Killer whales in grave danger





People really like killer whales — from the popularity of whale watching and movies like “Free Willy,” to the recent viral tale of a killer whale carrying its dead calf for over two weeks off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia.
That makes the possible population collapse of these iconic creatures even more distressing.
A paper in the Sept. 28 issue of Science says killer whales are at great risk, but not from climate change, loss of habitat or loss of their prey. It will be due to something that sounds very 1970s – PCB, or polychlorinated biphenyl. Another harmful human invention.



PCB Passed On Through Generations

PCBs are human-made chemicals used for making plastics, electronics, lubricants, heat transformers and other materials and technology. In the late 1970s, studies showed the harmful effects of PCB on humans and on wildlife, such as birds, otters and seals.
In 1979, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the chemicals. European agencies followed suit over the next decade.
But PCB is still being produced, and marine animals high on the food chain, like killer whales and sharks, are being harmed most by it. According to a 2017 paper, killer whale populations off the coast of the most industrialized parts of Europe are close to extinction.
PCB impairs the animals’ reproduction and immune system, and increases their cancer risk, says ecologist Jean-Pierre Desforges, co-author of the Science study.
In addition, PCBs are easily transmitted from mother to calf. “We are very worried about reproductive effects where these high levels of PCBs can impact the survival of killer whale offspring,” says Desforges, a postdoc at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Bleak Forecast for Some Whale Populations

Desforges and his team created a risk-assessment model to forecast the effects of PCB on killer whales over the next 100 years. It’s based on measurements of the chemicals in 351 killer whales from oceans around the world. The model simulates the chemical accumulation in whales and the level inherited by calves.
The North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans, which includes the coasts of Alaska, Iceland and Norway, have the lowest PCB risk. But the model suggests levels will continue to increase in those waters.
The highest risk is in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans near Brazil, Hawaii, Japan, the Strait of Gibraltar and the United Kingdom, to name a few. These areas are near industrialized regions, where the chemicals were used a lot before being banned or, in some cases, are still being used.
Diet also impacts PCB concentrations in the animals. In the Northern Pacific, Bigg’s killer whales prey on marine mammals, tuna and sharks, and they have sky-high PCB levels, the paper says. This is probably because the larger prey carry more PCB and the chemicals are transferred to the predator. In the same Northern Pacific waters, killer whales preying on fish low in the food chain have lower PCB levels.

Desforges says researchers need to study where PCBs are entering the environment, identify contaminated hotspots and clean them up. Also, more studies on the effects of the chemicals on killer whales are needed.
“Addressing the PCB issue will definitely not be straightforward because PCBs are so widespread and thus a global problem,” says Desforges.
This may be another species we will have to say goodbye to.

Climate Change has created extreme weather events this year

Dozens are feared dead on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi after a powerful earthquake triggered a tsunami that swept away homes, buildings and bridges on Friday evening.
Rescuers have scrambled to reach hard-hit areas after a 1.5-metre (5ft) wave thundered over the coastline, crashing into Palu, the capital of central Sulawesi province, a smaller city in Donggala and several other coastal settlements, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster agency.
Indonesia’s Metro TV channel quoted one hospital official as saying at least 30 people had died but this has not been confirmed. Nugroho said in a television interview there are “many victims”, with families reported missing. However, communications and power supplies have been disrupted, hampering efforts to get information.
Dozens of injured people were being treated in makeshift medical tents set up outdoors, TV images showed.
Early witness reports said the tsunami had claimed lives on Talise beach in Palu, a city that is home to about 350,000 people. “Many corpses are scattered on the beach and floating on the surface of the sea,” Nining, a resident, said she had identified victims amongst the debris of the coastal area, which has reportedly sustained severe damage.
TV images showed dozens of injured people being treated in makeshift medical tents set up outdoors in public places.

Search and rescue teams have been sent to hard-hit areas, Nugroho said on Saturday. On Friday he said military transport planes and helicopters would be deployed on Saturday, along with “all national potential”.
“There are reports that many buildings collapsed in the earthquake,” he said. “Residents panicked and scattered out of their homes.”
            
The shallow 7.5 magnitude tremor was more powerful than a series of quakes that killed hundreds on the Indonesian island of Lombok in July and August.
People living hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre reported feeling the massive shake, hours after a smaller jolt killed at least one person in the same part of the south-east Asian archipelago.
Dramatic video footage filmed from the top floor of a parking ramp in Palu, nearly 80km (50 miles) from the quake’s epicentre, showed waves of water bring down several buildings and inundate a large mosque.



The magnitude 7.5 earthquake on Friday was followed by numerous strong aftershocks, including one of magnitude 6.7.

MORE EXTREME WEATHER:
Six tornadoes create havoc in Canada

Last Friday six tornadoes touched down in Eastern Ontario. Gerald Cheng, a meteorologist, says that with the warm, humid temperatures, it was the perfect condition for a severe thunderstorm to develop.
 “Just because it’s hot and humid doesn’t mean there are thunderstorms, there has to be a trigger,” Cheng added. That trigger was the cold front that passed through. He added that with the winds going up in height and coming from different directions allowed for rotation, which caused the tornadoes. “Six touching down is extraordinary,” he said.
The last time there was a comparable event in Ontario was in 2009, Cheng said. That was when 18 tornadoes hit south of Toronto in the largest single-day tornado outbreak in Ontario and Canadian history.
“When thunderstorms do hit the area, you can seek shelter. That’s the first thing people should think about,” Cheng said. He added to always pay attention to Environment Canada alerts. He added that with the new alert ready system, it sends these alerts directly to your phone. It’s important, Cheng says, to take these alerts seriously.
Although Canada has been lucky in the past not to be troubled by many tornadoes, we are learning how to cope now that Climate change has visited extreme weather events upon us. The last decade has taught us some hard lessons: ice storms, wind storms, lightening storms, wildfires, floods
and now tornadoes. If it starts raining cats and dogs, I'm going to need a bigger umbrella.
 Love that global warming.

