Here are some of this week’s top science stories:
- Crops are withering and cherries are roasting on their trees thanks to heat dome.
- Bootleg Fire burns as locals remain skeptical of the climate crisis; the wildfire is so large it could be creating its own weather complete with fire tornadoes.
- Pacific Northwest heat wave was only possible because of climate change; not only did more than 800 people die from the heat, more than 1 billion sea creatures also perished.
- No one is safe from the climate crisis as Germany and Belgium are inundated by flood and the western U.S. burns.
- Allison Crimmins appointed to head the US Global Change Research Program.
- Arctic scientists wrestle with climate ‘tipping point’.
- Brazil’s Amazon is now a carbon source thanks to logging, farming, and fires.
- Corn and soybean crops grown in the United States are poorly adapted to climate change.
- Lake Powell may soon no longer be able to generate hydropower.
- Racism is magnifying the deadly impact of rising city heat, and se walls make floods someone else’s problem.
Details and links to sources below the fold.
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608,502 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 185.8 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE RECEIVED A VACCINATION DOSE
The Washington Post
Canada’s farmers brace for new heat wave as scorching summer leaves cherries roasting on trees
As devastating heat waves sweep swaths of the globe, farmers in Canada are facing a crippling phenomenon: Crops are baking in fields.
Cherries have roasted on trees. Fields of canola and wheat have withered brown. And as feed and safe water for animals grow scarce, ranchers may have no choice but to sell off their livestock.
“It will totally upend Canadian food production if this becomes a regular thing,” said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. […]
Newman said farmers are resilient and have been planning for slow, constant climate change. But no model predicted this summer’s spike, which she characterized as a “thousand-year” event that cannot become the norm.
[…] The West has been beset by historic drought and heat waves this year exacerbated by climate change, but among the small towns that have been threatened by the Bootleg Fire — Sprague River, Beatty, Bly — there is little talk of global warming. Instead, residents vent about the federal government’s water policies and forest management. They blame liberal environmentalists for hobbling the logging industry and Mexican marijuana farmers for sucking up the area’s water.
“Now the top end of the Forest Service are a bunch of flower children,” said Jim Rahi, 71, who was filling up his 3,600-gallon water tanker to deliver to firefighters in the town of Lakeview, east of the spreading fire. “That’s what the real problem is. It’s not that much hotter. It’s environmentally caused mismanagement.” […]
Climate change driven by the human burning of fossil fuels has raised the Earth’s temperature an average of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, a warming that has led to more frequent and extreme natural disasters. […] But despite the harm from fires and drought, many in this part of southern Oregon don’t place the blame on a changing climate.
The Oregonian
US, Northwest pushing limits of firefighting resources: ‘Worst possible conditions’
U.S. Forest Service leaders got a message from their top boss Wednesday.
Chief Vicki Christiansen, the agency’s leader, announced that all Forest Service workers should immediately refocus their time and energy to address the country’s worsening wildfire season.
Fires were resisting control efforts, she said, and the West was bracing for more extreme weather in the coming months.
Strange moonfish, a rare find in Oregon, washes up near Seaside
A strange-looking fish has washed up on the Oregon coast, a stunning sight for beach walkers and an unusual discovery for the local aquarium.
The 3.5-foot, 100-pound opah fish was discovered on Sunset Beach north of Seaside on Wednesday morning, and was quickly reported to the Seaside Aquarium, which placed it the fish in a freezer to preserve it for future educational opportunities, the aquarium said.
Also known as a moonfish, the opah is typically found in warmer, tropical waters, though it’s not unheard of to find them along the Oregon coast.
Inside Climate News
[…] Like much of the American West, this dry, hilly, high-elevation landscape straddling the California-Oregon border is experiencing a summer of extreme drought. But when the federal government announced in May that, for the first time ever, it would cut irrigation water to about 180,000 acres of agriculture in the basin, tensions ignited between farmers and the Klamath tribes.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation made the cuts to preserve two endangered species of suckerfish sacred to the Klamath Tribes, as well as protected coho and chinook salmon that travel along the Klamath River to reach spawning habitat. After meeting the needs of the fish, the bureau determined, there would not be enough water left over for most irrigators in the basin. […]
Farmers arrived in the Klamath Basin in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Klamath Tribes were here thousands of years before that. And somewhere deep in time, several species of fish central to tribal traditions and livelihoods claimed this place as home, as did waterfowl and migratory birds needing respite on their flights up and down the western United States.
All need water. All have been promised water by the federal government. But in the last 20 years, it’s become clear there’s not enough to go around.
