx lower-income communities. In Kansas, more than a hundred thousand people of color live below the federal poverty line. 

“Most of the individuals and nations that feel the disproportionate effect of climate change are the least responsible for this sort of social issue,” said Saint Paul’s Bartholomew. Bartholomew’s research focuses on the relationship between economic justice and racial equality, and he spends much of his time working with Black churches. 

More than a quarter of Kansas’ population makeup frontline communities, living in polluted neighborhoods where collective wealth is low. These are the communities that are facing the greatest repercussions of the climate emergency. 

A 2019 Climate Accountability Institute dataset identified 20 fossil fuel companies as predominant contributors to more than one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — a problem exacerbated by carbon-emitting corporations in industries like agriculture and construction. 

Bartholomew says that exploitation can be explained by connections between white supremacy and environmental degradation. 

“It’s the same enemy,” he said. “The enemy in the system of racism and white supremacy is the same enemy of environmental degradation. And that's basically human beings' domination of one another, and nature.” 

As climate change’s fallout is being felt across every industry, every place and every walk of life, frontline communities are also being forced to rebuild in the wake of costly disasters, which have surged in frequency during the past forty years. Research investigating links between rising wealth inequality and rising disaster costs has found that these populations are left with little to no federal resources and financial support in the aftermath of increasingly frequent extreme weather events. 

For Sister Carillo of the Benedictine monastery, living sustainably and advocating for climate action are important steps faith-based communities can take to help mitigate the severity of such impacts, while aiding the most vulnerable.  

“It really is a moral imperative,” said Carillo. “That care for the Earth was integrally connected with uplifting the marginalized, and helping those who have not had access to power and resources, find their strength and regain that opportunity.” 

NEW ORLEANS — Warmer winters could make twisters more powerful.

Though tornadoes can occur in any season, the United States logs the greatest number of powerful twisters in the warmer months from March to July. Devastating winter tornadoes like the one that killed at least 88 people across Kentucky and four other states beginning on December 10 are less common. 

But climate change could increase tornado intensity in cooler months by many orders of magnitude beyond what was previously expected, researchers report December 13 in a poster at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting.

Tornadoes typically form during thunderstorms when warm, humid airstreams get trapped beneath cooler, drier winds. As the fast-moving air currents move past each other, they create rotating vortices that can transform into vertical, spinning twisters (SN: 12/14/18). Many tornadoes are short-lived, sometimes lasting mere minutes and with a width of only 100 yards, says Jeff Trapp, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Over the last 20 years, tornado patterns have shifted so that these severe weather events occur later in the season and across a broader range in the United States than before, Trapp says (SN: 10/18/18). But scientists have struggled to pin down a direct link between the twister changes and human-caused climate change.

Unlike hurricanes and other severe storm systems, tornadoes happen at such a small scale that most global climate simulations don’t include the storms, says Kevin Reed, an atmospheric scientist at Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the new research.

To see how climate change may affect tornadoes, Trapp and colleagues started with atmospheric measurements of two historical tornadoes and simulated how those storm systems might play out in a warmer future.

The first historical tornado took place in the cool season on February 10, 2013, near Hattiesburg, Miss., and the second occurred in the warm season on May 20, 2013, in Moore, Okla. The researchers used a global warming simulation to predict how the twisters’ wind speeds, width and intensity could change in a series of alternative climate scenarios.

Both twisters would likely become more intense in futures affected by climate change, the team found. But the simulated winter storm was more than eightfold as powerful as its historical counterpart, in part due to a predicted 15 percent increase in wind speeds. Climate change is expected to increase the availability of warm, humid air systems during cooler months, providing an important ingredient for violent tempests.

“This is exactly what we saw on Friday night,” Trapp says. The unseasonably warm weather in the Midwest on the evening of December 10 and in the early morning of December 11 probably contributed to the devastation of the tornado that traveled hundreds of miles from Arkansas to Kentucky, he speculates.

Simulating how historical tornados could intensify in future climate scenarios is a “clever way” to address the knowledge gap around the effects of climate change on these severe weather systems, says Daniel Chavas, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who was not involved in the new research.

But Chavas notes that this research is only one piece of a larger puzzle as researchers investigate how tornados might impact communities in the future.

One drawback of this type of simulation is it often requires direct measurements from a historical event, Reed says. That limits its prediction power to re-creating documented tornadoes rather than broadly forecasting shifts in large-scale weather systems.

Though the team based its predictions on only two previous tornados, Trapp says he hopes that adding more historical twisters to the analysis could provide more data for policy makers as well as residents of communities that may have to bear the force of intensifying tornadoes.

By Ayurella Horn-Muller (Climate Central). With reporting and news segment by Amber Strong (Newsy).

Just two hours north of New York city is the Chuang Yen Monastery, a serene site of Buddhist worship sheltered by more than 200 acres of dense woodland. Image Credit: Andrew Shafer/ Newsy

This is the second story in Faith for Earth. First story: ‘Preach now or mourn in the future’: How Key West faith leaders are confronting climate change Third Story: ‘A moral imperative’: Monastic sisters in rural Midwest make faith-based case for climate action

NEW YORK — Bhikkhu Bodhi has lived in a monastery in New York's lower Hudson River Valley for the past 14 years, where he’s witnessed firsthand the compounding effects of climate change. Intensifying storms particularly concern him. 

“People are always responsive to the words of spiritual leaders,” said Bodhi, an American Theravada Buddhist and president of the Buddhist Association of the United States. “If we speak up more explicitly, directly, clearly about the climate crisis and about the impact that it's going to have on humanity, it really calls for a very determined, full-scale response.”

Through collaborations involving Climate Central, Southerly and Newsy, this three-part series led by reporters Ayurella Horn-Muller and Amber Strong investigates ways in which religious leaders and faith-based communities across the U.S. are responding to climate change.

The monk, who has spent decades engaging the Buddhist community on climate change, is one of many religious leaders along the East Coast making the moral case for climate action. 

Spanning many traditions and miles, these leaders and faith groups are advocating for local, federal and global policies advancing an equitable clean energy transition — putting forth spiritual arguments for mitigating climate change. 

Conscious of his carbon footprint, Bodhi is a vegetarian who encourages others to consider cutting meat consumption to reduce personal emissions. He’s also the founder of Buddhist Global Relief, a charity that fights hunger by teaching communities how to create sustainable food sources. 

Buddhist Global Relief helps address a large contributor to carbon emissions — agriculture. The food system produces over a third of global emissions. In the U.S., agriculture is responsible for about 10% of emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. 

“What we found is one of the ways to both support farmers to emerge from poverty and to increase the yields of crops, while at the same time fighting climate change, is to support organic or ecologically sustainable types of agriculture,” said Bodhi. 

(Newsy)

The Buddhist tradition focuses on the theory of causality, or the idea that there are actions behind every consequence. Bodhi blames unchecked carbon emissions on humanity’s prioritization of economic growth. “There’s a whole lattice, a whole network of environmental impacts due to reckless and unrestrained human activity.” 

That harmful human activity was a key focus as world leaders, organizations and activists gathered in Glasgow in the fall for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 26. Among the faith leaders addressing COP 26 members, the Dalai Lama shared a message calling for cooperative and immediate action to confront ‘the urgent reality’ of climate change. He gave his first speech on climate change in 1990. 

Preceding the COP summit in 2015, the Dalai Lama, Bhikkhu Bodhi and other Buddhist activists signed a statement on behalf of ‘over a billion Buddhists worldwide’, asking global leaders to prioritize mitigating climate change by aggressively curbing fossil fuel production, in the hopes of protecting those most impacted by the warming climate. ‘The Time to Act is Now: A Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change’ joined a consensus of religious calls to action, including the Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis, the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, and the Hindu Declaration on Climate Change. 

At the Chuang Yen Monastery, American Theravada monk Bhikkhu Bodhi explains the Buddhist philosophy of causality and how that connects to human-induced climate change. Image Credit: Andrew Shafer/ Newsy

‘Religions have their problems, and their promise’ 

All traditional forms of religion share a common calling: a moral and ethical obligation to help those in need. Human rights to life, health, food and beyond are irrevocably threatened by climate change, which is why some say religious intervention is required. 

“This is an ethical issue of the future, of the planet, of very vulnerable people,” said Yale University senior lecturer and researcher Mary Evelyn Tucker. “How could it not be moral?” 

Tucker co-directs the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, a project which aims to mobilize climate action in all places of worship. She also authored and edited several books on the relationship between faith and environmental stewardship, with a focus on Confucian and Taoism. 

“All of these [Eastern] religions have a very profound sense of the interdependence of life. All of this is one flow; from the heavens, to Earth, and to humans,” said Tucker. “So humans are co-creators, with the universe and Earth, as caring for these great systems of life.” 

Faith leaders across all denominational boundaries have been increasingly coming together to do climate activism. While the trend is blossoming today, the seed was planted decades ago; religious authorities spoke out about the warming climate even before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988. Ten years later, the nonprofit Interfaith Power and Light was established in the U.S. as a coalition of churches pursuing renewable energy, creating a model that would be adopted across 40 states.

Over the past decade, the number of global, national and local faith groups joining the climate movement has grown to include a robust range of religions calling for policy solutions to address climate change. They’re not just spreading awareness, either. A 2021 Nature article identified that one-third of the institutions that have pledged to divest almost $40 trillion from fossil fuel companies are faith-based organizations.

There’s still a long way to go, especially in the U.S., where religious attitudes towards science are more politicized and antagonistic than in other countries. Examples of this modern faith-fueled mistrust of climate science include groups like The Cornwall Alliance, a Tennessee-based evangelical nonprofit opposed to religious environmentalism and action against climate change.   

“Religions have their problems, and their promise,” Tucker said, explaining that a lack of education about climate change, as well as who belongs to a parish, can sometimes stop local faith leaders from addressing climate change on the pulpit. Local faith leaders may also shy away from talking about climate change because of American political polarization.

People flock from all over the world to see the monastery’s centerpiece: a 37-foot marble statue of Buddha, the largest indoor Buddha statue in the Western Hemisphere. Image Credit: Andrew Shafer/ Newsy

“It's not always easy for these ministers to do it, because sometimes the interests of their congregation could be with a fossil fuel company,” Tucker said. “So, unfortunately, for some people in the pews, it may not be as clear.” 

Who is sitting in American halls of worship is changing, too. Less than half of 10,000 young adults in the U.S. surveyed in a 2021 report think that faith communities are concerned with climate change. Nearly half of those respondents also said they don’t turn to faith communities due to a ‘lack of trust’ in the people, beliefs and systems of organized religion. 

The number of U.S. adults overall who no longer consider themselves to be part of any religious denomination or tradition has also risen in recent decades. A 2014 Pew Research study found 23 percent of the adult population didn’t identify with a religion, up from 16 percent in 2007. Another 2018 Pew survey found a steady decline in the number of American adults under the age of 40 who say they believe in God or a universal spirit.  

A lecturer at Tufts University and former Harvard Law Visiting Fellow of The Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, Erum Sattar says this disconnect is because organized religions are failing to reach younger generations. 

“They're not growing, and the pews are empty, people don't come, or maybe people are feeling disconnected from what this tradition has to tell them about the world they inhabit,” Sattar said. 

Sattar sees faith communities engaging in climate action as a bridge to repair that divide. “I think it could be a real way to also revive and reinvigorate these traditions that, in a formal way, are losing sort of practical resonance.”

‘A risk we were willing to take’ 

Along the East Coast, climate change is hammering communities with intensified storms, higher tides and worsening heat. Compared to the first half of the 20th century, the Northeast has been seeing 50 percent more rainfall during its most severe storms. 

In September, Hurricane Ida triggered extreme flooding across the Northeast, killing 46 people in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Many of the victims lived in illegal basement apartments in cities with high living costs. It was the region’s worst storm since 2012’s Sandy, which claimed 43 lives in New York City alone. 