Climate & Cycles of civilization what to expect moving into 2025 : Peter Temple (685)

Knight Man

Climate scientists reveal their fears about the future

Crusader Jenny , Nanook & Knight Mika

As Science improves climate change forcast gets hotter

Knight Sha

By enforcing climate change denial, Trump puts us all in peril

Bob Richling carries Iris Darden as water from the Little River starts to seep into her home on Monday in Spring Lake, North Carolina. Flood waters from the cresting rivers inundated the area after the passing of Hurricane Florence. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
By  Jesse Jackson       09/17/2018 
North Carolina has been hit with a storm of biblical ferocity.

Florence has left at least 17 dead there, 500,000 without power, with flash flooding across the state from the coast to the western mountains. Landslides and infectious diseases are predicted to follow. North Carolina is not alone, of course.

We’ve witnessed the devastation wrought by Katrina in New Orleans, Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey, Hurricane Harvey in Houston and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Maria is now estimated to have taken 2,975 lives, nearly as many as died on Sept. 11, 2001.

As economics historian J. Bradford DeLong summarizes, the four storms — all in the past 15 years — are among the most damaging in U.S. history. No one storm can be attributed to any one cause. But repeated storms of greater force are the “predictable result” of catastrophic climate change, and they are a mild augury of what is likely to follow.

President Donald Trump has enforced climate denial in Washington. He has systematically sought to repeal even the inadequate steps the U.S. had taken to begin to address the problem. Last year he announced the U.S. was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.

He’s geared up to repeal President Barack Obama’s executive orders on energy, climate and gas mileage. He’s opening up more public lands to mining and drilling and weakening environmental restrictions on coal, oil and natural gas, including most alarmingly, restrictions on the release of methane gas from natural gas pipes.

 Web pages with climate change information have been removed or buried at the EPA and the Interior and Energy departments. The rest of the world vows to continue to deal with climate change, but with the wealthiest nation in the world scorning the effort, it is certain to be more inadequate than it already is.

Catastrophic climate change is a clear and present threat to our national security. The Pentagon realizes this. It is developing contingency plans for bases around the globe that will be threatened by rising waters and raging storms. Its intelligence agencies warn that climate change will be more destabilizing than terrorism across the developing world.

DeLong offers one snapshot of the threat. Two billion poor farmers toil in the six great river valleys of Asia. Their existence is dependent on the snow melt from the region’s high plateaus arriving at the right moment and in the right volume to support the crops on which the billions rely. Another billion depend on the monsoon arriving at the right time each year.

Now as the planet heats up, the sea levels rise, the polar ice caps melt, so too the snow melt will change dramatically, as will the monsoons and cyclones. The disruption will wreak havoc on billions, forcing dramatic migrations to who knows where. The same is predicted as Africa gets hotter and drier, and desertification continues to uproot long settled peoples.

The effects are already here, visible in the scorching heat experienced across the country, the fires in the West, the drought in the South and the storms in the East. We are seeing climate change with our own eyes. Yes, no one storm or heat wave can be directly attributed to global warming. But global warming guarantees that catastrophic weather events will get more frequent and more ferocious.

Some suggest it is too late. The carbon already in the atmosphere will take us beyond the warming levels that the international community suggested were manageable. We are headed into the unmanageable.

But denial is no answer. Continuing to do more of the same is simple madness. It is not too late to make the wholesale cuts need in greenhouse gas emissions. Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University notes: “It is not going off a cliff; it is like walking out into a minefield. So the argument that it is too late to do something would be like saying: ‘I’m just going to keep walking.’ That would be absurd.”

Trump’s chaos presidency is corrosive and divisive. His impulsive and uninformed decision-making is terrifying. Now on what surely is becoming the greatest threat to our security — indeed human existence, if not addressed — he and the Republican Congress that aids and abets him, are adding fuel to the fire.


Without vision, the Bible says, the people perish. Trump’s blind denial of the reality around us seems intent on demonstrating how true that is.

Thanx Jesse
Knight Mama

Old Stone Drought Warning Resurfaces in Europe: 'When You See Me, Cry'