AP News
Oregon’s Bootleg Fire forms ‘fire clouds,’ considered extreme fire behavior
Smoke and heat from a massive wildfire in southeastern Oregon are creating giant “fire clouds” over the blaze — dangerous columns of smoke and ash that can reach up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) in the sky and are visible from more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.
Authorities have put these clouds at the top of the list of the extreme fire behavior they are seeing on the Bootleg Fire, the largest wildfire burning in the U.S. The inferno grew Friday to about 75 square miles (194 square kilometers) larger than the size of New York City and was raging through a part of the U.S. West that is enduring a historic drought.
The fire was so dangerous late Thursday and into Friday that authorities pulled out crews. Meteorologists this week also spotted a bigger, more extreme form of fire clouds — ones that can create their own weather, including “fire tornadoes.”
Greenland suspends oil exploration because of climate change
The left-leaning government of Greenland has decided to suspend all oil exploration off the world’s largest island, calling it “a natural step” because the government “takes the climate crisis seriously.” […]
“The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect we have much more to gain,” the Greenland government said in a statement. The government said it “wants to take co-responsibility for combating the global climate crisis.”
The Seattle Times
A consortium of international scientists found that the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave was implausible if not for climate change, but also that temperatures soared so high that they exceeded what scientists thought were statistically likely today.
“Although this was a rare event, it would have been virtually impossible in the past,” said Sarah Kew, a researcher with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, during a news conference Wednesday, adding that the heat wave was estimated to be 150 times more likely because of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Kew added that heat waves are expected to become more common and more intense in the future. […]
With another 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit of worldwide warming, which the scientists said the world could reach as soon as the 2040s, the analysis suggests a heat wave of this magnitude could be expected roughly every five to 10 years.
Arizona Daily Sun
Flooding pushes Flagstaff to forefront of climate debate
Video of that event taken by Flagstaff resident Taylor Landy showing a neighbor’s Toyota Prius being washed down Steves Boulevard went viral, garnering millions of views online and thrusting Flagstaff into debate over additional action on climate change. […]
City Energy and Climate Specialist Jenny Niemann said while it is impossible to determine that any one event is solely the result of a changing climate, she added that scientists do expect that weather events are going to become more variable and increasingly extreme.
“What we know is that climate change is going to bring more intense storms,” Niemann said. “More extreme events of all types.”
The New York Times
‘No One Is Safe’: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World
Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.
Only days before in the Northwestern United States, a region famed for its cool, foggy weather, hundreds had died of heat. In Canada, wildfire had burned a village off the map. Moscow reeled from record temperatures. And this weekend the northern Rocky Mountains were bracing for yet another heat wave, as wildfires spread across 12 states in the American West.
The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it. The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.
‘It Is All Connected’: Extreme Weather in the Age of Climate Change
The images from Germany are startling and horrifying: houses, shops and streets in the picturesque cities and villages along the Ahr and other rivers violently washed away by fast-moving floodwaters. […]
The storm was a frightening example of an extreme weather event, with some places getting a month’s worth of rain in a day. But in an era of climate change, extreme weather events are becoming more common. […]
For many scientists the trend is clear. “The answer is yes — all major weather these days is being affected by the changes in climate,” said Donald J. Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois.
Nature
Influential US climate report moves ahead — under new leadership
US President Joe Biden’s administration has appointed a new director to lead the nation’s next major climate assessment, finalizing the roster on its federal climate team and marking the end of a turbulent period in the office that coordinates work on global warming.
By law, the US government must complete a national climate assessment every four years, reviewing the latest science and highlighting the local and regional impacts of climate change — with the goal of helping individuals, businesses and state and local officials to make decisions about how to curb emissions and adapt to global warming. The most recent such report was finalized in 2018.
Work on the next report — the fifth National Climate Assessment — began last year… In November 2020, Trump officials appointed a climate-change denier to head the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which produces the assessments and coordinates climate activities across 13 federal agencies. Many experts feared that the move was intended to influence the report.
Since Biden took office in January, his administration has been assembling its own team of specialists to work on it. The latest is Allison Crimmins, who has worked on climate issues for the past decade at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and was appointed this week to head the fifth assessment.
Racism is magnifying the deadly impact of rising city heat
[…] From Los Angeles to Lagos, extreme heat is a growing problem. As temperatures soar and heatwaves become more common because of global warming, people living in cities are particularly at risk. Asphalt, concrete and other surfaces that absorb and emit heat make many urban environments much hotter than suburban or rural areas.
