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Category: Climate

  • Methane leaks are a climate problem. These satellites could help find them.

    Illustration of satellite amongst stars

    The vision

    “It doesn’t matter how many thermographers we have, boots on the ground, satellites flying in the air, people with drones and airplanes and all the other technology, none of it matters if you don’t stop methane. None of it counts.”

    — Sharon Wilson, “methane hunter” and director of Oilfield Witness

    The spotlight

    Back when I worked with satellites (my career before journalism), and I’d talk about my job with folks from outside the space industry, they often responded simply, “Oh, cool.” It always struck me that, though satellites in many ways enable modern life, many people still think about space tech in terms of astronauts and other worlds. But satellites are what make GPS, weather forecasting, long-distance communication, and even airplane Wi-Fi possible. And a growing fleet of precision satellites are now enabling climate solutions, too: helping us spot, and stop, pollution.

    Two weeks ago, a satellite designed to identify, measure, and monitor greenhouse gas emissions worldwide was launched into orbit by SpaceX. The spacecraft, called Tanager-1, is a collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Earth-imaging company Planet Labs, the environmental nonprofit Carbon Mapper, and others. Tanager-1 has now joined 23 other satellites on orbit, operated by a mix of organizations and agencies, all capable of detecting the potent greenhouse gas methane — which, for the first 20 years after it’s emitted, warms the planet 80 times faster than the same amount of CO2.

    Naveena Sadasivam and I recently reported on this new wave of methane-monitoring satellites, and as part of that reporting, we had the chance to speak with Riley Duren, the CEO of Carbon Mapper. Duren previously worked as the chief systems engineer for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Earth science division where he pushed to establish a climate research portfolio, which included expanding the lab’s ability to monitor greenhouse gases. He knew this monitoring could help mitigate climate change, not just study it.

    “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” Duren said.

    Carbon Mapper itself emerged in 2020 as a “spin-off,” Duren said, of the work he and others at the lab were doing to study the sources of methane emissions from planes, identify the worst offenders, and alert them so that the operators could take action to fix the leaks that the researchers spotted. While they’d had much success with these aerial surveillance campaigns, “to do it in a sustained and operational way,” Duren said, “we needed satellites.”

    But government agencies had no plans to build and launch satellites of that kind, so Duren started chatting with climate philanthropists to put together the funds that would allow him and Carbon Mapper to create their own spacecraft.

    Tanager-1, and the flock of similar satellites that Carbon Mapper plans to launch, will work alongside another nonprofit mission that launched earlier this year, MethaneSAT, to better understand where the highest-value actions can be taken to quell methane emissions and leaks. Duren used a metaphor of photographing birds to describe how the satellites can support each other’s efforts to monitor methane. MethaneSAT provides the equivalent of a landscape view, and can point out where there’s a flurry of bird activity. Tanager-1 can then zoom in and capture telephoto snapshots of the metaphoric birds and nests. “And because Carbon Mapper’s flying a constellation of satellites,” Duren said, “it’s kind of like an army of birdwatchers that are going out to follow up on what the landscape photographer has drawn everyone’s attention to.”

    Below is an excerpt of the feature I co-wrote with Naveena, covering the highly anticipated launch of MethaneSAT in March, and the hopes and worries of those watching. You can find the full feature here, if you want to read more about the history of using satellites to monitor greenhouse gas emissions, what this new fleet offers, and what opportunities researchers hope to open up with this new and improved tech.

    — Syris Valentine

    -----

    Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant (Excerpt)

    On a blustery day in early March, the who’s who of methane research gathered at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California. Dozens of people crammed into a NASA mission control center. Others watched from cars pulled alongside roads just outside the sprawling facility. Many more followed a livestream. They came from across the country to witness the launch of an oven-sized satellite capable of detecting the potent planet-warming gas from space.

    The amount of methane, the primary component in natural gas, in the atmosphere has been rising steadily over the last few decades, reaching nearly three times as much as preindustrial times. About a third of methane emissions in the United States occur during the extraction of fossil fuels as the gas seeps from wellheads, pipelines, and other equipment. The rest come from agricultural operations, landfills, coal mining, and other sources. Some of these leaks are large enough to be seen from orbit. Others are miniscule, yet contribute to a growing problem.

    Identifying and repairing them is a relatively straightforward climate solution. Methane has a warming potential about 80 times higher than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, so reducing its levels in the atmosphere can help curb global temperature rise. And unlike other industries where the technology to decarbonize is still relatively new, oil and gas companies have long had the tools and know-how to fix these leaks.

    MethaneSAT, the gas-detecting device launched in March, is the latest in a growing armada of satellites designed to detect methane. Led by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, and more than six years in the making, the satellite has the ability to circle the globe 15 times a day and monitor regions where 80 percent of the world’s oil and gas is produced. Along with other satellites in orbit, it is expected to dramatically change how regulators and watchdogs police the oil and gas industry.

    “Companies do a good job of complying with the law, but the law has been insufficient,” said Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel at As You Sow, a nonprofit group that has used shareholder advocacy to push fossil fuel producers to tackle climate change. “So this change will increase incentives for reducing methane emissions.”

    Those at Vandenberg or watching online were a bit on edge. A lot could go wrong. The SpaceX rocket carrying the satellite into orbit could explode. A week before, engineers worried about the device that holds the $88 million spacecraft in place during launch and pushes it into space. “That made us a little nervous,” recalled Steven Wofsy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University and a key architect of the project along with Steven Hamburg, the scientist who leads MethaneSAT at EDF. If that didn’t go wrong, the satellite could still fail to deploy or have difficulty communicating with its minders on Earth.

    They needn’t have worried. A couple hours after the rocket blasted off, Wofsy, Hamburg, and his colleagues watched on a television at a hotel about two miles away as their creation was ejected into orbit. It was a jubilant moment for members of the team, many of whom had traveled to Vandenberg with their partners, parents, and children. “Everybody spontaneously broke into a cheer,” Wofsy said. “You [would’ve] thought that your team scored a touchdown during overtime.”

    The data the satellite generates in the coming months will be publicly accessible — available for environmental advocates, oil and gas companies, and regulators alike. Each has an interest in the information MethaneSAT will beam home. Climate advocates hope to use it to push for more stringent regulations governing methane emissions and to hold negligent operators accountable. Fossil fuel companies, many of which do their own monitoring, could use the information to pinpoint and repair leaks, avoiding penalties and recouping a resource they can sell. Regulators could use the data to identify hotspots, develop targeted policies, and catch polluters. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking steps to be able to use third-party data to enforce its air quality regulations, developing guidelines for using the intelligence satellites like MethaneSAT will provide. The satellite is so important to the agency’s efforts that EPA Administrator Michael Regan was in Santa Barbara for the launch as was a congressional lawmaker. Activists hailed the satellite as a much-needed tool to address climate change.

    “This is going to radically change the amount of empirically observed data that we have and vastly increase our understanding of the amount of methane emissions that are currently happening and what needs to be done to reduce them,” said Dakota Raynes, a research and policy manager at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “I’m hopeful that gaining that understanding is going to help continue to shift the narrative towards [the] phase down of fossil fuels.”

    With the satellite safely orbiting 370 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mission enters a critical second phase. In the coming months, EDF researchers will calibrate equipment and ensure the satellite works as planned. By next year, it is expected to transmit reams of information from around the world. Its success will depend on the quality of the data it can produce and — perhaps more importantly — how that data is put to use.

    — Syris Valentine & Naveena Sadasivam

    [Check out the full feature on the Grist site, here.]

    More exposure

    A parting shot

    This image shows methane emissions from a landfill in Georgia, detected by Carbon Mapper’s aerial surveillance by plane (before the launch of Tanager-1, its first satellite). These imaging tools use a spectrometer to reveal the infrared signature the gas leaves behind — making the invisible visible.

    Methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure including the Permian Basin in Texas, and landfills in Georgia and Louisiana.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Methane leaks are a climate problem. These satellites could help find them. on Aug 28, 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Syris Valentine.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Mick Lynch supports a review of jailed Climate Protesters | 25 August 2024 | Just Stop Oil #shorts


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  • ‘Climate Protesters Receiving Disproportionate Sentences’ | Carla Denyer MP | 25 August 2024


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  • Pacific leaders meet for ‘pivotal’ climate change, decolonization and security talks

    Pacific island leaders and top diplomats from key partners including China and the United States have gathered in Tonga for a week of talks on decolonization of New Caledonia, climate change and regional security and cohesion. 

    The Pacific Island Forum’s importance as the peak regional diplomatic body is growing as geopolitical competition heats up in the Pacific Islands. Nations are contending with creeping militarization and an unprecedented battle for influence as the U.S. and allies like Australia push back against China’s inroads. 

    United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will also participate in meetings of the 18-member PIF in Nuku’alofa, where he will amplify calls from Pacific leaders about the need to take faster and stronger action on climate change.

    As leaders met, a 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck the main island of Tongatapu at a depth of over 100 kilometers (62 miles) but no tsunami warning was issued for one of the most at-risk countries in the world for natural hazards.

    A record number of attendees are registered for this year’s forum, including the largest ever Chinese delegation, civil society groups and business lobbyists. 

    Speaking at the opening of the summit, Pacific Island Forum, or PIF, Secretary General Baron Waqa said it was a “pivotal time” in the region’s history.

    “We may be small island countries but we are a force to be reckoned with,” he said in his speech. “We are at the center of geostrategic interest, we are at the forefront of a battle against climate change and its impacts.”

    Waqa said regional unity was essential to meet the challenges facing Pacific people.

    “We need to remain vigilant on issues of regional security and we must, must ensure that these respond to national and regional needs,” he said.

    High on the agenda for leaders will be climate change, a regional policing initiative, the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific, and the applications of U.S. territories Guam and American Samoa for associate member status.

    Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka will also outline his vision for an “ocean of peace” to be declared in the region.

    20240825 Rabuka church doorstop.jpg
    Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka speaks to the media after the PIF Sunday church service in the Tongan capital Nuku’alofa on Aug. 25 2024. (Stefan Armbruster/BenarNews)

    “We have to make sure our foreign affairs are conducted in a way that does not interfere with others,” Rabuka told reporters after a church service on Sunday.  

    “We’d like to remove the issue of fear. If we are friends with China, [or] we are friends with America and some are not – that should not create any fear.”

    For Pacific island leaders, addressing the turmoil in the French territory of New Caledonia – which has full PIF membership – will be among the most pressing issues. 

    In mid-May, the French government’s backing of electoral reforms that would have diluted the voting power of New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanak people triggered weeks of violent riots in the capital Noumea. 

    The unrest resulted in the deaths of 11 people, more than two billion euros (US$2.24billion) in economic damage and the deployment of thousands of French police and special forces. The electoral changes were shelved ahead of French National Assembly elections in late June but tensions remain high.

    A PIF fact-finding mission to New Caledonia, which was scheduled for last week, was deferred amid reports of disagreement between the territory’s pro-independence governing coalition and France. 

    Some Pacific leaders are calling for a fresh referendum on independence in France’s Pacific territory. 

    20240826 PIF Solaveni PM opening 2.jpg
    Tongan Prime Minister and PIF chair Siaosi Sovaleni addresses the opening ceremony of the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga on Aug. 26, 2024. (Stefan Armbruster/BenarNews)

    “We must honor the vision of our forefathers regarding self-determination, including in New Caledonia,” Tongan Prime Minister Hu’akavemeiliku Siaosi Sovaleni said in his opening address.

    The forum, founded in 1971, comprises 18 members from across Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, as well as Australia and New Zealand. It has said climate change is the region’s single greatest concern, but geopolitics will cast a long shadow over proceedings. 

    Billions of dollars worth of aid is being pumped into the region annually and some 18 new embassies have opened since 2017. 

    “There is a real sense that heightened geopolitical interest means bigger delegations and more interested actors outside the immediate forum family,” said Dr. Anna Powles, associate professor at the Center for Defence and Security Studies at Massey University in New Zealand.

    “The forum will be safeguarding the agenda to ensure it doesn’t become an opportunity to advance geopolitical interest, as has been the case in the past.”

    BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Harry Pearl for BenarNews.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘Integrity at the Present time is Resistance’ | Climate Genocide Act Now | 3 August 2024


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  • As planet boils, no sense of urgency on climate at DNC w/Collin Rees


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  • ‘This Was Not Caused by God, But Caused by Climate Change’:  CounterSpin interview with Victoria St. Martin on suing Big Oil  

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Inside Climate News‘ Victoria St. Martin about suing Big Oil for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Janine Jackson: A lot of us have started seeing local weather forecasts with numbers unfamiliar to us for this time of year. As reporters, you could treat that as, “Oh, isn’t that curious? How are folks on the street dealing with this? Are sales of sunscreen going up?” Or, as a reporter, you can seriously engage the predicted, disastrous effects of fossil fuel production as predicted and disastrous—not, though, in terms of what, in other contexts, we would call criminal.

    So what does it look like when business as usual is called out as an actual crime? Our next guest is reporting on an important case in a county in Oregon.

    Veteran journalist and educator Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Victoria St. Martin.

    Victoria St. Martin: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here.

    Inside Climate News: ‘Not Caused by an Act of God’: In a Rare Court Action, an Oregon County Seeks to Hold Fossil Fuel Companies Accountable for Extreme Temperatures

    Inside Climate News (7/8/24)

    JJ: So what happened in summer 2021 in northwest Oregon, such that it became the subject of scientific study? What happened there? What were the harms?

    VSM: The county called this a “heat dome disaster,” but basically there was a heat dome over three days in June of ’21 that recorded highs of 108°, 112°, 116°  Fahrenheit. During that time, 69 people died from heat stroke, and most of them were in their homes.

    Typically, in this part of Oregon, they have very gentle summers. The highs top out at about 81°. But this was unprecedented.

    And one of the attorneys that is working with the county says this was not an act of God. This was not caused by God, but caused by climate change.

    JJ: And that’s exactly the point. Oftentimes, folks might be surprised to hear, but environmental impacts were legitimately, legally written off, if you will, as acts of God. This is just nature, this is just what’s happening. So this is actually something new.

    VSM: Yes. The attorney that I was speaking about, his name’s Jeffrey B. Simon; he is a lawyer for the county. He talks about this idea of how, no, this is not an act of God. This catastrophe was caused by “several of the world’s largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people, by selling as much oil and gas as they could.”

    JJ: What is a heat dome, just for folks who might not know?

    VSM: Let’s see, how would I describe it? I would call it the atmosphere creating an intense umbrella of heat, and especially in areas where they don’t typically see this type of heat, like northwest Oregon. We’ve had heat domes this summer already, all across the nation, in places that typically don’t have this type of high heat.

    JJ: So it’s a thing we all need to get familiar with. If you don’t know what it means today, you need to figure it out for tomorrow.

    VSM: Yeah, some scientists, they say it’s like the atmosphere traps hot air, and, yeah, I said an umbrella, but like a lid or a cap being put on a bottle, and trapping that hot air for days like it did in northwest Oregon.

