Rare white squirrel

 



Go! Go! Greta

 

 

Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg on Monday opened the United Nations Climate Action Summit with an angry condemnation of world leaders for failing to take strong measures to combat climate change.

Thunberg, visibly emotional, said in shaky but stern remarks at the opening of the summit that the generations that have polluted the most have burdened her and her generation with the extreme impacts of climate change.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you," she said.

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words," Thunberg said.

Days after millions of young people took to the streets worldwide to demand emergency action on climate change, leaders gathered for the annual United Nations General Assembly were to try to inject fresh momentum into stalling efforts to curb carbon emissions.

 

 Greta Thunberg is a hero. She has taken on the world leaders single-handedly. She has shamed them and made their attitude seem ignorant, crass and downright criminal. She may stir enough passion and conscience to save this planet. Bless her.

Sea Turtles are gravely endangered

 

WWF is working to save habitats of species across the globe and to stop illegal wildlife trade. Please visit WWFnow.org to become a monthly donor today. Monthly donors provide resources we need to support WWF’s global conservation work.


The 'Blob' is back

 

A gigantic Heat Anomaly Brewing in The Pacific Threatens a Return of 'The Blob'. The menacing heatwave  in the Pacific Ocean has scientists worrying that the deadly 'Blob' of 2015 is back.

Roughly five years ago, a huge patch of unusually warm ocean water appeared off the coast of North America, stretching from Mexico's Baja California Peninsula all the way up to Alaska. It was nicknamed the Blob, after a horror film monster that consumes everything in sight. The heatwave, which lasted for several years, was an equally indiscriminate killer.
 

According to estimates, during this time the southern coast of Alaska lost more than 100 million Pacific cod. Thousands of seabirds were found washed up on the shore, and about half a million were decimated in total. In one year alone, populations of humpback whales dropped by 30 percent. Salmon, sea lions, krill, and other marine animals also vanished in astonishing numbers, as toxic algae bloomed.
The Blob caused ecosystems and industries alike immense losses - so much so that researchers from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are now closely tracking these events.

The current heatwave, they say, has not only popped up in the same area, it's grown in much the same way and is almost the same size. Side by side, a comparison of both their early stages is ominous. Like the blob, the current marine heat wave emerged only a few months ago, as the winds that cool the ocean's surface began to die down.
"Given the magnitude of what we saw last time, we want to know if this evolves on a similar path," says marine ecologist Chris Harvey from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

 

 

Researchers tracking the phenomenon say the patch of ocean water is now roughly five degrees Fahrenheit above normal - just a degree or two less than temperatures during the last Blob.
Deep upwells of cold water have kept the heat wave from reaching the shore, but officials predict the event will likely have an impact on coastal ecosystems sometime this Northern Hemisphere fall.

"It's on a trajectory to be as strong as the prior event," says Andrew Leising, who developed a system for tracking and measuring marine heatwaves for NOAA.
"Already, on its own, it is one of the most significant events that we've seen."
In fact, according to records, which go back to 1981, it's the second largest marine heatwave ever recorded. And it comes just years after the last one.
Still, not all heatwaves are the same and these blobs are hard to predict. As quickly as they can emerge, they can also dissipate. Scientists say there's still a chance that weather patterns will change and that the current patch of warm water will cool down, but they're keeping their eye on it.
Research suggests that blobs and similar events are becoming more common worldwide. Earth's oceans are being heated at an unprecedented rate due to climate change.

For now, researchers at NOAA are focused on tracking, predicting and mitigating the effects of marine heatwaves. During the last Blob, for instance, many whales died by getting trapped in fishing nets, as the animals moved closer to shore to avoid the warmer waters.
If fisheries and ecologists can work together, researchers hope we might be able to reduce some of the losses in the future. In the end, though, our control of the situation is pretty limited.
"There are definitely concerning implications for the ecosystem," says NOAA meteorologist Nick Bond, who is credited with naming the Blob.
"It's all a matter of how long it lasts and how deep it goes."

New Species of Tarantula among many discoveries on our evolving planet - By Jake

Sri Lanka is home to a new species of tarantula—and its females are fuzzy, brilliantly  turquoise-tinged, and big enough to comfortably hug a donut.

Scientists found the arachnids within an isolated patch of southwestern rainforest, ringed by tea and rubber plantations. Living in tubular, silk-lined burrows, they are fast and aggressive, seizing unlucky insects that wander too close to their underground lairs. Measuring roughly five inches from tip to tip, these spiders are not exactly small, nor are their brilliant blue patches particularly subtle.
 

In fact, it’s these snazzy blue colors that first caught biologist Ranil Nanayakkara’s attention, and flagged the critters—now named Chilobrachys jonitriantisvansicklei—as potentially new to science.

“When we first spotted them I was in awe, lost for words,” Nanayakkara says of the decked-out females. “The males,” he notes, “are smaller and are mossy brown in color.”
 

The fluorescent blue tarantula is only the second species to be found in Sri Lanka; the first, a drab brown arachnid called C. nitelinus, was identified 126 years ago. Why this brand new genus has evolved no one knows and why so brightly colored, scientists can't explain although, there are other brightly colored species of spider. They are usually the male gender, brightly dressed to attract females. In this case the female is colorful. Perhaps it is a reversal of roles.
 

There has been a rise in the discovery of new species on the planet in the past decade. Perhaps nature has speeded up evolution to adapt to the changing climate.

A new species of venomous swarming spider was discovered in India recently when a swarm of thousands attacked a village leaping on people, biting them and making them seriously ill. They still have not been identified.
 

 Tarantulas can live for thirty years and have been known to grow to a leg span of eleven inches. Some of them make great pets and are harmless. Although they could bite if they felt threatened, they are not venomous. Females are larger than the males and usually eat the male after mating. You would think the males would learn to get away quickly after mating but they are either too slow or not too bright. Not many male tarantulas survive to mate again.

