The vision

“I think science is the perfect way to solve this issue. Because a lot of innovation and invention happens in science, and technology is always changing. And so I think, if I really wanted to make a big impact, this would be the way to go.”

High schooler and science fair winner Victoria Ou

The spotlight

Last month, around 2,000 high school students from all over the world traveled to Los Angeles for the annual Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF. Reading the list of winning projects is … well, intimidating, even for a 30-year-old who technically has a degree in science. The top prize (of $75,000 — this is not the science fair from your high school gym) went to Grace Sun for her project “Novel Chemical Doping Strategy to Enhance N-Type Organic Electrochemical Transistors.” Another top award went to a project titled “Solving Second-Order Cone Programs in Matrix Multiplication Time.”

This year’s entrants included several climate-related projects as well: an AI approach to wildfire detection; a palm tree-inspired prototype for disaster-resilient building; a new energy-smart approach to optimizing indoor temperatures.

Youth climate activists get a lot of attention. We see them taking to the streets, demanding action, and holding policymakers accountable, and we believe their passion could change the world. But looking at these ISEF projects, it struck me that we often overlook this very different form of youth leadership.

These are not kids being pushed into crazy science projects by strict parents or overzealous teachers. They want to change the world, too — through research and innovation. And talking to them just confirms that.

“I want to help make sure that future generations can still have the same planet that we live on — that they don’t have to constantly worry about their health just because of what we have done in the past,” said Victoria Ou, another of this year’s top winners.

Victoria and Justin Huang, two 17-year-olds from The Woodlands College Park High School in Texas, designed a system that filters microplastic particles out of water using ultrasound waves. Their project received the Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Outcomes for Future Generations, which comes with a scholarship prize of $50,000.

Victoria and Justin pose with their award at ISEF. Society for Science / Lisa Fryklund

They’ve competed in science fairs before, starting in middle school. Justin notes that it’s a part of the culture in their school system — they both attend the Academy of Science and Technology within College Park High School. But this was their first time teaming up, and their first time going to ISEF. They’ve both been interested in environmental science for some time (Justin cites the Pixar movie WALL-E as an early influence) and constructed their device themselves, doing the research in their own homes.

In their experiments, the device they built was able to successfully trap up to 94 percent of the microplastic particles present in the system, letting clean water flow out the other side. They’re keen to continue working on the invention, refining the design and ultimately looking toward scaling it up. But in the meantime, they’re hopeful that their success can serve as an inspiration to other young scientists, or anyone wondering how they can make a difference on an issue as thorny as the microplastics crisis.

Talking to them was like talking to any passionate youngsters (if those youngsters used a lot of terminology you had to google on the side and also invented a device with the potential to change one of the biggest problems facing our planet). I spoke with them a couple weeks after their ISEF win about their project, their experiences at the science fair, and what they’ve learned along the way. Their responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q. Do you want to start by telling me a little bit about yourselves, and your interest in science?

Victoria: OK, I can go first. I’m Victoria Ou, I’m a current junior — well, ongoing to senior, in high school. We’ve actually been in school together since elementary. So we had the same sixth-grade science teacher, and she was kind of our big inspiration for getting into science. She really showed a lot of passion for it. And she was the one who had us do a science project that was really similar to a science fair. For my project that year, I actually did plastic pollution, which is how this kind of all started. I first read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and microplastics that we’re getting into our water and our food. And I was like, This is definitely a huge problem.

Justin: Ms. Caldwell was really the first one who raised the issue about the environment, and how we have one Earth and what we’re doing to it is really not good. So moving forward into our future, we wanted to be able to help with this issue. That’s how we got involved with this environmental aspect of science. She was the big inspiration for both of us.

Q. I’m sure that must mean a lot to her. So tell me more about your research, and how you got started with this project.

Victoria: So, we know microplastics are a huge issue, right? They get into all of our food and water and produce a lot of harmful health issues. We were looking into some possible ways to filter them out of our water. And there are a lot of current methods that we were looking at, but they all have their own disadvantages. Some of them are too expensive or too slow to work. And some of them also added chemicals that could be harmful to our health, which we definitely don’t want.

We were thinking of a more noninvasive approach. And we came upon two main studies for this — the first showed how ultrasound could be used to get red blood cells within your bloodstream to clump together. And we thought, ”Oh, this is kind of a similar concept to microplastics in water.” So we kept digging a little more into that and found another study that showed how they could focus microplastics within the water. So you would have water flowing and the microplastics would gather into streams in the water. We used these two as a big inspiration for our own project.

Victoria and Justin hold up their invention in front of their booth at ISEF. While it looks a little like two pens taped together, it is not, in fact, two pens taped together. Why would you even think that. Society for Science / Chris Ayers Photography

Q: How exactly does your invention work (for a nonscience person)?

Victoria: So imagine you have your tube, and water’s flowing this way. We have a transducer [Editor’s note: That’s a device that converts energy into something else] attached to one section of the tube that’s producing ultrasound. So as water is going this way, the ultrasound produces a force that pushes microplastics back the opposite way, but the water is still able to get through. So at the end we have water coming out, but the microplastics, they all kind of get stuck in the upper half of the tube, and that’s where they eventually accumulate. And we can clean them out afterwards.

Justin: You can think of it as invisible filtration — because you can’t really see the sound waves. But the microplastics are still getting blocked within the system, within the tube itself.

One of the things that we thought of here was, if we’re looking at physical filters, they’re really easy to get clogged. We wanted to make sure we didn’t have the same problem. In our experimentation, we did tests with high concentrations of microplastics, like, thousands of times higher than what we would see in real life, as well as really high volumes of water. And our system was still able to work really well. In the end, the microplastics are clumped together in the entry part of the tube — and we would have to clean it out eventually, but it doesn’t really run into any of the problems that physical filters do.

