Collapse

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/37059204

Lisa Hendrickson is almost out of sand.

Hendrickson is the mayor of Redington Shores, Florida, a well-heeled beach town in Pinellas County. Her town occupies a small section of a razor-thin barrier island that stretches down the western side of the sprawling Tampa Bay metro area, dividing cities like Tampa and St. Petersburg from the Gulf of Mexico. Many of her constituents have an uninterrupted view of the ocean.

The town’s only protection from the Gulf of Mexico’s increasingly erratic storms is a pristine beach that draws millions of tourists every year — but that beach is disappearing fast. A series of storms, culminating in last fall’s Hurricane Idalia, have eroded most of the sand that protects Redington Shores and the towns around it, leaving residents just one big wave away from water overtaking their homes.

Dr. Hansen has published a new communiqué.

If you appreciate his work, you may consider supporting CSAS.

(It's a little worrisome that research of this importance relies on private donations, isn't it?)

Abstract

Efforts to make food systems more sustainable have emphasized reducing adverse environmental impacts of agriculture. In contrast, chemical and biological processes that could produce food without agriculture have received comparatively little attention or resources. Although there is a possibility that someday a wide array of attractive foods could be produced chemosynthetically, here we show that dietary fats could be synthesized with <0.8 g CO2-eq kcal−1, which is much less than the >1.5 g CO2-eq kcal−1 now emitted to produce palm oil in Brazil or Indonesia. Although scaling up such synthesis could disrupt agricultural economies and depend on consumer acceptance, the enormous potential reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as well as in land and water use represent a realistic possibility for mitigating the environmental footprint of agriculture over the coming decade.

Millions of Americans in southeast Texas endured brutally hot conditions on Tuesday without the relief of air conditioning after deadly Tropical Storm Beryl knocked out power to a large portion of the region. Scorching heat also baked much of the Western U.S. and Canada, raising the risk of wildfires.

About 2 million Texas homes and businesses were without electricity, according to Poweroutage.us, as temperatures were reaching above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 C) at midday on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said.

"Without power across much of Southeast Texas in the wake of Beryl, no air conditioning could make for dangerous conditions," the service said.

The heat wave has also sent temperatures soaring across much of western Canada, increasing the risk of wildfires, said Armel Castellan, a meteorologist at Environment Canada.

The federal weather agency issued heat warnings on Tuesday for parts of the Pacific coast province of British Columbia, the main oil-producing province of Alberta, and Saskatchewan in the Canadian prairies.

There were 59 forest fires burning in Alberta and 97 in British Columbia as of Tuesday.

The British Columbia village of Lytton, where 90% of structures burned down in a wildfire in 2021, was the hottest place in Canada at about 2 p.m. (2100 GMT) at 39 C (102 F).

Abstract

Long-distance passenger travel has received rather sparse attention for decarbonization. Here we characterize the long-distance travel pattern in England and explore its importance on carbon emissions from and decarbonization of passenger travel. We find that only 2.7% of a person’s trips are for long distance travel (>50 miles one-way), but they account for 61.3% of the miles and 69.3% of the greenhouse gas (CO2 equivalent) emissions from passenger travel, highlighting its importance for decarbonizing passenger transport. Long-distance travel per person has also been increasing over time, trending in the opposite direction to shorter-distance travel. Flying for leisure and social purposes are the largest contributors to long distance miles and emissions, and these miles are also increasing. Overall, per capita travel emissions have started decreasing slowly from 2007, but are still higher than in 1997. We propose a new metric—emissions reduction sensitivity (% emission reduced/% trips altered)—to understand the efficiency of travel demand related initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Long-distance travel—especially flying—can offer orders of magnitude larger emissions reduction sensitivity compared with urban travel, which suggests that a proportionate policy approach is necessary.

Lucy Ray has one word to describe how most fields of corn and hay an hour east of Atlanta in Morgan County look right now: "crispy."