To help reduce the risk of heat stroke and other heat-related illnesses, urban planners, meteorologists, climate experts and other scientists are working to identify the most vulnerable neighbourhoods. Underlying such efforts is a growing awareness of how extreme heat takes a disproportionate toll on people of colour and those in lower-income communities. Racist urban policies, particularly in the United States, have left communities of colour at higher risk of heat-related illness or death than their white neighbours.
In the past few years, a growing body of research has revealed the environmental injustices that have left some residents baking in vast expanses of asphalt while other urban neighbourhoods benefit from green parks, spacious lawns and sprawling trees. “It’s really shocking,” says Angel Hsu, a climate scientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “We have to ask ourselves why — to try to figure out why these patterns are so consistent and so pervasive.”
Mongabay
As Arctic warms, scientists wrestle with its climate ‘tipping point’
For Arctic scientists, the summer of 2007 changed everything. That’s when, for the first time in history, record warmth melted the Northwest Passage, nearly opening it to shipping…
Walt Meier, a senior researcher at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado, was following the satellite images. “You’re watching and it’s neck and neck. Is it going to make it? Is it not going to make it? It’s like, we’re going to break this [annual low sea ice extent] record in August if it keeps up like this.” […]
He adds: “There was this thought that we have reached a tipping point.”
Tipping point. The expression has become a foundational concept in climate change science discussions and a mainstay of media headlines. Just last month, a leaked version of the newest upcoming science report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of looming “tipping points” for Arctic, Greenland and Antarctic ice; subarctic permafrost melt, savannification of the Amazon Rainforest, and other planetary environmental thresholds beyond which recovery may be impossible. “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems … humans cannot,” warns the draft.
Brazil’s Amazon is now a carbon source, unprecedented study reveals
The Amazon has long done its part to balance the global carbon budget, but new evidence suggests the climate scales are tipping in the world’s largest rainforest. Now, according to a study published July 14 in Nature, the Amazon is emitting more carbon than it captures.
“The Amazon is a carbon source. No doubt,” Luciana Gatti, a researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and lead author of the study, told Mongabay. “By now we can say that the budget for the Amazon is 0.3 billion tons of carbon per year [released] into the atmosphere. It’s a horrible message.” […]
In the Amazon, forests are often cut during the wet season and burned during the dry season to make way for agribusiness, particularly cattle pasture. According to the study, fire emissions in the southeastern Amazon are three times larger than the net biome exchange (NBE), a measure of the forest’s carbon uptake plus all emissions from decomposition and human sources such as burning fossil fuels.
Science Daily
Is global plastic pollution nearing an irreversible tipping point?
Current rates of plastic emissions globally may trigger effects that we will not be able to reverse, argues a new study by researchers from Sweden, Norway and Germany published on July 2nd in Science. According to the authors, plastic pollution is a global threat, and actions to drastically reduce emissions of plastic to the environment are "the rational policy response."
Plastic is found everywhere on the planet: from deserts and mountaintops to deep oceans and Arctic snow. As of 2016, estimates of global emissions of plastic to the world's lakes, rivers and oceans ranged from 9 to 23 million metric tons per year, with a similar amount emitted onto land yearly. These estimates are expected to almost double by 2025 if business-as-usual scenarios apply.
"Plastic is deeply engrained in our society, and it leaks out into the environment everywhere, even in countries with good waste-handling infrastructure," says Matthew MacLeod, Professor at Stockholm University and lead author of the study. He says that emissions are trending upward even though awareness about plastic pollution among scientists and the public has increased significantly in recent years.
Vox
How climate change fueled the devastating floods in Germany and northwest Europe
After historic rainfall caused devastating flooding that killed more than 100 people in northwestern Europe and left more than 1,000 missing, officials and scientists aren’t being coy about the main culprit: climate change.
In response to footage of the unfolding disaster, German Minister of the Environment Svenja Schulze announced, “These are the harbingers of climate change that have now arrived in Germany.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the flooding “a clear indication of climate change” and “something that really, really shows the urgency to act.”
The Guardian
Climate scientists shocked by scale of floods in Germany
The intensity and scale of the floods in Germany this week have shocked climate scientists, who did not expect records to be broken this much, over such a wide area or this soon. […]
Climate scientists have long predicted that human emissions would cause more floods, heatwaves, droughts, storms and other forms of extreme weather, but the latest spikes have surpassed many expectations.
“I am surprised by how far it is above the previous record,” Dieter Gerten, professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said. “We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed.”
Move faster to cut emissions, developing world tells rich nations
Rich countries must move faster to cut greenhouse gas emissions and provide financial assistance to their less wealthy counterparts to cope with the climate crisis, governments from the developing world have said.
