Climate Change l Global Warming l Update, News & Discussion

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

https://www.voanews.com/a/study-tru...o2-emissions-by-200m-tons-a-year/4815341.html

WASHINGTON —

The Trump administration's plans to roll back climate change regulations could boost U.S. carbon emissions by over 200 million tons a year by 2025, according to a report on Tuesday prepared for state attorneys general.

The increase from the world's second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter behind China would hobble global efforts to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, which scientists say is caused by burning fossil fuels and will lead to devastating sea-level rise, droughts and more frequent powerful storms.

"The Trump administration's actions amount to a virtual surrender to climate change," said the report by the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, released at a gathering of the National Association for Attorneys General in Washington.

The report from the research group, based out of New York University's law school, analyzed the impact of rolling back six major regulations related to climate change that President Donald Trump is seeking to rework to unfetter business.

They include national vehicle tailpipe standards and the Obama-era Clean Power Plan to limit emissions from power plants, among others focused on major polluter industries.

More than a dozen state attorneys general, including those from Maryland, New York and Massachusetts, are challenging the administration on their rollbacks in court.

California, for example, is leading a coalition of 21 states in challenging the administration's rollback of tailpipe standards. Weakening those standards will lead to an additional 16 million to 34 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually by 2025, according to the report.

It also estimated that American drivers would pay between $193 billion and $236 billion dollars in added fuel costs by 2035 without the national clean car standard.

The Trump administration has said it wants to reduce the emissions standard targets for vehicles because sticking to them would make automobiles too expensive.

The Trump administration's Affordable Clean Energy rule (ACE), which replaced the Clean Power Plan, would also result in a big jump in emissions along with a higher number of premature deaths from poor air quality, the report said.

The administration has countered that its revised rule would reduce emissions in much the same way as the Clean Power Plan, but in a way that strictly adheres to the federal Clean Air Act.

The six regulations the center examined provided the "most important near-term opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight against climate change," the report said.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

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[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/High_CO2_levels_can_destabilize_marine_layer_clouds_999.html

At high enough atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, Earth could reach a tipping point where marine stratus clouds become unstable and disappear, triggering a spike in global warming, according to a new modeling study.

This event - which could raise surface temperatures by about 8 Kelvin (14 degrees Fahrenheit) globally - may occur at CO2 concentrations above 1,200 parts per million (ppm), according to the study, which will be published by Nature Geoscience on February 25. For reference, the current concentration is around 410 ppm and rising. If the world continues burning fossil fuels at the current rate, Earth's CO2 level could rise above 1,200 ppm in the next century.

"I think and hope that technological changes will slow carbon emissions so that we do not actually reach such high CO2 concentrations. But our results show that there are dangerous climate change thresholds that we had been unaware of," says Caltech's Tapio Schneider, Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA. Schneider, the lead author of the study, notes that the 1,200-ppm threshold is a rough estimate rather than a firm number.

The study could help solve a longstanding mystery in paleoclimatology. Geological records indicate that during the Eocene (around 50 million years ago), the Arctic was frost free and home to crocodiles. However, according to existing climate models, CO2 levels would need to rise above 4,000 ppm to heat the planet enough for the Arctic to be that warm. This is more than twice as high as the likely CO2 concentration during this time period. However, a warming spike caused by the loss of stratus cloud decks could explain the appearance of the Eocene's hothouse climate.

Stratus cloud decks cover about 20 percent of subtropical oceans and are prevalent in the eastern portions of those oceans - for example, off the coasts of California or Peru. The clouds cool and shade the earth as they reflect the sunlight that hits them back into space. That makes them important for regulating Earth's surface temperature. The problem is that the turbulent air motions that sustain these clouds are too small to be resolvable in global climate models.

To circumvent the inability to resolve the clouds at a global scale, Schneider and his co-authors, Colleen Kaul and Kyle Pressel of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, created a small-scale model of a representative atmospheric section above a subtropical ocean, simulating the clouds and their turbulent motions over this ocean patch on supercomputers.