 

Favorite new species discovered in the last ten years

 

Micro Chameleon. Just over half an inch long - discovered in 2012

 

The Stabbing Shark discovered in 2011.  It's small but aggressive

 

Joker Crab discovered in the Philipines in 2012


Pig Nosed Vampire Rat from Indonesia


World's first glow-in-the-dark sea turtle discovered in 2016

By Jake Mahood

Scary loss of Greenland ice sheet

 

Published Aug 2019

Greenland's ice sheet just lost 11 billion tons of ice -- in one day. After months of record temperatures, scientists say Greenland's ice sheet experienced its biggest melt of the summer on Thursday, losing 11 billion tons of surface ice to the ocean -- equivalent to 4.4 million Olympic swimming pools.

Greenland's ice sheet usually melts during the summer, but the melt season typically begins around the end of May; this year it began at the start. It has been melting "persistently" over the past four months, which have recorded all time temperature highs, according to Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with Danish Meteorological Institute.

This July alone, Greenland's ice sheet lost 197 billion tons of ice -- the equivalent of around 80 million Olympic swimming pools -- according to Mottram. She told CNN the expected average would be between 60-70 billion tons at this time of year.

The weather conditions that brought a heat wave to Europe last week have reached the Arctic, where scientists say they could trigger one of Greenland's biggest ice melts.

Scientists recorded unconfirmed temperatures of 2.7C at 3,000 meters above sea level, which would be a new record if confirmed.

It came on the same day as meteorologists reported that globally, this July has been the hottest month in recorded history.

 

 Where sled dogs raced across ice, they now slosh their way through water

 

 

Researchers say they're "astounded" by the acceleration in melting and fear for the future of cities on coasts around the world. The ice sheet stores so much frozen water that if the whole thing melted, it would raise sea levels worldwide by up to 7m.

 

 European weather model showed temperature over parts of Greenland peaked at 40 DEGREES above normal in June. Melting observed on 45% of Greenland ice sheet that day,  a record so early in season.

 

Greenland ice sheet

The Greenland ice sheet is a vast body of ice covering 1,710,000 square kilometres, roughly 80% of the surface of Greenland. It is the second largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet is almost 2,400 kilometres long in a north-south direction, and its greatest width is 1,100 kilometres at a latitude of 77°N, near its northern margin. The mean altitude of the ice is 2,135 metres. The thickness is generally more than 2 km and over 3 km at its thickest point. In addition to the large ice sheet, isolated glaciers and small ice caps cover between 76,000 and 100,000 square kilometres around the periphery. If the entire 2,850,000 cubic kilometres of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 m. The Greenland Ice Sheet is sometimes referred to under the term inland ice, or its Danish equivalent, indlandsis. It is also sometimes referred to as an ice cap.

 

Area: 1.710 million km²

Length: 2,400 km

Thickness: 3,000 m

Favorite climate change memes

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remote South Pacific island has highest levels of plastic rubbish in the world

 

The beaches of World Heritage-listed Henderson Island, in the Pitcairn Group off South America, contain an estimated 37.7 million items of debris together weighing 17.6 tons, a new study has revealed.
Australian researcher Dr Jennifer Lavers said it meant the island had the highest density of plastic rubbish anywhere in the world.
"I've been fortunate in my career as a scientist to travel to some of the remote islands in the world, but Henderson was really quite an alarming situation … the highest density of plastic I've really seen in the whole of my career," she said.
Annual production of plastic has increased from 1.7 million tonnes in 1954 to 311 million tons in 2014.
This has resulted in an estimated five trillion plastic items — mostly less than five millimetres in size — circulating in the surface layer of the world's oceans.

 

To understand how much debris was accumulating on the remote island, Dr Lavers, a conservation biologist at the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, and Dr Alexander Bond at the Centre for Conservation Science in the UK surveyed the island's North and East Beach for three months in 2015.

The team calculated there were 671.6 items per square metre on the surface of the beaches, with approximately 68 per cent of debris buried less than 10 centimetres in the sand. Each day, 17 to 268 new items washed up on a 10-metre section of North Beach, representing a daily accumulation rate of 1.7 to 26.8 items per metre.

 

Plastic is a major threat to many marine species.

Henderson Island is in an area of the ocean that is rarely traversed and is not near any shipping lanes or fisheries, with no major land-based industrial facilities or cities within 5,000 kilometres.
"The majority of items appear to be coming from land originally, which made its way into the ocean and that really falls on our shoulders to make a difference and to reduce our demand for these products," she said.
The nearest settlement is Pitcairn Island with a population of 40 people.

 

This turtle was caught in a tangle of plastic rope.

Everyday items make up bulk of garbage

Dr Lavers said only around 7 per cent of the junk on the beach was connected to fishing-related activities.
She said most of the items found on the beaches were everyday household items such as cigarette lighters, plastic razors, toothbrushes, plastic scoops used in detergents or baby formula, and babies' soothers .
"It speaks to the fact that these items that we call "disposable" or "single-use" are neither of those things, and that items that were constructed decades ago are still floating around there in the ocean today, and for decades to come," Dr Lavers said.

Dr Lavers said their study showed "there is nowhere left in the world that is safe — plastic is ubiquitous".
Just over a quarter of the rubbish came from South America and was the result of the movement of currents in the South Pacific gyre, which flows anti-clockwise after travelling north up the continent.

The estimates were "alarmingly" conservative, as the survey did not include items buried deeper than 10 centimetres or debris on cliff areas or rocky sections.
Plastic pollution is a major threat to marine species, Dr Lavers said, with a study released in the past two months suggesting about 1,200 species were negatively impacted.