As the walls of Ida’s water subsided and grieving families buried their loved ones, what emerged from the wreckage were urgent calls for adaptation; as residents joined officials in rallying for preservation of infrastructure that wasn't built to withstand storms supercharged by climate change.

Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster thinks a key piece to that fortification lies in reducing emissions. The human rights activist and faith leader was one of three rabbis arrested in October for blocking the entrance of BlackRock, New York City’s largest financial firm, in a demonstration organized by the Jewish Youth Climate Movement. The protest aimed to pressure the firm to divest in companies that fund the fossil fuel industry. 

She was there as a rabbi, but also as a mother, concerned for her children as they inherit a volatile future. “We knew that we were risking arrest by blocking the entrance to the building,” said Kahn-Troster. “That was a risk we were willing to take to get the message across.” 

Kahn-Troster serves as the Executive Vice President of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) — a faith-based organization that lobbies major U.S. companies to reduce their contributions to emissions.  

Her father was a Jewish climate change activist, so Kahn-Troster grew up learning about a fundamental religious obligation: caring for others and the world in which they live. 

“We are caretaking the world as our obligation to other people. We know we only have one planet, and we all live on it,” said Kahn-Troster. “And we should all have the right to enjoy living here, sustainably. I think that message is very clear to me from my tradition.”

To the rabbi, that obligation extends beyond responsibility for environmental preservation and sustainable living, but also includes advocating for curbing emissions, expanding clean energy solutions and investing in sustainable agriculture, among other climate solutions. 

“As faith communities, we have something to say to structures of power, right?,” said Kahn-Troster. “Especially in the United States, faith is part of a political conversation.”

If it takes getting arrested for companies to stop exploiting the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves, the rabbi is willing to make that sacrifice. She isn’t just preaching to one congregation, but protesting on behalf of all of them. 

“Our political leaders are motivated when they hear from faith leaders,” she said. “That's an important piece of our role.”

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By Ayurella Horn-Muller (Climate Central). With news segment by Amber Strong (Newsy)

St. Paul’s Episcopal Key West, which is trying to spur climate action among its congregation. (Photo by Ayurella Horn-Muller)

KEY WEST, FLA—Grounds cloaked in greenery weave around a towering ivory chapel in the heart of downtown Key West, Fla. Founded in 1832, St. Paul’s Episcopal Key West is not only the oldest Christian congregation in the area, but one of the oldest congregations of any religious tradition south of St. Augustine. 

This is the first story in Faith for Earth. Second story: As flooding amplifies along the East Coast, Buddhist and Jewish faith leaders join the climate fight Third Story: ‘A moral imperative’: Monastic sisters in rural Midwest make faith-based case for climate action

The church is on its fourth building, the first three lost to fires and a hurricane. After nearly two hundred years of its congregation working to keep it standing, Reverend Donna Mote, the newest rector at St. Paul’s, is now worried about a more subtle risk: rising seas. 

Through collaborations involving Climate Central, Southerly and Newsy, this three-part series led by reporters Ayurella Horn-Muller and Amber Strong investigates ways in which religious leaders and faith-based communities across the U.S. are responding to climate change.

“It would be a shame to preserve all these buildings, and then have people scuba diving in them in 100 years,” Mote said.

St. Paul’s is located on one of the highest points of Key West; one of the 1,700 islands that make up the Florida Keys, where 90% of the land mass sits only five feet above the Atlantic Ocean. While scuba divers won’t be visiting the church in the coming century, with seas rising and storms intensifying, the eight-square-mile island city is facing more frequent and chronic flooding. 

Local officials and organizations are working to hold back the seawater climbing higher, threatening to plunge the area underwater by the turn of the century. But billion-dollar resilience projects in the pipeline—intended to raise roadways and floodproof infrastructure to combat flood risk—will depend on community buy-in. 

Just five months into her role at St. Paul’s, Mote intends to roll out a renewable energy audit of the church site to see how they can use cleaner energy. She also tries to set a sustainable example for her parishioners: she’s on a plant-based diet and encourages them to bike instead of drive, when possible.

While St. Paul Episcopal Key West sits on land high enough to protect it from all but the worst storm surges, a Climate Central analysis found that by 2080, rising seas will introduce a 1% annual chance of coastal flooding to the church’s property. That creates a one-in-four chance of a flood impacting the site every 30 years—a hazard so severe only 3% of the U.S. population currently lives in areas subject to this kind of risk. 

Mote belongs to one of several faith-based communities in Florida turning their attention to climate action, making religious cases for environmental preservation, clean energy and emissions reductions. At St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton, parish members lead beach clean-ups. The First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee donates to the city’s sustainability carbon fund as they seek to reduce their carbon footprint to net zero. The First Baptist Church of Orlando has been recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for reducing pollution through energy efficiency. 

Experts and faith leaders say provincial places of worship have a leading role to play in facilitating that support, and helping people engage in local environmental and justice issues. “We can either preach now to help people realize this,” said Ryan Gladwin, Palm Beach Atlantic University associate professor of ministry and theology. “Or we’re just going to have to be mourning with them, in the future, what we’ve lost.” 

(Newsy)

Key West is home to more than 24,000 permanent residents and attracts millions of tourists each year. Cobblestone walkways line tourist-saturated storefronts, adjacent to a sprawling, weathered dock overlooking the ocean. It’s picturesque until it starts to pour. Many locals are quick to name two converging streets downtown—Front and Greene—as frequent flood zones. In the lowest-lying parts of the longest island in the archipelago, heavy rainfall and high tides cause streets to flood, damage homes, and submerge vehicles. Monroe County expects another 17-inches of sea level rise by 2040. 

“The flooding has definitely been more than I’ve ever seen,” said Stephanie Piraino, manager at the Key West Key Lime Company, just a two-minute walk from the waterfront. Piraino said heavy rains can be brutal on the older properties and high tides often mean she’s taking her shoes off before wading through ankle-deep water in the parking lot. 

Hurricane Irma swept through in 2017, the force of the Category 4 storm surge strong enough to flip the store’s giant hundred-pound freezers upside-down. “We had everything covered. We put tarps in front of everything, did the sandbags with wood next to the door, but there’s really no way around it,” she said. Up to a foot of seawater came in. 

After Irma made landfall, Piraino remembers how a handful of local churches supplied donations to those in need. “Bug spray and charcoal saved the week for me and my kids,” she said. 

She used to live in a trailer in the nearby community of Stock Island, where dealing with chronic flooding was just a part of life. “Every time there was a high tide, the water would flood so much that it would come all the way to my front porch,” she said. She’d often struggle with electrical outages because of seawater submerging parts of her mobile home. 

With an average housing market value of just over $700,000, Key West is one of the most expensive cities to live in Florida. Workers need to earn $33 an hour to afford rental rates, according to the Florida Housing Data Clearinghouse. Although more than 11.6% of the population falls below the national poverty threshold, the city only has 390 properties set aside as affordable housing stock for those that can’t manage steep rental costs. Black, Indigenous and Latinx people make up the highest proportions of extremely low-income renters. In Key West, where 37% of the population are Black or Hispanic, more than 43% of those residents live in poverty.

It’s those residents who feel the consequences of climate change more intensely. Post-disaster government assistance programs are structured in ways that disadvantage them. “The least expensive, or the most affordable housing, also tends to be the most unsafe,” said Tom Callahan, executive director of Monroe County’s Star of the Sea SOS Foundation, run by the local Catholic church, which distributes two million pounds of food every year to nearly 10,000 residents in the Keys.

Nonprofits and places of worship are critical resources for those community members reeling from a hurricane or flood. Churches are often a place of solace for residents seeking help, offering everything from food to housing repairs to counseling. 

Many also serve as staging areas during a storm, or places to stay for emergency response volunteers. A 2020 FEMA assessment of faith-based responses to disasters found that after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit Louisiana, “local churches and community organizations often served disenfranchised groups missed by formal response efforts.” 

The Star of the Sea Foundation lost its roof during Hurricane Irma; it took six months to rebuild. Restoration funding came partially from the Archdiocese of Miami, which is made up of 118 Catholic parishes and missions spread across South Florida. Archbishop Thomas Wenski oversees all of those coastal congregations, where he says people are reminded of climate change every time there’s a hurricane or high tides. 

But as oceans rise, so do social divides. Climate gentrification is threatening affordable housing in Miami and across the region, as developers pour investment into premium elevation areas, pricing out existing residents. 

Faced with employment instability, rising rent and increasing floods, Callahan said a similar story is unfolding in Key West, as many moved north to find affordable housing options and work. Four percent of the Keys population left following the 2017 hurricane because of a lack of affordable housing options. Three years later, the coronavirus pandemic meant the islands were sealed off for months. Since then, many businesses have rebounded, but the recent, record-breaking surge of the COVID-19 delta variant in Florida has exacerbated the problems.

In June, Monroe County moved forward with a $1.8 billion plan to raise 150 miles of roads over the next 25 years. But that elevation solution will only apply to unincorporated roads in Monroe County, or non-governed areas outside of city limits.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a storm risk management study for the Keys that proposed investing almost $3 billion into floodproofing infrastructure and elevating nearly 4,700 homes, 43% of which are located in Key West, costing the city about $1.2 billion. The federal government will cover 65% if it is approved by Congress. The proposal is being formally submitted soon, according to Monroe County Chief Resilience Officer Rhonda Haag.

“We have a list of infrastructure projects and we’re ready to move forward, but the biggest problem is the funding,” Haag said. Increased taxes will be likely. “We’re going to need the residents and businesses to work with us.” 

Houses of worship could wield considerable influence on a small island. “Stories move people, right? And we know that pastors are very, very effective public speakers,” said Erum Sattar, a lecturer at Tufts University and a former Harvard Law Visiting Fellow of The Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. “They can get to your heart and they can motivate action.”

(Photo by Ayurella Horn-Muller)

But after working for the city for nine years and living in Key West for more than two decades, city of Key West sustainability coordinator Alison Higgins can only think of one local church that has been vocal about climate change. 

That doesn’t mean it isn’t on their minds, though. “There’s no concern about flooding at this site, not at 11 feet above sea level,” said Reverend John Baker about the Basilica St. Mary Star of the Sea, one of the largest and oldest places of worship in Key West. “But if there’s a storm surge, it doesn’t matter if you’re 11, or 20, feet above sea level, you don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

A Climate Central analysis found that by 2070, about half the Basilica site will become subject to occasional flood risk. By 2080, the whole area will face at least a 1% annual chance of flooding. By century’s end, the likelihood of flooding for the more than 200-year-old church property will increase 10-fold.

Baker’s led the only Catholic church on the island for 14 years. He’s less worried about flood risk at the church, and more about the consequences of climate change for the region. Although he’s quick to cite Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, a landmark document credited with driving faith-based environmental action, Baker doesn’t believe it’s his role to engage his congregation on the need for climate action. 

“I talk about Jesus Christ. And that’s why people come here. To discuss something that’s a controversial issue, you’re not bringing people together,” Baker said. “It’s best to not touch it because of that divisiveness,” he added. 

Downtown Key West. (Photo by Ayurella Horn-Muller)

A new study published in Environmental Research Letters found that over the last five years, a majority of U.S. Catholic bishops have been “nearly silent and sometimes even misleading,” in their official messaging to parishioners about climate change and the pope’s encyclical.

But a member of the Basilica St. Mary Star of the Sea’s congregation, Callahan, from the food bank, doesn’t think local government is doing enough to prepare for climate change, especially for the groups that need it most. 

“Climate change is the 800-pound gorilla that the county is trying to ignore,” Callahan said. “But they have finally, most recently, at least, started looking at it.”

The city’s preparing an adaptation plan for vulnerable infrastructure, like the low-lying roads and historic buildings already enduring flooding, which they expect to be ready by 2023. They’re also collaborating with the U.S. Navy to map flood patterns by tracking high tide as it moves through the island. 