By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | August 27, 2018 
One of the "hunger stones" exposed by the low level of water in the Elbe river is seen in Decin, Czech Republic.Credit: Petr David Josek/AP/REX/Shutterstock 
Old stones bearing ominous messages have resurfaced in a river in Central Europe, according to news reports.
Over the course of centuries, Europeans marked low water levels during droughts by carving lines and dates into boulders along the Elbe River, which runs from the Czech Republic into Germany. The idea was that if water levels dipped low enough to reveal an old carving, it would signal to locals that dry, hungry times — similar to those experienced in the marked year — were coming. Over a dozen of these "hunger stones" have reappeared in the Elbe this year, amid a record-setting European drought, the Associated Press reported Aug. 23. [7 Surprising Health Effects of Drought]
And the stones' warnings aren't wrong. Agence France-Presse reported that northern Europe's current drought has not only brought with it record-setting temperatures and wildfires but also significant threats to local food production. In Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, AFP reported, the grain harvest is expected to be down between 30 and 60 percent, depending on the region. England and France may also be significantly impacted. Farmers in northern Europe might have to "send much of their herds to slaughter due to a lack of feed," according to AFP.
While research indicates that climate change will exacerbate droughts in Europe — and make them more frequent around the world — these stones reveal how dangerous these sorts of events were when they occurred in previous centuries.
The oldest stone carving to emerge was carved in 1616 and is considered the oldest hydrologic landmark in Central Europe, according to the AP.
It "bears a chiseled inscription in German," the AP reported, "that says, 'when you see me, cry.'"
Originally published on Live Science
Thanx Rafi Leyzter
Crusader Jenny , Nanook & Mika

What do we do when the Science gets scary : Climate Change and the end of Civilizarion

Knight Jonny

Human Body Limit to Heat Stress from Abrupt Climate Change

Knight Sha

Plastic roads: India’s radical plan to use its garbage to build hiways and biways

 

In India, roads made from shredded plastic are proving a popular solution to tackling waste and extreme weather
Jambulingam Street, Chennai, is a local legend. The tar road in the bustling Nungambakkam area has weathered a major flood, several monsoons, recurring heat waves and a steady stream of cars, trucks and auto rickshaws without showing the usual signs of wear and tear. Built in 2002, it has not developed the mosaic of cracks, potholes or craters that typically make their appearance after it rains. Holding the road together is an unremarkable material: a cheap, polymer glue made from shredded waste plastic... Plastic shopping bags, plastic packaging, bottles, jars and other food containers.


Jambulingam Street was one of India’s first plastic roads . The environmentally conscious approach to road construction was developed in India around 15 years ago in response to the growing problem of plastic litter. As time wore on, polymer roads proved to be surprisingly durable, winning support among scientists and policymakers in India as well as neighboring countries like Bhutan. “The plastic tar roads have not developed any potholes, rutting, raveling or edge flaw, even though these roads are more than four years of age,” observed an early performance report by India’s Central Pollution Control Board. Today, there are more than 21,000 miles of plastic road in India.  Most are rural roads, but a small number have also been built in cities such as Chennai and Mumbai.

Waste used to pave roads


Adding flexible materials to strengthen tar roads is not a new idea. Commercially made polymer-modified asphalts first became popular in the 1970s in Europe. Now, North America claims 35% of the global market. Modified asphalts are made from virgin polymers and sometimes crumb rubber (ground tires). They are highly versatile. They are also expensive. Polymer roads in the US are made with asphalt that comes pre-mixed with a  high grade polymer.


The plastic tar roads of India are a frugal invention, made with a discarded, low-grade polymer. Every kilometer of this kind of road uses the equivalent of 1 million plastic bags, saving around one ton of asphalt and costing roughly 8% less than a conventional road. Dr R Vasudevan, a chemistry professor and dean at the Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai, came up with the idea through trial and error, sprinkling shredded plastic waste over hot gravel and coating the stones in a thin film of plastic. He then added the plastic-coated stones to molten tar, or asphalt. Plastic and tar bond well together because both are petroleum products. The process was patented in 2006. It will soon be used  on major roads and hiways and is expected to reduce construction costs  by 50%.


In India, plastic roads serve as a ready-made landfill for a certain kind of ubiquitous urban trash. Flimsy, single-use items like shopping bags and bubble packaging are the ideal raw material,  difficult to recycle, they are a menace, hogging space in garbage dumps, clogging city drains and even poisoning the air. Delhi’s air, in particular, has been called a “toxic pollutant punchbowl” partly due to contaminants from plastic-fueled street bonfires.


Last November, the Indian government announced that plastic roads would be the default method of construction for most city streets, part of a multibillion-dollar overhaul of the country’s roads and highways. Urban areas with more than 500,000 people are now required to construct roads using waste plastic. The project even has the blessing of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who has made “Clean India” a kind of personal crusade.
India’s road upgrade is long overdue. A recent road safety report by the World Health Organization (WHO) found that 17% of the world’s traffic fatalities occur in India, with crumbling roads partly responsible for the high death toll. In 2014, potholes alone caused more than 3000 deaths.
.

 

Dr R Vasudevan, a chemistry professor and dean at the Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai.

The Delhi-Meerut Expressway, which is currently under construction, may use unsegregated trash from one of the capital’s overflowing landfills to build its base and embankments. In an interview with the Times of India, India’s roads minister Nitin Gadkari said: “Delhi will get rid of these mounds of trash and we will get the material for laying base with little expense.”

In the long run, sloughed off particles of plastic from the roads may affect the surrounding soil. But

in the short run, the bigger challenge for plastic roads is execution. Tamil Nadu was the first state in India to actively develop a cottage industry around shredded plastic. Most plastic shredders are women who buy subsidized shredding machines and sell their finished product for a small profit. Job creation for waste pickers and small entrepreneurs is an added benefit of the roads.

It's a win/win situation for a country with billions of tons of plastic waste and a great need for good low maintenance roads. Friends, Recycle, Recycle, Recycle!