    JJ: We’ve had issues with news media who want to separate the stories. It’s not that they don’t cover things, it’s that they don’t connect dots. They separate a story from: Here was a heat emergency, in this particular case, and it was horrible, and people suffered from it. And then on another page, or on another day, they’ll have a story about fossil fuel companies lobbyists influencing laws. But part of the problem with news media is they don’t connect these things.

    And so I wonder, as a person who, besides being a journalist, a person who thinks about journalism, where are the gaps or the omissions or the missing dots that you think that media could be doing on this could-not-be-more-important story of climate disruption?

    Victoria St. Martin

    Victoria St. Martin: “To connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more.”

    VSM: Yes. One of my editors says that covering climate, it’s one of the greatest stories of the century, right, the greatest story of our lifetime, that we are covering. And I think one thing that we did well, journalism-wise, in the past 10 or so years, is we’ve pushed this idea that journalists have to be multidimensional, that they have to know how to edit photo and video and create a graphic and write a story.

    But what I think was lost in that, and what is important here and what is missing in these heat dome stories, these stories that are very, very plainly, as you can see, climate change stories, but what is missing here is journalists aren’t necessarily trained to be multidimensional in subject matter.

    And while there are environmental desks growing in newsrooms throughout the nation, newsrooms aren’t allowing the journalists interdisciplinary roles, to be able to cover a weather event and talk about climate. And we need to do more of that.  I think in order to connect those dots, to connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more of that.

    I love how last summer, I think I really saw it come to a head, because the Canadian wildfires came to the East Coast and turned the skies orange in New York. And it was this story you could not ignore anymore. And it forced newsrooms to really start talking about wildfires, and is it safe to breathe the air? And what is the air pollution from a wildfire, and what causes wildfires? I think we need to do more of that.

    While I don’t want climate disasters like wildfires to continue to happen, I do want journalists to think on their toes, think on their feet, think multidimensional, and be able to tell stories in a full and nuanced way, because we are not servicing our readers, our viewers, our listeners, if we aren’t. Our viewers, our listeners and our readers are here to get the full story, and we need to give them the full story and the full picture.

    JJ: And just finally, in terms of journalistic framework, what I think is so interesting with the Multnomah County story is we’re moving the actions of fossil fuel companies into the category of crime. You knew this was going to cause harm, and you still did it, and it caused harm, and that’s a crime. And I feel like that’s, for journalism, for media, that’s a framework shift. Lobbying is a story, and legislative influence is a story. And then crime is a whole different story, and a whole other page. But if we’re talking about actions that cause people to die, that cause people to be harmed, well, then, a lot of things that fossil fuels companies are doing are crimes, and that’s what’s paradigm-breaking with this Multnomah County story.

    VSM: I think also what’s different here is the attorneys reaching out once the county filed suit, once the attorneys filed suit, letting us know what’s happening, making sure that the story is amplified and gets out there. I think I appreciate it always, as a journalist, when there’s an open dialogue, and that I’m able to share the story with readers, viewers and listeners, because I had access to information, I had access to the lawsuit.

    I think, what is that saying? When a tree falls in the forest….  I’m so thankful that somebody called me up and said, “Hey, this is what’s happening.” So I think everybody does their part, and I think in this case, it was a moment of allowing journalists to be a part of that process, and to be able to see behind the curtain and see what’s actually happening. Sometimes law can be…

    JJ: Opaque.

    VSM: …slow and boring and monotonous, and I think, just like anything, like science…. But I think when you allow journalists to have a front-row seat, it helps to tell the story.

    JJ: Absolutely.

    Well, any final thoughts in terms of what you would like folks to take away from this piece that you wrote about the effort to call fossil fuel companies out for the harms that they’re causing? Any tips for other journalists who might be looking at the same story?

    VSM: I think one thing I constantly thought about when I was reporting this story, and something I did not see, is there’s a great database looking at lawsuits that have been filed by states and counties and cities that are seeking damages from oil and gas companies for the harms caused by climate change.

    Again, there are about three dozen lawsuits out there right now, but this is one of the only lawsuits that is focused on a heat dome. And so this is what makes that case unique. This is what sets this case apart from the rest. And, for me, that was important to report.

    So I’m thankful that you got to read it, and that others have gotten to read it, and I hope more people read about it. I think that was key here, and that was something I did not see before.  There are other lawsuits, but this one, a lot of law experts think, could really change the game here, because it’s focusing on a specific disaster, and how this county is going to pay for the costs that they’ve incurred from the effects of the heat dome.

    I think for journalists, when we’re reporting on these things, think of ways to get ahead of the pack, think of what makes the story unique, what sets the story apart from other weather event stories, or other climate change stories, and how to really help paint a picture about how important this story is.

    Sixty-nine people died over the course of three days. That is huge, and it is something that, for me, needed to be at the top of the story. The fact that this was one of the only cases that looked at heat dome disasters, that was something that needed to be at the top of the story for me. And I hope to keep reporting on this, so I can’t wait to see what happens next.

    JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Victoria St. Martin. You can find her work on this and other stories at InsideClimateNews.org. Victoria St. Martin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    VSM: Thank you so much.

     

     

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Climate policy at the DNC #biden #harris #walz #democrats #dnc #climatechange


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  • Climate Crisis & Election Roundtable: From Tim Walz’s Record to Project 2025 to Israel


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  • Climate Crisis & Election Roundtable: From Tim Walz’s Record to Project 2025 to Israel

    Seg6 climate

    Climate activists disrupted a DNC-adjacent event sponsored by ExxonMobil on Wednesday, the same day that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz formally accepted his nomination as vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Walz has faced harsh criticism from Indigenous and environmental rights groups in Minnesota for his authorization of the Line 3 oil pipeline through Native treaty lands in the state. We host a roundtable discussion on the climate crisis and the Democratic Party’s response with Ojibwe lawyer and founder of the Giniw Collective Tara Houska; climate organizer Collin Rees, who was part of the ExxonMobil action at the DNC; and climate scientist Michael Mann.


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  • This simple farming technique can capture carbon for thousands of years

    Simon Kitol’s 25-acre farm in western Kenya teems with maize, tomatoes, and beans, but also an invasive menace: Prosopis juliflora, better known as the mathenge plant. Its long roots steal water from his crops, and the shrub takes up valuable room for growing food. Kitol’s livestock also dine on the mathenge pods, which are loaded with sugar, causing even more problems. 

    “It damages their teeth, and eventually the cows or goats die,” Kitol said. The thickets also provide cover for predators like wild dogs and hyenas. “They hide there because it is so thick that you can’t see them. At night, when the goats or sheep walk around, they are attacked and killed.”

    Last year, experts with Penn State’s PlantVillage project, which helps smallholder farmers adapt to climate change, arrived to train Kitol and others in the area on a clever way to turn mathenge from a problem into an asset. Workers gather up those troublesome weeds — biomass — and convert it into biochar, concentrated carbon that they “charge” with nutrients by mixing it with manure. Farmers then apply the mixture to their fields, sometimes planting grass that provides fodder for livestock. Kitol said that the biochar helps his soils retain water and improves their fertility, leading to higher yields.

    Well beyond Kenya, biochar is having a moment: The worldwide market was worth $600 million last year, and could rise to over $3 billion next year. Anywhere people are producing waste biomass — corn stalks, weeds, dead trees — they’re also producing a powerful tool for sequestering carbon and improving soils. And if farmers can prove how much biomass they’re turning into biochar, they can prove how much carbon they’re putting back into the ground. Through a group like PlantVillage, a company can then pay those farmers to offset its carbon emissions. (Biochar in general accounts for over 90 percent of durable carbon credits that have already been delivered worldwide.)

    So with biochar, farmers are getting a new source of income and a way to better retain rainwater and boost yields. They’re helping mitigate climate change while adapting to its ravages. “Helping to solve an invasive species and land degradation problem, and produce biochar at the same time, is amazing,” said James Gerber, a data scientist who studies agriculture at the nonprofit climate group Project Drawdown. “Anything that gets money into the hands of smallholder farmers in Africa is probably just a good thing. But if it’s part of a functional, verifiable carbon-credit program, even better.”

    The trick to making biochar is pyrolysis. As people have known for millennia, if you expose biomass to very high temperatures but in a low oxygen environment, it doesn’t combust into all-consuming flames; it turns into a kind of charcoal. Companies can do this with big industrial chambers, producing the biochar you can buy for your garden. Smallholder farmers can do it by digging a pit and adding biomass in layers, which restricts oxygen to the smoldering fire at the bottom. A simple kind of metal kiln does the same.

    A kon-tiki kiln turns biomass into biochar. PlantVillage

    Whatever the method, the plant material isn’t fully combusting and billowing smoke. With biochar, you end up with concentrated, solid carbon. “It’s essentially coal,” said David Hughes, founder of PlantVillage. “It goes into the ground and it doesn’t break down, and this is because of the temperature you’ve exposed it to.”

    Because biochar is so spongy, it helps the soil retain more water — an especially welcome trait given the worsening droughts in Africa and elsewhere. But that sponginess also demands special care when applying to a field. “If you just put biochar into the soil, it will suck up all the nutrients in there, and your plants will do worse,” Hughes said. “So you have to charge it with nutrients. You can do that with compost or NPK — nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium — blends.”

    Traditionally, a farmer might burn piles of waste like corn stalks, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. If different farms across a landscape are doing this after a harvest, air quality plummets and imperils human health.

    So for a group like Biochar Life, which provides carbon removal offsets for biochar, the first step is to get a farmer to stop processing their waste biomass the old way. “We need to prove that the farmer didn’t burn it or just leave it there and let the biomass decompose and create methane,” said Aom Kwanpiromtara Suksri, the co-founder and global head of development and compliance at Biochar Life, which has offices in Asia and Africa and has formed a partnership with PlantVillage.

    Grass grows on Kitol’s farm. PlantVillage

    To be sure, carbon offset systems have been plagued with problems. One is a perverse incentive to deforest an area and plant trees again, selling those credits to companies. Where there’s been deforestation from logging or agriculture, planting a bunch of a single species of tree doesn’t create a proper ecosystem. There’s no boost to biodiversity, and tree plantations don’t sequester nearly as much carbon as a real forest. 

    By contrast, Biochar Life says its offset system is easier to quantify, and that it’s so far distributed more than $300,000 to farmers, and $265,000 to local teams that verify the credits. “We can’t generate a credit until we’ve proven that we’ve generated biochar, and that biochar has been charged and put back into the ground,” said Matt Rickard, Biochar Life’s chief operating officer. 

    Then there’s an issue of permanence: If farmers plant a bunch of trees and a drought strikes, and those trees all wilt or catch on fire, their carbon is going right back into the atmosphere. Scientists are still working out how long biochar can last in different kinds of soils and climates, but indications are that it can last thousands or possibly millions of years. And compared to waiting for a tree to grow and capture carbon, adding biochar to soil sequesters the carbon in the ground immediately.

    “Biochar, it’s kind of chemically locked in — it’d be very difficult to reverse that,” Gerber said. “For me, that is the most important reason that biochar has greater potential for carbon credits.”

    And unlike planting a new forest and walking away, farmers can keep producing biomass, charging it with nutrients, and adding it to the soil year after year. At the very least, a smallholder farmer like Kitol is getting a better handle on an invasive species while boosting yields and preparing his soils for the drier times ahead. “I see the future of biochar as promising,” Kitol said. “Biochar will be widely used as more people recognize its benefits.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This simple farming technique can capture carbon for thousands of years on Aug 22, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • ‘This Is a Push to Pass Laws Criminalizing Protest of Fossil Fuel Infrastructure’:  CounterSpin interview with Emily Sanders on criminalizing pipeline protest

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about criminalizing pipeline protests for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.


     

    FAIR: ‘Nothing to See Here’ Headlines Conceal Police Violence at Dakota Access

    FAIR.org (11/22/16)

    Janine Jackson: We have not forgotten the years of protest by the people of Standing Rock in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The cause could not have been more fundamental. The news and images were dramatic, and the support was global and cross-community.

    Fossil fuel makers, who would like to keep making money from the destruction of the planet’s capacity for life, along with their ally enablers in law and law enforcement, want nothing like that to ever happen again, and certainly not for you to see it and take inspiration.

    Pursuant to that are new efforts reported by our guest.

    Emily Sanders is senior reporter for ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. This story was co-published with the Lever. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.

    Emily Sanders: Hi. Thanks so much for having me again.

    JJ We’re talking, to start, about congressional actions. What is the context behind this new rulemaking authorization process that you’re writing about, and how did laws around pipeline protest get into this conversation?

    HuffPost: The Gassing Of Satartia

    HuffPost (8/26/21)

    ES: Congress is currently working to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which would set the agency’s funding and mandates for safety rulemaking on pipelines over the next few years. And that’s at the same time as the agency sets out to make new rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.

    And both these processes are especially crucial right now, as the oil and gas industry plans to build out tens of thousands of additional miles of pipeline for carbon capture projects. And CO2 is an asphyxiant. It can travel long distances, it can shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate or even kill people and wildlife.

    So these pipelines can be incredibly dangerous if and when they leak, as was the case in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, when a Denbury pipeline, now owned by ExxonMobil, ruptured and stalled emergency vehicles, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with reportedly zombie-like symptoms.

    So, after that, and now in the wake of yet another leak in Sulphur, Louisiana, earlier this year, advocates and community members have really been pushing the agency to take a hard look at these pipelines, and provide more transparent information to communities and first responders, who are often just underfunded, or volunteer fire departments tasked with dealing with these leaks at the last minute. And they’re asking the agency to implement real rules and oversight for the companies that, in these cases of leaks, were not appropriately monitoring their sites.

    So back in April, I reported on how the oil industry was lobbying to limit the scope of those rules, and dictate its own safety standards, so that it can build out CO2 pipeline infrastructure as quickly as possible, since it stands to benefit from huge tax incentives for CCS passed under the Biden administration.

    Emily Sanders of the Center for Climate Integrity

    Emily Sanders: “This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.”

    And what I found, as I dug further into those lobbying records, is that oil companies and their trade groups are now trying to pressure lawmakers to use this PHMSA reauthorization process to push through measures that could further criminalize pipeline protests at the federal level.

    The federal penalty for damaging or destroying pipelines is already a felony charge of up to 20 years in prison. But in hearing testimony that I found, and policy briefs posted online, oil industry trade group executives were basically pushing lawmakers to expand the definition of so-called “attacks” on pipelines that can be punished under felony charges to include vague language like “disruptions of service” or “attacks on construction sites.”

    And that could implicate a much broader set of activities that are used to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. So something like “disruption of service,” or interfering at a construction site, that could implicate anything from planting corn in the path of a pipeline construction, to a march, or a sit-in at a site. And it’s really hard to say what that actually means, which is why it’s so concerning.