“I think it’s kind of a good thing that we have been getting our feet wet once in a while,” said city sustainability coordinator Higgins. “You’re learning to live with that water because that’s what you’re going to have to do if this community is going to survive.”

Higgins hopes more religious sanctuaries will get involved with their adaptation and mitigation plans. “They’re an incredibly trusted messenger,” she said. She sees those collaborations as opportunities for local places of worship to help amplify support for such initiatives; including everything from urging their congregations to get involved with ongoing projects to planning events that promote them. 

“They can call me anytime to come and talk to them about how we can work together.” 

In the meantime, some faith leaders like Mote, from St. Paul’s Episcopal, are taking the moral call to environmental action more urgently. Mote has a background in disaster chaplaincy, or providing on-the-ground spiritual guidance to those affected by a crisis, such as a hurricane, and has trained other members of the clergy to be effective first responders. 

“We are called to be on the ground in the wake of a disaster,” Mote said. “What about our role in addressing the factors that are leading to the increase of these disasters?”

The demise of a West Antarctic glacier poses the world’s biggest threat to raise sea levels before 2100 — and an ice shelf that’s holding it back from the sea could collapse within three to five years, scientists reported December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.

Thwaites Glacier is “one of the largest, highest glaciers in Antarctica — it’s huge,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the Boulder, Colo.–based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, told reporters. Spanning 120 kilometers across, the glacier is roughly the size of Florida, and were the whole thing to fall into the ocean, it would raise sea levels by 65 centimeters, or more than two feet. Right now, its melting is responsible for about 4 percent of global sea level rise.

But a large portion of the glacier is about to lose its tenuous grip on the seafloor, and that will dramatically speed up its seaward slide, the researchers said. Since about 2004, the eastern third of Thwaites has been braced by a floating ice shelf, an extension of the glacier that juts out into the sea. Right now, the underbelly of that ice shelf is lodged against an underwater mountain located about 50 kilometers offshore. That pinning point is essentially helping to hold the whole mass of ice in place.

But data collected by researchers beneath and around the shelf in the last two years suggests that brace won’t hold much longer. Warm ocean waters are inexorably eating away at the ice from below (SN: 4/9/21; SN: 9/9/20). As the glacier’s ice shelf loses mass, it’s retreating inland, and will eventually retreat completely behind the underwater mountain pinning it in place. Meanwhile, fractures and crevasses, widened by these waters, are swiftly snaking through the ice like cracks in a car’s windshield, shattering and weakening it. 

This deadly punch-jab-uppercut combination of melting from below, ice shattering and losing its grip on the pinning point is pushing the ice shelf to imminent collapse, within as little as three to five years, said Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. And “the collapse of this ice shelf will result in a direct increase in sea level rise, pretty rapidly,” Pettit added. “It’s a little bit unsettling.”

Satellite data show that over the last 30 years, the flow of Thwaites Glacier across land and toward the sea has nearly doubled in pace. The collapse of this “Doomsday Glacier” alone would alter sea levels significantly, but its fall would also destabilize other West Antarctic glaciers, dragging more ice into the ocean and raising sea levels even more.

That makes Thwaites “the most important place to study for near-term sea level rise,” Scambos said. So in 2018, researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom embarked on a joint five-year project to intensively study the glacier and try to anticipate its imminent future by planting instruments atop, within, below it as well as offshore of it.

This pull-out-all-the-stops approach to studying Thwaites is leading to other rapid discoveries, including the first observations of ocean and melting conditions right at a glacier’s grounding zone, where the land-based glacier begins to jut out into a floating ice shelf. Scientists have also spotted how the rise and fall of ocean tides can speed up melting, by pumping warm waters farther beneath the ice and creating new melt channels and crevasses in the underside of the ice.

As Thwaites and other glaciers retreat inland, some scientists have pondered whether they might form very tall cliffs of ice along the edge of the ocean — and the potential tumble of such massive blocks of ice into the sea could lead to devastatingly rapid sea level rise, a hypothesis known as marine ice cliff instability (SN: 2/6/19). How likely researchers say such a collapse is depends on our understanding of the physics and dynamics of ice behavior, something about which scientists have historically known very little (SN: 9/23/20).

The Thwaites collaboration is also tackling this problem. In simulations of the further retreat of Thwaites, glaciologist Anna Crawford of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and her colleagues found that if the shape of the land beneath the glacier dips deep enough in some places, that could lead to some very tall ice cliffs — but, they found, the ice itself might also deform and thin enough to make tall ice cliff formation difficult.

The collaboration is only at its halfway point now, but these data already promise to help scientists better estimate the near-term future of Thwaites, including how quickly and dramatically it might fall, Scambos said. “We’re watching a world that’s doing things we haven’t really seen before, because we’re pushing on the climate extremely rapidly with carbon dioxide emissions,” he added. “It’s daunting.”

By Ayurella Horn-Muller (Climate Central), Brendan Rivers (ADAPT), and Danielle Uliano (WJXT)

The Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center recently raised its air conditioning units 18 inches to protect them from floods. Like many in the historically Black Lincolnville neighborhood in St. Augustine, the museum is coping with more frequent and intense flooding as seas rise and hotter temperatures drive heavier storms. 

This radio, television and text story was produced through a collaboration involving WJXT, ADAPT from WJCT Public Media, and Climate Central. Read full Climate Central report here

“When we do get high tide or a lot of rain, the streets tend to flood,” museum Executive Director Regina Gayle Phillips says. “There are certain areas that are worse than others.”

The Lincolnville Museum & Cultural Center, housed in the former Excelsior School building constructed in 1925 for black students during segregation. Credit: The Jaxson

About 150 years ago, newly freed slaves established what’s now the Lincolnville Historic District in the marshes bounding Maria Sanchez Creek. A hotbed for racial justice activism, in 1964 the neighborhood was the site of a Martin Luther King Jr. sit-in that helped lead to Congress’ passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Already, parts of Lincolnville are experiencing occasional or frequent flooding, particularly on the east and south sides of the neighborhood. The impacts are amplified by the neighborhood’s paved surfaces and lack of green spaces, which can absorb runoff. Within 30 years, a Climate Central analysis shows more than a dozen locations through the neighborhood will be at risk of chronic flooding unless steps are taken to protect them.

Phillips says the city put in some flooding controls in recent years, but they aren’t enough. Rising water’s threat to the cooling system of the museum is dwarfed by the threat to the community that it was built to chronicle and celebrate. “Sure, you can build back,” she said. “But you know, it doesn’t get built back the way that it was before.”

An 1885 map of St. Augustine showing the location of Lincolnville. Credit: State Archives of Florida

Lincolnville is one of the historic areas in the nation’s oldest continuously occupied European settlement that are threatened by rising seas caused by temperature increases from fossil fuel pollution. Everything, from millennia-old indigenous artifacts to centuries-old Spanish architecture and modern Black history, is at risk.  

And so is the local economy. Millions of annual “heritage tourists” spend more than $1.6 million a day.

“St. Augustine lives on its heritage tourism,” said Steven Roberts, the chief of interpretation, education and visitor service at the Castillo de San Marcos fort, the city’s biggest attraction. “It is the bread and butter of the St. Augustine economy.” 

Local, state and federal agencies, officials and conservators are working together through a cobbled-together historic preservation and resiliency system to hold back the water. There are financial limits to what they can do.

Similar scenes are playing out across the country. A historic downtown that helps draw 2 million visitors a year to Annapolis, Maryland, floods regularly; officials there are scrambling to fortify hundreds of buildings as the city prepares for flooding 350 days each year by 2040. In Charleston, South Carolina, 3,500 historic buildings are in low-lying areas that are inundated by frequent floods. And historic structures in New Orleans were destroyed by hurricanes Ida and Katrina. 

Though it faces a similar flood risk to nearby historic monuments like the Castillo de San Marcos, Lincolnville doesn’t rank as high in the city’s assessment of archaeological value, nor does it contribute as much to the local economy. 

An aerial view of the Castillo de San Marcos. Credit: Google Earth

Around 800,000 people visit the Castillo every year — with ticket revenue helping fund its preservation — while the Lincolnville Museum doesn’t see more than 2,500 visitors.

“We don’t get the tour trains coming through here,” said Phillips. “They have given us a lot of different excuses why they can’t come through here.”

St. Augustine Chief Resilience Officer Jessica Beach says the city has spent $10 million on flood projects in Lincolnville. As a national monument, the Castillo is federally owned, and Florida owns and operates a seawall that protects it.

“Overall, this challenge is faced by the entire city,” Beach said. The city has applied for grant funding to update its stormwater master plan to incorporate protecting historic resources; it relies on different revenue sources to help pay for flood protections. “We don’t have all of the answers yet,” she says.  

Andrew Rumbach, an associate professor at Texas A&M and member of the Colorado Cultural and Historic Resources Task Force, says the costs of protecting cultural sites from climate change far exceed local government resources. 

St. Augustine will eventually have to make “impossible choices” on what sites should be sacrificed, Rumbach says. “This is going to create very real inequalities.”

The Castillo de San Marcos in historic Downtown St. Augustine. Credit: The National Park Service

SPANISH ARCHITECTURE UNDER THREAT

A 1668 pirate attack on St. Augustine left dozens dead and prompted its Spanish occupiers to build the Castillo de San Marcos to protect against hostile ships. Now, it’s the water itself that threatens the national monument, which is the city’s oldest building and the oldest masonry fortification in the continental U.S. 

Built using coquina, a local limestone through which water can easily pass, the fort is increasingly affected by flooding associated with sea level rise. Floodwaters could reach the structure multiple times per year by mid-century, up from today’s average of less than once a year, the Climate Central analysis shows.

When driving and wading through floodwaters is required, fewer visitors come, according to Roberts. The parking lot and surrounding area floods on an almost monthly basis, with seas continuing to rise at a quickening pace.

Flooding at the Castillo de San Marcos’ parking lot. Credit: The National Park Service

For the Castillo, “managed retreat,” or relocating to an area of lower risk, is out of the question. “This is a large fort with more than 300,000 blocks of coquina stone,” Roberts said.

In addition to fortifying sea walls to protect the fort, a virtual adaptation strategy is also underway. University of South Florida Digital Heritage & Humanities Center Director Lori Collins is working with the National Park Service to digitally document it, using drone surveys and handheld laser scanning tools to photograph and record every inch.

While state and federal conservators are collaborating to fortify some historic sites, the onus largely falls on local officials to ensure their city’s cultural resources — and sources of economy — can be saved.  

“I think having the historical resources within our city, that’s all the more reason for us to be aggressive with this and do what we can to help protect these critical assets,” says Beach. 

This year, Florida passed legislation that earmarks $100 million annually for local government resilience planning and infrastructure. But these programs, along with federal funding opportunities like FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance program, are “really competitive,” she says, and don’t cover the full cost. 

How cities source funding to protect cultural heritage from sea-level rise differs. 

Beyond federal and state backing, the city of Annapolis is suing 26 oil and gas companies to try to hold them liable for climate change, while Charleston has been loosening design guidelines to reduce homeowners’ costs of elevating historic buildings. Both of these cities also have budgets that dwarf St. Augustine’s $60 million; Annapolis plans to spend $152 million this year, and Charleston $234 million.

“For a small municipality like ours, if we’re talking about a $30 million project, that’s over half of the entire city’s budget,” said Beach. “It’s just not possible for us to be able to do a large project without some type of supplemental funding.”

The Tolomato River laps at the base of a centuries old well at Shell Bluff Landing. Credit: The Florida Public Archaeology Network

INDIGENOUS HISTORY SLIPPING AWAY

Elsewhere in St. Johns County, Shell Bluff Landing is a 6,000-year-old site in Ponte Vedra Beach with a coquina well and a shell mound associated with indigenous groups like the St. Johns, the Timucua and the Guale. Archaeologists are working there to map the shoreline before the ancient site is swept away. 