News Clip Linked Coal to Climate Change — 106 Years Ago Today

By Kimberly Hickok, Staff Writer | August 14, 2018 04:37pm ET 
A newspaper clip published Aug. 14, 1912, predicts that coal consumption would produce enough carbon dioxide to warm the climate.Credit: Fairfax Media/CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 NZ 
A note published in a New Zealand paper 106 years ago today (Aug. 14) predicted the Earth's temperature would rise because of 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide produced by coal consumption.
"The effect may be considerable in a few centuries," the article stated.

The clip was one of several one-paragraph stories in the "Science Notes and News" section of The Rodney and Otamatea Times, published Wednesday, Aug. 14, 1912. 

The paragraph seems to have been originally printed in the March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics as the caption for an image of a large coal factory. The image goes with a story titled "Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future," by Francis Molena. [Photographic Proof of Climate Change: Time-Lapse Images of Retreating Glaciers]

In the article, Molena described how carbon dioxide in the air is associated with warmer temperatures, and "since burning coal produces carbon dioxide, it may be inquired whether the enormous use of that fuel in modern times may be an important factor in filling the atmosphere with this substance, and consequently indirectly raising the temperature of the Earth."
When Molena's story was published, scientists had already been predicting the effects of coal combustion on climate for the past few decades. Researchers were studying the topic at least as early as 1882, as evidenced by H.A. Phillips' paper titled "Pollution of the Atmosphere," published that year in the journal Nature.

Jeff Nichols, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Quartz that he's found many examples of newspaper articles published between 1883 and 1912 that make predictions about how rising carbon dioxide levels alter the climate. The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Kansas City Star all published articles about rising carbon dioxide levels affecting the climate more than a hundred years ago, Quartz reported.
Carbon dioxide continues to make up 65 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, having increased by 90 percent between 1900 and 2010, according to estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As of 2014, the top carbon dioxide-producing regions were China, the United States, the European Union, India, the Russian Federation and Japan, according to the EPA.
Original article on Live Science.
Thanx  Kimberly Hickok
Knight Jonny C.

30 Years Ago, Humans Bungled the Best Chance to Stop Climate Change

 By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | Seiyrmber  10, 2018
Upsala Glacier, the third largest glacier in South America, has been thinning and retreating at a rapid rate during recent years — from 2006 to 2010, it receded 43.7 yards (40 meters) per year.Credit: Etienne Berthier, University of Toulouse 
NEW YORK — Could the current climate crisis have been averted? Humans may have squandered the best shot at doing so decades ago.

As the 1970s drew to a close, incontrovertible evidence already pointed to the dangers that accumulations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) — resulting from the burning of fossil fuels — posed to the planet. During a pivotal 10-year period, from 1979 to 1989, scientists, activists and government officials worldwide took important first steps to address excessive CO2 emissions and to enact policies that would head off the worst of these emissions' impact on the global climate, according to "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change," a single-article special issue of The New York Times Magazine, published online today (Aug. 1).

Over those 10 years, a window of opportunity opened that might have saved the planet. Efforts were launched on an international level to raise awareness of global warming, curb CO2 output and thereby stave off climate change's most dire impacts. But those efforts stumbled and stalled, and we are witnessing the devastating consequences now, writer Nathaniel Rich reported in the article. [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

t almost worked. At the time, the topic of climate change was not heavily politicized in the U.S. as it is today, Rich said here at a launch event for the article yesterday (July 31). Members of the Republican and Democratic parties supported developing strategies to limit CO2, and advocating for the environment was not seen through the same political lens as it is now, Rich explained.

Leaders came heartbreakingly close to succeeding. Climate change became part of national and international conversations, which culminated in global superpowers convening to restrict carbon emissions — an initiative that ultimately fell through.
"At the end of the decade, paralysis set in," Rich said at the event, adding that, in the years since, we've collectively moved from a period of apprehension about climate change to a period of reckoning.
"We've run up a bill, and now it's coming due," he said.
Evidence of how this prolonged inaction played out is presented alongside Rich's report in sobering images by photographer George Steinmetz. His bird's-eye-view photos and videos — captured primarily by drone-mounted cameras in locations around the world in 2017 — present grim scenes, such as monsoons in Bangladesh, the aftermath of wildfires in California and the capital of Mauritania partially swallowed by desert sand.
Individual weather incidents — such as heat waves, floods and powerful storms — themselves are not necessarily the results of a changing climate. Rather, the proof of climate change is in weather patterns, and we can see its fingerprints in more prolonged or more frequent heat waves and flooding events, extended periods of drought and more powerful storms over time.

Global initiatives such as the Paris climate agreement show some worldwide commitment to the issue — a gesture that President Donald Trump rejected when he withdrew the U.S. from the global coalition in July 2017. But after decades of stalling and inaction, our time to effect meaningful change while minimizing the cost to communities and habitats around the world is running perilously short. As Rich noted in the article, Melvin Calvin, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who died in 1997, warned of this when he testified before the Senate about climate change back in 1988, telling the assembled officials, "It is already later than you think."
Original article on Live Science.
Thanx Mindy  Weisberger
Knight Man

Global warming could be far worse than predicted, new study suggests

Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
Temperatures across the United States are up 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 30 years. In Salida, Colorado, residents have noticed the change through more lawn watering, increased air conditioning sales and bigger fires. (June 18) AP
Collapsing polar ice caps, a green Sahara Desert, a 20-foot sea-level rise. 