    And we’re now already seeing this language show up in committee bills. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s draft reauthorization bill, which was one of two committee bills being negotiated before the legislation goes to the Senate, would add impairing the operation of pipelines, damaging or destroying such a facility under construction, and even attempting or conspiring to do so as felony activities punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

    So this is something industry lobby groups have tried before, back in 2019, to use this reauthorization process towards this purpose. They say it’s about preventing damage or destruction of pipelines that could create a harmful situation for communities on the ground. But, again, that’s already a felony under federal law. This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.

    JJ: Well, you’ve hit all the points, but let me just draw some out, because the perversity here—it’s not irony—this is coming at the center of legislative work about rules for industry due to devastating harms, like breaches in a carbon dioxide pipeline, things that have actively harmed the community.

    So in the process of legislating rules around that, fossil fuel makers have said, “Oh, well, while we’re talking about safety of pipelines, let’s also wiggle in this idea that protesters might be endangering pipelines.”

    And then here’s where it gets to peak irony, the idea that protesters might cause harm to human beings by protesting pipelines, when the context is we’re talking about the harm that these pipelines themselves have caused. I mean, it’s kind of off the chart.

    ES: Exactly. And this is as these same companies are continuing to invest in more and more fossil fuel infrastructure, while every scientific body is telling us that we have to do the opposite to avoid cataclysmic climate impacts. So they’re really using this growing pushback against their own operations to take this opportunity to silence that opposition.

    JJ: And then, of course, the vagueness of the language, which you point to in the piece, that is part of it, that you’re not supposed to quite understand, well, what counts as “protest,” what counts as “impairing the operation” of the pipeline. It’s very much suppressive of free speech and action.

    FAIR: It’s Only the Future of the Planet

    Extra! (4/13)

    ES: Exactly. There’s precedent for this, as you alluded to in your opening; this is part of a larger push to pass laws criminalizing protest of fossil fuel infrastructure since the protest against Keystone XL and Dakota Access, which brought together enormous coalitions of people that cross cultural and political boundaries to oppose those pipelines.

    And much of the legislation we’ve seen since then, which has been lobbied for by companies like Exxon and Marathon, Koch and Enbridge—much of that legislation was primarily based on a model bill crafted by the oil- and gas-funded American Legislative and Exchange Council, or ALEC, which made it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called critical infrastructure.

    And those critical infrastructure bills use a lot of the same, very vague types of language to describe trespass, which can make it incredibly dangerous, not just for protesters, many of whom are Indigenous people and farmers and other landowners just trying to protect their land and water rights, but also journalists and the press, who go to report on these protests on the ground. And, again, it’s just especially concerning when the cost to the planet and people’s safety are so high.

    JJ: I just want to ask, finally, it’s kind of open-ended, but I mean, it’s just not plausible to think that people are going to stop resisting or stop protesting or stop speaking out against the harms climate disruption is inflicting, that are evident much more every single day. And I just wonder—obviously, these fossil fuel companies are hoping that news media will use their age-old frames about criminality and law-breaking to push people back into the idea of, “Oh, it’s OK to want what you want”—like, not to see the capacity for human life on the planet destroyed—”it’s OK for you to want that, but just do it through proper channels. Don’t do it by protesting, because now that’s illegal in a new way.” And I just wonder, media have to do something different, big media have to do something different to actually rise to this occasion.

    ExxonKnews: Big Oil wants to increase federal criminal penalties for pipeline protests

    ExxonKnews (6/17/24)

    ES: I think it’s all about talking to the actual people on the ground who are doing the protesting. Like you said, it’s so easy to paint people as criminals, when the definition of a criminal is defined or written by the same industry trying to protect the product that those people are protesting. So I think it’s just so important to get their perspective, find out why they’re there. A lot of the time these are regular people, not just activists who are there because of the climate, but also just people who are there trying to protect their water, protect their land and their homes and livelihoods, or journalists who are trying to report on what’s going on. And I just think getting their voice heard from a source is the most important thing.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, senior reporter for ExxonKnews. You can find the piece, “Big Oil Wants to Increase Federal Criminal Penalties for Pipeline Protests,” online at ExxonKnews.org, as well as LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    ES: Thanks again for having me.

     

  • Your guide to voting after a disaster

    In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Louisiana experienced a parade of devastating hurricanes. On August 27, Hurricane Laura hit the state’s southwest coast as a Category 4 storm, bringing winds up to 150 miles per hour, extreme rainfall, and a 10-foot storm surge. Hurricane Delta hit the same region six weeks later as a Category 2. Hurricane Zeta then hit the southeast part of the state a week before the election. The storms made voting a chaotic and difficult process: polling locations damaged, thousands displaced from their state, all the necessary paperwork and IDs lost to floodwaters. 

    It is an experience that many Americans have found themselves in, or will in the future, as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters. According to recent polling from the Pew Research Center, seven in 10 Americans said their community experienced an extreme weather event in the past 12 months, including flooding, drought, extreme heat, rising sea levels, or major wildfires. 

    The aftermath of a disaster can be terrifying and traumatic, and many victims struggle to secure basic necessities such as food and shelter, or to fill out paperwork for disaster aid and insurance. Finding accurate information about where and how to vote is even harder — so hard, in fact, that many people who have experienced disasters don’t bother to vote at all.

    With experts forecasting a historically active hurricane season and a rash of wildfires breaking out across the West, it’s more important than ever to be prepared for disruptions to the voting process in what stands to be a pivotal election year.

    The guide below aims to help you navigate early voting, absentee voting, and election day, the rules of which vary widely across the U.S. (Still not registered to vote? You still have time: Find your state’s voter registration rules here.)

    VOTING IN-PERSON
    HOW TO VOTE EARLY
    ABSENTEE OR MAIL-IN VOTING
    VOTER ID LAWS
    KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
    A sign indicating a change in a polling location in Leonia, New Jersey following Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
    James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images

    In-person voting

    If a disaster strikes, the governor can extend voting deadlines, allow ballots to be forwarded to a new address, allow local officials to change or add new polling places, or postpone municipal elections. Those rules are different depending on the state, and in the wake of a disaster that information may be hard to find.

    The U.S. Vote Foundation has a tool to access your county election office’s contact information. These range by state; they’re typically county clerks, supervisors, auditors, boards of elections, or election commissions. You can try to contact these offices, but it’s not guaranteed they’ll be able to answer the questions. You can also ask voting rights groups in your area and watch local news for any changes or updates.  

    In the wake of a disaster, first confirm where you should be voting. Has your polling place been damaged or moved? If multiple locations are combined or election day volunteers are scarce post-disaster, be prepared to stand in long lines to vote. If you’re waiting in the heat, make sure to wear comfortable shoes and appropriate clothing (21 states prohibit campaign apparel, so keep that in mind), and bring water. Here are some other resources on heat waves. 

    Was your car damaged in a disaster? Need a ride to the polls? Some ride share services and public transit systems offer free rides on Election Day. Here’s more information. 

    Early voting

    Most states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands offer some form of early voting, which is voting in-person before the election anywhere from a few days to over a month early, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. However, the hours, locations, and timing differ for each. Three states — Alabama, Mississippi ,and New Hampshire — do not allow early in-person voting. 

    Early in-person voting is a useful option if you’d like to avoid lines on election day or will be out of town. It’s also an option for people who live in a region of the country prone to natural disasters or have been recently hit by one. In-person voting on election day, which comes at the tail end of “danger season,” may not be a possibility or a priority. Go here to see the specific rules around early voting in your state. 

    Francisco Salomon Mendoza of La Puente, California seals his mail-in ballot at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder on March 4. Christina House / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    Absentee ballots

    Absentee voting is often called “mail-in voting” or “by-mail voting.” Every state offers this, but some require you to meet certain conditions, like having a valid excuse for why you can’t make it to the polls on election day. Absentee voting can be a particularly useful tool for people who have been recently displaced by extreme weather, or are at risk of being so. It also safeguards voters who live in the hottest parts of the country, where heat can make waiting in long lines dangerous. 

    The League of Women Voters explains absentee voting rules by state here. If you reside in a county that gets a federal disaster declaration after a disaster hits, there may be changes to these processes that can offer you more time and flexibility. 

    Since it’s the height of hurricane season, we’ve included the registration and absentee ballot request deadlines for hurricane-prone states below:

    Florida: Registration deadline is October 7. If voting by mail, you must request an absentee ballot 12 days before the election, no later than 5 p.m. (more here).

    Alabama: Registration deadline is 15 days before the election. If voting by mail, request a ballot five days before the election if you’re applying in person, or seven days before if you’re mailing your request (more here).

    Mississippi: Mississippi does not have online registration. The deadline is October 7, 30 days before election day. The last day to request an absentee ballot is five days before election day (more here). 

    North Carolina: Voter registration deadline is 5 p.m. Friday, October 11, 2024. You must request an absentee ballot no later than a week before the election (more here). 

    South Carolina: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. You must request an absentee ballot no later than 5:00 p.m. on the 11th day prior to the election (more here).

    Louisiana: Online registration deadline is 20 days before election on October 15; in-person or mail is 30 days on October 7. Read the absentee ballot requirements here.

    Georgia: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. You can request an absentee ballot 11 weeks before the election, and it must be returned two Fridays before (more here).

    Texas: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. If voting by mail, you must request an absentee ballot 11 days before the election (more here).

    An election official in Lee County, Florida, sets up signs directing voters to a polling station in Fort Myers after Governor Ron DeSantis expanded early voting access following Hurricane Ian in 2022.
    Joe Raedle/Getty Images

    Voter ID laws

    Each state has a different voter ID law. Some require photo identification, others require a document such as a utility bill, bank statement, or paycheck; some require a signature. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a breakdown of these rules here.

    If your ID gets destroyed in a flood, fire, or tornado, your state may be able to exempt you from showing an ID at the polls. For instance, after Hurricane Harvey, Texas residents who lost their ID to floodwaters could vote without one once they filled out an affidavit stating that the voter didn’t have identification because of a natural disaster. Your state may also waive the fees associated with getting a new ID.

    The best way to find this information out is to contact your county clerk or other election official, or contact a voting rights group in your area. 

    Know your rights

    Just as there are strict rules in states around how people can cast ballots, there are also many others that dictate what happens outside of polling places. In most states, you can accept water and food from groups around election sites, but there is misinformation around whether or not it is legal. After the 2020 election, Georgia passed a law prohibiting this within a certain buffer zone. A judge struck down part of that law: there is no longer a ban on handing things to votes with 25 feet of them standing in line, but it’s still illegal to do so within 150 feet of the building where ballots are being cast. 

    Call or text 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) to report voter intimidation to the Election Protection Coalition. You can also find more information on voter rights from the ACLU. 

    Did we miss something? Please let us know by emailing community@grist.org.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Your guide to voting after a disaster on Aug 20, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Extreme weather 101: Your guide to staying prepared and informed

    No matter where you live, extreme weather can hit your area, causing damage to homes, power outages, and dangerous or deadly conditions. If you’re on the coast, it may be a hurricane; in the Midwest or South, a tornado; in the West, wildfires; and as we’ve seen in recent years, anywhere can experience heat waves or flash flooding. 

    Living through a disaster and its aftermath can be both traumatic and chaotic, from the immediate losses of life and belongings to conflicting information around where to access aid. The weeks and months after may be even more difficult, as the attention on your community is gone but civic services and events have stalled or changed drastically. 

    Grist compiled this resource guide to help you stay prepared and informed. It looks at everything from how to find the most accurate forecasts to signing up for emergency alerts to the roles that different agencies play in disaster aid. 

    STAYING INFORMED
    EMERGENCY KIT
    DISASTER AID
    FEMA
    POST-DISASTER
    WHAT NOT TO FORGET
    An aerial view shows flooding in Merced, California following a “bomb cyclone” in January 2023. Josh Edelson / AFP

    Where to find the facts on disasters 

    These days, many people find out about disasters in their area via social media. But it’s important to make sure the information you’re receiving is accurate. Here’s where to find the facts on extreme weather and the most reliable places to check for emergency alerts and updates.

    Your local emergency manager:  Your city or county will have an emergency management department, which is part of the local government. In larger cities, it’s often a separate agency; in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts. Emergency managers are responsible for communicating with the public about disasters, managing rescue and response efforts, and coordinating between different agencies. They usually have an SMS-based emergency alert system, so sign up for those via your local website (Note: Some cities have multiple languages available, but most emergency alerts are only in English.) Many emergency management agencies are active on Facebook, so check there for updates as well. 

    Local news: The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a storm. Follow your local newspaper and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly. 

    Weather stations and apps: The Weather Channel, Apple Weather, and Google will have information on major storms, but that may not be the case for smaller-scale weather events, and you shouldn’t rely on these apps to tell you if you need to evacuate or move to higher ground. 

    National Weather Service: This agency, also known as NWS, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and offers information and updates on everything from wildfires to hurricanes to air quality. You can enter your zip code on weather.gov and customize your homepage. The NWS also has regional and local branches where you can sign up for SMS alerts. If you’re in a rural area or somewhere that isn’t highlighted on its maps, keep an eye out for local alerts and evacuation orders, as NWS may not have as much information ahead of time.  

    Cal Fire firefighters livestream images and data from efforts to control and contain the Park Fire on July 29 near Chico, California. David McNew/Getty Images

    How to pack an emergency kit

    As you prepare for a storm, it’s important to have an emergency kit ready in case you lose power or need to leave your home. Review this checklist from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, for what to pack so you can stay safe, hydrated, and healthy. 

    These can often be expensive to create, so contact your local disaster aid organizations, houses of worship, or charities to see if there are free or affordable kits available. Try to gather as much as you can ahead of time in case shelves are empty when a storm is on the way.

    Some of the most important things to have:

    • Water (one gallon per person per day for several days)
    • Food (at least a several-day supply of non-perishable food) and a can opener
    • Medicines and documentation of your medical needs
    • Identification and proof of residency documents (see a more detailed list below)
    • Battery-powered or hand crank radio, batteries, flashlight
    • First aid kit
    • Masks, hand sanitizer, and trash bags 
    • Wrench or pliers 
    • Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
    • Diapers, wipes, and food or formula for babies and children
    • Food and medicines for any household pets

    Don’t forget: Documents

    One of the most important things to have in your emergency kit is documents you may need to prove your residence, demonstrate extent of damage, and vote. FEMA often requires you to provide these documents in order to receive financial assistance after a disaster.

    • Government issued ID, such as a drivers’ license for for each member of your household
    • Proof of citizenship or legal residency for each member of your household (passport, green card, etc.)
    • Social Security card for each member of your household
    • Documentation of your medical needs, such as medications or special equipment including oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, etc.
    • Health insurance card
    • Car title and registration documents
    • Pre-disaster photos of the inside and outside of your house and belongings
    • Copy of your homeowners’ or renters’ insurance policy
    • For homeowners: copies of your deed, mortgage information, and flood insurance policy, if applicable
    • For renters: a copy of your lease
    • Financial documents such as a checkbook or voided check

    You can find more details about why you may need these documents here.