It’s one among many low-lying historic and prehistoric zones in the Southeast at risk of destruction by sea level rise. 

“It’s a huge concern,” says Texas A&M Associate Professor Rumbach. “There’s not nearly enough of the kinds of resources we need to protect them to go around.” 

Rumbach says policymakers tend to prioritize protecting historic main streets and commercial properties that generate revenue, so the economic value of a site can outweigh cultural or historical significance. “So they can definitely become casualties of a changing climate,” he said.

Shell Bluff is one of more than 16,000 archaeological sites at risk from sea level rise statewide, tracing back to Indigenous origins in Florida almost 15,000 years ago. By the close of the century, nearly half of those sites could be inundated.

Unlike the Lincolnville Historic District and the Castillo de San Marcos, there are no solutions being explored to protect the rapidly eroding shore rife with indigenous heritage. Archaeologist Emily Jane Murray says the state’s strategy revolves around monitoring and mapping. It won’t be long before the site is underwater. 

“If this is what’s happening to the places where people used to live now, what’s coming for the places where we live?” Murray said. “These impacts are just kind of gonna snowball.”

Wildfire smoke and urban air pollution bring out the worst in each other.

As wildfires rage, they transform their burned fuel into a complex chemical cocktail of smoke. Many of these airborne compounds, including ozone, cause air quality to plummet as wind carries the smoldering haze over cities. But exactly how — and to what extent — wildfire emissions contribute to ozone levels downwind of the fires has been a matter of debate for years, says Joel Thornton, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

A new study has now revealed the elusive chemistry behind ozone production in wildfire plumes. The findings suggest that mixing wildfire smoke with nitrogen oxides — toxic gases found in car exhaust — could pump up ozone levels in urban areas, researchers report December 8 in Science Advances.

Atmospheric ozone is a major component of smog that can trigger respiratory problems in humans and wildlife (SN: 1/4/21). Many ingredients for making ozone — such as volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides — can be found in wildfire smoke, says Lu Xu, an atmospheric chemist currently at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. But a list of ingredients isn’t enough to replicate a wildfire’s ozone recipe. So Xu and colleagues took to the sky to observe the chemistry in action.

Through a joint project with NASA and NOAA, the researchers worked with the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality flight campaign to transform a jetliner into a flying laboratory. In July and August 2019, the flight team collected air samples from smoldering landscapes across the western United States. As the plane passed headlong through the plumes, instruments onboard recorded the kinds and amounts of each molecule detected in the haze. By weaving in and out of the smoke as it drifted downwind from the flames, the team also analyzed how the plume’s chemical composition changed over time.

Using these measurements along with the wind patterns and fuel from each wildfire sampled, the researchers created a straightforward equation to calculate ozone production from wildfire emissions. “We took a complex question and gave it a simple answer,” says Xu, who did the work while at Caltech.

As expected, the researchers found that wildfire emissions contain a dizzying array of organic compounds and nitrogen oxide species among other molecules that contribute to ozone formation. Yet their analysis showed that the concentration of nitrogen oxides decreases in the hours after the plume is swept downwind. Without this key ingredient, ozone production slows substantially.  

Air pollution from cities and other urban areas is chock full of noxious gases. So when wildfire smoke wafts over cityscapes, a boost of nitrous oxides could jump-start ozone production again, Xu says.

In a typical fire season, mixes like these could increase ozone levels by as much as 3 parts per billion in the western United States, the researchers estimate. This concentration is far below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s health safety standard of 70 parts per billion, but the incremental increase could still pose a health risk to people who are regularly exposed to smoke, Xu says.

With climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires, this new ozone production mechanism has important implications for urban air quality, says Qi Zhang, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Davis who was not involved in the study (SN: 9/18/20). She says the work provides an “important missing link” between wildfire emissions and ozone chemistry.

The findings may also pose a challenge for environmental policy makers, says Thornton, who was not involved in the research. Though state and local authorities set strict regulations to limit atmospheric ozone, wildfire smoke may undermine those strategies, he says. This could make it more difficult for cities, especially in the western United States, to meet EPA ozone standards despite air quality regulations.

Virginia’s Tangier Island is rapidly disappearing. Rising sea levels are exacerbating erosion and flooding, and could make the speck of land in the Chesapeake Bay uninhabitable within the next few decades. For years, island residents, policy makers and others have debated whether to attempt to save the island or relocate its small community elsewhere. But time to decide is running out, says David Schulte, a marine biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Crucially, that choice will signal how other groups most at risk from climate change, “which are often Native American, minority or low-income such as the isolated fishing community of Tangier, will have their needs addressed — or ignored,” Schulte and his colleague Zehao Wu write in a new study.

The island’s sole town, Tangier, is located on three upland ridges that have largely been protected from coastal erosion. By analyzing aerial photographs of the area from 1967 to 2019, Schulte and Wu, a field researcher at Biogenic Solutions Consulting in Newport News, Va., found that nearly 62 percent of the ridges have been lost to sea level rise. What’s left will convert completely to a wetland by 2051 — about a decade earlier than previously thought — the researchers report November 8 in Frontiers in Climate.

Already, frequent flooding has turned the front yards of many Tangier homes into marshland, Schulte says. Empty parking lots and elevated homes, schools and sidewalks “are all signs of just how bad it is out there.”

Just 436 people lived on the island as of 2020, and that number could drop to zero by 2053, Schulte and Wu’s analysis of population trends suggests. Many factors, including fewer employment opportunities, play a role in the island’s population decline, the researchers say. The shrinking area of dry land has probably convinced people to leave as well.

Protecting and restoring Tangier Island might persuade some residents to stay, but it comes with a hefty price tag: between $250 million to $350 million, Schulte and Wu estimate. That money would fund a medley of interventions, including installing stone along the shoreline to fight erosion and raising the upland ridges by 3 meters using sand from the Chesapeake Bay. Moving a cubic meter of sand from the bottom of the bay to the island costs about $20. Considering the amount of sand needed to raise the ridges, “it gets very expensive really quick,” Schulte says.

Relocating Tangier residents is about $150 million cheaper, the researchers calculate. That estimate is based on others from the Corps and the U.S. Government Accountability Office to relocate U.S. coastal communities such as the towns of Shishmaref, Kivalina and Newtok in Alaska, the Quinault Indian Nation village of Taholah in Washington and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana.

But moving a town requires more than finding a place for residents to live, Schulte says. Infrastructure such as schools, medical facilities, grocery stores and restaurants need to be moved or rebuilt to provide the community with a similar lifestyle. For Tangier, the lack of land access to nearby towns adds to the cost of relocating, which must be done via boat, Schulte says.

As the planet warms and oceans swell, an increasing number of other coastal towns and cities in the United States and around the world will probably face a similar choice as Tangier. The cost to save or relocate each one would, of course, differ, Schulte says. Some communities may not be as expensive to move as offshore Tangier, he speculates, but would certainly be in the ballpark.

Sea level rise has been driven, in part, by human activities in bigger cities (SN: 8/9/21). But it is shorelines, often inhabited by Native Americans, minority or low-income communities, that are the first to bear the brunt of this consequence of climate change, Wu notes. That makes it even more essential to draw attention to these overlooked communities, he says.

The Southern Ocean is still busily absorbing large amounts of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans’ fossil fuel burning, a study based on airborne observations of the gas suggests. The new results counter a 2018 report that had found that the ocean surrounding Antarctica might not be taking up as much of the emissions as previously thought, and in some regions may actually be adding CO₂ back to the atmosphere.    

It’s not exactly a relief to say that the oceans, which are already becoming more acidic and storing record-breaking amounts of heat due to global warming, might be able to bear a little more of the climate change burden (SN: 4/28/17; SN: 1/13/21). But “in many ways, [the conclusion] was reassuring,” says Matthew Long, an oceanographer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.  

That’s because the Southern Ocean alone has been thought to be responsible for nearly half of the global ocean uptake of humans’ CO₂ emissions each year. That means it plays an outsize role in modulating some of the immediate impacts of those emissions. However, the float-based estimates had suggested that, over the course of a year, the Southern Ocean was actually a net source of carbon dioxide rather than a sink, ultimately emitting about 0.3 billion metric tons of the gas back to the atmosphere each year.

In contrast, the new findings, published in the Dec. 3 Science, suggest that from 2009 through 2018, the Southern Ocean was still a net sink, taking up a total of about 0.55 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

The 2018 study had used newly deployed deep-diving ocean floats, now numbering almost 200, that are part of a project called Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling, or SOCCOM. Calculations based on data collected from 2014 through 2017 by 35 of the floats suggested that parts of the ocean were actually releasing a great deal of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere during winter (SN: 6/2/19). That sparked concerns that the Southern Ocean’s role in buffering the impacts of climate change on Earth might not be so robust as once thought.

Long says he and other researchers were somewhat skeptical about that takeaway, however. The floats measure temperature, salinity and pH in the water down to about 2,000 meters, and scientists use those data to calculate the carbon dioxide concentration in the water. But those calculations rest on several assumptions about the ocean water properties, as actual data are still very scarce. That may be skewing the data a bit, leading to calculations of higher carbon dioxide emitted from the water than is actually occurring, Long suggests.

Another way to measure how much carbon dioxide is moving between air and sea is by taking airborne measurements. In the new study, the team amassed previously collected carbon dioxide data over large swaths of the Southern Ocean during three separate series of aircraft flights — one series lasting from 2009 to 2011, one in the winter of 2016 and a third in several periods from 2016 to 2018 (SN: 9/8/11). Then, the researchers used those data to create simulations of how much carbon dioxide could possibly be moving between ocean and atmosphere each year.

The float-based and aircraft-based studies estimate different overall amounts of carbon dioxide moving out of the ocean, but both identified a seasonal pattern of less carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean during winter. That indicates that both types of data are picking up a real trend, says Ken Johnson, an ocean chemist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., who was not involved in the research. “We all go up and down together.”

It’s not yet clear whether the SOCCOM data were off. But to better understand what sorts of biases might affect the pH calculations, researchers must compare direct measurements of carbon dioxide in the water taken from ships with pH-based estimates at the same location. Such studies are under way right now off the coast of California, Johnson says.

The big takeaway, Johnson says, is that both datasets — as well as direct shipboard measurements in the Southern Ocean, which are few and far between — are going to be essential for understanding what role these waters play in the planet’s carbon cycle. While the airborne studies can help constrain the big picture of carbon dioxide emissions data from the Southern Ocean, the floats are much more widely distributed, and so are able to identify local and regional variability in carbon dioxide, which the atmospheric data can’t do.

“The Southern Ocean is the flywheel of the climate system,” the part of an engine’s machinery that keeps things chugging smoothly along, Johnson says. “If we don’t get our understanding of the Southern Ocean right, we don’t have much hope for understanding the rest of the world.”

When it comes to storing carbon in the ground, fungi may be key.

Soils are a massive reservoir of carbon, holding about three times as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere. The secret behind this carbon storage are microbes, such as bacteria and some fungi, which transform dead and decaying matter into carbon-rich soil.

But not all carbon compounds made by soil microbes are equal. Some can last for decades or even centuries in the soil, while others are quickly consumed by microbes and converted into carbon dioxide that’s lost to the atmosphere. Now, a study shows that fungi-rich soils grown in laboratory experiments released less carbon dioxide when heated than other soils.

The result suggests that fungi are essential for making soil that sequesters carbon in the earth, microecologist Luiz Domeignoz-Horta and colleagues report November 6 in ISME Communications.

Who is making soil matters, Domeignoz-Horta says.

The study comes as some scientists warn that climate change threatens to release more carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere, further worsening global warming. Researchers have found that rising temperatures can lead to population booms in soil microbes, which quickly exhaust easily digestible carbon compounds. This forces the organisms to turn to older, more resilient carbon stores, converting carbon stored away long ago into carbon dioxide.