On Henderson Island the rubbish created a barrier for sea turtles attempting to enter the beach and led to a reduction in sea turtle-laying numbers, while also affecting two native seabird species.
However, Dr Lavers said plastic pollution was also a major threat to human health as the toxic impact of plastic-related chemicals in the food chain were well documented.

"At a very minimum, 25 per cent of world's marine fish species are consuming plastic and we know with that plastic comes a suite of chemical pollutants," she said.
"Those fish are the base of the food web ... and we know humans are at the top of the food web.

"It is not a big leap to say the whole of the marine food web is contaminated and we are putting ourselves at grave risk."

The findings of this study, published on Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a wake-up call to the world that plastic pollution is as grave a threat to humanity as climate change.

Information gathered from
 Dani Cooper
 Many thanx

Why Is There So Much Oil in the Arctic?

An illustration of an oil platform in the Arctic Ocean. 
(Image: © Shutterstock) 
By Emma Bryce 
In 2007, two Russian submarines plunged down 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) into the Arctic Ocean and planted a national flag onto a piece of continental shelf known as the Lomonosov Ridge. Rising from the center of the Arctic Basin, the flag sent a clear message to the surrounding nations: Russia had just laid claim to the vast oil and gas reserves contained in this underwater turf.

Russia's dramatic show of power had no legal weight — but it isn't the only nation that's trying to stake claims to the Arctic's vast depository of oil and gas. The United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland and China are all trying to cash in. It's no wonder: Projections show that the area of land and sea that falls within the Arctic Circle is home to an estimated 90 billion barrels of oil, an incredible 13% of Earth's reserves. It's also estimated to contain almost a quarter of untapped global gas resources.

Most of the oil that's been located in this region so far is on the land, just because it's easier to access. But now, countries are making moves to start extracting offshore, where the vast majority — 84% — of the energy is believed to occur. But long before this oil race began, how did the Arctic become so energy rich? [How Does Oil Form?] 

"The first thing you realize [if you look at a map] is that the Arctic — unlike the Antarctic — is an ocean surrounded by continents," Alastair Fraser, a geoscientist from Imperial College London, told Live Science. Firstly, this means there's a huge quantity of organic material available, in the form of dead sea creatures such as plankton and algae, which form the basis of what will ultimately become oil and gas. Secondly, the surrounding ring of continents means that the Arctic Basin contains a high proportion of continental crust, which makes up about 50% of its oceanic area, Fraser explained. That's significant because continental crust — as opposed to ocean crust, which makes up the rest of the area — typically contains deep depressions called basins, into which organic matter sinks, he said.

Here, it gets embedded in shale and preserved in 'anoxic' waters, meaning they contain little oxygen. "Normally, in a shallow sea with lots of oxygen, it would not be preserved. But if the sea is deep enough, the ocean will be stratified, meaning the oxygenated waters at the top will be separated from the anoxic conditions at the base," Fraser explained. Conserved within these oxygen-deprived basins, the matter maintains compounds that ultimately make it useful as an energy source millions of years in the future.

The geography of the Arctic         (Image credit: Alistair Fraser) 
As mountains erode over millennia, the continents also provide a wealth of sediment, transported via huge rivers into the sea. This sediment flows into the basins, where it overlays the organic material, and over time, forms a hard but porous material known as "reservoir rock," Fraser said. Fast-forward millions of years, and this repeated layering process has put the organic material under such immense pressure that it has begun to heat up.
"The temperature of the sediments in basins increases roughly 30 degrees Centigrade [54 degrees Fahrenheit] with every 1 kilometer [0.6 miles] of burial," Fraser said. Under this intensifying pressure and heat, the organic material very gradually transforms into oil, with the highest temperatures forming gas.

Because these substances are buoyant, they begin moving upward into the gaps within the porous sedimentary rock, which becomes like a storage container — the reservoir — from which oil and gas are extracted.

So it's the combination of these ingredients — huge quantities of organic matter, abundant sediment to lock in the oil and gas, the ideal underlying geology and the huge scale across which these occur — which makes the Arctic Ocean so unusually energy rich. (On land, where a smaller percentage of the Arctic's overall oil and gas lies, these reserves were most likely formed in a time when the land was covered by sea.)
Into the wild
However, just because the energy is there doesn't mean it should be extracted, many conservationists and scientists say. The Arctic's remoteness, its dense, moving sea ice and drifting icebergs will make it a huge logistical challenge to safely extract oil and gas. [How Are Oil Spills Cleaned?]
"I really don't support it, because the industry does not have the technology to do it safely and in an environmentally friendly way," Fraser said. "Some people will argue that you never can do it in the Arctic in an environmentally friendly way."

Even on land, plans to expand oil and gas development in the Arctic are treated with concern. This year, the United States government intends to start leasing land in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy companies, because the refuge contains a vast, 1.5 million-acre (607,000 hectares) coastal plain that's rich in oil. But, it's also a biodiverse landscape that's home to huge migratory herds of caribou, hundreds of bird species and polar bears. "It's been called America's last great wilderness; it's one of the ecologically richest landscapes in the U.S.," said Garett Rose, an attorney with the Alaska Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The coastal plains of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.  (Image credit: Garett Rose) 
It's not just the increased risk of oil spills if drilling goes ahead that's concerning; conservationists also worry about seismic exploration, which "involves running these giant trucks over the landscape to send shock waves into the ground that return information on the underlying geology," Rose told Live Science. That would cause obvious disruption to wildlife. Construction of roads and pipelines will slice up this intact landscape and bring in increasing numbers of people — which will intensify the pressure on wildlife.
"[The refuge] is a dynamic and interconnected landscape that's extremely sensitive to change," Rose said. He also said he was concerned about the U.S. government's recent (but failed) attempt to open the Arctic off Alaska's coast to offshore drilling, too. "This is part of a wholesale attempt to expand oil and gas development across the Arctic," Rose said.