    A volunteer assesses the remains of a charred apartment complex in the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, western Maui, Hawaiʻi in 2023.
    Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images

    Disaster aid 101

    It can be hard to know who to lean on or trust when it comes to natural disasters. Where do official evacuation orders come from, for example, or who do you call if you need to be rescued? And where can you get money to help pay for emergency housing or to rebuild your home or community. Here’s a breakdown of the government officials and agencies in charge of delivering aid before, during, and after a disaster:

    Emergency management agencies: Almost all cities and counties have local emergency management departments, which are part of the local government. Sometimes they’re agencies all their own, but in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts. These departments are the first line of defense during a weather disaster. They’re responsible for communicating with the public about incoming disasters, managing rescue and response efforts during an extreme weather event, and coordinating between different agencies. Many emergency management agencies, however, have a small staff and are under-resourced.

    Much of the work that emergency managers do happens before a disaster: They develop response plans that lay out evacuation routes and communication procedures, and they also delegate responsibility to different government agencies like the police, fire, and public health departments. Most counties and cities publish these plans online. 

    In most cases, they are the most trustworthy resource in the days just before and just after a hurricane or other big weather event. They’ll send out alerts and warnings, coordinate evacuation efforts, and direct survivors and victims to resources and shelter.

    You can find your state emergency management agency here. There isn’t a comprehensive list by county or city, but if you search your location online you’ll likely find a website, a page on the county or city website, or a Facebook page that posts updates. 

    Law enforcement: County sheriffs and city police departments are often the largest and best-staffed agencies in a given community, so they play a key role during disasters. Sheriff’s departments often enforce mandatory evacuation orders, going door-to-door to ensure that people vacate an area. They manage traffic flow during evacuations and help conduct search and rescue operations. 

    Law enforcement agencies may restrict access to disaster areas for the first few days after a flood or fire. In most states, city and county governments also have the power to issue curfew orders, and law enforcement officers can enforce these curfews with fines or even arrests. In some rural counties, the sheriff’s department may serve as the emergency management department. 

    Lexington Firefighters’ swift water teams rescue people stranded by extreme rain in Lost Creek, Kentucky in 2022. Michael Swensen/Getty Images

    Governor: State governors control several key aspects of disaster response. They have the power to declare a state of emergency, which allows them to deploy rescue and repair workers, distribute financial assistance to local governments, and activate the state National Guard. The governor has a key role in the immediate response to a disaster, but a smaller role in distributing aid and assistance to individual disaster victims.

    In almost all U.S. states, and all hurricane-prone states along the Gulf of Mexico, the governor also has the power to announce mandatory evacuation orders. The penalty for not following these orders differs, but is most often a cash fine. (Though states seldom enforce these penalties.) The state government also decides whether to implement other transportation procedures such as contraflow, where officials reverse traffic flow on one side of a highway to allow larger amounts of people to evacuate. 

    HUD: The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, also spends billions of dollars to help communities recover after disasters, building new housing and public buildings such as schools — but this money takes much longer to arrive. Unlike FEMA, HUD must wait for Congress to approve its post-disaster work, and then it must dole out grants to states for specific projects. In some cases, such as the aftermaths of Hurricane Laura in Louisiana or Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, it took years for projects to get off the ground. States and local governments, not individual people, apply for money from HUD, but the agency can direct you to FEMA or housing counselors.

    A homeowner hangs a sign that reads “FEMA please help make Mexico Beach great again” on a house damaged by Hurricane Michael in Florida in 2018. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

    FEMA

    The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is the federal government’s main disaster response agency. It provides assistance to states and local governments during large events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

    FEMA is almost never the first resource on the ground after a disaster strikes. In order for the agency to send resources to a disaster area, the state’s governor must first request a disaster declaration from the president, and the president must approve it. For large disasters such as Category 4 or 5 hurricanes, this typically happens fast. For smaller disasters, like severe rain or flooding events, it can take weeks or even months for the president to grant a declaration and activate the agency. FEMA has historically not responded to heat waves.

    FEMA is broken into regional offices and offers specific contacts and information for each of those, as well as for tribal nations. You can find your FEMA region here.

    FEMA has two primary roles after a federally declared disaster:

    Contributing to community rebuilding costs: The agency helps states and local governments pay for the cost of removing debris and rebuilding public infrastructure. During only the most extreme events, the agency also deploys its own teams of firefighters and rescue workers to help locate missing people, clear roadways, and restore public services. For the most part, states and local law enforcement conduct on-the-ground recovery work. (Read more about FEMA’s responsibilities and programs here.)

    Individual financial assistance: FEMA gives out financial assistance to individual people who have lost their homes and belongings. This assistance can take several forms. FEMA gives out pre-loaded debit cards to help people buy food and fuel in the first days after a disaster, and may also provide cash payments for home repairs that your insurance doesn’t cover. The agency also provides up to 18 months of housing assistance for people who lose their homes in a disaster, and sometimes houses disaster survivors in its own manufactured housing units or “FEMA trailers.” FEMA also sometimes covers funeral and grieving expenses as well as medical and dental treatment.

    In the aftermath of a disaster, FEMA offers survivors:

    • A one-time payment of $750 for emergency needs
    • Temporary housing assistance equivalent to 14 nights’ stay in a hotel in your area 
    • Up to 18 months of rental assistance
    • Payments for lost property that isn’t covered by your homeowner’s insurance
    • And other forms of assistance, depending on your needs and losses

    If you are a U.S. citizen or meet certain qualifications as a non-citizen and live in a federal disaster declaration area, you are eligible for financial assistance. Regardless of citizenship or immigration status, if you are affected by a disaster you may be eligible for crisis counseling, disaster legal services, disaster case management, medical care, shelter, food, and water. 

    FEMA representatives take information from people displaced by Hurricane Ian in Estero, Florida in 2022. Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images

    FEMA also runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides insurance coverage of up to $350,000 for home flood damage. The agency recommends that everyone who lives in a flood zone purchase this coverage — and most mortgage lenders require it for borrowers in flood zones — though many homes outside the zones are also vulnerable. You must begin paying for flood insurance at least 30 days before a disaster in order to be eligible for a payout. You can check if your home is in a flood zone by using this FEMA website.

    How to get FEMA aid: The easiest way to apply for individual assistance from FEMA is to fill out the application form on disasterassistance.gov. This is easiest to do from a personal computer over Wi-Fi, but you can do it from a smartphone with cellular data if necessary. This website does not become active until the president issues a disaster declaration.

    Some important things to know:

    • FEMA will require you to create an account on the secure website Login.gov. Use this account to submit your aid application. 
    • You can track the status of your aid application and receive notifications if FEMA needs more documents from you. 
    • If FEMA denies your application for aid, you can appeal, but the process is lengthy. 

    Visiting a FEMA site in your area after a disaster: FEMA disaster recovery centers are facilities and mobile units where you can find information about the agency’s programs as well as other state and local resources. FEMA representatives can help you navigate the aid application process or direct you to nonprofits, shelters, or state and local resources. Visit this website to locate a recovery center in your area or text DRC and a ZIP Code to 43362. Example: DRC 01234.  

    A woman looks over her apartment in Fort Myers, Florida, after Hurricane Ian inundated it with floodwaters in 2022. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

    What to expect after a disaster

    Disasters affect people in many different ways, and it’s normal to grieve your losses — personal, professional, community — in your own time. Here are a few resources if you need mental health support after experiencing an extreme weather event.

    • The National Center for PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, on what to expect after experiencing a disaster.
    • The American Red Cross has disaster mental health volunteers they often dispatch to areas hit by a disaster.
    • The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, has a fact sheet on managing stress after a disaster. The agency has a Disaster Distress Helpline that provides 24/7 crisis counseling and support. Call or text: 1-800-985-5990

    After a disaster is an especially vulnerable time. Beware of scams and make sure to know your rights. 

    • Be wary of solicitors who arrive at your home after a disaster claiming to represent FEMA or another agency. FEMA will never ask you for money. The safest way to apply for aid is through FEMA’s official website: disasterassistance.gov. 
    • Be cautious about hiring contractors or construction workers in the days after a disaster. Many cities require permits for rebuilding work, and it’s common for scammers to pose as contractors after a disaster. 
    • Renters can often face evictions after a disaster, so familiarize yourself with tenant rights in your state. 
    Residents of Paradise, California visit the town’s planning department to file permitting applications to re-build homes and other structures after the devastating 2018 Camp Fire. Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Image

    What to keep in mind before, during, and after a disaster

    The most important thing to consider during a disaster is your own, your family’s, and your community’s safety. The National Weather Service has a guide for hurricanes and floods; FEMA has a guide for wildfires; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a guide for extreme heat safety.

    A few potentially life-saving things to remember:

    • Never wade in floodwaters. They often contain harmful runoff from sewer systems and can cause serious illness and health issues.
    • If it’s safe to do so, turn off electricity at the main breaker or fuse box in your home or business before a hurricane to prevent electric shock. 
    • If you lose power, never operate a generator inside your home. Generators emit carbon monoxide, a colorless and odorless gas that can be fatal if inhaled.

    Did we miss something? Please let us know by emailing community@grist.org.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme weather 101: Your guide to staying prepared and informed on Aug 20, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Hurricane Ernesto arrived way early. It’s an ominous sign.

    After unleashing widespread flooding and knocking out electricity for half of Puerto Rico, this season’s third hurricane, Ernesto, has turned north, and is approaching Bermuda. In an average Atlantic season, the third hurricane doesn’t spin up until September 7, so Ernesto has arrived way, way early. As of August 9, this summer had already produced a third of the activity in a typical season — with nearly 90 percent of it remaining.

    All that makes Ernesto, now a Category 2 hurricane, an ominous sign of what’s still to come in the next few months — and what to expect as the planet rapidly warms. “Being a little more than three weeks ahead of schedule for the third hurricane is pretty impressive,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

    This spring, scientists predicted that the Atlantic Ocean would play host to an exceptionally active hurricane season, with five major hurricanes and 21 named storms, for one particularly good reason — the ocean is exceptionally warm, and is expected to stay that way. In July, the nursery for Atlantic hurricanes was running 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average. “Hurricanes are a lot like engines — they need some sort of fuel,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “They need something to be able to accelerate and pick up wind speed, and the thing they use to do that largely is the ocean surface.”

    As water evaporates off the ocean, buoyant clouds form, releasing heat and lowering atmospheric pressure. That sucks in air, creating winds and a vortex. Hurricanes also love high humidity because dry air can slow the speed of the updrafts that the storms need to grow big and strong. Hurricanes hate wind shear — winds moving at different speeds and directions at different altitudes. El Niño tends to encourage the proliferation of wind shear over the Atlantic, while La Niña tends to discourage it. Right now the conditions are “neutral,” as El Niño has faded and La Niña has yet to officially form.

    So warm ocean temperatures aren’t the only ingredient to make a hurricane, but they’re certainly the fuel. As Ernesto was chugging across the Atlantic between West Africa and the Caribbean, it was encountering abnormally high ocean temperatures made at least 50 to 100 times more likely because of climate change, according to Climate Central’s analysis. (To be clear, this isn’t saying that Ernesto itself was more likely because of climate change — that will require further analysis.) More remarkable still, the group found that Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 that slammed into Texas in early July, fed on ocean temperatures made 100 to 400 times more likely by climate change. “We also know that storms are moving slower, they are lasting longer, and these things we expect to be influenced by climate as well,” Gilford said.

    High ocean temperatures also feed the “rapid intensification” of hurricanes, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Hurricane Beryl did that on its way to Texas, shattering records for how quickly it developed into a monster storm. Rapid intensification makes hurricanes extra dangerous because a coastal city might be preparing for a Category 2 to make landfall, only for a Category 5 to suddenly appear. And the problem is only getting worse, as research has found a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore.

    Luckily for Bermuda, Ernesto hasn’t rapidly intensified — though it’s come close this week — but it’s still a very dangerous Category 2. “The shear is potentially a little bit stronger than originally thought,” said Samantha Nebylitsa, who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami, and “dry air just has been really impeding the intensification. It’s just not letting up.” That could well weaken the storm into a Category 1 by the time it hits Bermuda.

    The Atlantic is likely to continue providing more fuel as summer winds down. Because the ocean takes longer to heat up than the land, the peak of hurricane season isn’t until September. And the season doesn’t officially close until the end of November. “The best predictions suggest that we are maybe only about 15 or 20 percent the way through of the total activity we expect this year,” Gilford said. “There’s a lot more to come down the pipeline in 2024.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Ernesto arrived way early. It’s an ominous sign. on Aug 16, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Can the Olympics survive climate change? | Edge of Sports


    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Emily Sanders on Criminalizing Pipeline Protest, Victoria St. Martin on Suing Fossil Fuel Companies

     

     

    ExxonKnews: Big Oil wants to increase federal criminal penalties for pipeline protests

    ExxonKnews (6/17/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see, public interest be damned. So the crickets you’re hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That’s all intentional.  We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.

     

    Inside Climate News: ‘Not Caused by an Act of God’: In a Rare Court Action, an Oregon County Seeks to Hold Fossil Fuel Companies Accountable for Extreme Temperatures

    Inside Climate News (7/8/24)

    Also and related: Not everyone is lying down and accepting that, OK, we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making, and we’ll address it that way. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.

     

    Employing the law to silence dissent on life or death concerns, or using the law to engage those concerns head on—that’s this week on CounterSpin!

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Climate change fueled last year’s extreme wildfires — some more than others

    Starting in March 2023, Canada burned for eight months, with flames licking all 13 provinces and territories in the country’s deadliest ever fire season. At least 150,000 people evacuated, and tens of millions across North America were affected by the drifting smoke. In New York, residents experienced the worst air quality in half a century.  

    Five months later, Greece was besieged by the European Union’s largest blaze yet, which claimed almost 350 square miles of forests and took the lives of 19 immigrants. Near the equator, the Amazon experienced a record-breaking number of fires. For months, satellite images showed thick plumes of smoke shrouding entire countries and swaths of charred land, their perimeter accented by flares of highlighter-orange flames.

    We can thank climate change for these unprecedented conflagrations. On Tuesday, an international group of scientists released State of Wildfires, an annual report that analyzed global wildfires between March 2023 and February 2024, concluding beyond doubt that climate change intensified the conditions that fueled the flames. According to the report, last year’s wildfires in Canada, Greece, and the Amazon were at least three times more likely — and up to 20 times more likely — than they would have been without human-caused planetary warming. 

    The scientists also found that all this burning generated a staggering 8.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — 3 billion more than the U.S. emitted by burning fossil fuels in 2022.