Weeks of above-normal temperatures with little rain has turned lawns brown around metro Atlanta, but the extremely hot, dry conditions are causing more serious problems on some Georgia farms, said Ray, a University of Georgia agriculture and natural resources agent.

The problem appears to be most acute for corn and animal forage crops in the northern half the state.

While many South Georgia farms have access to groundwater wells drilled into the Floridan aquifer to irrigate, those north of the vast coastal plain are generally more reliant on surface water and rainfall to quench their fields' thirst. And when little rain falls, as has been the case for several weeks, the consequences can be dire.

Justin Williams, the co-owner and manager of WDairy LLC in Madison, about 60 miles east of downtown Atlanta, said his family-run operation grows rye grass, alfalfa and corn to feed their 1,750 dairy cows. But only about one-third of his farmland is under irrigation.

The rest, mostly corn, is at the mercy of what falls from the sky. Lately, he said rain has been nearly nonexistent, calling the recent hot and dry spell something he's "never quite experienced before."

"We rely on Mother Nature, but this year, those acres are not going to offer a productive crop, to say the least," Williams said.

Before parts of Atlanta saw afternoon showers on Thursday, the city had received less than an inch of rain so far this month, according to NWS data, almost three inches less than the June average. Athens has not been much wetter, with only an inch and a half precipitation to date in June.

At the same time, brutal temperatures have sucked moisture from the soil.

Abstract

Lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) are used globally as a key component of clean and sustainable energy infrastructure, and emerging LiB technologies have incorporated a class of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) known as bis-perfluoroalkyl sulfonimides (bis-FASIs). PFAS are recognized internationally as recalcitrant contaminants, a subset of which are known to be mobile and toxic, but little is known about environmental impacts of bis-FASIs released during LiB manufacture, use, and disposal. Here we demonstrate that environmental concentrations proximal to manufacturers, ecotoxicity, and treatability of bis-FASIs are comparable to PFAS such as perfluorooctanoic acid that are now prohibited and highly regulated worldwide, and we confirm the clean energy sector as an unrecognized and potentially growing source of international PFAS release. Results underscore that environmental impacts of clean energy infrastructure merit scrutiny to ensure that reduced CO2 emissions are not achieved at the expense of increasing global releases of persistent organic pollutants.

Abstract

The Younger Dryas (YD) cold reversal interrupts the warming climate of the deglaciation with global climatic impacts. The sudden cooling is typically linked to an abrupt slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in response to meltwater discharges from ice sheets. However, inconsistencies regarding the YD-response of European summer temperatures have cast doubt whether the concept provides a sufficient explanation. Here we present results from a high-resolution global climate simulation together with a new July temperature compilation based on plant indicator species and show that European summers remain warm during the YD. Our climate simulation provides robust physical evidence that atmospheric blocking of cold westerly winds over Fennoscandia is a key mechanism counteracting the cooling impact of an AMOC-slowdown during summer. Despite the persistence of short warm summers, the YD is dominated by a shift to a continental climate with extreme winter to spring cooling and short growing seasons.

In Jordan’s cities, green tanker trucks supplying water are a common sight. The average Jordanian only receives one and a half days of access to piped water per week. When taps run dry, citizens and business owners pick up the phone to order a water delivery to fill their rooftop or basement storage tanks.

These trucks are usually not sent by the local water utility, however. Rather, they are operated by individual vendors who source their water from private wells with a license to sell drinking water or, increasingly, without one. This is the story of the rise of illegal water markets in the Middle East, as the climate crisis leads to more intense and frequent droughts.

When the government struggles to supply enough water

Water delivery via road is increasingly relevant in major cities worldwide. In parts of the world, urban water networks have deteriorated to such a degree that 1 billion people already face frequent public water supply interruptions. This has led to a proliferation of informal water markets. In many water-scarce countries, truck drivers, well owners, or both operate without a license to evade charges and try to obscure their activities. Whether these markets alleviate or exacerbate water stress is a question research has yet to answer.