Indeed, the situation in the Alaskan Refuge provides just a taster of what could unfold in other parts of the Arctic, if oil and gas extraction projects forge ahead. The risk of oil spills is enlarged offshore, because they'd be impossible to contain — with untold potential effects on sea life. And some scientists say the greatest ultimate threat is climate change. Bringing these fossil fuels to the surface would only lead to more fuel use, and more emissions being pumped into our atmosphere.

We're not there yet: Countries need to ratify an international United Nations agreement if they want to extract fossil fuels from parts of the continental shelf that fall beyond their offshore jurisdiction. That's slowing the Arctic rush. Still, international pressure is mounting, with countries like Russia having already staked out their claim on the seafloor.
And it could be a hard sell to make countries see that those reserves should remain untapped. Inshort, said Fraser, "I hope this region doesn't become too important [for energy production] 
Thanx  Emma Bryce
Knight Sha

Why a half-degree temperature rise is a big deal

By Bob Silberg,
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Image credits from left to right: Dave/Flickr Creative Commons/CC BY 2.0; Acropora at English Wikipedia; and Martin Haas/Shutterstock.com.

The Paris Agreement, which delegates from 196 countries hammered out in December 2015, calls for holding the ongoing rise in global average temperature to “well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels,” while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” How much difference could that half-degree of wiggle room (or 0.9 degree on the Fahrenheit scale) possibly make in the real world? Quite a bit, it appears.

The European Geosciences Union published a study in April 2016 that examined the impact of a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. a 2.0 C temperature increase by the end of the century, given what we know so far about how climate works. It found that the jump from 1.5 to 2 degrees—a third more of an increase—raises the impact by about that same fraction, very roughly, on most of the phenomena the study covered. Heat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater.

But in some cases, that extra increase in temperature makes things much more dire. At 1.5 C, the study found that tropical coral reefs stand a chance of adapting and reversing a portion of their die-off in the last half of the century. But at 2 C, the chance of recovery vanishes. Tropical corals are virtually wiped out by the year 2100.

With a 1.5 C rise in temperature, the Mediterranean area is forecast to have about 9 percent less fresh water available. At 2 C, that water deficit nearly doubles. So does the decrease in wheat and maize harvest in the tropics.

On a global scale, production of wheat and soy is forecast to increase with a 1.5 C temperature rise, partly because warming is favorable for farming in higher latitudes and partly because the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is largely responsible for the temperature increase, is thought to have a fertilization effect. But at 2 C, that advantage plummets by 700 percent for soy and disappears entirely for wheat.

Three climate scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who were not involved with this study, shed some light on the study’s results, starting with the impact on agriculture.

Corn plants with no corn
Why does a half degree of temperature increase make such a difference to some of the crops that were studied? For one thing, a half degree averaged out over the whole world can mean much more of an increase in some locations and at certain times.
“Most of that temperature change may occur during a small fraction of the year, when it actually represents conditions that could be 5 or 10 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures instead of just 1.5 or 2 degrees warmer,” said Dave Schimel, who supervises JPL’s Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems group.
A half degree averaged out over the whole world can mean much more of an increase in some locations and at certain times. 
“There are places in the world where, for these important breadbasket crops, they are already close to a thermal limit for that crop species,” Schimel said. Adding to the burden, he said, “this analysis (the EGU study) does not take into account the fact that pests and pathogens may spread more rapidly at higher temperatures.” 

And Schimel pointed out that heat can imperil agriculture even when crops don’t die. “If you get really high temperatures or very dry conditions during critical parts of the development of the crop, it produces essentially no grain. For example, above certain temperature thresholds, corn doesn't die but it doesn't grow seed. It doesn't grow a corncob. And other crops are similar to that, where the development of the actual food part of the crop is dramatically inhibited above critical temperatures.”

But what about that fertilization effect from carbon dioxide? “It does help a bit, but it doesn't make the underlying problem go away,” he said. “And by the way, if the plant was growing really fast when it died, it still died.”

Can we avoid the extra half-percent temperature increase? Schimel agrees that we should try hard to do so, but cautions that we don’t know how to fine-tune global warming with that much precision. “If we aim for 2 degrees, we might hit 3 degrees,” he said. “If we aim for 1.5 degrees, we might still hit 2 degrees.”

A multi-century commitment
Felix Landerer, who studies sea level and ice at JPL, said timescale is critical to forecasting how high the ocean will rise.
“This paper looks at this century,” he said. “So the effects appear to be fairly linear.” That is, a third more increase in temperature produces about a third more increase in sea level.
“But,” he said, “I would frame the discussion in the context that in recent studies—in particular of ocean-ice interactions—there is growing concern that the ice sheets are very sensitive to the surrounding ocean warming.” These studies show that giant glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica melt not only from the top down, but also from the bottom up as relatively warm ocean water makes its way to their undersides.
These studies show that giant glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica melt not only from the top down, but also from the bottom up as relatively warm ocean water makes its way to their undersides. 
“At two degrees (of temperature increase),” he said, “you might have crossed a threshold for significantly more sea-level rise than indicated here.” In other words, even if we are able to limit the rise in global air temperature to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century and stop the increase at that point, the ocean holds so much heat that it can continue melting ice sheets and thus raising sea level far beyond that point in time.
“The air temperatures level off, you (hypothetically) stabilize them, but you have committed to sea-level rise over multiple centuries,” Landerer said. “So it's good to stay away from two degrees. That's an experiment you don't want to run. Because that experiment would potentially wipe Florida off the map.”