They observed instability of the cloud decks followed by a spike in warming when CO2 levels exceeded 1,200 ppm. The researchers also found that once the cloud decks vanished, they did not reappear until CO2 levels dropped to levels substantially below where the instability first occurred.

"This research points to a blind spot in climate modeling," says Schneider, who is currently leading a consortium called the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) in an effort to build a new climate model. CliMA will use data assimilation and machine-learning tools to fuse Earth observations and high-resolution simulations into a model that represents clouds and otherimportant small-scale featuresbetter than existing models. One use of the new model will be to determine more precisely the CO2 level at which the instability of the cloud decks occurs.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

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[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/06/worl...-extremism-africa-middle-east-intl/index.html

(CNN)Climate change is already triggering devastating weather events across the planet, including prolonged droughts, flash floods and wildfires.


Parts of Africa and the Middle East are experiencing erratic harvests, heavy storms and the worst drought in the past 900 years.

Experts say that people here who are struggling to provide for their families are vulnerable to the influence of extremist recruits who offer them work and food.

Vanishing Lake Chad bolsters Boko Haram
Across the Sahel, a semi-arid region between the Sahara desert and Sudanian Savannah in Africa, temperature increases are projected to be 1.5 times higher than the global average, according to the United Nations.

About 50 million people in the Sahel are pastoralists whose livelihoods depend on rearing livestock.

The impact of climate change on the Sahel is clearly shown by the shrinking of Lake Chad.

Spanning seven countries, including Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon, the lake basin is critical to the livelihoods of nearly 30 million people.

But since the 1960s the lake's water supply has shrunk by over 90%, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Robert Muggah, who analyzes global climate and security challenges at the Igarape Institute, a think tank in Brazil, says the diminishing water sources are "flashpoints for violence" as communities struggle with reduced crop yields and high levels of poverty.

"Climate shocks and stresses are pushing many into extreme poverty. Joining an armed group is sometimes the only option available," he added.

What is climate change? Your questions answered
In 2018, US officials expressed concern about ISIS and al Qaeda affiliates in the Sahel region.

Muggah agrees with this assessment, claiming that the drying of Lake Chad has bolstered recruitment efforts of extremist groups including Boko Haram, the militant group operating in Nigeria.

Does water scarcity create a terror spring?
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the world's most water scarce region.

MENA is home to six percent of the world's population, but only one percent of the world's freshwater resources, according to the World Bank.

17 countries in the region fall below the water poverty line set by the United Nations, and some experts believe that drought played a part in sparking Syria's civil war.

According to a study from 2015, severe drought, likely compounded by climate change, triggered mass migration from rural to urban areas in Syria between 2007 and 2010.

The prolonged dry spell led to the death of 85% of livestock in eastern Syria and widespread crop failure, according to Jamal Saghir, a professor at the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University.

This pushed 800,000 people into food insecurity and prompted 1.5 million people to migrate to already overpopulated cities, contributing to the civil unrest which erupted in 2011 and spiralled into civil war, Saghir told CNN.

The impacts of "climate-induced drought" were also linked to the growing influence of ISIS in the Middle East in a 2017 report commissioned by the German foreign office.

The report said that increased water scarcity in Syria "played an important role" in the forming of ISIS and that "ISIS tried to gain and retain legitimacy by providing water and other services to garner support from local populations" during the prolonged drought.
However, other researchers have disputed how much of a role drought played in the conflict.
Can the Middle East solve its water problem?
In 2009 ISIS' recruitment efforts targeted impoverished farmers in Iraq whose livelihoods were devastated by drought and fierce winds, according to Saghir.

"Terrorist organizations like ISIS capitalize on the devastation wrought by climate change to attract new members," said Saghir.