That's the potential future of Earth, a new study suggests, noting that global warming could be twice as warm as current climate models predict.

The rate of warming is also remarkable: “The changes we see today are much faster than anything encountered in Earth’s history. In terms of rate of change, we are in uncharted waters,” said study co-author Katrin Meissner of the University of New South Wales in Australia. 

This could mean the landmark Paris Climate Agreement – which seeks to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels – may not be enough to ward off catastrophe.
“Even with just 2 degrees of warming – and potentially just 1.5 degrees – significant impacts on the Earth system are profound,” said study co-author Alan Mix, a scientist from Oregon State University.
“We can expect that sea-level rise could become unstoppable for millennia, impacting much of the world’s population, infrastructure and economic activity,” Mix said.

In looking at Earth's past, scientists can predict what the future will look like. In the study, the researchers looked back at natural global warming periods over the past 3.5 million years and compared them to current man-made warming.

By combining a wide range of measurements from ice cores, sediment layers, fossil records, dating using atomic isotopes and many other established paleoclimate methods, the researchers pieced together the impact of those climatic changes.
Human-inflicted climate change is caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, which release heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the the atmosphere.

Study lead author Hubertus Fischer of the University of Bern in Switzerland and his team found that our current climate predictions may underestimate long-term warming by as much as a factor of two. 

Meissner said that "climate models appear to be trustworthy for small changes, such as for low-emission scenarios over short periods, say over the next few decades out to 2100. But as the change gets larger or more persistent ... it appears they underestimate climate change."

The research also revealed how large areas of the polar ice caps could collapse and significant changes to ecosystems could see the Sahara Desert become green and the edges of tropical forests turn into fire-dominated savanna.
However, Meissner said "we cannot comment on how far in the future these changes will occur."

Referring to the study findings, lead author Fischer said that without serious reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, there is "very little margin for error to meet the Paris targets.”
The study, which was conducted by dozens of researchers from 17 countries, was published last week in Nature Geoscience, a peer-reviewed British journal.

Thanx Doyle Rice
Knight Sha

Global Warming ! A Silent Message

Watch very closely ... Global Warming is sneaking up on us.

Knight Mama

Global warming could spur more and hungrier crop-eating bugs

By Seth Borenstein | Associated Press 
A European corn borer . A warmer world likely means more and hungrier insects chomping on crops and less food on dinner platyes , a study suggests . Frank Peairs / Colorado University / Burwood.org
WASHINGTON — A warmer world likely means more and hungrier insects chomping on crops and less food on dinner plates, a new study suggests.

Insects now consume about 10 percent of the globe’s food, but that will increase to 15 to 20 percent by the end of the century if climate change isn’t stopped, said study lead author Curtis Deutsch, a University of Washington climate scientist.

The study looked at the damage bugs like the European corn borer and the Asiatic rice borer could do as temperatures rise. It found that many of them will increase in number at key times for crops. The hotter weather will also speed up their metabolism so they’ll eat more, the researchers report in Thursday’s journal Science. Their predictions are based on computer simulations of bug and weather activity.

“There’s going to be a lot of crop loss, so there won’t be as much grain on the table,” said study co-author Scott Merrill, an ecology professor at the University of Vermont.

The researchers calculate additional losses of 53 million tons in wheat, rice and corn from hungry bugs if the temperature rises another 2.7 degrees from now. The study estimates that in that warmer scenario, American corn, wheat and rice losses from insects will jump by a third above current levels. Bug damage to Russia’s rice crop would jump sixfold. And nine countries — North Korea, Mongolia, Finland, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Bhutan, Armenia, the United Kingdom and Denmark — would see at least a doubling of wheat loss from bugs.

If there are no drastic cuts in emissions from coal, oil and gas, the world will reach that 2.7 degree mark and extra insect loss around 2050 — give or take a decade or so, Deutsch said.

“In the history of agriculture, one of the most important themes is the continuing struggle between farmers and insects,” said Stanford University environmental institute director Chris Field, who wasn’t part of the study. “Based on this study, climate change tilts the balance in the insects’ favor.”

The Russian wheat aphid is a good example because “the populations are absolutely insane … they are born pregnant,” Merrill said. “If you increase the temperature a couple degrees you can see the population growing much faster.”

The researchers acknowledge that richer countries may be able to reduce projected losses with insecticides and other pest-fighting techniques.

The study comes as insect experts across the globe worry about declining numbers of flying insects, especially beneficial pollinators like bees and moths. But while many insects may be declining for a variety of reasons those associated with agriculture crops — especially invasive species — seem to be doing better, said University of Delaware’s Doug Tallamy, who wasn’t part of the study, which he considered too broad.

University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum, called the study distinctive.

“Problem insects are expanding their ranges with climate warming,” she said in an email.

Another study in the journal looked at how the world’s vegetation changed since the last ice age and applied that concept to current warming. The study logged massive changes to Earth’s landscape around the globe over more than 14,000 years from the last glacier period.

The same magnitude of warming — more than 7 degrees — is projected to occur with human-caused climate change, but may be in only 100 years or so, said study co-author Jonathan Overpeck, a University of Michigan climate scientist.

“It really paints a picture that is a lot more dire,” Overpeck said, calling it “vegetation chaos.”