    “This release of greenhouse gases … creates a positive feedback loop that could then lead to more extreme fires,” said Douglas Kelley, a fire scientist at U.K. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and one of the authors of the report. “So if we keep on putting out greenhouse gases in the same way we are now, we’ll see at least six to 11 times more of those fires by the end of the century.”

    the silhouettes of sky scrapers are barely visible against an orange backdrop of smokey skies
    An aerial view of a hazy, smoky sky due to Canadian wildfires in New York City in June 2023.
    Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images

    To understand how the changing climate stacked the odds, the researchers analyzed regional data to identify changes in fire weather — a term that describes the hot, dry, and often windy conditions that wildfires can easily start in. Climate and ecological factors, such as changes in rainfall or overgrowth of plants, can make environments more flammable. Add in drought and heat waves, both of which are exacerbated by climate change, and fire weather becomes more extreme.

    But these conditions only mean that a large fire could easily ignite and spread — not that it necessarily will. According to Kelley, even with a good understanding of risk, predicting the next extreme fire remains a tricky business, in part, because human behavior can make a big difference.

    “People go out and start fires, or they can put fires out,” Kelley said. “And although climate change has led to changes in fires, so has the human fragmentation of the landscape.” In some places, agriculture and roads block fires from spreading as far. In others, deforestation can make forests drier, and provide fuel for them to burn more. And in the U.S., decades of bad forest management set the stage for extreme fires by suppressing naturally occurring ones, allowing the landscape to become a tinderbox of overgrown vegetation.

    Because each area is uniquely complex, the researchers focused their analysis on three distinct regions that had large wildfires with robust data available: Canada, Greece, and the Amazon.

    In Canada, the incineration of over 50,000 square miles of boreal forest spewed roughly a quarter of the world’s total CO2 emissions in the yearlong study period. Overall, the report found that the warming planet made the Canadian fires three times more likely. But the researchers also note that if Canada’s landscape hadn’t been altered by people, through agriculture, fire management, and urban infrastructure, the damage would have been even more widespread. In Greece, similar factors prevented the 2023 Evros fire from being worse than it was. 

    The Amazon rainforest burns in October 2023 at the peak of the worst drought ever experienced by the region.
    Gustavo Basso/NurPhoto via Getty Images

    Among all the regions examined in the report, the rainforests of Amazonia — covering Brazil’s Amazonas state and neighboring sections of Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela — seem to bear the greatest influence from climate change. Here, the researchers found a 20 times greater likelihood of severe wildfires. And in 2023, a particularly strong El Niño, a multi-year climate pattern influenced by the cycling of warm ocean currents, contributed to a record-breaking fire season. 

    “El Niño makes it harder for rain to form in the Amazon, causing drier and hotter weather,” said Maria Lucia Barbosa, a fire researcher at the University of São Carlos, Brazil, and one of the authors of the study.  “When people use fire, it easily spreads under these conditions.”  According to the report, the fires also came at a heavy cost to dozens of Indigenous nations that live in the area, who depend on a healthy forest for their livelihoods. 

    The State of Wildfire report also discussed damage from other notable fires during the study period, although not in the same depth. In Hawaiʻi, the town of Lahaina was destroyed in an August inferno that took 102 lives. In Australia, more than 300,000 square miles burned through the Southern Hemisphere’s summer — making it the largest bushfire season in more than a decade. In Chile, hundreds of fires broke out in the midst of a megadrought. Globally, the report found that climate change made extreme fires twice as likely. A separate analysis of satellite data released in June found that extreme wildfires have become twice as frequent and intense over the last two decades. 

    “In our lived experience, we’re seeing things that were predicted decades ago,” said Maureen Kennedy, an associate professor of fire ecology at the University of Washington, Tacoma, who was not involved with the State of Wildfires report. She says that the report’s findings are in line with what she considers to be “classic hallmarks” of a warming planet.

    “Climate change is loading the dice in favor of extreme fire weather that makes it really hard to fight wildfires and really hard to suppress them,” she said.

    Although the State of Wildfires researchers found that the likelihood of such extremes will continue to rise through the end of the century, Kelley and McNorton say humanity still has time to create a better outcome.

    “I think that’s the hopeful, if not slightly scary, part of the future projections,” Kelley said. Although there will still be an increase in extreme fire no matter how much we limit our emissions, it’s still possible to limit how severe the situation becomes, he said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change fueled last year’s extreme wildfires — some more than others on Aug 15, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • From Papua to Gaza, military occupation leads to ‘ecocide’ – climate catastrophe

    Environmental destruction is not an unintended side effect, but a primary objective in colonial wars of occupation.

    By David Whyte and Samira Homerang Saunders

    Many in the international community are finally coming to accept that the earth’s ecosystem can no longer bear the weight of military occupation.

    Most have reached this inevitable conclusion, clearly articulated in the environmental movement’s latest slogan “No Climate Justice on Occupied Land”, in light of the horrors we have witnessed in Gaza since October 7.

    While the correlation between military occupation and climate sustainability may be a recent discovery for those living their lives in relative peace and security, people living under occupation, and thus constant threat of military violence, have always known any guided missile strike or aerial bombardment campaign by an occupying military is not only an attack on those being targeted but also their land’s ability to sustain life.

    A recent hearing on “State and Environmental Violence in West Papua” under the jurisdiction of the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT), for example, heard that Indonesia’s military occupation, spanning more than seven decades, has facilitated a “slow genocide” of the Papuan people through not only political repression and violence, but also the gradual decimation of the forest area — one of the largest and most biodiverse on the planet — that sustains them.

    West Papua hosts one of the largest copper and gold mines in the world, is the site of a major BP liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility, and is the fastest-expanding area of palm oil and biofuel plantation in Indonesia.

    All of these industries leave ecological dead zones in their wake, and every single one of them is secured by military occupation.

    At the PPT hearing, prominent Papuan lawyer Yan Christian Warinussy spoke of the connection between human suffering in West Papua and the exploitation of the region’s natural resources.

    Shot and wounded
    Just one week later, he was shot and wounded by an unknown assailant. The PPT Secretariat noted that the attack came after the lawyer depicted “the past and current violence committed against the defenceless civil population and the environment in the region”.

    What happened to Warinussy reinforced yet again the indivisibility of military occupation and environmental violence.

    In total, militaries around the world account for almost 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions annually — more than the aviation and shipping industries combined.

    Our colleagues at Queen Mary University of London recently concluded that emissions from the first 120 days of this latest round of slaughter in Gaza alone were greater than the annual emissions of 26 individual countries; emissions from rebuilding Gaza will be higher than the annual emissions of more than 135 countries, equating them to those of Sweden and Portugal.

    But even these shocking statistics fail to shed sufficient light on the deep connection between military violence and environmental violence. War and occupation’s impact on the climate is not merely a side effect or unfortunate consequence.

    We must not reduce our analysis of what is going on in Gaza, for example, to a dualism of consequences: the killing of people on one side and the effect on “the environment” on the other.

    Inseparable from impact on nature
    In reality, the impact on the people is inseparable from the impact on nature. The genocide in Gaza is also an ecocide — as is almost always the case with military campaigns.

    In the Vietnam War, the use of toxic chemicals, including Agent Orange, was part of a deliberate strategy to eliminate any capacity for agricultural production, and thus force the people off their land and into “strategic hamlets”.

    Forests, used by the Vietcong as cover, were also cut by the US military to reduce the population’s capacity for resistance. The anti-war activist and international lawyer Richard Falk coined the phrase “ecocide” to describe this.

    In different ways, this is what all military operations do: they tactically reduce or completely eliminate the capacity of the “enemy” population to live sustainably and to retain autonomy over its own water and food supplies.

    Since 2014, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and other essential infrastructure by the Israeli occupation forces has been complemented by chemical warfare, with herbicides aerially sprayed by the Israeli military destroying entire swaths of arable land in Gaza.

    In other words, Gaza has been subjected to an “ecocide” strategy almost identical to the one used in Vietnam since long before October 7.

    The occupying military force has been working to reduce, and eventually completely eliminate, the Palestinian population’s capacity to live sustainably in Gaza for many years. Since October 7, it has been waging a war to make Gaza completely unliveable.

    50% of Gaza farms wiped out
    As researchers at Forensic Architecture have concluded, at least 50 percent of farmland and orchards in Gaza are now completely wiped out. Many ancient olive groves have also been destroyed. Fields of crops have been uprooted using tanks, tractors and other vehicles.

    Widespread aerial bombardment reduced the Gaza Strip’s greenhouse production facilities to rubble. All this was done not by mistake, but in a deliberate effort to leave the land unable to sustain life.

    The wholesale destruction of the water supply and sanitation facilities and the ongoing threat of starvation across the Gaza Strip are also not unwanted consequences, but deliberate tactics of war. The Israeli military has weaponised food and water access in its unrelenting assault on the population of Gaza.

    Of course, none of this is new to Palestinians there, or indeed in the West Bank. Israel has been using these same tactics to sustain its occupation, pressure Palestinians into leaving their lands, and expand its illegal settlement enterprise for many years.

    Since October 7, it has merely intensified its efforts. It is now working with unprecedented urgency to eradicate the little capacity the occupied Palestinian territory has left in it to sustain Palestinian life.

    Just as is the case with the occupation of Papua, environmental destruction is not an unintended side effect but a primary objective of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The immediate damage military occupation inflicts on the affected population is never separate from the long-term damage it inflicts on the planet.

    For this reason, it would be a mistake to try and separate the genocide from the ecocide in Gaza, or anywhere else for that matter.

    Anyone interested in putting an end to human suffering now, and preventing climate catastrophe in the future, should oppose all wars of occupation, and all forms of militarism that help fuel them.

    David Whyte is professor of climate justice at Queen Mary University of London and director of the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice. Samira Homerang Saunders is research officer at the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice, Queen Mary University.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Islands Business: ‘Big picture’ style journalism is the future for media

    By Dominique Meehan, Queensland University of Technology

    In the expansive landscape of Pacific journalism, one magazine stands for unwavering command and unfiltered truth. Islands Business, with its roots deep beneath Fijian soil, is unafraid to be a voice for the Pacific in delivering forward-thinking analysis of current issues.

    Established in Fiji’s capital, Suva, Islands Business has carved out a niche position since the 1970s and is now the longest surviving monthly magazine for the region.

    With Fiji’s restrictive Media Industry Development Act (MIDA) only repealed in April 2023 following a change in government, the magazine can now publish analytical reporting without the risks it previously faced.

    With a greater chance for these stories to shine, communities have a greater chance that their voices will be heard and shared.

    Islands Business general manager Samantha Magick notes the importance of digging below the surface of issues and uncovering injustices with her work.

    “I feel like that time where you have to be objective and somehow live above the reality of the world is gone,” Samantha says.

    “Quite often I can go into a story thinking one thing and come out saying, ‘I was completely wrong about that.’

    ‘Objective openness’
    “Maybe it’s about going in with an objective openness to hear things, but then saying at some point ‘we as a publication, platform or nation should take a position on this.’”

    Magick provides the example of the climate change issue.

    “Our position from the start was that climate change is real. We need to be talking about this, we need to be holding these discussions in our space,” she says.

    “As long as you declare that this is our position and where we stand on it, why would I give a climate denier space? Because it’s going to sell more magazines or create more of a stir online? That’s not something that we believe in.”

    Islands Business magazine frequently highlights social justice issues
    Islands Business magazine frequently highlights social justice issues, including coverage of meetings between Solove’s cane farmers and the Ministry of Sugar Industry to address land lease expirations, the effects of drought on crop production and other concerns. Image: Islands Business/Facebook

    Despite the magazine’s dedication to probing coverage of business and social issues, new waves of digital journalism continue to affect its reach.

    With an abundance of free news readily available online, media outlets around the world have seen a significant reduction in demand for paid content, recent research shows.

    Despite this being a global phenomenon, the impact appears to be harsher on smaller outlets such as Islands Business compared to large media corporations.

    ‘Younger people expect to not pay’
    “Younger people expect to not pay for their media content, due to having so much access to online content,” Magick says.

    “We need to be able to demonstrate the value of investigative reporting, big picture sort of reporting, not the day-to-day stuff, and to be able to do that, we need to be able to pay high quality reporters and train them up in future writing.”

    Islands Business’s newest recruit, Prerna Priyanka, agrees that this very style of reporting attracted her to work for the publication.

    “Their in-depth writing style was something new for me compared to other media outlets, so learning and adapting as a rookie journalist was something that drew me to work with them,” Prerna says.

    Prerna notes she has some say over the topics she can cover and strives to incorporate important issues in her work.

    “I believe it’s essential to shed light on pressing issues like gender equality and environmental sustainability, and I actively seek out opportunities to do so in my work,” she says.

    As Islands Business looks forward, Samantha Magick aims to ensure the diverse Pacific voices remain centred in every discourse and are an active part of the magazine’s raw, unfiltered storytelling.

    Dominique Meehan is a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This article is republished by Asia Pacific Report in collaboration with the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), QUT and The University of the South Pacific.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • How the 2024 Paris Olympics handled the heat — and didn’t

    Curled up on a small, white rectangle of fabric on the grass by a park bench in Paris, Italian swimmer Thomas Ceccon inadvertently took the internet by storm simply by sleeping outside. The moment, posted to social media on Monday by a fellow Olympic athlete, came a week after Ceccon failed to qualify for the men’s 200-meter backstroke finals, despite having just won gold in the 100-meter event.

    In an interview with an Italian broadcaster, Ceccon blamed his performance gap on subpar sleeping conditions in the Olympic Village — namely, heat. This week, media speculation that the uncomfortable temperatures were also behind his alfresco nap stirred an already roiling pot of concerns around the impact of extreme weather on this year’s summer games. (The Italian Swimming Federation denied that Ceccon’s nap was related to conditions in the Olympic village.)

    In the weeks leading up to the Paris Olympics, weather forecasters and athletes alike feared that the games could become the hottest on record, surpassing the 2021 Tokyo events, where high humidity and 90 degree Fahrenheit days led 100 athletes to seek medical attention for heat illnesses; even more nonathletes followed suit. Although it’s too soon to know how this year’s games will stack up, a punishing heat dome settled over Paris on July 29, lasting for four days and spiking temperatures to highs of 97 degrees F as the first week of the games were underway.

    During the scorching weather, national teams rushed to keep their athletes in tip-top shape, renting air conditioners for their bedrooms in the Olympic Village and offering them ice vests. The Australian Olympic Committee even invested in state-of-the-art monitors to record on-the-ground temperature, radiation, humidity, and wind speed, resulting in personalized recommendations to help their athletes manage heat risks. For some outdoor sports, like tennis and soccer, new protocols for additional rest breaks were triggered as temperatures surpassed predetermined safety thresholds. 

    Japan’s Kaito Kawabata lies down after competing in the men’s 4 x 400-meter relay at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
    Antonin Thuillier / AFP via Getty Images

    Climate change is driving up the frequency of extreme and deadly heat waves. Rings of Fire II, a report on Olympic heat released before this year’s games began on July 26, found that average summer temperatures in Paris have warmed by 3.1 degrees Celsius, or about 5.6 degrees F, since 1924, the last time the City of Light hosted the games. 