Poor nations have been frustrated with the slow progress at the recent G7 leaders’ summit and meetings of the G20 group of major economies.
More than 100 developing country governments have joined together in Thursday’s demand for clear action from the rich world before Cop26, the vital UN climate talks to be held in Glasgow in November. Cop26 is the most important meeting on the climate emergency since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015, and is intended to put the world on track to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The Atlantic
California’s Cliffs Are Collapsing One by One
[…] Collapsing coastal bluffs are a threat wherever waves, earthquakes, and intense rainstorms can destabilize steep seaside terrain, and with sea levels rising, this risk is increasing. It is a pronounced risk throughout many areas along the Pacific Coast of North America, especially in Southern California. Considering that many lives, homes, and vital infrastructure are at stake, scientists have been trying to figure out exactly what causes such cliffs to fall.
Adam Young, a marine geologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, is developing a tool that could eventually be used to predict bluff collapses in order to better protect lives and property. He and his team have spent three years driving up and down a 2.5-kilometer stretch of the coast near Del Mar, firing a sensitive lidar laser mounted atop their research truck at the cliff sides. Through repeat measurements, the equipment can track tiny shifts in the ground, and by taking measurements over years the team intends to give a warning of potentially vulnerable coastal areas. […]
“The main thing new here is doing the high-resolution survey every week, which allows us to isolate time periods of when waves are hitting the cliff, or when there’s rainfall, giving us a better idea of how these different processes are acting on the cliff,” he says.
It’s important to understand the particular qualities of rainstorms, waves, and groundwater that result in erosion and trigger landslides, especially in the context of the coastal changes scientists anticipate as sea levels rise farther, Young says.
The Green New Deal Does Not, Strictly Speaking, Exist
Since its ascension in 2018, the Green New Deal has defined the terms of the global climate debate. Perhaps no other climate policy in history has been as successful. Democrats and Republicans alike have been judged by how closely they seem to hew to it. The Sunrise Movement, the highest-profile American climate-activism group, rallies for it. Abroad, the European Union has dubbed its 1-trillion-euro attempt to decarbonize its economy “the European Green Deal.” And on the histrionic fields of social media, progressives ask how society can afford flooded subways, horrific droughts, deadly heat waves, and uncontrollable wildfires but not pay for a Green New Deal.
Even now, as Democrats in Congress and the White House wrangle over the terms of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, the Green New Deal leers from the sidelines. How does the bipartisan infrastructure deal differ from the Green New Deal? Will the partisan reconciliation bill amount to a Green New Deal?
With so much ballyhoo, it’s become easy to miss the central, implacable fact about the Green New Deal: It does not exist.
Phys.org
US corn and soybean maladapted to climate variations, study shows
U.S. corn and soybean varieties have become increasingly heat and drought resistant as agricultural production adapts to a changing climate. But the focus on developing crops for extreme conditions has negatively affected performance under normal weather patterns, a University of Illinois study shows.
"Since the 1950s, advances in breeding and management practices have made corn and soybean more resilient to extreme heat and drought. However, there is a cost for it. Crop productivity with respect to the normal temperature and precipitation is getting lower," says Chengzheng Yu, doctoral student in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) at the University of Illinois and lead author on the new paper, published in Scientific Reports.
Climate-resilience of rural chicken is in the genes
The genetic make-up of indigenous chickens has changed to better cope with climatic challenges, giving hope to future breeding of more productive and climate-resilient livestock, a study in Ethiopia has found.
According to researchers, backyard poultry farming provides about 97 percent of Ethiopia's total poultry meat and egg production.
African indigenous chickens are known to cope with harsh environmental conditions but how their genes contribute to this resilience was unknown. The researchers analyzed environmental and genomic data relating to 245 Ethiopian indigenous chickens from diverse climatic regions including hot and temperate zones to identify the environmental and genetic drivers of local adaptation.
Researchers identified genes associated with adaptation to six key environmental factors such as temperature, rainfall that impacts water availability, and soil cover that affects food availability for foraging chickens, says the study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Soybean expansion in South America doubled over past 20 years
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., Brazil and Argentina has found that land dedicated to growing soybeans in South America has doubled over the past 20 years. In their paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability, the group describes their approach to measuring soy growing areas in South America and what they learned about its impact on land use on the continent.
Soybean plants are a species of legume native to East Asia, but they are now grown as crops around the world. The beans are used for a variety of purposes, from animal feed to oil and tofu. In recent years, demand for the beans has grown steadily, as beef cattle production has increased dramatically in Asian markets. The increased demand has led to the need for land on which to grow the crops. South American farmers have taken advantage of that need by dedicating more land to growing the crop. This growth has worried climate scientists because prior research has suggested much of that new land comes from tearing down or burning rainforest. In this new effort, the researchers wondered just how much land has been dedicated to growing soy in South America as demand has grown. To find out, they conducted two kinds of studies.