"The ISIS recruiters offered money, food and other riches to rural Iraqis to lure them into joining the ranks of the jihadist group. With no means to sustain themselves through agricultural means, many farmers accepted ISIS' bribes for both monetary and morale support," he said.

Sustainable alternatives to extremism

To prevent their citizens from falling into the grip of extremists, countries must invest in adaptation programs, which will reduce people's "vulnerability to extreme climatic events," Nadim Farajalla, director of the climate change and environment program at the American University of Beirut, told CNN.

Two ways for countries to become more climate resilient include diversifying their crop production and investing in renewable energy, he said.

Countries susceptible to drought should move away from irrigating their crops and focus on rain-fed agriculture, growing crops like lentils and chickpeas instead of the water-intensive livestock feed alfalfa, he explained.

Solar power should be harnessed in the fight against extremism, according to Rachel Kyte, CEO of UN initiative Sustainable Energy for All.

Providing communities in Africa and the Middle East with clean, affordable energy can help them cope with climate change, advance women's rights and beat back support for extremists, Kyte told CNN.

"With solar-powered irrigation we have an opportunity to increase agricultural yields in rural communities, giving families greater income and greater economic hope," she said.

Muggah agreed that small-scale interventions like solar electricity generators can have a "transformative effect on neglected communities."

"By strengthening and empowering local residents, the influence of extremist groups can be weakened," he said.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

@pakistanipower @nahtanbob @gambit @vostok @F-22Raptor @LeGenD @KAL-EL @VCheng @Noob

 

[nahtanbob]

how about population growth ?

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

how about population growth ?

They genetically modify crops and double global population to 14 billion.

 

[nahtanbob]

They genetically modify crops and double global population to 14 billion.

people need food every day not just when the harvest is plentiful
we are presiding over the 6th extinction where 90% of species are being wiped out. the end result is our own extinction

 

[Sine Nomine]

people need food every day not just when the harvest is plentiful
we are presiding over the 6th extinction where 90% of species are being wiped out. the end result is our own extinction

Age of extinction is near then we have thought,Earth is pretty much getting exhausted.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/05...ree-in-the-summer-from-as-early-as-2030-study

The Arctic Ocean could become ice-free in the summer from as early as 2030 as a natural cycle in water temperature adds to man-made global warming, according to a new study.

Computer models currently expect the Arctic Ocean to be ice-free in the summer, more specifically in the month of September, between 2030 and 2050.

But a new study published late last month in the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) journal, Geophysical Research Letters, found that it is most likely to happen on the earlier end of the spectrum.

The acceleration is due to a natural cycle called the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) — long-term ocean surface temperature shifts in the Pacific of about 0.5 degree Celsius and lasting between 15 to 30 years.

Five years ago, the Pacific began to switch from the cold to the warm phase of the IPO.

The authors of the study plotted predictions of when an ice-free Arctic would occur in model experiments where the IPO was shifting in the same direction as the real world. These showed an earlier ice-free Arctic — by seven years on average — than those predictions that were out of step with reality.

"The trajectory is towards becoming ice-free in the summer but there is uncertainty as to when that's going to occur," James Screen from the University of Exeter in the UK and the study's lead author, said in a statement.

"You can hedge your bets," he added. "The shift in the IPO means there's more chance of it being on the earlier end of that window than on the later end."

The study does warn, however, that while IPO is one of the factors that will modulate the rate of Arctic sea-ice loss in coming decades, human-caused climate change remains the main factor.

"The timing of the first ice-free summer will also depend considerably on whether greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise or are curtailed," it states.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

http://time.com/5546507/climate-change-doubters-schools/

(HARTFORD, Conn.) — A Connecticut lawmaker wants to strike climate change from state science standards. A Virginia legislator worries teachers are indoctrinating students with their personal views on global warming. And an Oklahoma state senator wants educators to be able to introduce alternative viewpoints without fear of losing their jobs.

