Download a transcript of this episode here. Last I heard, there are two million podcasts — two million! On one hand, that’s amazing. So many people picking up microphones and saying what they want to say. Frankly, I think that’s healthy for the democracy. On the other hand, yeesh! That’s a helluvalot of podcasts. And, […]
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Africa’s “Great Green Wall” initiative is a proposed 8,000-kilometer line of trees meant to hold back the Sahara from expanding southward. New climate simulations looking to both the region’s past and future suggest this greening could have a profound effect on the climate of northern Africa, and even beyond.
By 2030, the project aims to plant 100 million hectares of trees along the Sahel, the semiarid zone lining the desert’s southern edge. That completed tree line could as much as double rainfall within the Sahel and would also decrease average summer temperatures throughout much of northern Africa and into the Mediterranean, according to the simulations, presented December 14 during the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. But, the study found, temperatures in the hottest parts of the desert would become even hotter.
Previous studies have shown that a “green Sahara” is linked to changes in the intensity and location of the West African monsoon. That major wind system blows hot, dry air southwestward across northern Africa during the cooler months and brings slightly wetter conditions northeastward during the hotter months.
Such changes in the monsoon’s intensity as well as its northward or southward extent led to a green Sahara period that lasted from about 11,000 to 5,000 years ago, for example (SN: 1/18/17). Some of the strongest early evidence for that greener Sahara of the past came in the 1930s, when Hungarian explorer László Almásy — the basis for the protagonist of the 1996 movie The English Patient — discovered Neolithic cave and rock art in the Libyan Desert that depicted people swimming.
Past changes in the West African monsoon are linked to cyclical variations in Earth’s orbit, which alters how much incoming solar radiation heats up the region. But orbital cycles don’t tell the whole story, says Francesco Pausata, a climate dynamicist at the Université du Québec à Montréal who ran the new simulations. Scientists now recognize that changes in plant cover and overall dustiness can dramatically intensify those monsoon shifts, he says.
More vegetation “helps create a local pool of moisture,” with more water cycling from soil to atmosphere, increasing humidity and therefore rainfall, says Deepak Chandan, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the work. Plants also make for a darker land surface compared with blinding desert sands, so that the ground absorbs more heat, Chandan says. What’s more, vegetation reduces how much dust is in the atmosphere. Dust particles can reflect sunlight back to space, so less dust means more solar radiation can reach the land. Add it all up, and these effects lead to more heat and more humidity over the land relative to the ocean, creating a larger difference in atmospheric pressure. And that means stronger, more intense monsoon winds will blow.
The idea for Africa’s Great Green Wall came in the 1970s and ’80s, when the once-fertile Sahel began to turn barren and dry as a result of changing climate and land use. Planting a protective wall of vegetation to hold back an expanding desert is a long-standing scheme. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt mobilized the U.S. Forest Service and the Works Progress Administration to plant walls of trees from the Great Plains to Texas to slow the growth of the Dust Bowl. Since the 1970s, China has engaged in its own massive desert vegetation project — also nicknamed the Great Green Wall — in an attempt to halt the southward march of sand dunes from the Gobi Desert (SN: 7/9/21).
Led by the African Union, Africa’s Great Green Wall project launched in 2007 and is now roughly 15 percent complete. Proponents hope the completed tree line, which will extend from Senegal to Djibouti, will not only hold back the desert from expanding southward, but also bring improved food security and millions of jobs to the region.
What effect the finished greening might ultimately have on the local, regional and global climate has been little studied — and it needs to be, Pausata says. The initiative is, essentially, a geoengineering project, he says, and when people want to do any type of geoengineering, they should study these possible impacts.
To investigate those possible impacts, Pausata created high-resolution computer simulations of future global warming, both with and without a simulated wall of plants along the Sahel. Against the backdrop of global warming, the Great Green Wall would decrease average summertime temperatures in most of the Sahel by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But the Sahel’s hottest areas would get even hotter, with average temperatures increasing by as much as 1.5 degrees C. The greening would also increase rainfall across the entire region, even doubling it in some places, the research suggests.
These results are preliminary, Pausata says, and the data presented at the meeting were only for a high-emissions future warming scenario called RCP8.5 that may not end up matching reality (SN: 1/7/20). Simulations for moderate- and lower-emissions scenarios are ongoing.