    “Yesterday, climate change crashed the Olympics,” said climatologist Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution, an academic project that studies climate change impacts on meteorology, on July 31. “If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuel, Paris would have been about 3 degrees C cooler and much safer for sport.”

    Just a few degrees can make a big difference for athletes. In warm temperatures, the body is less able to shed the heat it generates, which can impact performance and health: A 2023 study of marathon and racewalking athletes found that a 2.7 degrees F increase in core body temperature could result in up to 20 percent slower performance times. And as the body tries to cool down, it sweats and dilates blood vessels. When these mechanisms are pushed too hard, they lead to dangerous health risks — such as dehydration, organ failure, and heart attacks. And the longer a heat wave drags on, the more deadly the impacts become. 

    Extreme heat affects a wide range of sports. The Rings of Fire report, a collaboration between the British Association for Sustainable Sport and the Australian climate advocacy group Frontrunners, documented stories from elite athletes across 15 sports on how extreme temperatures had impacted their careers and health. In the report, British swimmer Hector Pardoe said he was “practically paralytic” after a heat stroke that left him vomiting and motionless during a competition in Budapest. For Yusuke Suzuki, a Japanese racewalker, heatstroke was a torturous ordeal that took two years to recover from.  

    “Going forward, I don’t see this being any less of a problem,” said Mike Tipton, a human physiology researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. who contributed to the report. While Tipton is encouraged by the changes he sees taking place across sports to protect athletes and fans from extreme heat — such as water breaks and cooling stations — he also cautions against losing sight of the importance of mitigating the direct cause of climate change: humans burning fossil fuels. 

    The organizers of the Paris Olympics would seem to agree. In the years leading up to the games, the committee made unprecedented sustainability promises like slashing the greenhouse gas emissions of recent Olympics in half. But, along with a 60 percent plant-based menu, the decision to cut energy use by building Olympic Village dorms with geothermal cooling, rather than air conditioning, has become a main source of athletes’ complaints about the accommodations. Bernadette Szocs, a Romanian table tennis player, told The Guardian that the fans offered in dorm rooms weren’t enough. “You can feel it is too hot in the room,” she said.

    “I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes, but I think a lot more about the survival of humanity,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a French radio station in 2023 about the decision to eschew air-conditioning. But as temperature projections and concerns climbed, eventually, the organizers caved and ordered 2,500 air-conditioning units for teams willing to pay for them. Some, like the Korean swim team, have opted to stay in hotels. Unequal access to such comforts have raised concerns of two-tier games. 

    Britain’s Jack Draper cools himself with a bag of ice during a break at a tennis event in the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty

    Experts agree that air-conditioning can create a competitive advantage. “Being able to cool down at night is a significant part of managing heat risk,” said Richard Franklin, a professor of public health and tropical medicine at James Cook University, in Queensland, Australia. Franklin added that heat waves often come with higher nighttime temperatures that prevent the body from fully recovering, and that lack of sleep and the physical strain of competition can increase risks. 

    There are other ways that athletes can mitigate the dangers of competing in high temperatures.

    “The best thing you can do is prepare ahead of the games by acclimatizing your body to the conditions,” said Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto and author of a book on how global warming is changing sports. She says that each sport comes with unique risk factors, such as time spent on exposed pavement, or duration of play. But for any athlete to properly sync their body before competition, she says, exercising in the heat is crucial. “It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it pushes the boundaries of when they feel the impacts. It makes a big, big difference.”

    Hannah Mason, a public health lecturer at James Cook University and lead author of a 2024 paper analyzing the impacts of extreme heat on mass sporting events, said that other factors — including the availability of shade and existing health conditions — should be considered in athletes’ heat preparedness plans. For example, paralympic athletes often use equipment, like wheelchairs, that can trap more heat.

    Tipton, Orr, and Mason all agreed that, eventually, the escalating dangers of climate change will leave Olympics organizers with no option but to change the timing of summer games to happen during months with cooler weather. The good news, Tipton says, is that teams and athletic federations have started taking the risk of heat more seriously. “We’re seeing the nature of sports change in terms of the rules, regulations, and permissible cooling strategies,” he said.

    According to Mason, more top-down rulemaking on safety limits will be crucial for managing risk. With the high stakes and pressure of competition, she says athletes are often unwilling to back out even when conditions become dangerously hot.

    “If it’s a few degrees too hot, they’re not going to back out,” she said. “We need policies to fall back on so that we don’t put these decisions in the hands of athletes that have spent their whole life training for that event.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the 2024 Paris Olympics handled the heat — and didn’t on Aug 9, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • ‘Hit by tidal wave’ – remote FSM atoll calls for seawall

    By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific Journalist

    The Chief Administrator of the Federated States of Micronesia’s most remote island is calling on senators in the Congress to approve funds to build a major seawall.

    Solomon Lowson says Kapingamarangi Atoll, which has a population of about 500, has been battered by climate-related disasters for decades.

    “Without seawall, our crop will not grow well because this happens every year, especially in the months of November and December,” Lowson told RNZ Pacific.

    In January, homes were washed away and their taro patches damaged by salt water.

    He said his island is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis.

    “We’ve been having this problem for so many years; we’ve been hit by a tidal wave and it caused a lot of inundation of water into our taro patches,” he said.

    “So we’re trying to get some money to help build and make it safe for the future.”

    Pohnpei State Governor, Stevenson Joseph, is due to arrive in Kapingamarangi on Friday (local time) to discuss the issues.

    Lowson said the type of seawall needed would need to be built from rocks and concrete.

    Kapingamarangi resident Rubino and his old taro pit which was destroyed by seawater in January 2024. It was manually dug out.
    Kapingamarangi resident Rubino and his old taro pit which was destroyed by seawater in January 2024. It was manually dug out. Image: Scott Nguyen/RNZ

    ‘Our budget is very small’
    Kapingamarangi is an atoll and a municipality in the state of Pohnpei of the Federated States of Micronesia.

    The community is allocated around US$87,000 (NZ$147,000) each year for the municipal operation, but the seawall is expected to cost around US$80,000, Lowson said.

    “We have only small projects like renovating our office, because we don’t have enough money to to make a big project [like the seawall],” he said.

    Around 150 people currently reside on Kapingamarangi, and there is a diaspora of around 2000 living in Pohnpei, in mainland Hawaii, Guam and many other places, Lowson said.

    With sea surges wrecking their taro crops Lawson issued a declaration calling for food assistance.

    He said he does not want to keep relying on shipments of rice, ramen and flour because local produce is much healthier.

    Drought another threat
    While the small remote atoll gets battered by the ocean, there is another threat, drought.

    Thousands of people have been impacted by drought in the Federated States of Micronesia over the past year, including Kapingamarangi residents.

    Earlier this year, the Australian vessel Reliant dispatched 116,000 liters of fresh water for drought response in Pohnpei, while the US Coast Guard aided in transporting relief supplies and RO units to Kapingamarangi and Nukuoro, the Office of the President said via a statement.

    Lowson is hoping this week’s visit from Joseph will end in solutions and a plan to fund a seawall.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ‘Hit by tidal wave’ – remote FSM atoll calls for seawall

    By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific Journalist

    The Chief Administrator of the Federated States of Micronesia’s most remote island is calling on senators in the Congress to approve funds to build a major seawall.

    Solomon Lowson says Kapingamarangi Atoll, which has a population of about 500, has been battered by climate-related disasters for decades.

    “Without seawall, our crop will not grow well because this happens every year, especially in the months of November and December,” Lowson told RNZ Pacific.

    In January, homes were washed away and their taro patches damaged by salt water.

    He said his island is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis.

    “We’ve been having this problem for so many years; we’ve been hit by a tidal wave and it caused a lot of inundation of water into our taro patches,” he said.

    “So we’re trying to get some money to help build and make it safe for the future.”

    Pohnpei State Governor, Stevenson Joseph, is due to arrive in Kapingamarangi on Friday (local time) to discuss the issues.

    Lowson said the type of seawall needed would need to be built from rocks and concrete.

    Kapingamarangi resident Rubino and his old taro pit which was destroyed by seawater in January 2024. It was manually dug out.
    Kapingamarangi resident Rubino and his old taro pit which was destroyed by seawater in January 2024. It was manually dug out. Image: Scott Nguyen/RNZ

    ‘Our budget is very small’
    Kapingamarangi is an atoll and a municipality in the state of Pohnpei of the Federated States of Micronesia.

    The community is allocated around US$87,000 (NZ$147,000) each year for the municipal operation, but the seawall is expected to cost around US$80,000, Lowson said.

    “We have only small projects like renovating our office, because we don’t have enough money to to make a big project [like the seawall],” he said.

    Around 150 people currently reside on Kapingamarangi, and there is a diaspora of around 2000 living in Pohnpei, in mainland Hawaii, Guam and many other places, Lowson said.

    With sea surges wrecking their taro crops Lawson issued a declaration calling for food assistance.

    He said he does not want to keep relying on shipments of rice, ramen and flour because local produce is much healthier.

    Drought another threat
    While the small remote atoll gets battered by the ocean, there is another threat, drought.

    Thousands of people have been impacted by drought in the Federated States of Micronesia over the past year, including Kapingamarangi residents.

    Earlier this year, the Australian vessel Reliant dispatched 116,000 liters of fresh water for drought response in Pohnpei, while the US Coast Guard aided in transporting relief supplies and RO units to Kapingamarangi and Nukuoro, the Office of the President said via a statement.

    Lowson is hoping this week’s visit from Joseph will end in solutions and a plan to fund a seawall.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • California’s Park Fire is spawning its own smoke thunderclouds

    With 600 square miles burned so far, the Park Fire is already one of California’s biggest wildfires ever — and it’s still far from contained. Driven by strong winds, the blaze has chewed through desiccated plants, spewing smoke high into the atmosphere. So much smoke and rising hot air, in fact, that it’s been creating fire tornados and one of the strangest natural phenomena on earth: the pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or pyroCb.

    It’s a smoke thundercloud that makes a dangerous wildfire like the Park Fire, burning in the northern part of the state, even more unpredictable. PyroCbs can produce lightning that goes on to spark more fires around the very blaze that made the clouds. And as the planet warms, pyroCbs seem to be growing more common, since they’re spawned by the biggest, fiercest wildfires, which themselves are getting worse. “PyroCbs are such massive, almost volcanic-like eruptions,” said Rajan Chakrabarty, an aerosol scientist who studies the clouds at Washington University in St. Louis. “These pyroCbs create their own fire weather.”

    The Park Fire has grown massive on a diet of extra-dry fuel. This part of California hasn’t burned for decades, so a lot of plant life had built up and desiccated under the summer sun. Very low humidity has helped suck what little moisture remains in the vegetation, turning the landscape into a pile of tinder.

    Such a big and intense fire is a breeding ground for pyroCbs — marvels of fire physics. As a blaze like the Park Fire burns — and burns more viciously thanks to climate change producing higher temperatures and drier fuels — the heat from the flames rises, propelling smoke particles tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere. As the air rises, it cools and expands. Water then condenses on the smoke particles, and the cloud forms. 

    The masses of rising air in a pyroCb form a sort of void at ground level, which sucks in more air, generating winds that encourage the spread of the flames. The most intense of wildfires consume so much oxygen that they can somewhat smother themselves, but pyroCb winds inject more of the gas into the firestorm. It’s “a self-perpetuating process,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at ​​UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Because the more intense it is, the more oxygen that rushes in, which means the more intense it is, which means the more oxygen rushes in. So you can see how that goes.”

    At the same time, a towering pyroCb can create a downdraft, making winds at the surface even more unpredictable. “The convection causes a lot of chaos, so it becomes very hard to predict where air is coming from and moving to,” said Payton Beeler, an atmospheric scientist who studies pyroCbs at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. That, in turn, leads to chaotic fire behavior, as those winds push the flames across the landscape at different speeds and in different directions. 

    The smoke from a pyroCb travels well beyond the blaze that spawned it. “Some of the aerosols that get injected into the upper troposphere or lower stratosphere tend to stick around for up to six to eight months,” Beeler said. “And they can get transported across hemispheres, basically.”

    The black carbon from a pyroCb cloud isn’t exactly behaving itself up there, either. In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Communications, Beeler found that the black carbon from a pyroCb absorbs up to twice as much visible sunlight as black carbon from smaller fires or from urban sources, like the burning of coal. “Particles in the pyroCb plume tend to have really, really thick coatings of organics,” Beeler said, “and that is distinct from black carbon from other sources.”  

    That increases light absorption and raises temperatures in the atmosphere. “It is like a black sweater — it absorbs all the sun and warms the vicinity around it,” said Chakrabarty, who coauthored the paper with Beeler. 

    Why this happens in pyroCb clouds, though, scientists still don’t fully understand. It may be that there’s something distinct about the way a pyroCb-spawning wildfire burns, or that there’s a secondary process going on inside the cloud to coat the particles with more organics. (Organics in this case come from the fire’s combustion of vegetation.)

    Another unanswered question is whether pyroCb clouds are already more common due to climate change supercharging wildfires, or whether scientists are getting better at detecting them with satellites, or a combination of the two. PryoCb plumes have been popping up all over the world, from Australia to Siberia, as fuels get drier and temperatures get higher. The monster blazes in Canada this summer have been breeding them, too. “They seem to be happening more frequently,” Beeler said. “Whether that’s a function of warming climate and better identification, I think it’s probably both. But the impacts seem to be very long-lasting and long-ranging.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California’s Park Fire is spawning its own smoke thunderclouds on Jul 30, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Plants and their pollinators are increasingly out of sync

    For the past four years, plant biologist Elsa Godtfredsen has trekked to a subalpine meadow in Colorado to study the interactions between wildflowers and bumblebees. The pollinators buzz among fields of purple delphinium and columbine, an iconic image of spring in the Rocky Mountains.

    Godtfredsen works at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a research center set amid evergreens and jagged granite peaks in Gothic, Colorado. Each spring and summer, they track four species of wildflowers from bloom to seed set, using this data to model the impact of climate change on these plants and their pollinators. 

    “Subalpine and alpine ecosystems are changing rapidly,” Godtfredsen said. “We’re trying to see if these species can persist in ecosystems that are going to continue changing unless we see drastic shifts in policy.”

    As winters get warmer, snow in alpine and subalpine regions melts earlier, causing a timing mismatch where flowers bloom before bumblebees emerge from diapause, or insect hibernation. Without enough pollinator visits, plants can’t make seeds and reproduce. That will leave fewer flowers for pollinators next spring — and future springs as well. 

    “We’re seeing a ubiquitous trend: Generally when snowmelt happens earlier, we see flowering earlier as well,” said Godtfredsen.