With the combined threat of rising temperatures and damage to soil microbe communities from intensive farming and disappearing forests, some computer models indicate that 40 percent less carbon will stick in the soil by 2100 than previous simulations have anticipated (SN: 9/22/16).

To see if scientists can coax soils to store more carbon, researchers need to understand what makes soil microbes tick. But that is no simple task. “Some say soil is the most complex matrix on the planet,” says Kirsten Hofmockel, an ecologist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., who was not involved in the research.

To simplify matters, Domeignoz-Horta, of the University of Zurich, and colleagues grew their own dirt in the lab. The researchers separated fungi and bacteria from forest soil and grew five combinations of these communities in petri dishes, including some that were home only to bacteria or fungi. The researchers sustained the microbes on a diet of simple sugar and left them to churn out soil for four months. The team then heated the different soils to see how much carbon dioxide was produced.

Bacteria were the main drivers behind making soil, but fungi-rich soils produced less carbon dioxide when heated than soils made solely by bacteria, the researchers found. Why is still unclear. One possibility is that fungi could be producing enzymes — proteins that build or break up other molecules — that bacteria aren’t capable of making on their own, Domeignoz-Horta says. These fungi-derived compounds may provide bacteria with different building blocks with which to build soil, which may end up creating carbon compounds with a longer shelf life in soils.

What happens in lab-grown soil may not play out the same in the real world. But the new research is an important step in understanding how carbon is locked away long-term, Hofmockel says. This kind of information could one day help researchers develop techniques to ensure that more carbon stays in the ground for longer, which could help mitigate the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“If we can get carbon in the ground for five years, that’s a step in the right direction,” Hofmockel says. “But if we can have stable carbon in the soil for centuries or even millennia, that’s a solution.”

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid
Thor Hanson
Basic Books, $28

As a conservation biologist, Thor Hanson has seen firsthand the effects of climate change on plants and animals in the wild: the green macaws of Central America migrating along with their food sources, the brown bears of Alaska fattening up on early-ripening berry crops, the conifers of New England seeking refuge from vanishing habitats. And as an engaging author who has celebrated the wonders of nature in books about feathers, seeds, forests and bees (SN: 7/21/18, p. 28), he’s an ideal guide to a topic that might otherwise send readers down a well of despair.

Hanson does not despair in his latest book, Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid. Though he outlines the many ways that global warming is changing life on our planet, his tone is not one of hand-wringing. Instead, Hanson invites the reader into the stories of particular people, places and creatures of all sorts. He draws these tales from his own experiences and those of other scientists, combining reporting with narrative tales of species that serve as examples of broader trends in the natural world.

A trip to La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, for example, has Hanson reliving the experience of tropical ecologist and climatologist Leslie Holdridge, who founded the research station in the 1950s and described, among other things, how climate creates different habitats, or life zones, as elevation increases. As Hanson sweats his way up a tropical mountainside so he can witness a shift in life zones, he notes, “I had to earn every foot of elevation gain the hard way.” I could almost feel the heat that he describes as “a steaming towel draped over my head.” His vivid descriptions bring home the reason why so many species have now been documented moving upslope to cooler climes.

Hanson doesn’t waste much breath trying to convince doubters of the reality of climate change, instead showing by example after example how it is already playing out. The book moves quickly from the basic science of climate change to the challenges and opportunities that species face — from shifts in seasonal timing to ocean acidification — and the ways that species are responding.

As Hanson notes, the acronym MAD, for “move, adapt or die,” is often used to describe species’ options for responding. But that pithy phrase doesn’t capture the complexity of the situation. For instance, one of his titular characters, a lizard slammed by back-to-back Caribbean hurricanes in 2017, illustrates a different response. Instead of individual lizards adjusting, or adapting, to increasingly stormy conditions, the species evolved through natural selection. Biologists monitoring the lizards on two islands noticed that after the hurricanes, the lizard populations had longer front legs, shorter back legs and grippier toe pads on average than they had before. An experiment with a leaf blower showed that these traits help the lizards cling to branches better — survival of the fittest in action.

In the end, the outcomes for species will probably be as varied as their circumstances. Some organisms have already moved, adapted or died as a result of the warming, and many more will face challenges from changes that are yet to come. But Hanson hasn’t given up hope. When it comes to preventing the worst-case scenarios, he quotes ecologist Gordon Orians, who is in the seventh decade of a career witnessing environmental change. When asked what a concerned citizen should do to combat climate change, he responded succinctly: “Everything you can.” And as Hanson points out, this is exactly how plants and animals are responding to climate change: by doing everything they can. The challenge feels overwhelming, and as a single concerned citizen, much feels out of my hands. Yet Hanson’s words did inspire me to take a cue from the rest of the species on this warming world to do what I can.

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It’s hard to imagine what Earth might look like in 2500. But a collaboration between science and art is offering an unsettling window into how ongoing climate change might transform now-familiar terrain into alien landscapes over the next few centuries.

These visualizations — of U.S. Midwestern farms overtaken by subtropical plants, of a dried-up Amazon rainforest, of extreme heat baking the Indian subcontinent — emphasize why researchers need to push climate projections long past the customary benchmark of 2100, environmental social scientist Christopher Lyon and colleagues contend September 24 in Global Change Biology.

Fifty years have passed since the first climate projections, which set that distant target at 2100, says Lyon, of McGill University in Montreal. But that date isn’t so far off anymore, and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions emitted in the past and present will linger for centuries (SN: 8/9/21).

To visualize what that future world might look like, the researchers considered three possible climate trajectories — low, moderate and high emissions as used in past reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — and projected changes all the way out to 2500 (SN: 1/7/20). The team focused particularly on impacts on civilization: heat stress, failing crops and changes in land use and vegetation (SN: 3/13/17).

For all but the lowest-emission scenario, which is roughly in line with limiting global warming to “well under” 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial times as approved by the 2015 Paris Agreement, the average global temperature continues to increase until 2500, the team found (SN: 12/12/15). For the highest-emissions scenario, temperatures increase by about 2.2 degrees C by 2100 and by about 4.6 degrees C by 2500. That results in “major restructuring of the world’s biomes,” the researchers say: loss of most of the Amazon rainforest, poleward shifts in crops and unlivable temperatures in the tropics.

The team then collaborated with James McKay, an artist and science communicator at the University of Leeds in England, to bring the data to life. Based on the study’s projections, McKay created a series of detailed paintings representing different global landscapes now and in 2500.

The team stopped short of trying to speculate on future technologies or cities to keep the paintings based more in realism than science fiction, Lyon says. “But we did want to showcase things people would recognize: drones, robotics, hybrid plants.” In one painting of India in 2500, a person is wearing a sealed suit and helmet, a type of garment that people in some high-heat environments might wear today, he says.

The goal of these images is to help people visualize the future in such a way that it feels more urgent, real and close — and, perhaps, to offer a bit of hope that humans can still adapt. “If we’re changing on a planetary scale, we need to think about this problem as a planetary civilization,” Lyon says. “We wanted to show that, despite the climate people have moved into, people have figured out ways to exist in the climate.”

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2000 vs. 2500

High greenhouse gas emissions could increase average global temperatures by about 4.6 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial times. As a result, extreme heat in India could dramatically alter how humans live in the environment. Farmers and herders, shown in 2000 the painting at left, may require protective clothing such as a cooling suit and helmet to work outdoors by 2500, as shown in the painting at right.

If greenhouse gas emissions remain high, the U.S. Midwest’s “breadbasket” farms, as seen below in 2000 in the painting at left, could be transformed into subtropical agroforestry regions by 2500, researchers say. The region might be dotted with some versions of oil palms and succulents, as envisioned in the painting at right, and rely on water capture and irrigation devices to offset extreme summer heat.

Over decades, centuries and millennia, the steady skyward climb of redwoods, the tangled march of mangroves along tropical coasts and the slow submersion of carbon-rich soil in peatlands has locked away billions of tons of carbon. 

If these natural vaults get busted open, through deforestation or dredging of swamplands, it would take centuries before those redwoods or mangroves could grow back to their former fullness and reclaim all that carbon. Such carbon is “irrecoverable” on the timescale — decades, not centuries — needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and keeping it locked away is crucial.

Now, through a new mapping project, scientists have estimated how much irrecoverable carbon resides in peatlands, mangroves, forests and elsewhere around the globe — and which areas need protection.

The new estimate puts the total amount of irrecoverable carbon at 139 gigatons, researchers report November 18 in Nature Sustainability. That’s equivalent to about 15 years of human carbon dioxide emissions at current levels. And if all that carbon were released, it’s almost certainly enough to push the planet past 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels.

“This is the carbon we must protect to avert climate catastrophe,” says Monica Noon, an environmental data scientist at Conservation International in Arlington, Va. Current efforts to keep global warming below the ambitious target of 1.5 degrees C require that we reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and that carbon stored in nature stays put (SN:12/17/18). But agriculture and other development pressures threaten some of these carbon stores.

To map this at-risk carbon, Noon and her colleagues combined satellite data with estimates of how much total carbon is stored in ecosystems vulnerable to human incursion. The researchers excluded areas like permafrost, which stores lots of carbon but isn’t likely to be developed (although it’s thawing due to warming), as well as tree plantations, which have already been altered (SN: 9/25/19). The researchers then calculated how much carbon would get released from land conversions, such as clearing a forest for farmland. 

That land might store varying amounts of carbon, depending on whether it becomes a palm oil plantation or a parking lot. To simplify, the researchers assumed cleared land was left alone, with saplings free to grow where giants once stood. That allowed the researchers to estimate how long it might take for the released carbon to be reintegrated into the land. Much of that carbon would remain in the air by 2050, the team reports, as many of these ecosystems take centuries to return to their former glory, rendering it irrecoverable on a timescale that matters for addressing climate change.

Releasing that 139 gigatons of irrecoverable carbon could have irrevocable consequences. For comparison, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that humans can emit only 109 more gigatons of carbon to have a two-thirds chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees C. “These are the places we absolutely have to protect,” Noon says.

Approximately half of this irrecoverable carbon sits on just 3.3 percent of Earth’s total land area, equivalent to roughly the area of India and Mexico combined. Key areas are in the Amazon, the Pacific Northwest, and the tropical forests and mangroves of Borneo. “The fact that it’s so concentrated means we can protect it,” Noon says.

Roughly half of irrecoverable carbon already falls within existing protected areas or lands managed by Indigenous peoples. Adding an additional 8 million square kilometers of protected area, which is only about 5.4 percent of the planet’s land surface, would bring 75 percent of this carbon under some form of protection, Noon says.

“It’s really important to have spatially explicit maps of where these irrecoverable carbon stocks are,” says Kate Dooley, a geographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s a small percentage globally, but it’s still a lot of land.” Many of these dense stores are in places at high risk of development, she says. 

“It’s so hard to stop this drive of deforestation,” she says, but these maps will help focus the efforts of governments, civil society groups and academics on the places that matter most for the climate.

When North Carolina residents Susan McGuirk and her husband bought a holiday house on a large waterfront plot in Wingate, in Maryland’s Dorchester County, the stately old home hadn’t been occupied for more than a decade.

“We pulled into the driveway and it was love at first sight,” she said. “Once inside, it was obvious just how well built the house was.”

This is the third story in “Life on the Edge,” a series of journalism and research initiatives at Climate Central examining wetlands, sea-level rise and coastal change with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. This story was produced and published through partnership with the Chesapeake Bay Magazine.

Since then, they’ve sealed up the original wavy glass windows, fixed walls, installed insulation and new plumbing and wiring, and raised the entire waterfront property to protect against regular flooding. And as they’ve rehabilitated what McGuirk called a “gem,” they’ve watched the coastal landscape around it change as well.

“The point that we can see when we look out there is called Crab Point, and when we bought the place in 2010 there were 80 trees on that point,” McGuirk said. “Now there’s one. They’ve fallen and gone.”