Generations down the road
The EGU study found that the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius of warming “is likely to be decisive for the future of tropical coral reefs.” JPL’s Michelle Gierach was not surprised.
“Reef-building corals are extremely vulnerable to warming,” she said. “Prolonged warming harms warm-water corals not only through bleaching (a phenomenon in which corals under stress, such as from water that is too warm, expel the algae they need to survive), but also through making them more susceptible to disease.”
Gierach attended the international conference that produced the Paris Agreement and she was happy to see the ocean and climate getting their due attention. But she acknowledges the difficulty in turning that attention into action over a long period of time.
“We want to see instant results. That's not something that's going to happen with climate change. You need to just keep pursuing it and know that generations down the road will reap the benefits.” - Michelle Gierach, JPL climate scientist 
“It's very against how our society is now,” she said. “We want to see instant results. That's not something that's going to happen with climate change. You need to just keep pursuing it and know that generations down the road will reap the benefits.”
The Paris Agreement goes into effect when 55 nations, accounting for at least 55 percent of total global greenhouse-gas emissions, ratify it. The status so far: 19 nations, accounting for 0.18 percent of total greenhouse-gas emissions, have ratified the agreement as of June 30, 2016. Updates are available from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Thanx  Bob Silberg
Knight Jonny

Has the Earth Ever Been This Hot Before?

 By Isobel Whitcomb 
Climate change can make droughts more extreme. 
(Image: © Shutterstock) 
Would you ever go on vacation to the North Pole? Unless you like subzero temperatures and Nordic-ski treks, probably not. But if you lived 56 million years ago, you might answer differently. Back then, you would have enjoyed balmy temperatures and a lush green landscape (although you would have had to watch out for crocodiles). That's because the world was in the middle of an extreme period of global warming called the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when the Earth was so hot that even the poles reached nearly tropical temperatures.

But was the planet ever as hot as it is today, when every month the globe seems to be breaking one high-temperature record after another?

It turns out that the Earth has gone through periods of extreme warming more than once. The poles have frozen and thawed and frozen again. Now, the Earth is heating up again. Even so, today's climate change is a different beast, and it's clearly not just part of some larger natural cycle, Stuart Sutherland, a paleontologist at the University of British Columbia, told Live Science. [How Often Do Ice Ages Happen?] 

Earth's climate does naturally oscillate — over tens of thousands of years, its rotations around the sun slowly change, leading to variations in everything from seasons to sunlight. Partially as a result of these oscillations, Earth goes through glacial periods (better known as ice ages) and warmer interglacial periods.

But to create a massive warming event, like the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum, it takes more than a change in the tilt of Earth's axis, or the shape of its path around the sun. Extreme warming events always involve the same invisible culprit, one we're all too familiar with today: a massive dose of carbon dioxide, or CO2.

This greenhouse gas was almost certainly responsible for the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum. But how did CO2 concentrations get so high without humans around? Scientists aren't absolutely sure, said Sébastien Castelltort, a geologist at the University of Geneva. Their best guess is that volcanoes spewed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, trapping heat, and perhaps melting frozen pockets of methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than CO2 that had been long sequestered under the ocean. Just because extreme warming events spurred by greenhouse gases have happened before, doesn't mean these events are harmless. Take, for instance, the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which struck a few million years before dinosaurs arose on the planet. If the word "extinction" isn't enough of a clue, here's a spoiler: it was an absolute disaster for Earth and everything on it.

This warming event, which occurred 252 million years ago, was so extreme that Sutherland calls it the "poster child for the runaway greenhouse effect." This warming event, which was also caused by volcanic activity (in this case, the eruption of a volcanic region called the Siberian Traps), triggered climate chaos and widespread death.
"Imagine extreme drought, plants dying, the Saharah spreading throughout the continent," Sutherland told Live Science.
Temperatures rose 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius). (This is compared with the 2.1 F (1.2 C) rise in temperature we've seen since humans began burning fossil fuels). Around 95% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial life went extinct.
"It was just too hot and unpleasant for creatures to live," Sutherland said.

It's uncertain how high greenhouse gas concentrations were during the Permian-Triassic extinction event, but they likely were far higher than they are today. Some models suggest they grew as high as 3,500 parts per million (ppm). (For perspective, today's carbon dioxide concentrations hover a little over 400 ppm — but that's still considered high).

But it's the rate of change in CO2 concentrations that makes today's situation so unprecedented. During the Permian Triassic extinction event, it took thousands of years for temperatures to rise as high as they did — according to some studies, as many as 150,000 years. During the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum, considered an extremely rapid case of warming, temperatures took 10,000 to 20,000 years to reach their height.

Today's warming has taken only 150 years.

That is the biggest difference between today's climate change and past climatic highs. It's also what makes the consequences of current climate change so difficult to predict, Castelltort said. The concern isn't just "but the planet is warming." The concern is that we don't know how rapid is too rapid for life to adjust, he said. Based on past warming events, no experts could possibly say that the current rate of warming won't have dramatic consequences, he said. "We just don't know how dramatic," he added.

Thanx Isobel Whitcomb

Knight  Man

Car Wash for Knights



Who will survive the end-game of the climate crisis ??

 

With one in every four species facing extinction, which animals are the best equipped to survive the climate crisis? (Spoiler alert: it’s probably not humans).

“I don’t think it will be the humans. I think we’ll go quite early on,” says Julie Gray, a plant molecular biologist, with a laugh. She was asked which species she thinks would be the last ones standing if we don’t take transformative action on climate change. Even with our extraordinary capacity for innovation and adaptability, humans, it turns out, probably won’t be among the survivors.
This is partly because humans reproduce agonizingly slowly and generally just one or two at a time – as do some other favourite animals, like pandas. Organisms that can produce many offspring quickly may have a better shot at avoiding extinction.