Abstract

Across the last ~50,000 years (the late Quaternary) terrestrial vertebrate faunas have experienced severe losses of large species (megafauna), with most extinctions occurring in the Late Pleistocene and Early to Middle Holocene. Debate on the causes has been ongoing for over 200 years, intensifying from the 1960s onward. Here, we outline criteria that any causal hypothesis needs to account for. Importantly, this extinction event is unique relative to other Cenozoic (the last 66 million years) extinctions in its strong size bias. For example, only 11 out of 57 species of megaherbivores (body mass ≥1,000 kg) survived to the present. In addition to mammalian megafauna, certain other groups also experienced substantial extinctions, mainly large non-mammalian vertebrates and smaller but megafauna-associated taxa. Further, extinction severity and dates varied among continents, but severely affected all biomes, from the Arctic to the tropics. We synthesise the evidence for and against climatic or modern human (Homo sapiens) causation, the only existing tenable hypotheses. Our review shows that there is little support for any major influence of climate, neither in global extinction patterns nor in fine-scale spatiotemporal and mechanistic evidence. Conversely, there is strong and increasing support for human pressures as the key driver of these extinctions, with emerging evidence for an initial onset linked to pre-sapiens hominins prior to the Late Pleistocene. Subsequently, we synthesize the evidence for ecosystem consequences of megafauna extinctions and discuss the implications for conservation and restoration. A broad range of evidence indicates that the megafauna extinctions have elicited profound changes to ecosystem structure and functioning. The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions thereby represent an early, large-scale human-driven environmental transformation, constituting a progenitor of the Anthropocene, where humans are now a major player in planetary functioning. Finally, we conclude that megafauna restoration via trophic rewilding can be expected to have positive effects on biodiversity across varied Anthropocene settings.

China is facing hotter and longer heatwaves and more frequent and unpredictable heavy rain as a result of climate change, the weather bureau warned on Thursday, as the world's second-biggest economy braces for another scorching summer.

In its annual climate "Blue Book", the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) warned that maximum temperatures across the country could rise by 1.7-2.8 degrees Celsius within 30 years, with eastern China and the northwestern region of Xinjiang set to suffer the most.

China describes itself as one of the world's most climate-vulnerable countries, and it is coming under increasing pressure to adapt to rapidly changing weather patterns and sea levels that are rising faster than the global average.

"China is a region that is sensitive to global climate change, a region where the impact will be significant," said Yuan Jiashuang, vice-director of the CMA's National Climate Centre, at a briefing.

She warned that if emissions remained high, extreme heat events expected to occur once every fifty years in China could happen every other year by the end of the century, and rainfall could double and become more unpredictable.

The weather bureau said on Thursday that it expects temperatures in most areas across China to be relatively high over the next few months, signalling a second consecutive summer of extreme heat.

"The weather is going to be different from previous years and there is more extreme weather now," said Chen Yuhan, a resident of China's commercial hub Shanghai, which saw above-38 Celsius (100.4 Fahrenheit) temperatures on Thursday.

Prolonged heatwave may damage rice, cotton crops

China's weather bureau warned on Thursday that a prolonged heatwave forecast in the country's eastern, central and southern regions in July may hit production of rice and cotton, as extreme weather continues to threaten its food production.

"It is necessary to guard against the risk of yield reduction of cotton, early rice and late rice caused by high temperature and heat damage," Jia Xiaolong, the CMA's deputy director, said at a briefing. Summer temperatures in regions including Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Gansu and Ningxia are expected to be 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, the CMA said.

China is facing hotter and longer heatwaves, as well as more frequent and unpredictable heavy rain as a result of climate change, the weather bureau warned.

Record-breaking temperatures last month have already broiled key grain producing provinces in the northwest and east, forcing corn farmers to delay planting, while torrential rain in other regions flooded soybean and rice fields.

Extreme weather is hurting developing crops globally as the impact of climate change intensifies, with vast swathes of farmland in China, Russia, India and the United States experiencing extremely hot conditions and below-normal rainfall, squeezing world supplies and pushing prices higher.