The Chesapeake has become a global hotspot for the emergence of ghost forests—stands of dead and leafless trees before they topple into piles of logs. Within the Chesapeake, Dorchester County may be the greatest hotspot of all.

Throughout the rural and forested land that surrounds their house, Susan points out “acres and acres” of dead trees. “There’s a little church called Emmanuel Episcopal Church, and it is surrounded by all those dead trees.”

The culprit of arboreal mortality tends to be environmental change. In Colorado, ghost forests are being created by beetles attacking pines at higher altitudes as temperatures warm. In California, forest overcrowding from a century of wildfire suppression followed by severe drought left more than 100 million trees dead.

Here, the key culprit is salt, which can kill a tree outright or make it more susceptible to attacks by pests.

Global sea rise caused by heat-trapping pollution and a gradual sinking of the land around the Chesapeake have combined to create some of the world’s fastest local rates of sea rise. That’s been pushing saltwater higher up shorelines, where it’s seeping into sweeping stretches of intact forest and killing them off.

The McGuirks’ home in Wingate, Md. (Jay Fleming)

McGuirk hasn’t been able to figure out the exact age of the house, but she said local oral history suggests it was built well over a century ago. Data gathered by scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS) indicate the property would have been dry back then, most likely covered with forest or farmland.

Now, the house is surrounded by lawn, mud and marsh, and the land is regularly covered by water spilling up from an estuary. “When everything is aligned—a full moon, easterly winds, high tide—it gets pretty dicey,” McGuirk said.

The appearance of these assemblages of towering deadwood along the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf coasts have captured the fascination of national media outlets, which point to them in photo essays as flamboyant evidence of the grim reality of climate change.

The natural sinking of the land following the prehistoric retreat of glaciers from North America is also driving up water levels throughout the region, compounding the briny impacts of climate change. And as the forests die back, their roots decompose, lowering the ground further still.

As coastal woodlands die, birds and other wildlife that had depended upon them for food and habitat are forced inland. The changes are also affecting parcels of land that in some instances have been owned by the same families for hundreds of years.

“As we start to lose forests, these landowners are losing their identity—they’re losing how they can use the land,” said Matthew Hurd, a forester with the Maryland Forest Service.
 “For me there’s a huge mental shift between someone who owns a forest and manages it versus someone who has marsh.”

Coastal timberlands and farmlands are losing value as salt continues its upward march. Rising sea levels can have corrosive effects on the fertility of coastal lands, with knockout punches often delivered by storm surges that leave large doses of salt behind as they subside.

Coastal ecologists point out that the ghost forests of the Chesapeake don’t represent local ecological carnage, so much as a transformation from one ecosystem to another. Beneath the desiccating branches of dead trees, marshland is seizing the soggy land from forests that can’t abide the soil’s new chemistry.

To survive as seas rise, marshes can grow vertically—though only up to a point before they get swamped. They can also migrate inland, conquering areas that formerly harbored forests, farms, and yards. Experts point to ghost forests as visually arresting indicators of marsh migration.

Marshes provide critical habitat for fish and ducks. They also offer powerful natural protections for coastal communities and infrastructure from flooding during storms. More than half of wetlands nationwide are estimated to have been destroyed by development and other forces, though they remain widespread in relatively undeveloped places like Dorchester County.

With few roads or buildings blocking their migration, research by Climate Central’s sea level scientists has indicated marshes could expand their territory in Dorchester County by more than a third from 2000 to 2050. Other Eastern Shore counties are projected to see even bigger expansions of marshland.

The new marshes aren’t perfect replicas of the old ones. An invasive variety of Phragmites (aka reeds) tends to beat native marshland species into new areas as trees start to die back and the forest canopy opens up. 

The reeds’ feathery plumes can tower on rigid stems over a dozen feet. Native wildlife struggle to use the Phragmites for nesting and foraging, compared with native plants. 

Remains of trees show the damage from saltwater intrusion (Jay Fleming)

“We’re seeing a real expansion of that species as the forest retreats,” said Keryn Gedan, a biologist at George Washington University. “We think it just does better in the shady conditions than the native grass marshes. It’s the first one to take advantage of the increasing light availability.”

Matt Kirwan, a marsh scientist at VIMS, began investigating the emergence of ghost forests in 2000 as an undergraduate student. His research has found that 80,000 acres of forestland and 20,000 acres of farmland have transformed to marshland since the 1850s across the Chesapeake Bay.

“We’re right at the edge of a live forest and a dead forest,” he said on a hot late morning in early June as he bushwhacked through dying coastal forest near the Moneystump Swamp in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, about 20 miles north of McGuirk’s vacation home.

Kirwan was there leading a team of scientists from his lab on a weeklong fieldwork campaign as they gathered data from sites from Virginia to Delaware. The fieldwork was part of a multiyear effort to monitor physical and chemical changes as coastal forestland succumbs to marshland.

Research by Kirwan’s and other labs is helping to predict the emergence of ghost forests. This could help avoid costly efforts to protect and restore forests that are doomed to die.

“This was our transition zone plot, which was supposed to have 50 percent living and 50 percent dead trees,” he said, pointing around at an abundance of dead snags. “We established it last year and I would say there’s nowhere close to 50 percent living trees right now.”

A few hundred feet further inland, while talking in the cool shade of a large pine, Kirwan said the tree overhead might look healthy, but that it was already destined to be killed by the rising concentrations of salt in the soil beneath it.

“The little stuff dies before the big stuff,” Kirwan said. “You’ll see lots of healthy-looking pine trees but then you look below you and there’s nothing in the understory to take their place. So the forest, even though it looks healthy, it’s already effectively dead. Whenever those large trees die, it’ll only be marsh.”

It started with polar bears.

In 2012, polar bear DNA revealed that the iconic species had faced extinction before, likely during a warm period 130,000 years ago, but had rebounded. For researchers, the discovery led to one burning question: Could polar bears make a comeback again?

Studies like this one have emboldened an ambitious plan to create a refuge where Arctic, ice-dependent species, from polar bears down to microbes, could hunker down and wait out climate change. For this, conservationists are pinning their hopes on a region in the Arctic dubbed the Last Ice Area — where ice that persists all summer long will survive the longest in a warming world.

Here, the Arctic will take its last stand. But how long the Last Ice Area will hold on to its summer sea ice remains unclear. A computer simulation released in September predicts that the Last Ice Area could retain its summer sea ice indefinitely if emissions from fossil fuels don’t warm the planet more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which is the goal set by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement (SN: 12/12/15). But a recent report by the United Nations found that the climate is set to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100 under current pledges to reduce emissions, spelling the end of the Arctic’s summer sea ice (SN: 10/26/21).

Nevertheless, some scientists are hoping that humankind will rally to curb emissions and implement technology to capture carbon and other greenhouse gases, which could reduce, or even reverse, the effects of climate change on sea ice. In the meantime, the Last Ice Area could buy ice-dependent species time in the race against extinction, acting as a sanctuary where they can survive climate change, and maybe one day, make their comeback.

Ecosystem of the frozen sea

The Last Ice Area is a vast floating landscape of solid ice extending from the northern coast of Greenland to Canada’s Banks Island in the west. This region, roughly the length of the West Coast of the United States, is home to the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic, thanks to an archipelago of islands in Canada’s far north that prevents sea ice from drifting south and melting in the Atlantic.

As sea ice from others part of the Arctic rams into this natural barrier, it piles up, forming long towering ice ridges that run for kilometers across the frozen landscape. From above, the area appears desolate. “It’s a pretty quiet place,” says Robert Newton, an oceanographer at Columbia University and coauthor of the recent sea ice model, published September 2 in Earth’s Future. “A lot of the life is on the bottom of the ice.”

The muddy underbelly of icebergs is home to plankton and single-celled algae that evolved to grow directly on ice. These species form the backbone of an ecosystem that feeds everything from tiny crustaceans all the way up to beluga whales, ringed seals and polar bears.

These plankton and algae species can’t survive without ice. So as summer sea ice disappears across the Arctic, the foundation of this ecosystem is literally melting away. “Much of the habitat Arctic species depend on will become uninhabitable,” says Brandon Laforest, an Arctic expert at World Wildlife Fund Canada in Montreal. “There is nowhere else for these species to go. They’re literally being squeezed into the Last Ice Area.”

The last stronghold of summer ice provides an opportunity to create a floating sanctuary —an Arctic ark if you will — for the polar bears and many other species that depend on summer ice to survive. For over a decade, WWF Canada and a coalition of researchers and Indigenous communities have lobbied for the area to be protected from another threat: development by industries that may be interested in the region’s oil and mineral resources.

“The tragedy would be if we had an area where these animals could survive this bottleneck, but they don’t because it’s been developed commercially,” Newton says.

But for Laforest, protecting the Last Ice Area is not only a question of safeguarding arctic creatures. Sea ice is also an important tool in climate regulation, as the white surface reflects sunlight back into space, helping to cool the planet. In a vicious cycle, losing sea ice helps speed up warming, which in turn melts more ice.

And for the people who call the Arctic home, sea ice is crucial for food security, transportation and cultural survival, wrote Inuit Circumpolar Council Chair Okalik Eegeesiak in a 2017 article for the United Nations. “Our entire cultures and identity are based on free movement on land, sea ice and the Arctic Ocean,” Eegeesiak wrote. “Our highway is sea ice.” 

The efforts of these groups have borne some fruit. In 2019, the Canadian government moved to set aside nearly a third of the Last Ice Area as protected spaces called marine preserves. Until 2024, all commercial activity within the boundaries of the preserves is forbidden, with provisions for Indigenous peoples. Conservationists are now asking these marine preserves to be put under permanent protection.

Rifts in the ice

However, there are some troubling signs that the sea ice in the region is already precarious. Most worrisome was the appearance in May 2020 of a Rhode Island—sized rift in the ice at the heart of the Last Ice Area. Kent Moore, a geophysicist at the University of Toronto, says that these unusual events may become more frequent as the ice thins. This suggests that the Last Ice Area may not be as resilient as we thought, he says.  

This is something that worries Laforest. He and others are skeptical that reversing climate change and repopulating the Arctic with ice-dependent species will be possible. “I would love to live in a world where we eventually reverse warming and promote sea ice regeneration,” he says. “But stabilization seems like a daunting task on its own.”

Still, hope remains. “All the models show that if you were to bring temperatures back down, sea ice will revert to its historical pattern within several years,” says Newton.

To save the last sea ice — and the creatures that depend on it — removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will be essential, says oceanographer Stephanie Pfirman of Arizona State University in Tempe, who coauthored the study on sea ice with Newton. Technology to capture carbon, and prevent more carbon from entering the atmosphere, already exists. The largest carbon capture plant is in Iceland, but projects like that one have yet to be implemented on a major scale.

Without such intervention, the Arctic is set to lose the last of its summer ice before the end of the century. It would mean the end of life on the ice. But Pfirman, who suggested making the Last Ice Area a World Heritage Site in 2008, says that humankind has undergone big economic and social changes — like the kind needed to reduce emissions and prevent warming — in the past. “I was in Germany when the [Berlin] wall came down, and people hadn’t expected that to happen,” she says.

Protecting the Last Ice Area is about buying time to protect sea ice and species, says Pfirman. The longer we can hold on to summer sea ice, she says, the better chance we have at bringing arctic species —from plankton to polar bears — back from the brink.   

In a remote corner of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, researchers have spent decades catching and measuring birds in a large swath of forest unmarred by roads or deforestation. An exemplar of the Amazon’s dazzling diversity, the experimental plot was to act as a baseline that would reveal how habitat fragmentation, from logging or roads, can hollow out rainforests’ wild menagerie.

But in this pristine pocket of wilderness, a more subtle shift is happening: The birds are shrinking.