Thanx  Seth Borenstein
Crusader Jenny , Nanook & Mika

Rise for the Climate Marches...Worldwide

The "Rise for the Climate" march took place in cities around the world

Environmentalists have held protests around the world demanding stepped up measures against climate change, ahead of a summit in California next week. Politicians, business leaders and celebrities will attend the Global Climate Action Summit, whose sponsors include the UN, Facebook and Google.

Thousands protested in Paris, days after France's environment minister quit over perceived policy failures. The demonstrations have been organized by New York-based group 350.org.
In all, more than 800 protests are being held in 90 countries.
On Friday, Pacific island nations declared climate change to be the "single biggest threat" they face.
Saturday's demonstrations started in Sydney harbour.



The protests began on Saturday with tall ships sailing into Sydney Harbour in Australia.

 

Australia remains heavily reliant on coal to generate electricity, but activists say the country must join an international push towards renewable energy.

 

Demonstrators in Bangkok highlighted their opposition to US President Donald Trump

 

In Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, environmentalists demonstrated outside a building where climate experts were discussing the 2015 Paris accord. The agreement commits nearly 200 countries to keeping rising global temperatures "well below" 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Last year President Donald Trump announced the US would pull out of the deal, but this will not become effective until 2020 at the earliest.

Protests against the Trump administration's environmental policies took place in cities across the US.

 

In Manila protesters called for renewables to replace "dirty" energy

 

Environmental groups accuse the US of using UN talks to reduce the contributions of developed countries to the Green Climate Fund, which was set up to help countries deal with the effects of global warming.

 

In Peru's capital Lima, activists gathered to protest against fossil fuel consumption

 

In Manila in the Philippines, demonstrators demanded an end to the funding of fossil fuel companies and more investment in renewable energies.

  

    Germany's Tagebau Hambach mine has led to the destruction of large forests

 

German environmentalists protested outside the open-pit Tagebau Hambach coal mine in the west of the country.
In France, where popular Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot quit in frustration last week, rallies were held in several cities, including Paris, Strasbourg and Marseille. Official estimates said 18,000 marched in Paris, but the demonstrations organizers said 50,000 attended.

A "march for the climate" took place in the French capital

 
Citizens gathering around the world have the power to drive change for our children's future," the former minister said (in French) on his Twitter account.

 

 

Estimates say between 18,000 and 50,000 people attended the Paris demonstration

 

 

In Marseille, far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon attended a similar demonstration

 Protests against the Trump administration's environmental policies took place in cities across the US.

Demonstrations took place across the US

At a protest in downtown San Francisco, signs made to look like solar panels were placed on pavements near the protest.

 

Protesters in the US used a number of slogans to voice their opposition to Mr Trump's many policies aside from his climate policy, or lack thereof.

 

 

Giant Barrier to clear Pacific plastic



Deadline for climate action: Act strongly before 2035 to keep warming below 2°C

August 30, 2018      Source:  European Geosciences Union
If governments don't act decisively by 2035 to fight climate change, humanity could cross a point of no return after which limiting global warming below 2°C in 2100 will be unlikely, according to a new study. The research also shows the deadline to limit warming to 1.5°C has already passed, unless radical climate action is taken. 

These plots from the study show the probability of staying below the 1.5°C (left) or 2°C (right) global-average temperature increases, set by the Paris Agreement. The coloured curves represent the various emission-reduction scenarios, i.e., how quickly we would be able to reduce emissions by using more renewable energy: m1 (red) indicates a scenario where we would be able to increase the share of renewable energy by 1% each year, m2 (green) one where the share of renewable energy would increase by 2% each year, and m3 (orange) one where the share of renewable energy would increase by 5% each year. The top and bottom panels show the cases with and without strong negative emissions, respectively. The 'point of no return' for a given emission-reductions policy is given by the point in time where the probability drops below a chosen threshold. The default threshold of two-thirds (67%) is dashed. The unachievable region is bounded by the extreme mitigation scenario: one where we would be able to completely stop greenhouse gas emissions instantly. 
Credit: Aengenheyster et al., Earth System Dynamics, 2018, Creative Commons Attribution License 

If governments don't act decisively by 2035 to fight climate change, humanity could cross a point of no return after which limiting global warming below 2°C in 2100 will be unlikely, according to a new study by scientists in the UK and the Netherlands. The research also shows the deadline to limit warming to 1.5°C has already passed, unless radical climate action is taken. The study is published today in the European Geosciences Union journal Earth System Dynamics.

"In our study we show that there are strict deadlines for taking climate action," says Henk Dijkstra, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and one of the study authors. "We conclude that very little time is left before the Paris targets [to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C] become infeasible even given drastic emission reduction strategies."

Dijkstra and his colleagues at the Utrecht Centre for Complex Systems Studies and at Oxford University, UK, wanted to find the 'point of no return' or deadline for climate action: the latest possible year to start strongly cutting greenhouse-gas emissions before it's too late to avoid dangerous climate change. "The 'point of no return' concept has the advantage of containing time information, which we consider very useful to inform the debate on the urgency of taking climate action," says Matthias Aengenheyster, a doctoral researcher at Oxford University and the study's lead author.