It may seem like just a thought experiment. But discussing which species are more, or less, able to survive climate change is disturbingly concrete. As a blockbuster biodiversity report stated recently, one in every four species currently faces extinction. Much of this vulnerability is linked to climate change, which is bringing about higher temperatures, sea level rise, more variable conditions and more extreme weather.
 

One  source of uncertainty has to do with life forms’ capacity to adapt. Take ectotherms (cold-blooded animals like reptiles and amphibians), which have historically been slower to adapt to climatic change than endotherms (warm blooded animals). For one thing, they are less able to adjust their body temperatures. But there are exceptions, like the American bullfrog, which may actually find more habitable environments as a consequence of warming.
And, of course, there is an alternative: we humans could get our acts together and stop the climate crisis from continuing to snowball by adopting policies and lifestyles that reduce greenhouse gases. But for the purposes of these projections, we’re assuming that’s not going to happen.

Even with the uncertainties, we can make some educated guesses about broad patterns. Heat tolerant and drought resistant plants, like those found in deserts rather than rainforests, are more likely to survive. So are plants whose seeds can be dispersed over long distances, for instance by wind or ocean currents (like coconuts). Plants that can adjust their flowering times may also be better able to deal with higher temperatures.

We also can look to history as a guide. The fossil record contains signs of how species have coped with previous climatic shifts. There are genetic clues to long-term survival too, such as in the hardy green microalgae that adapted to saltier environments over millions of years
Importantly, though, the uniquely devastating nature of the current human-made climate crisis means that we can’t fully rely on benchmarks from the past. The climate change that we see in the future may differ in many ways from the climate change that we’ve seen in the past.

The historical record does point to the tenacity of cockroaches. These largely unloved critters “have survived every mass extinction event in history so far”, says a soil biogeochemist at the University of California. For instance, cockroaches adapted to an increasingly arid Australia, tens of millions of years ago, by starting to burrow into soil.
This shows two characteristics, says Robert Nasi, the director general of the Center for International Forestry Research: an ability to hide (e.g. underground) and a long evolutionary history. Ancient species appear more resilient than younger ones. These are among the traits that, Nasi says, are linked to surviving large catastrophic events which triggered major changes in climate.
Cockroaches also tend to not be picky eaters. Having broad diets means that climate change will be less of a threat to the food sources of species that are not too fussy about their food, such as rats, opportunistic birds, and urban raccoons.

As a comparison, take an animal like the koala. Koalas eat primarily eucalyptus leaves, which are becoming less nutritious due to increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. As a result, climate change is increasing their risk of starvation.
As well as having a specialized diet, koalas have low genetic diversity – one reason that chlamydia has ravaged wild koala populations. These are worrying traits in terms of extinction risk. “In many cases, specialized species, like koalas, are those that we expect to see disappear first,” says Carr. This extends to species in micro-habitats like high elevation forests, or those in narrow ranges, like some tropical birds or small-island plants.

 Also vulnerable are species that depend on pristine environments as compared to the species that succeed in rougher, often disturbed habitats, such as grasslands and young forest. These species “might do well under climate change because they thrive in states of change and transition”, says Jessica Hellmann, who leads the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. “For example, deer (in the US) are common in suburban areas and thrive where forests have been removed or are regularly disturbed.”

Species that Carr calls “mobile generalists”, which can move and adapt to different environments, are likely to be more durable in the face of climate change. While this adaptability is generally positive, it might come at a cost to other parts of an ecosystem. Invasive species like cane toads, which are poisonous, have led to local extinctions of other species like quolls (carnivorous marsupials) and monitors (large lizards) in Australia. And Hellmann says that the versatility of invasive plant species “leads to the worry that, in addition to losing vulnerable species, a warmer world will be a weedier world”. The weeds typically found along roadsides may be especially long-lasting in comparison with other plants.

Of course, many organisms are intrinsically less mobile. Most plants will be unable to move quickly enough to keep pace with rapid heating, although they’ve done so in response to the slower climatic changes of the past.
The good news is that some specialized species might have a buffer known as climate change refugia: areas that are relatively protected from climate change’s consequences, such as deep sea canyons. Although deep sea zones are heating up and declining in oxygen concentrations, Jonathon Stillman, a marine environmental physiologist at San Francisco State University, suggests that deep sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, specifically, might be one bright spot in an otherwise mostly bleak situation.
“They are pretty much uncoupled from the surface of our planet and I doubt that climate change will impact them in the least,” he says. “Humanity didn’t even know they existed until 1977. Their energy comes from the core of our Earth rather than from the Sun, and their already extreme habitat is unlikely to be altered by changes happening at the ocean surface.”

Similarly, Douglas Sheil, a tropical forest ecologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, suggests that “at some point in the future the only vertebrate species surviving in Africa might be a blind cave fish deep underground”. As in the deep sea hydrothermal vents, “many species remain undiscovered and thus unknown – Europe’s first cave fish was only found in Germany in 2015.”

Thermophiles (heat-adapted organisms) living in extreme environments like volcanic springs are also likely to be less affected by surface temperature changes. Indeed, the organisms best able to live in severe circumstances are microbes, as noted by many scientists. Computer modelling suggests that only microbes would be able to survive increasing solar intensity. Soil biogeochemist Berhe says of archaea, one of the major types of microbes, “these critters have figured out how to live in the most extreme of environments”.

Not quite as tiny but also nearly indestructible are tardigrades, commonly known as water bears. Environmental physiologist Stillman enthuses: “They can survive the vacuum of outer space, extreme dehydration, and very high temperatures. If you are a Star Trek fan, you have learned about them in a sci-fi setting, but they are real creatures that live across most habitats on Earth.”