Over 40 years, dozens of Amazonian bird species have declined in mass. Many species have lost nearly 2 percent of their average body weight each decade, researchers report November 12 in Science Advances. What’s more, some species have grown longer wings. The changes coincide with a hotter, more variable climate, which could put a premium on leaner, more efficient bodies that help birds stay cool, the researchers say.

“Climate change isn’t something of the future. It’s happening now and has been happening and has effects we haven’t thought of,” says Ben Winger, an ornithologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who wasn’t involved in the research but has documented similar shrinkage in migratory birds. Seeing the same patterns in so many bird species across widely different contexts “speaks to a more universal phenomenon,” he says.

Biologists have long linked body size and temperature. In colder climates, it pays to be big because having a smaller surface area relative to one’s volume reduces heat loss through the skin and keeps the body warmer. As the climate warms, “you’d expect shrinking body sizes to help organisms off-load heat better,” says Vitek Jirinec, an ecologist at the Integral Ecology Research Center in Blue Lake, Calif. 

Many species of North American migratory birds are getting smaller, Winger and colleagues reported in 2020 in Ecology Letters. Climate change is the likely culprit, Winger says, but since migrators experience a wide range of conditions while globe-trotting, other factors such as degraded habitats that birds may encounter can’t be ruled out.

To see if birds that stay put have also been shrinking, Jirinec and colleagues analyzed data on nonmigratory birds collected from 1979 to 2019 in an intact region of the Amazon that spans 43 kilometers. The dataset includes measurements such as mass and wing length for over 11,000 individual birds of 77 species. The researchers also examined climate data for the region.

All species declined in mass over this period, the researchers found, including birds as different as the Rufous-capped antthrush (Formicarius colma), which snatches insects off the forest floor, and the Amazonian motmot (Momotus momota), which scarfs down fruit up in trees. Species lost from about 0.1 percent to nearly 2 percent of their average body weight each decade. The motmot, for example, shrunk from 133 grams to about 127 grams over the study period.

These changes coincided with an overall increase in the average temperature of 1 degree Celsius in the wet season and 1.65 degrees C in the dry season. Temperature and precipitation also became more variable over the time period, and these short-term fluctuations, such as an especially hot or dry season, better explained the size trends than the steady increase in temperature.

“The dry season is really stressful for birds,” Jirinec says. Birds’ mass decreased the most in the year or two after especially hot and dry spells, which tracks with the idea that birds are getting smaller to deal with heat stress.

Other factors, like decreased food availability, could also lead to smaller sizes. But since birds with widely different diets all declined in mass, a more pervasive force like climate change is the likely cause, Jirinec says.

Wing length also grew for 61 species, with a maximum increase of about 1 percent per decade. Jirinec thinks that longer wings make for more efficient, and thus cooler, fliers. For instance, a fighter jet, with its heavy body and compact wings, takes enormous power to maneuver. A light and long-winged glider, by contrast, can cruise along much more efficiently.

“Longer wings may be helping [birds] fly more efficiently and produce less metabolic heat,” which can be beneficial in hotter conditions, he says. “But that’s just a hypothesis.” This body change was most pronounced in birds that spend their time higher up in the canopy, where conditions are hotter and drier than the forest floor.

Whether these changes in shape and size represent an evolutionary adaptation to climate change, or simply a physiological response to warmer temperatures, remains unclear (SN: 5/8/20). Whichever is the case, Jirinec suggests that the change shows the pernicious power of human activity (SN: 10/26/21).

“The Amazon rainforest is mysterious, remote and teeming with biodiversity,” he says. “This study suggests that even in places like this, far removed from civilization, you can see signatures of climate change.”

By John Upton, Climate Central and Maanvi Singh, The Guardian

The Dixie fire ranked as the second-largest California wildfire on record - surpassed only by the million-acre-plus August Complex fire of 2020. Photograph: David Swanson/Reuters

This story was produced through a partnership between The Guardian and Climate Central.

On late summer and autumn days, when the hot, howling winds sting the skin and chap the lips, Holly Fisher starts to feel a bit unsettled. So do many of her neighbors in the town of Paradise, a name that evokes bitter irony in northern California.

“It feels eerie,” she said. Three years ago, this arid, blustery weather portended the Camp fire. It consumed the town, killed more than 80 people, and burned down Fisher’s home. As the region reeled in the aftermath, the same potent convergence of weather conditions – known as “fire weather” – helped fuel the North Complex fire in 2019, and the Caldor and Dixie fires this year.

Across the Sierra Nevada foothills, fire weather is increasingly becoming a distressing reality of life. Over the last half-century, global heating has dramatically increased the number of annual fire-weather days in the region, a Climate Central analysis of federal weather station data shows.

The Climate Central research reveals that the number of annual fire-weather days in what the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) defines as the Sacramento Drainage climate division climbed from an average of seven days in the early 1970s to 22 in 2020. This year there were 25.

The number of fire weather days has jumped from seven in the early 1970s to 25 in 2021.
 

Analysis of weather station and fire data also indicates that after the Dixie fire erupted in mid-July this year, nine of the ten days in which it grew the most explosively were characterized by fire weather conditions. The blaze tore through 1m acres of forest and razed much of the city of Greenville.

The new analysis found that a similar trend is bearing out across much of the US west. From the Pacific coast to the Great Plains, the number of fire-weather days is increasing. In some regions, fire weather has come to characterize nearly a quarter of the year.

The findings are consistent with a growing body of research suggesting that California is entering an unprecedented new era of fire. Climate scientists have found that in parts of the state, fall fire-weather days are expected to double by the end of the century. California’s fire season, which has historically peaked in the late summer and autumn, has been expanding.

“Stringing together many extreme fire-weather days in a row allows fire sizes to quickly escalate,” said John Abatzoglou, a climate and fire scientist at the University of California, Merced, who advised the Climate Central analysis and co-authored the research regarding fall fire weather.

“We used to have a lot more regional fire hotspots and now those hotspots are growing. It’s a contagion and that is certainly compromising our ability to manage fire,” said Abatzoglou, adding that the changes are creating “synchronous” fire risks across the region– and the world – making it more difficult for governments and agencies to backstop one another with firefighters and equipment.

What is a fire-weather day? Based on the approach taken by federal storm forecasters at NOAA, Climate Central characterized a fire-weather day as one when, for two consecutive hours within the same day, the temperature reached at least 40F (5C) in winter, 50F (10C) in the summer or 45F (7.2C) during spring and autumn; when winds blew at sustained intensities of at least 15 mph; and when relative humidity neared thresholds adopted by storm forecasters in various regions. During peak fire season, relative humidity in many parts of the west dip to single digits.

Characterization of fire weather by Climate Central.

On days with fire weather, a small spark could ignite a megafire in a landscape that has been primed to burn by decades of prolonged drought.

The combination of rising temperatures and low humidity also sucks moisture out of the soil, further allowing flames to zip across forests and towns, uninhibited by moisture.

“Everything is so dry that as soon as you blow one of those embers out of the existing fire perimeter, things just catch like that,” said Karen McKinnon, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies climate breakdown and destructive weather.

Global heating and build-up of flammable vegetation have contributed to the increase in wildfires.

McKinnon’s research has examined the role of climate change in driving dryer conditions that are leading to the increase in the recent fire weather, but she pointed out that “it’s not just related to climate”.

In northern California, fires like the Dixie fire have been further fueled by massive build-ups of vegetation – which has accumulated on the landscape during a century of aggressive fire suppression.

“I’m always feeling like a sitting duck,” said Trina Cunningham, the executive director of the Maidu Summit Consortium, who saw a tribal health center, the homes of several members, and a 2,325-acre expanse of culturally important land burn up in the Dixie fire. “The velocity of the fire was just mind-boggling,” said Cunningham. “I couldn’t even comprehend it.”

Her two sons, who work for local fire crews, narrowly escaped the blaze as it bore down on the town of Greenville and surrounding areas where many Maidu tribal members lived. As she watched the wind pick up, her eldest reported that he was safe – but the crew’s truck and equipment were destroyed.

As drought and fire weather simultaneously overtake regions across California and the west, fire crews have been strained and short-staffed.

By then, Cunningham had begun frantically making calls, appealing to local fire chiefs and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to send more firefighters to the region. “I kept asking – we need help, we need support,” she said. Eventually, a small crew did arrive – but thousands of acres had already burned.

“It’s been really frustrating to have to sit there and watch year after year of neglect take its toll,” she said. “We need to start tending to our landscape as we tend to our gardens.”

For Cunningham, the comment is more than metaphor. For centuries before European colonization, California Indians kept forest fuel loads under control by using what foresters now call “prescribed burns”. Today many critics say the practice is underutilized. To reduce the fire risks wrought by the increase in fire weather, experts have for years been calling on western states and the federal government to radically boost the use of prescribed fire to clear would-be fuel from forests.

With extreme fire weather in the mix, firefighters can no longer expect cooler, more humid night conditions to help them tamp down big blazes. As drought and fire weather simultaneously overtake regions across California and the west, fire crews have been strained and short-staffed.

“A lot of us here had come to dread summers, because we know that there’s always a potential for a crazy fire season,” Cunningham said. In the aftermath, “there’s been so much fear, anger, trauma – and just sheer exhaustion”.

Californians have had to cope with a seemingly nonstop cycle of disasters in recent years. But the expanding season and growing intensity of wildfires creates a new level of anxiety, according to David Baron, a neuropsychiatrist at the Western University of Health Sciences in Southern California.

“In California you learn, ‘Yeah, earthquakes can come, the big one might come,’ but you almost tend to deny it to some degree,” said Baron. “Fire is a different story because every fire season they’re getting worse and worse.”

Climate Central’s analysis shows that nearly the entire state appears to have been affected by more frequent fire weather, though no data is available for a narrow band of the state’s north-eastern corner. Other states are also seeing stark changes. In parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oregon and Washington, fire weather is at least twice as prevalent as it was 50 years ago.

To combat the increase in fire weather, there’s scientific consensus that the global economy must be flipped from reliance on polluting fossil fuels to 21st-century technologies. For example, local electrical grids powered by solar and wind energy, augmented by battery storage, produce negligible carbon pollution, and they reduce threats from long-distance transmission lines, which have sparked some of California’s deadliest and most destructive fires.

“I don’t think that these big wildfires are going to stop until something really gives,” said Fisher. Paradise is unlikely to burn again in the near future – there’s not much left to burn. “But I worry for other communities, about who’s going to be next.”

Global temperatures are rising and so, it seems, is part of the sky.

Atmosphere readings collected by weather balloons in the Northern Hemisphere over the last 40 years reveal that climate change is pushing the upper boundary of the troposphere — the slice of sky closest to the ground — steadily upward at a rate of 50 to 60 meters per decade, researchers report November 5 in Science Advances.

Temperature is the driving force behind this change, says Jane Liu, an environmental scientist at the University of Toronto. The troposphere varies in height around the world, reaching as high as 20 kilometers in the tropics and as low as seven kilometers near the poles. During the year, the upper boundary of the troposphere — called the tropopause — naturally rises and falls with the seasons as air expands in the heat and contracts in the cold. But as greenhouse gases trap more and more heat in the atmosphere, the troposphere is expanding higher into the atmosphere (SN: 10/26/21).

Liu and her colleagues found that the tropopause rose an average of about 200 meters in height from 1980 to 2020. Nearly all weather occurs in the troposphere, but it’s unlikely that this shift will have on a big effect on weather, the researchers say. Still, this research is an important reminder of the impact of climate change on our world, Liu says.

“We see signs of global warming around us, in retreating glaciers and rising sea levels,” she says. “Now, we see it in the height of the troposphere.”

By Ayurella Horn-Muller (Climate Central), Brendan Rivers (ADAPT) and Danielle Uliano (WJXT)

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and during the ensuing economic slowdown, Jacksonville virtually shut down. Businesses shuttered their doors and most who were able to started working from home. That meant far fewer internal combustion engine vehicles were being driven, leading to massive reductions in air pollution and noticeably cleaner air.