    Scientist Elsa Godtfredsen tracks pollinator behavior in her Rocky Mountain research plots in Colorado. Courtesy of Gwen Kirschke

    Scientists warn that these mountainous ecosystems foreshadow trends that other areas may soon experience, or in some cases, already face. Globally, spring is arriving progressively sooner. Flowers now bloom several weeks ahead of schedule in temperate forests in Japan and an average of 23 days earlier in the United States. Another study in the United Kingdom found that plants flower a month earlier on average.

    Most animals and insects rely on temperature cues to start seasonal activities, like migrating, breeding, or emerging from hibernation. When those signals change due to warming temperatures or earlier snowmelt, it can lead to timing mismatches that threaten populations.  

    For example, insect-eating tree swallows nesting earlier in the spring face higher chick mortality rates due to inclement weather, which reduces insect availability. Arctic plants have also been emerging earlier in Greenland, and many caribou calves have died when spring plant growth preceded caribou’s calving season.

    One of the smallest, and potentially most worrisome, animals being affected are insect pollinators, like bees, flies, butterflies, and moths. These arthropods are crucial for our food system: They help pollinate a third of major food crops and contribute around $15 billion annually to U.S. agriculture. Climate change, however, is causing 60 percent of plants and insects to fall out of sync.

    Chris Wyver, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Reading, found that Bramley apples in the United Kingdom now bloom earlier due to warmer springs and increased rainfall. Their pollinators are also emerging earlier, but are less sensitive to temperature cues that trigger apple bloom. If this divergence continues to widen, it could threaten apple yields.

    “We saw that in warmer springs, the mismatch was slightly bigger compared with cooler springs,” Wyver said. 

    In crops like cranberries, Brazil nuts, and passion fruit, bloom times are also occurring weeks earlier. 

    A bee visits the flower of Passiflora edulis, the plant the produces passion fruit. Bettapoggi/Getty Images

    If timing mismatches worsen worldwide, scientists warn they could also exacerbate pollinator declines. Inadequate pollination currently causes a 3 percent to 5 percent decline in global fruit, vegetable, and nut production annually, leading to over 400,000 deaths due to reduced access to diverse and nutritious diets.

    “Probably the impact isn’t going to be felt in the U.K. or the U.S. or Europe — the Global North,” Wyver said. Instead, he noted, the strongest impacts will likely be felt in regions that already experience food insecurity, where supply chains are less reliable.

    In some cases, managed honey bees can make up for pollinator losses if timing mismatches cause significant native pollinator declines. Farmers already use honey bee colonies to pollinate crops like apples, nuts, and seed crops.

    However, there is concern about supply.

    “If we have to turn to honey bees, the question is, will there be enough?” Wyver said. “I worry it’s just going to create a bidding war for honeybees that’s going to make food more expensive.”

    In early April this year, Godtfredsen’s colleagues from the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab skied to the research meadow to lay large black shade cloths on the snow, each around 16.5 feet wide. Over time, the dark fabric spurs snow to melt faster than the surrounding area, imitating pockets of earlier spring. Once the snow melts, they remove the cloths so plants can grow. 

    “The plants have to grow to a good size and put up flowering stalks, and then flower,” Godtfredsen said. “That’s when I go out.”

    Once the plants are ready, usually in late May, Godtfredsen hikes to the meadow. They and a team of research assistants spend the summer counting the number of fruits on the plants they’re studying, observing bees as they move from one flower to the next, and collecting seeds. 

    “Basically, you get up, walk two feet, squat down, and look at another plant,” Godtfredsen said. 

    The team then compares data between the black-clothed, early snowmelt plots and normal conditions, comparing flower and pollinator activity. 

    “What we’re seeing is a common narrative in climate change research,” Godtfredsen said. “Some species are going to benefit from this scenario, and some will suffer.” 

    By counting seeds and bee activity in small subalpine meadow plots, Elsa Godtfredsen and their research assistants are studying how climate change is disrupting the delicate relationship between pollinators and plants. Courtesy of Andrew Davies

    One of the research site’s earliest blooming flowers, Nuttall’s larkspur, or Delphinium nuttallianum, had fewer pollinator visits than the other flowers.

    Another wildflower species they’re studying, prairie smoke, or Geum triflorum, is doing better under the early snowmelt manipulation. The plant has larger stalks and produces the same number of seeds. But a third species, wild blue flax, or Linum lewisii, is taking hits across the board, with smaller stalks, lower seeds, and more signs of plant stress. 

    “The narrative is never simple,” Godtfredsen said. Godtfredsen admitted that this may be because the plants they’re studying rely on a variety of animal pollinators, including bumblebees, solitary bees, flies, and hummingbirds. 

    Plants that rely on specialist pollinators — those with highly adapted relationships to specific plants — may be significantly more affected by seasonal shifts induced by climate change.

    Solitary native squash bees, Peponapis pruinosa and Xenoglossa strenua, for example, are crucial pollinators of squashes, pumpkins, and gourds in the United States, and primarily collect pollen from plants in the squash family. However, a recent study revealed that squash plants in drought conditions produced fewer seeds, threatening squash plants and the bees that depend on them.

    “The connections are very direct and limited between specialist bees and the plants they forage on,” said Ed Henry, an ecologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. If those connections are broken, then “those [specialist bees] are going to be in tremendous danger.” 

    We also don’t know how much tolerance for change is built into our ecosystems, Henry explained, or when we’ll exceed that tolerance to the point where plants or pollinators significantly decline or go extinct. 

    “It’s like we’re walking in the dark, and we know that there are cliffs, and we don’t know where the edge is,” Henry said. “But we continue to walk forward.”

    One of the biggest challenges is the lack of reliable, long-term data on insect pollinators, so scientists know very little about how their populations and timings have changed. 

    Such a data gap — particularly in the tropics, where pollinators and the farmers that depend on them are especially vulnerable — makes it hard to determine whether conservation efforts are needed to counter timing mismatches.  

    “In some places, the data is fantastic,” Wyver said, “but in others, we don’t really know what’s doing the heavy lifting from the pollinator point of view, and trying to address those parts of the world has been a big challenge.” 

    Henry trains and helps state and local land managers plan and install pollinator forage and habitats on the nation’s working lands through his work at USDA. Pollinator habitats on farms can improve crop yields and reduce the need for pesticides, which can help farmers with climate change adaptation. 

    Native plants adapted to local climate, soil, and pollinator species can provide food and habitat for pollinators that are more resilient to extreme weather events in a particular region. 

    To make our food system more climate-resilient, Henry noted, we need to aim for diversity and complexity, not the other way around. 

    “Whenever you simplify a system,” Henry said, like through monoculture farming, “it’s usually less resilient. Nature creates the most resilient system over time.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Plants and their pollinators are increasingly out of sync on Jul 30, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change

    At the end of a semester that presaged one of the hottest summers on record, the students in associate professor Michael Sheridan’s business class were pitching proposals to cut waste and emissions on their campus and help turn it into a vehicle for fighting climate change.

    Flanking a giant whiteboard at the front of the classroom, members of the team campaigning to build a solar canopy on a SUNY New Paltz parking lot delivered their pitch. The sunbaked lot near the athletic center was an ideal spot for a shaded solar panel structure, they said, a conduit for solar energy that could curb the campus’s reliance on natural gas. 

    The project would require $43,613 in startup money. It would be profitable within roughly five years, the students said. And over 50 years, it would save the university $787,130 in energy costs.

    “Solar canopies have worked for other universities, including other SUNY schools,” said Ian Lominski, a graduating senior who said he hopes to one day work for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “It’s well within the realm of possibility for SUNY New Paltz.” 

    Sheridan’s course is an example of an approach known as “campus as a living lab,” which seeks to simultaneously educate students and reduce the carbon footprint of college campuses. Over the past decade, a growing number of professors in fields as diverse as business, English and the performing arts have integrated their teaching with efforts to minimize their campuses’ waste and emissions, at a time when human-created climate change is fueling dangerous weather and making life on Earth increasingly unstable. 

    The State University of New York at New Paltz is among a growing number of higher education institutions where professors are using the “campus as a living lab” to teach students to reduce carbon emissions. Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

    Engineering students have helped retrofit buildings. Theater students have produced no-waste productions. Ecology students have restored campus wetlands. Architecture students have modeled campus buildings’ airflow and worked to improve their energy efficiency. The efforts are so diverse that it’s difficult to get a complete count of them, but they’ve popped up on hundreds of campuses around the country.

    “I think it’s a very, very positive step,” said Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University and author of the book Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis. “You’ve got the campus materials, you’ve got the integration of teaching and research, which we claim to value, and it’s also really good for students in a few ways,” including by helping them take action on climate in ways that can improve mental health.

    That said, the work faces difficulties, among them that courses typically last only a semester, making it hard to maintain projects. But academics and experts see promising results: Students learn practical skills in a real-world context, and their projects provide vivid examples to help educate entire campuses and communities about solutions to alleviate climate change.

    From the food waste students and staff produce, to emissions from commuting to campus and flying to conferences, to the energy needed to power campus buildings, higher education has a significant climate footprint. In New York, buildings are among the single largest sources of carbon emissions — and the State University of New York system owns a whopping 40 percent of the state’s public buildings. 

    Andrea Varga talks with honors students at SUNY New Paltz after they’ve made presentations as part of her Ethical Fashion course. Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

    About 15 years ago, college leaders began adding “sustainability officers” to their payrolls and signing commitments to achieve carbon neutrality. But only a dozen of the 400 institutions that signed on have achieved net-zero emissions to date, according to Bridget Flynn, senior manager of climate programs with the nonprofit Second Nature, which runs the network of universities committed to decarbonizing. (The SUNY system has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045, per its chancellor, John B. King Jr.) 

    Campus sustainability efforts have faced hurdles including politics and declining enrollment and revenue, say experts. “Higher ed is in crisis and institutions are so concerned about keeping their doors open, and sustainability is seen as nice to have instead of essential,” said Meghan Fay Zahniser, who leads the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. 

    But there’s change happening on some campuses, she and others noted. At Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, a net-zero campus since 2020, students in statistics classes have run data analyses to assess why certain buildings are less efficient than others. Psychology students studying behavior change helped the campus dining hall adopt a practice of offering half, full and double portions to cut down on food waste. Physics students designed solar thermal boxes to boost renewable biogas production on an organic farm owned by the college. 

    Neil Leary, associate provost and director of the college’s Center for Sustainability Education, teaches classes in sustainability. Last fall’s students analyzed climate risks and resilience strategies for the campus and its surrounding county and then ran a workshop for community members. Among the recommendations emerging from the class: that athletic coaches and facilities staff receive training on heat-related health risks. 

    A bike station sits next to trees.
    A bike repair station at SUNY New Paltz. Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

    Similarly, at SUNY Binghamton, Pamela Mischen, chief sustainability officer and an environmental studies professor, teaches a course called Planning the Sustainable University. Her students, who come from majors including environmental studies, engineering and pre-law, have helped develop campus green purchasing systems, started a student-run community garden and improved reuse rates for classroom furniture. 

    And across the country, at Weber State University in Utah, students have joined the campus’s push toward renewable energy. Engineering students, for example, helped build a solar-powered charging station on a picnic table. A professor in the school’s construction and building sciences program led students in designing and building a net-zero house. 

    On the leafy SUNY New Paltz campus about 80 miles north of Manhattan, campus sustainability coordinator Lisa Mitten has spent more than a decade working to reduce the university’s environmental toll. Among the projects she runs is a sustainability faculty fellows program that helps professors incorporate climate action into their instruction. 

    One day this May, Andrea Varga, an associate professor of theatre design and a sustainability fellow, listened as the students in her honors Ethical Fashion class presented their final projects. Varga’s class covers the environmental harms of the global fashion industry (research suggests it is responsible for at least 4 percent of greenhouse emissions worldwide, or roughly the total emissions of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined). For their presentations, her students had developed ideas for reducing fashion’s toll, on the campus and beyond, by promoting thrifting, starting “clothes repair cafes,” and more. 

    Microplastic filters in the Esopus Hall dormitory laundry room at SUNY New Paltz. Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

    Jazmyne Daily-Simpson, a student from Long Island scheduled to graduate in 2025, discussed expanding a project started a few years earlier by a former student, Roy Ludwig, to add microplastic filters to more campus washing machines. In a basement laundry room in Daily-Simpson’s dorm, two washers are rigged with the contraptions, which gradually accumulate a goopy film as they trap the microplastic particles and keep them from entering the water supply.

    Ludwig, a 2022 graduate who now teaches Earth science at Arlington High School about 20 miles from New Paltz, took Varga’s class and worked with her on an honors project to research and install the filters. A geology major, he’d been shocked that it took a fashion class to introduce him to the harms of microplastics, which are found in seafood, breast milk, semen and much more. “It’s an invisible problem that not everyone is thinking about,” he said. “You can notice a water bottle floating in a river. You can’t notice microplastics.”

    Around campus, there are other signs of the living lab model. Students in an economics class filled the entryway of a library with posters on topics such as the lack of public walking paths and bike lanes in the surrounding county and inadequate waste disposal in New York State. A garden started by sculpture and printmaking professors serves as a space for students to learn about plants used to make natural dyes that don’t pollute the environment. 

    In the business school classroom, Sheridan, the associate professor, had kicked off the student presentations by explaining to an audience that included campus facilities managers and local green business leaders how the course, called Introduction to Managing Sustainability, originated when grad students pitched the idea in 2015. The projects are powered by a “green revolving fund,” which accumulates money from cost savings created by past projects, such as reusable to-go containers and LED lightbulbs in campus buildings. Currently the fund has about $30,000. 

    A bearded man with long hair tied back stands in front of a tree.
    Michael Sheridan’s classes at SUNY New Paltz include a course that engages business students in designing proposals for greening the campus. Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

    “This class has two overarching goals,” said Sheridan, who studied anthropology and sustainable development as an undergraduate before pursuing a doctorate in business. The first is to localize the United Nations global goals for advancing sustainability, he said, and the second is “to prove that sustainability initiatives can be a driver for economic growth.” 

    In addition to the solar canopy project, students presented proposals for developing a reusable water bottle program, creating a composter and garden, digitizing dining hall receipts and organizing a bikeshare. They gamely fielded questions from the audience, many of whom had served as mentors on their projects.

    Jonathan Garcia, a third-year business management major on the composting team, said later that he’d learned an unexpected skill: how to deal with uncooperative colleagues. “We had an issue with one of our teammates who just never showed up, so I had to manage that, and then people elected me leader of the group,” he said later. “I learned a lot of team-management skills.”

    The solar panel team had less drama. Its members interviewed representatives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Central Hudson Gas & Electric and a local company, Lighthouse Solar, along with Mitten and other campus officials. Often, they met three times a week to research and discuss their proposal, participants said.

    Lominski, the senior, plans to enroll this fall in a graduate program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse. Before Sheridan’s class, he said, he had little specific knowledge of how solar panels worked. The course also helped him refine his project management and communication skills, he said. 