Using information from climate models, the team determined the deadline for starting climate action to keep global warming likely (with a probability of 67%) below 2°C in 2100, depending on how fast humanity can reduce emissions by using more renewable energy. Assuming we could increase the share of renewable energy by 2% every year, we would have to start doing so before 2035 (the point of no return). If we were to reduce emissions at a faster rate, by increasing the share of renewable energy by 5% each year, we would buy another 10 years.
The researchers caution, however, that even their more modest climate-action scenario is quite ambitious. "The share of renewable energy refers to the share of all energy consumed. This has risen over the course of over two decades from almost nothing in the late nineties to 3.6% in 2017 according to the BP 

Statistical Review, so the [yearly] increases in the share of renewables have been very small," says Rick van der Ploeg, a professor of economics at Oxford University, who also took part in the Earth System Dynamics study. "Considering the slow speed of large-scale political and economic transformations, decisive action is still warranted as the modest-action scenario is a large change compared to current emission rates," he adds.

To likely limit global warming to 1.5°C in 2100, humanity would have to take strong climate action much sooner. We would only have until 2027 to start if we could increase the share of renewables at a rate of 5% a year. We have already passed the point of no return for the more modest climate-action scenario where the share of renewables increases by 2% each year. In this scenario, unless we remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it is no longer possible to achieve the 1.5°C target in 2100 with a probability of 67%.

Removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, by using 'negative emissions' technology, could buy us a bit more time, according to the study. But even with strong negative emissions, humanity would only be able to delay the point of no return by 6 to 10 years.
"We hope that 'having a deadline' may stimulate the sense of urgency to act for politicians and policy makers," concludes Dijkstra. "Very little time is left to achieve the Paris targets."


Story Source:   Materials provided by European Geosciences Union. Note: Content may edited for style and length .

Knight  Sha C.

DEMOCRATS’ LATEST GLOBAL WARMING TALKING POINTS ARE STRAIGHT FROM THE OBAMA PLAYBOOK

Michael Bastasch | Energy Editor
 Democratic talking points against the Affordable Clean Energy rule draw from a 2009 Obama administration memo.
The memo called for connecting global warming to “personal worries,” like asthma and lung disease.
Politicians are using this formula to claim people will die if Obama’s legacy is repealed.
When the Trump administration rolled back Obama-era climate regulations, Democratic talking points emphasized the potential public health impacts of pollution over global warming.

It should be expected, too. Arguments against the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule were pre-written years ago in a memo circulated by President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“Time after time, the Trump Administration has sold out our children’s health to enrich special interests and big polluters pushing their toxic agenda,” Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement that only mentioned the “climate” once.

“This rule is a brazen special interest handout that poisons families’ health today, and threatens their security and well-being for decades to come by accelerating the climate crisis,” Pelosi said.

California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris mentioned global warming, but ended her statement with the claim that repealing Obama-era regulations “could cause hundreds of premature deaths each year due to increased air pollution.”

Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee labeled President Donald Trump an “unindicted co-conspirator” in estimated future air pollution deaths that may never happen. (RELATED: Federal Data Supports A Key Justification For Rolling Back Obama-Era Climate Rules)

“And if you want to know why this is a terrible idea take a look out your window because we are choking on dirty air, and he would give us dirtier air to breathe,” Inslee said Wednesday.

Democrats and environmentalists have been pointing to the potential public health consequences of global warming for years, but the genesis of that argument stems from an EPA memo circulated among staff in the early days of the Obama administration.

“Most Americans will never see a polar ice cap, nor will most have the chance to see a polar bear in its natural habitat,” reads a memo circulated among top EPA officials in March 2009, just months after Obama took office.

“Therefore, it is easy to detach from the seriousness of this issue. Unfortunately, climate change in the abstract is an increasingly — and consistently — unpersuasive argument to make,” reads the memo.

“There will be many opportunities to discuss climate-related efforts this year. As we do so, we must allow the human health argument to take center stage,” reads the memo.

And that’s what the Obama EPA did. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy routinely claimed that regulations to address carbon dioxide emissions would prevent minority children from getting asthma.

McCarthy appeared Monday on MSNBC to protest the Trump EPA’s ACE rule, saying it was part of a plot to take “away our public health protections.” ACE replaced the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which aimed to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

It was a climate regulation that was expected to have no measurable impact on future global warming, even by McCarthy’s own admission. So, they needed to highlight public health concerns to justify a rule estimated to cost more than $8 billion.

The memo also encouraged Obama administration officials to use people’s children to build up support carbon-cutting policies.

“This justifies our work at the most base level,” the memo reads. “By revitalizing our own Children’s Health Office, leading the global charge on this issue, and highlighting the children’s health dimension to all of our major initiatives — we will also make this issue real for many Americans who otherwise would oppose many of our regulatory actions.”

And that’s of course what Democrats and environmentalists are doing now.

“Trump’s allegiance is clear — he’s willing to pollute our air and undermine families’ health to play the hero for a few coal industry executives,” Janet Redman, a Greenpeace campaigner, said in a statement.

Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin said “our children will have to reckon with the steep environmental costs” with repealing the Clean Power Plan.

Senator Ben Cardin

      ✔
@SenatorCardin
 Scrapping the #CleanPowerPlan represents yet another attack on public health. More Americans will develop health conditions, the U.S. economy will fall behind as other nations outpace us on renewable energy, and our children will have to reckon with the steep environmental costs.

NPR Politics
✔
@nprpolitics
#Breaking: The Trump administration has unveiled a proposal to dramatically weaken former President Obama's Clean Power Plan by allowing states to set their own regulations for coal-fired power plant emissions. https://n.pr/2nSRCVw
Thanx   Michael Bastasch /Energy Editor

Knight  Jonny C.