This feature story and radio and television segments were produced through a collaboration with News4Jax WJXT Channel 4 and ADAPT from WJCT Public Media. Click here for local reporting tools and suggestions.

“There was definitely less traffic,” said Veronica Glover, a lifelong resident of Jacksonville’s Urban Core and the executive director of the Sister Hermana Foundation, a non-profit that helps families fighting cancer. The only time Glover noticed any serious traffic was during the food giveaway events that she helped organize or at COVID-19 testing sites across the city.

Veronica Glover, left, and her mother Carolyn Myers, right. Credit: Veronica Glover

What Glover witnessed was happening all across the globe, but as people and industries returned to their routine use of cars and trucks, air quality worsened again. That’s because the largest contributor to carbon emissions in the U.S. is transportation — contributing to 29% of national emissions. And 76% of emissions in the transportation sector come from the fossil fuel-burning engines in our cars, trains, trucks and buses. 

Electric vehicles present a solution for reducing this substantial share of harmful pollutants. Experts say electrification of trucks and cars would be an essential step toward canceling out America’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Often called “net zero,” such an elimination of heat-trapping emissions would also require deep investments in solar and wind generation and battery storage, possibly nuclear power, and an overhaul of transmission lines nationally.

Princeton University’s Net Zero America program has been researching scenarios that could see the U.S. reach net zero by 2050. Under a scenario with an aggressive approach to electrifying vehicles, one that would see sales of electric vehicles outnumber sales of gas guzzlers within a decade, they estimate Florida could avoid nearly 10,000 premature deaths by 2050 caused by diseases from tailpipe pollution. 

 

The benefits wouldn’t just be felt in frontline communities like Glover’s. Air quality across the entire state would improve if internal combustion engines were replaced with electric vehicles.

Putting all those electric vehicles on the roads would mean more than just building and buying them, though. A raft of infrastructure overhauls would be required, including scaling up installation of chargers and changes to utilities’ electrical transmission strategies.

Florida officials last year prepared a roadmap that could help the state achieve such a daunting task. The plan included everything from adapting transportation infrastructure to advancing electrified mobility and electrifying disaster preparedness. 

The Republican-controlled legislature passed its first piece of climate legislation in 2020. With the next legislative session beginning in January, Advanced Energy Economy policy lead and Clermont City Councilman Ebo Entsuah is paying close attention to what policymakers bring forward. 

“Especially in a state where we do see a number of natural disasters, it’ll be important for our legislators to get together and put out some of these recommendations from the floor, from the electric vehicle roadmap,” Entsuah said. 

Traffic heading towards downtown Jacksonville. Credit: Sharkshock, Shutterstock

Multi-billion-dollar boost

Florida has the third-highest number of new EV charging stations added between 2017 and 2021, behind California and New York. At 58,160, Florida also has the second highest number of registered EVs in the country.

Dory Larsen, the Electric Transportation Program Manager for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, says thanks to booming EV sales, utility investment and charging deployment, Florida is poised to lead the EV market across the Southeast. To meet that demand, an additional economic boost could come from EV manufacturing in the state, she says. 

“We found that in Florida, if all of the cars, trucks, and buses were electric today, Florida would have an extra $12.5 billion circulating through the state’s economy, annually,” said Larsen. A SACE report found that in 2019, the state and consumers spent $27.6 billion on gas and diesel, while fully electric transportation would have cost only $17.2 billion. 

The time it takes to move from combustion engines to electric motors will have a significant effect on curbing overall greenhouse gas emissions. EVs would need to dominate American auto sales by the end of this decade for the U.S. to successfully decarbonize by 2050, helping it meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and avoid the most catastrophic potential levels of climate change.

The federal administration is taking steps toward net zero planning as President Biden has called for 50% of passenger vehicle and light truck sales in 2030 to be zero-emission vehicles. On Thursday, the federal administration released the newest framework of their $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan, which it is trying to push through Congress. 

The new framework includes a $555 billion commitment to curbing carbon emissions, with a focus on making clean energy cheaper through tax credits. The legislation also specifies electrifying transit systems to improve air quality, reducing consumer costs of EVs manufactured in the U.S. and directing clean energy jobs towards lower-income communities. 

An electric vehicle at a charging station. Credit: Bill Bortzfield, WJCT News

Electric vehicles in the River City

Convincing drivers to switch technologies for the sake of air quality could be a tough proposition. Fleet purchasers wield a lot more consumer influence, and the rental car industry will play a critical role in the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. Tesla’s new $4.2 billion deal with Hertz signals a shift in the way the rental car industry is responding to consumers’ growing sustainability demands.   

For individual consumers, fuel savings can be a draw, helping to start to replace some of the internal combustion engines on the roads with cleaner-running electric vehicles. 

Electric vehicle fueling costs per household can be 50% to 75% lower than for gasoline-fueled vehicles. A 2020 U.S. Department of Energy study found that in Florida, an EV driver’s lifetime fuel costs are an average $7,000 cheaper than for drivers of fossil-fueled vehicles. 

That cost-effectiveness is what won Jacksonville resident Erik Gonzalez over. “After having done some research into EVs, and Tesla in particular, I was really just impressed by not just the performance aspect, but the reliability and the cost of maintenance,” he said. 

Gonzalez just invested in his first Tesla. He gets about 285 miles out of a full charge and has driven about 6,000 miles. “That equates to a cost savings of about $1,100 so far, just in fuel savings,” he said. Gonzalez also recently signed up for a new incentive program for EV owners that JEA launched in October. 

The rebate can shave nearly $100 a year off the electric bill and offset some of the cost of installing an electric charger.  

“This is a win-win for the utility and for the EV owners that get approximately 2,000 miles of free driving every year they enroll in the program,” said Dave McKee, JEA’s program manager of electrification.

Gonzalez is one of hundreds who have signed up for the rebate, which is part of JEA’s larger Drive Electric program. JEA and the federal government also offer incentives for individuals and companies that want to install electric vehicle charging stations, on top of up to a $7,500 federal tax credit for buying new electric and hybrid vehicles.

Many Jacksonville residents considering EVs may also be concerned about what their city utility’s energy mix means for their personal carbon footprint. JEA is still very dependent on fossil fuels. Last year the utility got just 1% of its energy from renewable sources and this year is expected to be very similar. 

JEA, however, has a stated goal of getting 30% of its energy from carbon-neutral sources by the end of this decade. It’s working through the logistics of how to get there. 

JEA’s downtown Jacksonville headquarters. Credit: Bill Bortzfield, WJCT News

“We are going to know more, probably, in a year and half to say what our forward plan is, and we’ll have a much better understanding of how renewables play into our mix,” said Vicki Nichols, JEA director of customer solutions, market and development. 

Jacksonville is not unique. Electric vehicles still only make up 1% of passenger cars worldwide, but many of the world’s biggest automakers are investing in manufacturing EVs, from Ford to Toyota to Volkswagen, in a range of price points and styles. 

JEA is also working with Jacksonville car dealers on educating shoppers about the benefits of electric vehicles, including at Tom Bush Volkswagen in Arlington.

“Volkswagen’s really getting into electric vehicles in a big way. They’re developing a whole fleet of charging stations across the country, and they just launched the ID.4 this last spring, and it’s selling so well. We’re really excited about this vehicle,” said Megan Del Pizzo, vice president of Tom Bush Volkswagen.

In addition to price, one of the most common concerns Del Pizzo and her colleagues hear from customers interested in EVs has to do with finding charging stations. According to Del Pizzo, that’s pretty much a non-issue in the River City.

“The amount of chargers we have in Jacksonville now, you really don’t need the range anxiety that a lot of people have when they’re driving an electric car, because there are chargers everywhere: at dealerships, workplaces, at the (St. Johns) Town Center,” she said.

Duval’s high ratio of charging stations per driver is due, in part, to a relatively low number of EV vehicles on Jacksonville’s roads. 

“We benefited from entities like Town Center mall coming out with large charging banks… but less than 1% of our market right now is EVs,” said Nichols with JEA. “But a year from now, who knows? We may be behind. So we’re committed to keeping up with the market.” 

As EVs grow in popularity, gas stations throughout Jacksonville and elsewhere could install charging stations to benefit from the transition to a majority electric transportation sector. But a new Florida law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in June, prohibits local officials from requiring gas stations to install electric vehicle chargers. 

“It really is taking the power out of the hands of the municipalities and the counties and preventing them from hitting those 100% clean energy goals,” said Ebo Entsuah, the state policy lead at AEE. State legislators’ shying away from clean-energy legislation and gas industries’ lobbying against local sustainable policies doesn’t help. “It definitely can stall a bit,” Entsuah said.

Trachea transplant recipient Sonia Sein talks with the lead surgeon of her procedure, Dr. Eric Genden, left, during a checkup visit. Credit: Marshall Ritzel, AP Photo

‘A triple burden’

Exposure to air pollution increases the chance that people will end up in the hospital, and if they have respiratory or cardiovascular diseases like COPD, stroke, lung cancer or asthma, it lowers their chance of surviving them. That means where you live within Jacksonville can actually be a matter of life and death.  

“In low and middle income areas of cities, where historically, highways and roads tend to have been built in… in those areas where there’s a lot more car traffic and transportation traffic, we see a higher increased risk or higher increased prevalence of these diseases,” said Scott Helgeson, a pulmonologist at Jacksonville’s Mayo Clinic.  

Air pollution disproportionately affects those living near busy freeways and congested roadways, in neighborhoods that typically have larger portions of Black and Latinx residents, partly because of racist historical housing practices such as redlining. These frontline communities also tend to live close to power plants or other industrial facilities, which compounds the poor air quality.  

“There’s a triple burden,” said Marianne Hatzopoulou, a professor in engineering at the University of Toronto and head of the school’s transportation and air quality research group. “Not only are disadvantaged populations experiencing the highest levels of air pollution, but they are also the ones that are generating the least amount of emissions from transportation in a day,” she said. 

Hatzopoulou says a growing body of evidence linking air pollution exposure to social disadvantage should be taken into account when local and state governments evaluate transportation decisions. 

“What we want is the benefits of these policies to actually accrue to the people who are exposed to the highest level of air pollution,” Hatzopoulou said.

For nearly two years, researchers tracked air quality disparities between low-income neighborhoods of color and high-income white neighborhoods in Jacksonville and more than 50 other U.S. cities. The recently published study, co-authored by University of Virginia atmospheric chemist Sally Pusede, focused on levels of NO2, or nitrogen dioxide — an air pollutant released from fossil fuels that can cause and exacerbate chronic health problems like asthma. 

In Jacksonville, people of color living in low-income neighborhoods breathe air containing nearly a quarter more NO2 than non-Hispanic whites living in high-income areas. 

That same study also compared diesel NO2 emissions on weekends with weekdays, finding that a drop in heavy trucking on weekends led to pollution cuts of more than 60% on average, with frontline communities benefiting the most.

“This is another piece of evidence that says to policymakers that these trucks are really important, to control the emissions of diesel trucks,” said Pusede. “People should be paying attention to the equity dimensions of these vehicles. That is the most important part.” 

Throughout her life, Jacksonville resident Veronica Glover has had to watch her friends and family suffer through terrible illnesses. Her mother has COPD and is a breast cancer survivor, her husband died from colon cancer and her grandmother died from lung cancer. Glover, who herself is a breast cancer survivor, worries that pollution from vehicles and industrial sources is contributing to the prevalence of these diseases in her neighborhood just northeast of Downtown.

“Inhaling that same type of toxin over and over and over again is definitely not good for our community,” she said. While Glover tries to help residents deal with the effects of pollution, she hopes city leaders and other policymakers start pursuing electrification strategies that will help communities like hers breathe cleaner air. 

“It would definitely impact and increase our numbers, in saving lives,” she said.