As climate change becomes a hotter topic in American classrooms, politicians around the country are pushing back against the near-universal scientific consensus that global warming is real, dire and man-made.

Of the more than a dozen such measures proposed so far this year, some already have failed. But they have emerged this year in growing numbers, many of them inspired or directly encouraged by a pair of advocacy groups, the Discovery Institute and the Heartland Institute.

“You have to present two sides of the argument and allow the kids to deliberate,” said Republican state Sen. David Bullard of Oklahoma, a former high school geography teacher whose bill, based on model legislation from the Discovery Institute, ran into opposition from science teachers and went nowhere.

Scientists and science education organizations have blasted such proposals for sowing confusion and doubt on a topic of global urgency. They reject the notion that there are “two sides” to the issue.

“You can’t talk about two sides when the other side doesn’t have a foot in reality,” said University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles.

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said these legislative proposals are dangerous, bad-faith efforts to undermine scientific findings that the fossil-fuel industry or fundamentalist religious groups don’t want to hear.

In the mainstream scientific community, there is little disagreement about the basics that greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas are causing the world to warm in a dangerous manner. More than 90 percent of the peer-reviewed studies and scientists who write them say climate change is a human-caused problem.

A Nobel Prize-winning international panel of scientists has repeatedly published reports detailing the science behind climate change and how the world is likely to pass a level of warming that an international agreement calls dangerous. The U.S. government last year issued a detailed report saying that “climate-related threats to Americans’ physical, social and economic well-being are rising.”

The battle over global warming resembles the fight that began decades ago over the teaching of evolution, in which opponents led by conservative Christians have long called for schools to present what they consider both sides of the issue.

Some of those who reject mainstream climate science have cast the debate as a matter of academic freedom.

James Taylor, a senior fellow at Heartland, an Illinois-based group that dismisses climate change, said it is encouraging well-rounded classroom discussions on the topic. The group, which in 2017 sent thousands of science teachers copies of a book titled “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming,” is now taking its message directly to students. A reference book it is planning for publication this year will rebut arguments linking climate change to hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather.

“We’re very concerned the global warming propaganda efforts have encouraged students to not engage in research and critical thinking,” Taylor said, referring to news reports and scientific warnings.

Neither Discovery nor Heartland discloses the identities of its donors.

Instruction on the topic varies widely from place to place, but climate change and how humans are altering the planet are core topics emphasized in the Next Generation Science Standards, developed by a group of states. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards, and 21 others have embraced some of the material with modifications.

Still, a survey released in 2016 found that of public middle- and high-school science teachers who taught something about climate change, about a quarter gave equal time to perspectives that “raise doubt about the scientific consensus.”

By early February, the Oakland, California-based nonprofit National Center for Science Education flagged over a dozen bills this year as threats to the integrity of science education, more than the organization typically sees in an entire year.

Several of them — including proposals in Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota — had language echoing model legislation of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which says teachers should not be prohibited from addressing strengths and weaknesses of concepts such as evolution and global warming.

Similar measures became law in Louisiana in 2008 and Tennessee in 2012. In states where they may not be feasible politically, Discovery has urged legislators to consider nonbinding resolutions in support of giving teachers latitude to “show support for critical thinking” on controversial topics. Lawmakers in Alabama and Indiana passed such resolutions in 2017.

Discovery officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Florida state Sen. Dennis Baxley is pressing legislation that would allow schools to teach alternatives to controversial theories.

“There is really no established science on most things, you’ll find,” the GOP legislator said.

Elsewhere, lawmakers in Connecticut and Iowa, which both adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, have proposed rolling them back. Connecticut state Rep. John Piscopo, a Republican who is a Heartland Institute member, said he wants to eliminate the section on climate change, calling it “totally one-sided.”

Other bills introduced this year in such states as Virginia, Arizona and Maine call for teachers to avoid political or ideological indoctrination of their students.