The effects of greening the Sahara might extend far beyond the region, the simulations suggest. A stronger West African monsoon could shift larger atmospheric circulation patterns westward, influencing other climate patterns such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation and altering the tracks of tropical cyclones.
Chandan agrees that it’s important to understand just what impact such large-scale planting might have and notes that improvements in understanding what led to past changes in the Sahara are key to simulating its future. That the Great Green Wall’s impact could be far-ranging also makes sense, he says: “The climate system is full of interactions.”
By John Upton (Climate Central) and Joe Martucci (Press of Atlantic City)
ATLANTIC CITY — Like many of the 21,735 casino workers in New Jersey, Mike Luko’s ability to get to and from work can be affected by the direction of the moon, the phase of the moon and what storms are nearby, all of which affect coastal flooding.
“Sometimes it’s a hassle, they end up detouring you at Route 9, or they close the road,” said Luko, of Egg Harbor City. Luko takes the White Horse Pike to get to his job as a carpenter for Bally’s Atlantic City, unless the spilled over bays get in the way.
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This story was produced through a partnership between The Press of Atlantic City and Climate Central. |
On average, it’ll happen two dozen times a year. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, that’s how many times the tide gauge at Steel Pier in Atlantic City detects tidal flooding, roughly six times more annually than in the 1950s and 1960s.
It’s not just commuters who contend with the tidal flooding on the roads. Tens of millions of tourists travel to Atlantic City each year.
“We’re a driving market, we’re a large driving destination,” said Michael Chait, president of the Greater Atlantic City Chamber. “It’s two factors, it’s getting home and working.”
Chait described the Black Horse Pike as a “perfect example” of an important road where operations are disrupted by floodwaters.
“When you look at roadways and the infrastructures that currently exist, there are enormous issues. … That also carries into our tourism,” Chait said.
While the roads in and around Atlantic City have been affected by tidal flooding throughout the city’s history, the frequency of flooding is on the rise because of the 1.5 feet of local sea level rise that has occurred since 1911, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Exacerbating the flooding is the sinking of land, or subsidence, along the mid-Atlantic coastline.
Those who frequent the city accept the flooding as a way of life. But for each foot in sea level rise, it will cost exponentially more to deal with it.
The impacts from sea level rise affect almost every facet of life here, from the economy to the culture and physical landscape. To better understand how the sea continues to shape the resort, The Press of Atlantic City and Climate Central are examining the challenges, strategies and opportunities as the city deals with increasing flood risks.
Schools and local restaurants are being forced to cope with increasingly frequent flooding, forcing workers and parents to trod through floodwaters and in some cases miss shifts. Homeowners, particularly those in the back bay neighborhoods, face heavy financial burdens from flooding, whether it’s repairing them after storms or paying more for flood insurance.
For emergency managers, it’s the flooding of roadways that poses “huge problems,” said Kimberly McKenna of the Stockton University Coastal Research Center, which researches and works with local governments and state agencies to monitor and manage intensifying flooding.
“For emergency safety and stuff, it’s probably number one on the list,” McKenna said.
AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center’s Mainland and City campuses work with local emergency managers and responders to “ensure safe transportation of patients” during flooding from severe weather, official James Kilmer Jr. said.
Other businesses in Atlantic City catering to tourists also suffer.
Frank Becktel is a jitney driver, part of Atlantic City’s minibus service that has moved people around the city since 1915. He lives in what he describes as the lowest point in Atlantic City, near Gardner’s Basin. It floods so often on his street, the bottom of the fire hydrant near him is rusted from years of saltwater intrusion.
A Jitney drives through flooded streets during major coastal flooding Feb. 1.
It’s also part of Becktel’s livelihood to help his riders navigate floods.
“We’re owner-operators, we don’t have the luxury of stopping when the water’s too high. We only get paid by the people that we pick up. If they’re standing in the flood waters, we have to get them,” he said.
Becktel said his riders often go to great lengths not to miss work or an appointment.
“They try to walk to places where it’s drier, they stand on high points on the road. If they catch a jitney, they know how to get to the high points, they wear boots and get on the jitney as quickly as possible,” he said.
Both the jitney drivers and the passengers who need to move around the city are in tune with the weather and flooding conditions.
“What time it’s going to flood, what time it’s receding, etc. … We all always discuss this,” Becktel said.