NPR News
At Least 600 Tons Of Dead Fish Have Washed Up Along Tampa Bay's Shore
For beachgoers in the Tampa Bay area, the last few weeks have been anything but normal. Discolored, soupy waters have been lapping the shore, and the beaches are laden with dead, rotting sea life. […]
The microscopic algae that create red tides, known as Karenia brevis, are naturally found in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But intense blooms are rarely seen in the summer in the Tampa Bay area, according to Richard Stumpf, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Blooms typically begin in the fall and go away by January, but summer blooms in the area have occurred a handful of times in more recent history: 1995, 2005 and, most recently, 2018.
"This is not normal," Stumpf said. "The fact that it's been three years since the last one is not good."
Scientific American
Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
More than 1 billion sea creatures along the Vancouver coast were cooked to death during a record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, according to preliminary data.
The maritime massacre surprised even the experts. Christopher Harley, a professor at the University of British Columbia, said the death toll kept climbing as his team investigated area beaches.
“I was on a shore just as the tide was falling on the first of the three hot days. I was not thinking to myself, ‘All of these things will probably be dead by Monday afternoon,’” Harley said. “I didn’t realize that I would spend most of the next few weeks madly dashing around the province to document such unprecedented impacts.”
Thawing Permafrost Is Artificially Chilled to Stabilize Alaska Oil Pipeline
Thawing permafrost threatens to undermine the supports holding up an elevated section of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, jeopardizing the structural integrity of one of the world’s largest oil pipelines and raising the potential of an oil spill in a delicate and remote landscape where it would be extremely difficult to clean up. […]
In response, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources has approved the use of about 100 thermosyphons—tubes that suck heat out of permafrost—to keep the frozen slope in place and prevent further damage to the pipeline’s support structure.
Gizmodo
The latest megadrought alarm bell just went off in the West. The Bureau of Reclamation began emergency water releases from reservoirs upstream in the Colorado River this week in an effort to keep Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir, full enough to continue to generate hydroelectric power.
The manmade lake, which sits along the crucial Colorado River, has reached the lowest levels it’s been in decades due to extreme heat and the searing drought that’s gripped the region coupled with overuse. The reservoir is projected to hit a critical new low of (1,075 meters) by April 2022, just 25 feet (7.6 meters) above the level at which hydropower can no longer be generated. The Bureau of Reclamation said the emergency releases from reservoirs upstream—which includes the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming, the Blue Mesa Reservoir in Colorado, and the Navajo Reservoir in New Mexico—will continue until December and could last into next year.
Satellite Images Reveal the Shocking Toll the Heat Wave Had on Pacific Northwest Snow and Ice
The impacts of the record-breaking Pacific Northwest heat wave are still playing out across the region. Medical offices are still getting a handle on the loss of life, and firefighters are battling a number of massive wildfires across the region.
Now, satellite imagery makes clear another terrible impact: The region’s snow and ice took a massive hit. Hotter-than-normal temperatures on high accompanied blistering triple-digit heat in the valleys, and snowpack shriveled as a result. The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite passed over the region before and after the heat wave. The imagery from the Olympic Peninsula to the iconic volcanoes like Mount Hood and Rainier shows the disappearing act of the ice and snow.
Reports earlier this week indicate Mount Rainier lost 30% of its snowpack in the heat wave alone. Even before then, the 100 or so inches (254 centimeters) of snow on the ground at the Paradise weather station was in trouble. The heat wave basically just turbocharged the decline.
Ars Technica
Sea walls might just make floods someone else’s problem, study suggests
Protecting the coasts in the United States from the impacts of climate change comes with a hefty price tag. But new research shows that using sea walls to safeguard land can just make the rising tides a problem somewhere else.
The paper, published in PNAS, looks into the effect of erecting sea walls in one location and what that means for other places along the coast. Using the San Francisco Bay as a case study, it also assesses the economic impacts of flood scenarios in the nonprotected regions. According to the paper, defending individual parcels of the shore can increase flooding elsewhere by as much as 36 million cubic meters. This can result in $723 million in damages for a single flooding event in the most dire situations—costs can even exceed the damages that would have resulted otherwise in the protected region.
As the sea level around the world rises, humans are inevitably going to be putting up structures to protect themselves—and, in the case of the US, that includes 350,000 structures near the coast. But this can have detrimental effects on those places we choose not to protect.