“If they’re teaching about a subject, such as climate change, and they present both sides, that’s fine. That’s as it should be. A teacher who presents a skewed extension of their political beliefs, that’s closer to indoctrinating. That’s not good to kids,” said Virginia state Rep. Dave LaRock, a Republican.

While there are many details about climate science hotly debated among scientists, it is well-established that global warming is real, human-caused and a problem, said scientist Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

“When people say we ought to present two sides, they’re saying we ought to present a side that’s totally been disproven along with a side that has been fundamentally supported by the evidence,” Field said.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristi...ects-trauma-over-climate-change/#36f0a640693e

Recent excavations at a 15th century archaeological site on the coast of Peru have revealed an enormous mass burial of 137 children, three adults, and 200 llamas or alpacas. Archaeologists argue that the sacrifice may have been related to a traumatic climate event.

The burial is part of a site called Huanchaquito-Las Llamas (HLL) in the Province of Trujillo, just 350 meters from the shore and 2 miles north of the ancient city of Chan Chan, which was the largest pre-contact city in South America and the capital of the Chimú state. The latter part of this ancient state's 11th-15th century AD existence, however, was full of destabilizing events such as warfare, and locations like Punta Lobos and Chan Chan have revealed evidence of mass executions and human sacrifice over the past several years.

In a new research paper published today by PLoS One, archaeologists Gabriel Prieto of the National University of Trujillo, John Verano of Tulane University, and their colleagues consider the meaning of the HLL sacrifice, which is unique in both its scale and its composition. When it was first discovered in 2011, the HLL site immediately revealed a high number of child skeletons in unusual burial positions and with cuts to their breastbone, all within an area of 700 square meters.

The children were wrapped in plain cotton shrouds following their deaths, the archaeologists discovered, and many were buried in groups of three. Some children had their faces painted with red cinnabar, while others wore fabric headdresses. The llamas were placed on top of or next to the children. And trails of footprints of adults, children, and llamas dotted the site, pressed into a thick layer of fresh mud and preserved for nearly 600 years.

Laboratory analysis so far has determined that the boys and girls were in good health and ranged in age from 5 to 14, with a majority of them between 8-12 years old. About a dozen of the children had modified cranial vaults, a practice that indicated their association with a particular ethnic group within the Chimú civilization.

What surprised the archaeologists was that "nearly all children with complete sternal elements showed a single transverse cut," Prieto and colleagues write. "Many of the children had visible spreading and displacement of the ribs, indicating the chest was opened forcefully. Heart removal is a likely motivation."

Little previous evidence has been found of human sacrifice in this region of Peru. However, old historical records by Spanish chroniclers may provide clues to its purpose. Friar Antonio de la Calancha, for example, claimed that child sacrifices were made by the Chimú during lunar eclipses and were sometimes made to sacred places or huacas. And in the 16th century, Cristóbal de Molina described Inca child sacrifice, writing that children "had their live hearts taken out, and so the priests offered the beating hearts to the huacas to which the sacrifice was made."

Given the thick layer of mud that the graves of children and llamas were dug into, though, Prieto and colleagues suspect a catastrophic climate event may have precipitated the sacrifice. "It is probably associated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon," they note, "that periodically brings coastal flooding and elevated sea temperatures that disrupt the marine food chain in northern and central Peru. It is possible that the sacrifices were made in response to the heavy rains."

Bioarchaeologist Celeste Gagnon of Wagner College, who works at a nearby site in Peru, finds this hypothesis plausible. "Given that the Peruvian north coast is ground zero for ENSO," she tells me, "the weather pattern would have decimated the marine resources that were so important to their lives. This may also be why at least one event of Moche sacrifice about 700 years earlier near Chan Chan also has ENSO mud evidence." Matthew Piscitelli, an archaeologist at the Field Museum, concurs that Prieto and colleagues have made a compelling argument about the motivation for the sacrifice. He tells me that since the research "ties together so many lines of evidence--isotopic, genetic, osteological, zooarchaeological--it's hard not to believe that this was how this prehistoric population reacted to the traumatic effects of ENSO."