From 1993 to 2017, sea levels in New Jersey rose an average of 1.9 inches per decade, according to a Rutgers University Science and Technology panel. Of that 1.9-inch growth, nine-tenths of an inch comes from natural processes, such as sinking land. A warming world, driven by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, accounts for 0.87 inches, while 0.2 inches of the rise is due to unknown factors. The rate of sea-level rise is increasing globally, and it will continue to affect Atlantic City at a quickening pace.
By 2050, there is a 50% confidence level of sea levels rising 1.4 feet above the 2010 average, regardless of emissions outcome, according to the most recent Rutgers Science and Technical Advisory Panel.
Robert Noland, a professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers, worked with a Rutgers colleague and Climate Central’s sea level scientists to investigate how rising seas could affect workers in Atlantic and Cape May counties.
The research combined localized sea level projections with information about road networks to identify where travel would be blocked by coastal flooding, and how many workers that would cut off from their jobs. This information was combined with a “gravity model,” a planning tool that provides a measure of access based on travel time to job locations.
The paper, published two years ago, warned that increasing sea levels will have “large impacts on people and the economy, and large populations will have access to employment disrupted well before their own properties or places of employment may begin to flood.”
While most climate impacts are felt far more acutely by low-income communities than wealthy ones, Noland said that “in this case, because there are a lot of wealthy households along the shore, they were getting hit hard” as well in the research findings.
And while coastal flooding is widely perceived to be a coastal issue, Noland warned that inland roads also flood throughout the area and that the research showed these closures would increasingly affect workers.
A “big limitation” of the research was that it approximated where residents’ jobs were located, Noland said, but it helps to demonstrate the skyrocketing impacts as seas continue to rise. The researchers developed a measure of job accessibility and looked at how it would be reduced throughout the two-county area as water levels continue to rise.
In Gardner’s Basin, job accessibility falls by more than four-fifths with one foot of sea level rise, according to Noland’s research. In Atlantic City’s Chelsea Heights neighborhood, job accessibility falls more than three-fifths. Six feet of sea-level rise, which is theoretically possible this century, would virtually eliminate job accessibility in the area.
Percent reduction in the accessibility index by block-group for different levels of water height for Atlantic and Cape May counties. Atlantic City would see a 63, 64, 67, and 99 percent drop for one, two, three and six feet of sea level rise, respectfully.
Noland’s projections assume that roadways and other infrastructure remain unchanged through the coming decades. Efforts to protect them from flooding will reduce the impacts, and the state and local governments have myriad projects planned or underway to protect traffic from worsening hazards.
Like other state agencies, the New Jersey Department of Transportation has assembled a working group to help plan for extreme weather. The group is “developing recommendations that will be incorporated in our project designs and infrastructure maintenance practices” to protect the state’s roadways from effects of climate change, spokesperson Jim Barry said.
Some 4,175 casino employees live in mainland communities where Route 30 offers the most direct access to Atlantic City. More frequent flooding would mean they would have to pay a toll and ride the Atlantic City Expressway, something commuters such as Luko would rather not do.
For him and for Becktel, who has grown accustomed to his rusting fire hydrant, solutions to sea level rise — both long- and short-term — can’t come soon enough.
Noland
TRANSOM: “TRAN-sum” A small hinged window above a door, allowing light and ventilation into hallways of older buildings. At magazine and newspaper offices, unsolicited manuscripts were submitted “over the transom.” A YEAR-END RETROSPECTIVE 2021 marked Transom’s 20th anniversary. And anniversaries have a way of encouraging us to pause and reflect. To think about what’s been […]
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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.
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.”
Erica Heilman’s story “Finn and the Bell” is the best I’ve heard all year. Yes. It’s that good. The documentary tells the story of Finn Rooney, a young man who was a volunteer fireman and a poet and a baseball player and, as one friend put it, “a hipneck” — a perfect blend of hippy […]
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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.
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This is the third story in Faith for Earth. |
“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.
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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.”
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
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This is the second story in Faith for Earth. |
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.”
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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
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.”
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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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 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.
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This is the first story in Faith for Earth. |
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.
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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.”
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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?”
Last Minute Gift Guide Here are some gift ideas from the Transom crew: items we’d give audio producers we know, or that we’ve had our eyes on for ourselves. We’ve included a range of items, from inexpensive accessories to major splurges, and plenty of in-between. Prices on electronics tend to be volatile, and there are […]
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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.
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This radio, television and text story was produced through a collaboration involving WJXT, ADAPT from WJCT Public Media, and Climate Central. |
“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
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
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.”