Mysterious deep sea creatures with 'super powers'... may be endangered

                  

 

  A vent system belching hot water and surrounded by tubeworms  

              

Maggie Georgieva is turning a jar of preservative around in her hands. "This is it," she says. "This is 'The Hoff' - the famous yeti crab with a hairy chest," referring to the object suspended in alcohol.

Most of us would be hard pressed to name a recently discovered creature from the deep, and this animal may even be the only one that triggers any sort of recognition.
The Hoff made headlines in 2012 after being spotted living 2,000m down in a volcanic region of the Southern Ocean.
A novel species, the researchers who found it joked that the crustacean's fluffy appearance had something in common with a certain American movie star. The nickname stuck.

 

 

Hoff crab

Of course, The Hoff eventually got a proper title and description. It's correctly called Kiwa tyleri. And, as is customary, reference examples were lodged at the Natural History Museum in London, which is how a specimen comes to be in the hands of Dr Georgieva.

She's fascinated by hydrothermal vents. These are volcanic systems found along mid-ocean ridges - places where new sea-floor is created by the upwelling of magma.
In some locations, water can get drawn through cracks in the hot rock and become loaded with dissolved metals and other chemicals, before then being ejected back into the ocean. Specialised bacteria are able to exploit these hot fluids (up to 400C), to provide the energy foundation for a beautiful and bizarre collection of more complex organisms.
The Hoff, for example, "farms" the bacteria on its hairy chest. Comb-like mouthparts scrape up the microbes into a meal.

               

Tube Worms

Dr Georgieva has another jar in her collection of what are known as tubeworms.
These do symbiosis in a slightly different way. The animals have no mouth parts, no stomach and no gut. Instead, they possess an organ called a trophosome which acts as a kind of shelter for the bacteria. The microbes pay their rent to the worms in nutrients.

Yet another jar contains a little shrimp, Rimicaris. It nurtures the bacteria under its shelly hood, or carapace. Rimicaris will swarm around vents in vast numbers. Thousands per square metre.
The shrimp needs to keep its farm of microbes in the optimum waters - close enough to make use of the scalding fluids and their chemical bounty, but not so close that there's a risk of getting cooked.

Rimicaris will swarm in vast numbers

Rimicaris has no eyes, just an "eye-spot" - a concentrated patch of the light-sensitive pigment rhodopsin on its back. The thinking is it can use this feature to detect thermal radiation.

But this cliff-edge existence is nothing compared with the peril faced by the fourth creature in Dr Georgieva's vent collection - the Pompeii worm.
It builds paper-thin tubes on the sides of the "chimney" structures where the fluids emerge. Temperatures inside these dens can top 80C. "Pompeii" seems an apt name and the worm uses a thick blanket of bacteria to help insulate it from harm.
"The remarkable thing about hydrothermal vents is that they can produce these unique and strange adaptations in animals," says Dr Georgieva. "We're trying to get an idea of how quickly animals can adapt to these environments. The adaptations tend to be related to getting symbionts and dealing with the harsh conditions, obviously.
"In order to get symbionts, one thing you have to do is make changes to your immune system - which you might expect because there'll be some bacteria you want to let in but others that you don't."

 

Pompeii Worm

One interesting question is how some of the creatures have spread so far around the globe.

Vents are nutrient-rich oases in what is otherwise a resource-poor environment thousands of metres down from the sunlit surface of the ocean. And yet the likes of The Hoff and its five yeti-crab cousins have managed to reach widely separated volcanic ridges across the Southern Hemisphere.

Their last common ancestor probably lived 30-40 million years ago in the eastern Pacific. What we see today is the result of successful colonisations of vents by dispersed larvae. (Females release mini-Hoffs in big numbers to drift through the water column, some potentially making it to the next vent system).

It's all very precarious, to say the least, because vent systems are patchy. What is more, they will switch on and off through time, and when one dies so do all the local animals. Somehow a species must inhabit multiple locations - multiple stepping stones along a ridge - so that if one foothold is temporarily lost, the overall population will remains robust.

Their last common ancestor probably lived 30-40 million years ago in the eastern Pacific. What we see today is the result of successful colonisations of vents by dispersed larvae. (Females release mini-Hoffs in big numbers to drift through the water column, some potentially making it to the next vent system).

It's all very precarious, to say the least, because vent systems are patchy. What is more, they will switch on and off through time, and when one dies so do all the local animals. Somehow a species must inhabit multiple locations - multiple stepping stones along a ridge - so that if one foothold is temporarily lost, the overall population will remains robust.

 

 The Hoff is one of six yeti crab species

It's like a game of Whac-A-Mole, says yeti crab expert Nicolai Roterman from Oxford University. Successful dispersion ensures a species can pop back up in a new location. But the worry now is that certain human activities might soon load the game in favour of extinction by widening the gap between the places where a species could re-emerge.

It is one of the dangers posed by the proposed mining of metals at hydrothermal vents, believes Dr Roterman.
"The critical thing is if you start ploughing through and bulldozing hydrothermal vents, this human activity effectively simulates what is already happening naturally. It's then possible you could get to a situation where a meta-population simply collapses because it can't be sustained anymore."

The United Nations is meeting this week to begin discussions on the formulation of a treaty that would regulate certain activities on high seas - deep-sea mining among them. I hope they come up with a treaty that works. It is our trust, our charge, to preserve and nurture all the species on earth...even the mysterious species on the bottom of the ocean that we rarely see.