The trauma of the ancient climate events may therefore help explain the sacrifice. Piscitelli suggests that it may be difficult for us to imagine carrying out this sacrifice, "but you need to put yourself in their shoes. How would you react if the world as you know it was crumbling around you, with catastrophic flooding and searing droughts? Without meteorology, where would you turn? In this case, it might have been religion and a belief that only the ultimate sacrifice would appease what the Chimú thought were angry gods."

But the discovery of this grim graveyard raises the question of another kind of trauma: the emotional effects it had on the archaeologists and may have on the public.

Gagnon, who works in the same lab in Peru as these researchers, witnessed their analysis in 2017. She recalls that she was "sharing a space with textile researchers, and they were processing loin cloths" that several of the male children were dressed in. "Some of them were covered in what were clearly blood and bodily fluids, with spatter patterns and pooling apparent."

As a bioarchaeologist myself, I am used to dealing with human skeletons from ancient cemeteries, but this context of sacrifice deeply affected me as I was reading the PLoS paper because I am also the mother of two children within the age range of those sacrificed. So I asked the archaeologists about their experiences with this mass burial.

Prieto told me that when the remains were first discovered in 2011, "I was not a father, so my perspective was very objective. But once my son was born in 2013, and during the field seasons of 2014 and 2016, I felt terrible - it is really hard to excavate these remains. I have to keep in mind that someone has to recover these bodies and record them in the best possible way, though."

Verano has many more years of experience in forensic anthropology, in which he has dealt with the bodies of people who were the victims of genocide. Because of that and because this site dates to several centuries ago rather than very recently, Verano told me that that it was second nature for him as a scientist to "drop in and start asking questions, and not think too much about it." Even so, the scale of the sacrifice was a hard thing for him to get his head around. "It's an amazing ancient society, but a really intense thing they did. What was it like for the children to be marched down there?"

Footprints around the burials are clearly identifiable as those of adults wearing sandals and small children who walked barefoot, Prieto, Verano, and colleagues note. "At least two large groups of children and camelids came from the northern and southern sides of the site to meet at the center of the sacrificial area. From there, the sacrifice presumably was conducted, and the human and animal bodies placed in burial pits excavated through the mud layer" by Chimú priests or other officials.

Matt Velasco, a bioarchaeologist at Cornell University who also works in Peru, tells me that this "is a remarkable example of the kind of fine-grained reconstructions of past events that are possible when multiple lines of evidence are brought into conversation with one another -- down to the manner in which processions of children and llamas converged at the site of sacrifice." Gagnon agrees, saying that "the excavations at HLL are among the most significant Peruvian finds in the last several decades."

Although the sacrifice is the aspect of the discovery that has captured the public's attention, Gagnon says that "continued analysis of the amazingly well preserved biological and cultural remains will yield new data for years." Specifically, Velasco notes that there is "striking variability in the form of cranial modification compared to other sites during this time period. It will be really interesting to see if further isotopic and genetic analyses support the hypothesis that the children were brought to HLL from different corners of the Chimú state."

Following the completion of excavation of the mass burial site, Verano told me, last summer the town of Huanchaco just north of Huanchaquito installed a memorial to the prehistoric event on the beach between the two towns. One tree was planted for each of the 140 people killed there in 1450 AD, and a statue was erected of a child next to a juvenile llama. Prieto, who is originally from Huanchaco, was instrumental in the dedication of the new monument and has further plans to help build a local museum to the ancient Chimú culture. The story of the children of Huanchaquito-Las Llamas is not yet over.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

@pakistanipower @nahtanbob @gambit @vostok @F-22Raptor @LeGenD @KAL-EL

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

@pakistanipower @nahtanbob @gambit @vostok @F-22Raptor @LeGenD @KAL-EL