The future will have not only more extreme environments, but also more urban, human-altered spaces. So “resistant species would likely be the ones that are well attuned to living in human-modified habitats such as urban parks and gardens, agricultural areas, farms, tree plantations, and so on”, says Arvin C Diesmos, a herpetology curator at the Philippine National Museum of Natural History. ( that would probably include rats, mice, squirrels, raccoons, the inevitable cockroaches and other bugs and arachnids and more)
 Nasi sums it up. “The winners will be very small, preferably endotherms, highly adaptable, omnivorous or able to live in extreme conditions.”
“It doesn’t sound like a very pretty world.”

Of course, to some extent we already know what’s needed to limit the bleakness of the future natural world. This includes reducing greenhouse gases; protecting biodiversity; restoring connectivity between habitats (rather than building endless dams, roads and walls); and reducing interrelated threats like pollution and land harvesting. Even species that are close to extinction, like Saiga antelopes, can be brought back from the brink with enough conservation effort. To reflect the power of sustained conservation, scientists are developing a Green List of species on the road to recovery and full health, to complement the Red List of threatened species.
The political barriers are daunting. But dealing with them sure beats surrendering the planet to a bunch of microbes and cockroaches.

And FYI, July was confirmed as the hottest month on record, worldwide

 

Masked Invaders

Raccoons are spreading across Earth—and climate change is helping

The voracious invaders are found on three continents, and warming could help their range expand northward. Much of the world is hospitable for raccoons, and the potential range of these masked invaders is set to expand into new areas with climate change, according to new research.A study published in Scientific Reports looked at what climatic conditions are most suitable for these native North American mammals, in areas where they are currently found. The scientists then extrapolated across the globe to find where environment variables were likely to support populations of the animals—and how that will change with global warming. The scientists found favorable climatic conditions for the adaptable raccoons in a zone that is expected to expand considerably to the north.Raccoons (Procyon lotor) are best suited to riverine environments. Their scientific name translates to “before the dog,” and “washer” in Latin, referencing their habit of catching and washing food in rivers and water bodies. The name for them in German, Italian, and Japanese all roughly translate to “washing bear.”

The yellow areas represent the native habitat of raccoons

 The darker green areas are favorable for habitation of raccoons

 The lighter green areas represent new habitation areas that

are opening

 up due to climate change

 

 

First introduced into Germany in the 1930s, raccoons have dispersed to every surrounding country, west to Spain, south to Italy, and east to Poland. In Japan, they’ve been bounding their way through the islands of the country since the 1960s, and are found in at least 42 of the country’s 47 prefectures. There is another major population in Iran and Azerbaijan.

 

Part of the reason the mammals became a problem in Japan is due to a book and ensuing cartoon series called “Rascal,” featuring a cute raccoon, which became a hit in Japan in the 1970s. That spurred the importation of up to 1,500 animals per month for a time, though the country later banned the practice. But it was too late: Raccoons make terrible pets, and many of the animals were released into the wild.

 

 

Northward bound

To create the model, the scientists looked at several future trajectories of carbon dioxide emissions and how each scenario would contribute to warming temperatures around the globe.

Though the team saw similar increases in favorable conditions for raccoons with several trajectories, the team settled on the most extreme case—mainly because the expansion was more pronounced. Called RCP 8.5 (for Representative Concentration Pathway), this represents the “worst-case scenario”—albeit one we could be on a path toward—and involves robust petroleum use into the future.

“RCP 8.5 is the most extreme case but also, unfortunately, the most realistic and probable,” Louppe says.

The most concerning thing about the raccoons’ potential northward spread is the impact on northern woodlands, known as boreal forests, Louppe adds.

“The ecosystems in these areas are peculiar and fragile,” he says, and could suffer from the introduction of a new predator.

This is particularly relevant to the northern forests of Europe, Canada and Asia, where raccoons could expand much further, says Suzanne MacDonald, a professor at York University in Toronto who studies animal behavior .

Raccoons can “completely upend whatever delicate balance is already there,” says MacDonald, a National Geographic Society explorer. “And they’re already finding that, in places like Japan.”

That’s because “they eat everything—small invertebrates, frogs, bird eggs, birds, small mammals, everything,” she says.

 

Trash pandas

The creatures are particularly well suited to cities, where they happily subsist on trash (hence their popular nickname, trash pandas).

“Every night in Toronto, you’ll see raccoons in your backyard,” MacDonald says, by way of example. “Not some nights, but every night.” She especially worries about their potential to spread disease, such as rabies. “I lose sleep over these things.”

 

The modeling in the study didn’t include some ecological variables, like the presence of prey and predators, so it’s not a definitive demonstration of where they could live, Louppe cautions.

That being said, since raccoons eat just about everything, there’s a good chance they could survive in much of these climatically favorable places.
 

Meanwhile, raccoons continue to spread through non-native areas, eliciting less alarm than they probably should. “They are cute,” Macdonald says, “but they are insidious.”

less alarm than they probably should. “They are cute,” Macdonald says, “but they are insidious.”

“People don't know what they’ve done by importing them,” she adds. “They are going to decimate anything in other countries which are not prepared for them.”

Alaskan glaciers melting 100 times faster than previously thought

 

Alaskan glaciers are melting 100 times faster than experts previously thought. Scientists looked at how tidewater glaciers melt underwater. Their results were startling. A new way of measuring how some glaciers melt below the surface of the water has uncovered a surprising realization: Some glaciers are melting a hundred times faster than scientists thought they were. In a new study published today in Science, a team of oceanographers and glaciologists unpeeled a new layer of understanding of tidewater glaciers—glaciers that end in the ocean—and their dynamic processes.

“They’ve really discovered that the melt that’s happening is dramatically different from some of the assumptions we’ve had,” says Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
 

Some of this calving and glacial melt is a normal process that glaciers undergo during seasonal transitions from winter to summer, and even through the summer. But a warming climate accelerates glacier melting across the globe, potentially through melting across the surface of the glacier, but also through underwater melting.