Hiya! Welcome back to Starting Out from me and Transom. A few weeks ago I sent out a survey to hear what’s working with the newsletter so far and what you’d like to see in the new year. Thank you all for such thoughtful feedback! One thing I’ve noticed is that recent subscribers have requested […]
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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.
Download a transcript of this episode here. I can think of two rock-solid reasons why radio should be a subject for podcasts (and for radio broadcasters, too). And I don’t mean actual radios, I mean radio history and culture — stories about a medium that has been a staple of daily life for generations. The […]
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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.
False claims and conspiracy theories about the new Covid-19 variant Omicron emerged online after the variant was reported by South Africa to the World Health Organization (WHO) on November 24. The WHO said the variant has had a large number of mutations and may present an increased risk of reinfection, but studies on its transmissibility, severity of infection (including symptoms), performance of vaccines and diagnostic tests, and effectiveness of treatments are still underway.
Conservative influencers are circulating claims that the variant is part of a government plan to oppress unvaccinated populations.
In a Facebook Live that was broadcast November 30, conservative radio show host Ben Ferguson alleged that the government is using the Omicron variant to “fearmonger” and to perpetuate “Covid racism” by separating society into those who are vaccinated and those who are not. Ferguson also claimed in the video, which had been shared over 600 times and garnered over 26,000 views as of December 3, that the government is pushing for people to get booster shots through the purported fear mongering.
Other conservative influencers, including Ben Shapiro, Chuck Callesto, Kim Iversen, and Candace Owens, said that the Omicron variant was being used to enforce another lockdown and frighten people into getting vaccinated. One post from Owens implying Covid-19 was being used to “usher in a totalitarian new world order” was shared over 44,000 times on Facebook; the original tweet garnered over 19,000 retweets.
One popular false narrative from supporters of ivermectin has been that the Omicron variant was either made up or deliberately released by proponents of the Covid-19 vaccine in Africa. According to this conspiracy theory, up until last week the African continent had been successful in fending off the pandemic because of the prevalent use of the “miracle drug” ivermectin despite its low vaccination rate. According to the Food and Drug Administration, currently available data shows that ivermectin is not effective in treating Covid-19.
Perhaps one of the most prominent examples came from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has frequently promoted QAnon and other conspiracy theories. In a series of tweets November 27, she amplified this conspiracy theory, falsely claiming that “many clinical trials have proven Ivermectin to be a very effective safe & cheap treatment against #Covid”.’ These tweets have been shared thousands of times.
In Australia, a number of rumors have also been circulating. Public Facebook posts that mention Omicron with the most interactions between November 22 and 29 are from MP George Christensen, far-right figure Lauren Southern and anti-lockdown activist Topher Field. Each of these posts gained thousands of interactions within 24 hours.
One of the most popular false claims is that Omicron appears “ahead of schedule,” citing a chart purportedly from the WHO, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Johns Hopkins University with a predetermined “plan” for releasing the variants. Spokespeople from the WHO, WEF and Johns Hopkins told First Draft in email statements that they are not associated with the image. The chart has circulated online since at least July and has also been debunked by Reuters Fact Check, Snopes and India Today.
Other false claims among the Facebook posts include calling the variant “planted” and blaming vaccinated people for the variant. One claim also falsely declared that vaccines weakened people’s immunity. Similarly in a Telegram group with more than a million members, one post falsely stated that the Covid-19 vaccines are what caused Omicron.
A prominent conspiracy theory links the new variant’s emergence to Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial, which started in the US on November 29. For example, one comment on Topher Field’s post shares a screenshot of a post from US conservative influencer Rogan O’Handley, or DC Draino, that reads in part: “If you think the Omicron hysteria popping up 2 days before the Ghislaine Maxwell trial starts is just a ‘coincidence,’ then you don’t know who she was trafficking underage girls to.” Similar comments are also found on George Christensen’s post and a Telegram post, which also ties Omicron to the QAnon conspiracy theory of a “tyrannical peadophile CV19 government.”
Another conspiracy theory states that the letters “o,” “m” and “i” in Omicron stand for “occlusion” and “myocardial infarction,” linking without evidence the new variant to the rare side effects, such as a rare blood clotting disorder and myocarditis, that some Covid-19 vaccines have caused in a small number of people.