    His solar panel teammate Madeleine Biles, a senior majoring in management, transferred to New Paltz from SUNY Binghamton before her sophomore year because she wanted a school that felt more aligned with her desire to work for a smaller, environmentally minded business. 

    An avid rock climber whose parents were outdoor educators, she’d developed some financial skills in past business classes, she said, but the exercises had always felt theoretical. This class made those lessons about return on investment and internal rate of return feel concrete. “Before it was just a bunch of formulas where I didn’t know when or why I would ever use them,” she said. 

    This summer, Biles is interning with the Lake George Land Conservancy and hopes to eventually carve out a career protecting the environment. While she said she feels fortunate that her hometown of Lake George, in New York’s Adirondack region, isn’t as vulnerable as some places to climate change, the crisis weighs on her. 

    “I think if I have a career in sustainability, that will be my way of channeling that frustration and sadness and turning it into a positive thing,” she said. 

    She recently got a taste of what that might feel like: In an email from Sheridan, she learned that her team’s canopy project was chosen to receive the startup funding. The school’s outgoing campus facilities chief signed off on it, and, pending approval from the department’s new leader, the university will begin the process of constructing it.

    “It’s cool to know that something I worked on as a school project is actually going to happen,” said Biles. “A lot of students can’t really say that. A lot of projects are kind of like simulations. This one was real life.” 

    This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for their higher education newsletter.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change on Jul 30, 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘We can’t solve the climate crisis without gender equality’, says Heine

    Climate justice and gender equality cannot be achieved separately, a Pacific women’s conference heard this week.

    Marshall Islands President Dr Hilda Heine said the climate crisis faced in the region and the world would make gender equality more difficult to attain.

    “For example, we know that we cannot have gender equality without climate justice, and vice versa,” Dr Heine told delegates at the the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women gathered in the Northern Pacific for the first time in 40 years.

    15TH TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF PACIFIC WOMEN
    15TH TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF PACIFIC WOMEN

    “Our aspirations are shared,” Dr Heine said.

    “We have convened on Majuro because of one of those aspirations is the empowerment of Pacific women and girls in all their diversities and ultimately to reach gender parity in our region.”

    President Heine said that for gender parity to be achieved, every Pacific woman’s ability, talent dreams would need to be harnessed.

    “We must draw on the resourcefulness of Pacific women, rich in our diverse cultures and traditions, to map a way forward for us, tapping into our region’s diversity and creativity to find solutions that are embedded in our Pacific philosophies and world views,” she said.

    “We know that the climate crisis will make achieving gender equality even harder — and that we cannot solve the climate crisis without gender equality.”

    Women hit fastest, hardest
    Heine said women were often hit fastest and hardest by climate impacts.

    “They are the first responders of the family, responsible for ensuring that the family is taken care of and healthy,” she said.

    “As climate change brings droughts, they are charged with securing water; when children or the elderly are affected by extreme heat, it is women who are the primary caregivers.

    Former Marshall Islands president Hilda Heine
    Marshall Islands President Dr Hilda Heine … women among strongest voices for climate ambition.  Image: PresidentOfficeRMI

    “In the Marshalls, where women often participate in the informal economy through the production of handicrafts, for example, we know that the material used for those handicrafts are at risk as sea levels rise and salt water inundates our arable land.

    “Women are also central to the solutions to the climate crisis.”

    Dr Heine said Pacific women had been some of the strongest voices for climate ambition at the international level while at home they were caretakers for solar panels, providing communities with clean energy.

    She described them as being at the heart of securing climate justice.

    High tides in Marshall Islands in March 2016 hit a seawall.
    Women’s health, gender-based violence, and climate justice are key challenges Pacific women continue to face. Image: RNZI/Giff Johnson

    ‘Gains are far from consistent’
    Two regional meetings took place on Majuro Atoll this week — the 8th Ministers for Women meeting and the 3rd PIF Women Leaders Meeting.

    Political commentators said this showed that regional leaders recognised the importance of gender equality and the meetings provided opportunities to collectively discuss how to advance their commitments to the issue at national, regional and international levels.

    President Heine acknowledged that the Pacific had made what she described as remarkable progress on women’s rights on many fronts in recent decades.

    “But these gains are far from consistent and much more remains to be done,” she warned.

    Women’s health, gender-based violence, and climate justice were the themes for discussion during the conferences and highlight some of the key challenges Pacific women continue to face.

    Dr Heine said all these issues aggravated the impacts of inequalities faced by women and girls as a result of existing social norms and structures.

    She said the triennial conference and the Pacific Ministers for Women meeting were important platforms at which to unpack these and other barriers to gender equality.

    Netani Rika e is communications manager of the Pacific Conference of Churches and is in Majuro, Marshall Islands, covering the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • 70 years on from tests, Marshallese women still fight for nuclear justice

    The first report in a five-part web series focused on the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women taking place in the Marshall Islands this week.

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Netani Rika in Majuro

    Women continue to fight for justice 70 years after the first nuclear tests by the United States caused devastation on the people and environment of the Marshall Islands.

    And, as Pacific women gathered on Majuro this week to discuss ways to end gender-based violence, they heard from local counterparts about a battle for justice older than many of the delegates.

    Ariana Kilma, chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission and descendant of survivors of weapons testing, shared a story of survival, setting the backdrop for the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women.

    15TH TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF PACIFIC WOMEN
    15TH TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF PACIFIC WOMEN

    “I am here to share with you our story. This is a story not only of suffering and loss, but also of strength, unity, and unwavering commitment to justice,” Kilner told delegates from across the region.

    “The conference theme ‘an pilinlin koba komman lometo’ (a collection of droplets creates an ocean)” reflects the efforts of the many Marshallese women before me, and together, we call on you, our Pacific sisters and brothers, to stand united in our commitment to justice, healing, and a brighter future for the Pacific.”

    The triennial will focus on three specific areas – climate change, gender-based violence, and the health of women and girls.

    Nuclear weapon testing in Marshall Islands
    The current story of Marshallese women began in the aftermath of World War II when the group of atolls in the Northern Pacific was selected as ground zero for a nuclear weapon testing programme. Image: RNZ Pacific

    Marshall Islands President, Dr Hilda Heine, acknowledged that nothing less than a collective, regional effort was needed to effectively address the three issues at the centre of the regional conference.

    “Our gender equality journey calls on Pacific leadership to be intentional, innovative and bold in our responses to the gaps that we see in our efforts,” Heine said.

    ‘We must take risks’
    “We must take risks, create new partnerships, and be unwavering in our commitment to bring about substantive gender equality for the region.”

    In the area of gender equality, young Marshallese women like Kilner are forging pathways to ensure that justice is done, even if the battle for restitution takes another 70 years. In a bold, innovative move, women of the Marshall Islands have taken their cry to the World Council of Churches and the United Nations.

    “Marshallese women have shown remarkable resilience and leadership,” Kilma said.

    “From the early days of testing, they raised their voices against the injustices inflicted upon our people. They documented health issues, collected evidence, and demanded accountability.”

    The current story of Marshallese women began in the aftermath of World War II when the group of atolls in the Northern Pacific was selected as ground zero for a nuclear weapon testing programme.

    This was the beginning of a profound and painful chapter which continues today.

    “The people of Bikini and later Enewetak were displaced from their home islands in order for the tests to commence,” Kilner said.

    Infamous Bravo test
    “For a period of 12 years, between 1946 and 1958, 67 nuclear tests were conducted in our islands, including the infamous Bravo test on Bikini Atoll in 1954. Despite a petition from the Marshallese to cease the experiments, the testing continued for another four years with 55 more detonations.”

    Containment of nuclear waste in the Marshall Islands.
    Containment of nuclear waste in the Marshall Islands. Image: RNZ Pacific

    Immediately after the Bravo test, people fell ill — their skin itching and peeling, eyes hurting, stomachs churning with pain, heads split by migraines and fingernails changing colour because of nuclear fallout.

    It was not long before women gave birth to what have been described jellyfish babies.

    “So deformed, [were our] babies sometimes born resembling the features of an octopus or the intestines of a turtle, in some instances, a bunch of grapes or a strange looking animal,” Kilner told delegates at the regional forum this week.

    “The term jellyfish babies was coined after the birth of many babies who were born without limbs or a head, whose skin was so transparent their mothers saw their tiny hearts beating within.

    “We were told by those scientists that our babies were a result of incest.”

    Despite a 2004 study by the United States National Cancer Institute which concluded that the Marshallese could expect an estimated 530 “excess” cancers, half of which had yet to be detected, the US has made no move towards reparation for the islanders.

    The study showed that the fallout resulted in elevated cancer risks, with women being disproportionately affected.

    Twenty years after the study, the Marshall Islands continues to fight for justice, women at the forefront of the struggle, just as they have been since 1 March 1954.

    If anyone has the resilience to fight for justice, it is the Marshallese women.

    Netani Rika e is communications manager of the Pacific Conference of Churches and is in Majuro, Marshall Islands, covering the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women. Published with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Not up for debate: Fijian journalists in the climate crisis response

    By Brooke Tindall, Queensland University of Technology

    With more than 50 Fijian villages earmarked for potential relocation in the next five to 10 years due to the climate crisis, Fijian journalists are committing themselves to amplifying the voices of those who face the challenges of climate change in their everyday lives.

    Vunidogoloa village on the island of Vanua Levu was home to 32 families who lived in 26 homes. As early as 2006, floods and erosion caused by both sea-level rise and increased rains started to reach homes and destroy crops that fed the community.

    The situation worsened in the following years, with water progressively taking over the village. The mangroves that used to cover the coast where they lived were absorbed by the sea completely.

    The Fijian government began the mission to relocate Vunidogoloa in 2014. Not only did people in the community walk away from their homes, they left the place where their traditions and stories were passed down. Since Vunidogoloa was relocated, five other Fijian villages have faced the same fate.

    Several projects have been established in response to such pressing threats, with an aim to increase the amount of climate journalism in Fijian media.

    University of the South Pacific journalism coordinator Associate Professor Shailendra Singh has previously expressed concern about the lack of specialisation in climate reporting in the Pacific and says the articles produced can often come from “privileged elite viewpoints”.

    Dr Singh continues to harbour such concerns in 2024. He notes that Pacific news media organisations have small profit margins, so rather than face the expense of sending out teams to talk to everyday people, their stories tend to focus on presentations and speeches that are cheaper to cover.

    “This refers to the plethora of meetings, conferences, and workshops where the experts do all the talking and presenting,” he says.

    “Ordinary people in the face of climate change are suffering impacts and do not get as much coverage.”

    Training journalists to specialise in climate reporting will give them an in-depth understanding of both talking to experts and ordinary people experiencing the effects of climate change, Dr Singh says.


    Blessen Tom’s climate change ‘ghost’ village report on Vunidogoloa for Bearing Witness in 2016. Video: Pacific Media Centre

    “It brings focus, consistency and knowledge if done on a regular basis. Science has its place, but let’s not forget that people dealing and living with the effects of climate change are experts in their own right.”

    Up-and-coming journalists, USP students Brittany Nawaqatabu and Viliame Tawanakoro say they see it as a good journalists’ responsibility to prioritise climate stories.

    “Journalism provides people with the opportunity to be the vessel of message to the world. We are the captain of the ship that delivers the message,” Viliame says.

    Brittany criticises Western media that considers climate change as a “debatable” topic.

    “You have to put yourself in the shoes of a Pacific Islander to know what it’s really like. You can’t be debating it because you’re not the one going through it,” she says.

    It’s important for Fijian media to continue to put the climate crisis on the front page and not let the stories become lost in other news, she says.

    “If we are not going to become strong advocates as Pacific islanders for climate change and what our island homes are going through, then it’s only going to go downhill.”

    Brooke Tindall is a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This is published as the first of a series under our Asia Pacific Journalism partnership with QUT Journalism.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Earth just sweltered through the hottest day ever recorded

    Sunday was an unprecedented day, and not just because President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race so close to the election. July 21 was the hottest day on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, with a global average temperature of 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly beating out the previous record set on July 6 of last year. 

    For 13 straight months now, the planet has been notching record temperatures, from hottest year (2023) to hottest month (last July). And what was a daily temperature record eight years ago has now become worryingly commonplace. “What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus service, in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”  

    The territory may be uncharted, but the causes of this heat are abundantly clear. For one, there’s the steady rise of global temperatures due to carbon emissions. Since 1850, the Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.11 degrees F per decade on average, but that rate of warming since 1982 has jumped to 0.36 degrees per decade. Last year was already the hottest year on record by far, while 10 of the warmest years have all happened in the last decade. Copernicus also notes that before July 2023, the daily global average temperature record was 62.24 degrees F, on August 13, 2016. But since July 3, 2023, 57 days have exceeded that mark. Uncharted territory, indeed.

    The world may also be feeling the lingering aftereffects of El Niño this summer. That’s the band of warm Pacific Ocean water off the coast of South America, which sends additional heat into the atmosphere that raises temperatures and influences weather patterns. The most recent El Niño peaked around the new year, then faded through this spring. “The atmosphere knows no boundaries,” said Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “We’re still under the influence of El Niño. Not to mention that North Atlantic warming is one of the reasons that this Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be very active.”

    So while July 21 might have been sweltering for landlubbers, the parts of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes form are also extremely hot. Those warm waters are what fuel cyclones like Hurricane Beryl earlier this month, which slammed into Texas and left hunger in its wake. Scientists have forecasted five major hurricanes and 21 named storms this season, thanks in part to those high ocean temperatures.

    There might also be some natural variability thrown into the mix this summer: Some years are just hotter than others even in the absence of human-caused warming. And this time of year is when global average temperatures naturally peak, as the Northern Hemisphere summer starts to mature. (More landmasses in the North absorb and emit the sun’s energy, versus all that ocean area in the South that helps cool things down. 

    “It just so happened that we had a spike on top of what is typically the warmest climatological week of the entire year,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, which does its own climate analyses. “This is the warmest day on record, but also July is now — at least in my analysis — almost certain to not be the warmest July on record.” That is, the 13-month streak of records may well come to an end. Last July was so hot, it set a very high bar for future Julys to beat.

    At the same time, by Hausfather’s calculations, there’s a 95 percent chance that 2024 will edge out 2023 as the hottest year ever. “It’s just been so warm in the first six months of the year that even if we don’t set new records for the second six months, we’re still very likely going to end up above 2023,” Hausfather said. “We’ve just built up that much of a lead already.”

    Back in the Pacific Ocean, though, relief may be on the way: With El Niño gone, its cold-water counterpart, La Niña, could form in the coming months. That may help bring down global temperatures in 2025, and maybe even beyond. “The last La Niña was a three-year event,” Xie said. “That is of course very rare, but has extraordinary effects on the climate.”

    Regardless of El Niño and La Niña, though, the past year has been exceptionally hot — an ominous sign that the planet hasn’t just entered uncharted territory, but an increasingly perilous one. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Earth just sweltered through the hottest day ever recorded on Jul 23, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.