Glaciers can extend hundreds of feet below the surface, explained Ellyn Enderlin, a glaciologist at Boise State University who was not involved with the study. Finding higher rates of submarine melting tells us that “glaciers are a lot more sensitive to ocean change than we’ve even thought.” Understanding the melting processes and calculating the amount of melt accurately is essential for planning for sea level rise.
“We are just super jazzed that we can even do this,” said David Sutherland, an oceanographer at the University of Oregon. “We weren’t 100 percent sure it was going to work.”

 

Measuring melting masses of ice

LeConte was an ideal glacier to study because it is really accessible for a tidewater glacier, Sutherland said. A complex environment, the project required so many lines of data that several teams of oceanographers and glaciologists collected data simultaneously at the glacier.

Calculating how fast a glacier melts requires more finesse than measuring a melting ice cube in a glass of water. With a glacier, you have to know how fast the ice moves into the fjord, as well as what proportion is melting and what proportion is breaking off, or calving.

It was “pretty simple in my head, and sounded good on paper,” laughs Sutherland. But navigating a boat into the fjord, where the LeConte Glacier slips into the sea, is tricky on a good day. Scientists spent weeks aboard the boat working 24 hours a day, with each scientist taking 12-hour shifts.

Mountain goats scrambled on ridges above and whales frequented the fjord, with seabirds dipping into the water. “When you aren’t wishing for better weather…it was a pretty awesome place to be,” says Sutherland.

From the 80-foot MV Stellar, oceanographers performed sonar surveys underwater, like the ones used to measure ocean depths. Instead of directing the sonar toward the ocean floor, though, they angled the sonar to collect the 3D underwater portion of the glacier face. Scientists repeated their observations during two summers, obtaining multiple scans each trip.
 

Simultaneously, a team of glaciologists camped on a ridge overlooking the glacier. They “babysat” a delicate radar instrument to measure the natural movement of the glacier. Time-lapse cameras were used to measure glacier flow so that they knew how fast the ice moves toward the ocean.

From the datasets, researchers were able to calculate a total melting rate for the underwater portion of the glacier: two orders of magnitude higher than they expected.
Several processes of melting happen at a tidewater glacier, which is why scientists tackled the melting mystery from multiple angles.
When a plume of freshwater from surface melt enters the fjord, it hits the fjord close to the glacier face. The more buoyant freshwater rises to the surface and then undercuts, or erodes the glacier face.

And then you have this submarine melting that occurs wherever the ocean touches the surface of the glacier. The really cool part of the new method, said Sutherland, is that you can pinpoint the exact location where higher melt occurs.

“A pretty large percentage of the ice that flows into the ocean is melted away by the warm ocean water right away, on contact".
But they calculated that the glacier melted underwater at a rate of almost 5 feet per day in May and up to 16 feet per day in August last summer. Later in the season, the warmer water increased the underwater melting.
So we have learned that the rate of glacier melting under the water is far faster than the rate of melting above water. The scientists agreed, 'its a call to action'.

 

99.9999% chance humans are causing global warming, and other science-based facts on climate change for Earth Day

MMM
Doyle Rice and Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
Climate change is real and increasingly a part of our daily lives. New research and studies out in just the past six months highlight the latest facts about the human-caused shift to our global weather systems and its effects on our planet. 

First among them, there's no longer any question that rising temperatures and increasingly chaotic weather are the work of humanity. There's a 99.9999% chance that humans are the cause of global warming, a February study reported. That means we've reached the "gold standard" for certainty, a statistical measure typically used in particle physics. 

The mechanism is well understood and has been for decades. Humans burn fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas, which release carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and other gases into the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. CO2 is the greenhouse gas that's most responsible for warming.

Study lead author Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, told Reuters that “the narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong." 

Hottest on record
The past five years have been the five warmest since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. The Earth has experienced 42 straight years (since 1977) with an above-average global temperature, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Based on five separate data sets that keep track of the Earth's climate, the global average temperature for the first 10 months of 2018 was about 1.8 degrees above what it was in the late 1800s. That was when industry started to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

A major ice sheet in western Antarctica is melting,
A major ice sheet in western Antarctica is melting, and its collapse could raise the global sea level nearly 2 feet, though that could take centuries. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Australia experienced record summer heat in January of this year. The town of Port Augusta reached the hottest day since record-keeping began in 1962 with a temperature of 121, according to the Guardian.

The heat was so intense it caused bats to fall from trees, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Carbon dioxide up 46%
Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases being released into the atmosphere by industry, transportation and energy production from burning fossil fuels are enhancing what's known as the planet's natural greenhouse effect.

Carbon dioxide is the most prevalent among all greenhouse gases produced by human activities, attributed to the burning of fossil fuels.

The atmospheric carbon dioxide level for March was 411.97 parts per million and continue to rise. It has now reached levels in the atmosphere not seen in 3 million years.

That's an increase of 46% from just before the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, when CO2 levels were around 280 parts per million. Levels began to rise when humans began to burn large amounts of fossil fuels to run factories and heat homes, releasing CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Scientists say to keep a livable planet, we need to cut the level to 350 parts per million.

Rising seas
A consequence of higher temperatures is the melting of the polar ice caps, which is causing sea levels to rise. The world's oceans have risen about an inch in the past 50 years due to melting glaciers alone, a study published this month in the journal Naturefound.

The Earth's glaciers are now losing up to 390 billion tons of ice and snow per year, the study suggests.

Global warming has caused over 3 trillion tons of ice to melt from Antarctica in the past quarter-century and tripled ice loss there in the past decade, another study, released in June, said.
Thanx   Doyle  Rice  & Elizabeth  Weiser

Crusader   Jenny , Nanook  , Knight Mika & Knight  Moto