Our research finds a notable data void on Omicron, even though assessments take time. The deficit in data needs to be filled with credible information from trusted sources and facilitated by precise, accurate reporting as soon as possible to stop the spread of baseless or false information about the variant and the pandemic. — Esther Chan, Kaylin Dodson
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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.”
Defining the role of associate producer can be a little bit challenging, especially at a show like Radiolab, where every member of staff is a jack of all trades. Additionally, I was brought in “temporary,” a contract hire to help exclusively with the new mini-series Mixtape, hosted by Simon Adler. As half of a two-person team, […]
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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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Cat Jaffee is clear. Podcasting is not about talking into a mic. It’s about listening. Cat’s a firm believer in “a better world through better listening,” as she puts it. As a podcaster, she feels the best content is derived from listening. Cat is the founder and director of House of Pod, a community podcasting […]
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As the United States is poised to roll out its Covid-19 vaccine booster program for all adults, misleading information on social media around this latest development is likely to become the focal point of the next round of vaccine misinformation.
Already, false narratives about additional vaccine shots creating a new wave of infections and newer variants of the coronavirus elsewhere in the world have resurfaced. For example, Robert Malone, a Covid-19 vaccine skeptic known for his role in contributing to the development of mRNA vaccine technology but has since been promoting claims of the vaccine causing miscarriage, the vaccine not being authorized and other false information, is a major promoter. Malone, who has a sizeable audience through Twitter and his amplifiers in the right-wing media ecosystem, has posted multiple tweets in the past few days describing the vaccine as “leaky”.
Other pandemic skeptics and vaccine deniers used the rise of case numbers in Western Europe, where many countries had already given out extra doses, as purported “proof” of booster shots leading to new and more infections. Some social media posts pointed to Gibraltar, the highly vaccinated British territory that just announced a new round of Covid-19 restriction measures because of increasing infection numbers.
A blog post by an anti-vaccine Substack user popular among like-minded social media users claimed that neighbouring countries where booster shots have not yet begun or kicked into high gear had less of a spike in cases than Gibraltar. It was retweeted by Jeffrey A. Tucker, a libertarian writer and president of the Brownstone Institute, a newly founded publication that has been promoting ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and other unproven Covid-19 “cures.” — Keenan Chen
The post Misinformation accompanies US expansion of boosters appeared first on First Draft.
False comparisons have again been drawn between Nazi Germany and Covid-19 pandemic measures, this time prompted by the introduction of a lockdown for people in Austria who are not fully vaccinated.
About two million people in Austria, or one-third of the population, were placed in lockdown on Monday, November 15, with the country facing a surge of infections. Austria has one of the lowest vaccination rates in Western Europe, with anti-vaccine sentiment encouraged by the far-right opposition Freedom Party.
In the hours after the announcement of the lockdown, the following statements were made in the Facebook comment sections of Australian news publishers with millions of followers, on subreddits with millions of members, and in Australian Telegram groups with thousands of members.
There were many references to Austria as Adolf Hitler’s birthplace and the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany, with comments claiming history was repeating itself.
Others commenters falsely claimed unvaccinated people would be sent to “camps”, “rounded up” and vaccinated, or forced to wear signs like yellow stars, as Jewish people were forced to under Nazi rule. Some referred to “the Final Solution” when discussing the lockdown, while others made antisemitic statements and claimed the lockdown was a sign that Austria is embracing fascism.
Comments that misconstrued the role of vaccines and therefore the relevance of the lockdown were common. Some falsely stated that the vaccines don’t work and that unvaccinated people were being blamed for rising case numbers. Research shows that vaccinated people are less likely to contract and spread Covid-19, and less likely to require hospitalization.
There were misleading attempts to link Austria’s lockdown with pandemic measures in Australia, such as claiming that Victoria’s controversial pandemic laws would give the state’s premier power to implement a similar lockdown. The false claim was also made that Australia is building camps for the unvaccinated, as debunked by AAP Fact Check here.
As previously reported by First Draft, opposition movements to Covid-19 vaccination and other public health measures have frequently sought to link aspects of the pandemic with Nazi indoctrination and policies. These types of comparisons are unfounded and irrelevant: Jewish people and others, including Romani and gay people, were persecuted and killed based on ethnicity and sexuality. — Lucinda Beaman
The post Austria’s lockdown for unvaccinated people falsely compared to Nazi policies appeared first on First Draft.
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.”
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.