Q. What was it like testing your device? How did you build the experiment?

Justin: So first, to create the system — there’s actually equipment out there to generate ultrasound, but it’s really expensive.

Victoria: We found that there are three main components, which are the signal generator [Ed: an electronic device that produces electrical signals, or currents], power amplifier [Ed: does what it sounds like], and piezoelectric transducers [Ed: basically, converting electricity into vibrations].

So the signal generator and power amplifier we were able to borrow from Electronics and Innovation [Ed. an equipment manufacturer in New York]. They were actually really generous because we emailed them, we were like, “Hey, could we maybe rent this for this amount of money?” But once they heard we were high school students trying to do research, they were like, “Actually, we can give you this old model for free.” And we were super blown away, definitely could not have done it without them. Once we had the signal generator and power amplifier, we could produce the electrical impulses needed for our transducers to convert into ultrasound.

Justin: How we collected our data was we had microplastic samples that we created, whether that be shavings of objects around the house that were plastic, or cutting up plastic straws or that kind of stuff. And then we would put it in water and then we would have a syringe pump that we could slowly push the water through. That’s how we tested the system. We collected the water at the end, and then we did some analysis to see how much we filtered.

Q. How do you envision your device being used in the real world?

Victoria: We were thinking of two main applications for our device. One would be in water-treatment plants, since that directly impacts us and the water we use. And we were also, based on previous studies in the field, thinking of using this for laundry machines, to clean up the synthetic textile particles that come out of the laundry machines. Because they actually contribute to around 35 percent of primary microplastics pollution. So being able to clean up the laundry water before it goes back into the environment would help a lot, since we cut them off at the source instead of having to continuously clean them up from the environment.

Q. What do you feel like you learned going through the process of inventing this device and then taking it to ISEF?

Justin: Definitely something that I would’ve liked to hear when I was back in eighth grade doing science fair for the first time, is to always stay curious. Because you never know if something that you’re going to learn now is going to be useful in the future. I remember when I was in fifth grade, I built some LED lights with my grandpa — and that engineering skill really translated over to actually building the system here. So just stay curious and don’t give up.

Victoria: I guess on that note, I could also add to not be afraid of failure. When I went to ISEF, I was actually super intimidated by everyone else. I’d talk to a person, they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to Harvard, I’m going to MIT,” and I was like, “Oh my gosh, how could I ever measure up to these people? They’ve probably been successful their whole lives.” And I think having gone through the whole ISEF process, I just never realized that they put in a lot of hard work, too. Everything you see is only just the surface, right? You don’t see all the late nights, hundreds of hours of hard work that everyone puts in, and you don’t see the parts where they fail, either. Because no one ever wants to talk about that. But I think going through failure at some point is super important, because we failed a lot of times throughout our project, and each time it helped us learn something that could help us achieve the next step of being able to reach our goal. So I think just don’t give up, and learn from your mistakes, but keep going.

Q. On the note of never giving up — does doing this work make you feel more hopeful about our future, and more empowered to act on big issues like pollution and the climate crisis?

Justin: Yeah, definitely. You always see these things on the internet or on TV about how so-and-so invented whatever, to cure some disease or to solve some environmental issue. It’s really surreal being the ones who were able to create this, because we thought it took like, decades and decades of research. And of course it does, and what we have is just kind of a small step in our journey. But being able to see how just two high schoolers, from their own home, without even a lab, could make a difference in the world — I feel like that was truly something that inspired us, that can inspire us to go even further in the future.

Victoria: For me, going to ISEF was already super fun and I think that was fulfilling enough. And for other people, they don’t necessarily have to feel like you have to win an award or do something super famous to make a difference. I volunteer with our township sometimes to clean up trash. And every time I do that, I still feel almost as fulfilled as standing on that stage, you know? So I think just seeing the little things in life also is super fulfilling, and seeing how you can help the people next to you.

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

• Read: more about Justin and Victoria and their award-winning project (Fox 26 Houston)
• Read: recent Grist coverage on the ubiquity of microplastics and their effects on human health
• Read: about the advantages and drawbacks of bioplastic alternatives (BBC)
• Read: a few tips on how to avoid consuming microplastics as much as possible (Wirecutter)

A parting shot

In the U.K., environmental artist and activist Rob Arnold invented a filtration device (pictured here) that separates bits of plastic from sand and other natural detritus, using a filtering system that involves water flotation. He and other volunteers use the machine on beach cleanups to collect “nurdles,” tiny plastic pellets that are used to manufacture a range of plastic materials, but often end up as waste themselves.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Society for Science / Lisa Fryklund; Society for Science / Chris Ayers Photography

Parting shot: Ben Stansall / Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A different kind of youth activist: Meet the high schoolers who invented a microplastics solution on Jun 5, 2024.

They call it “The Blob.” A vast expanse of ocean stretching from Alaska to California periodically warms by up to 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit), decimating fish stocks, starving seabirds, creating blooms of toxic algae, preventing salmon returns to rivers, displacing sea lions, and forcing whales into shipping lanes to find food.

The Blob first formed in 2013 and spread across an area of the northeast Pacific the size of Canada. It lasted for three years and keeps coming back — most recently last summer. Until now, scientists have been unable to explain this abrupt ocean heating. Climate change, even combined with natural cycles such as El Niño, is not enough.

But a new analysis suggests an unexpected cause. Xiaotong Zheng, a meteorologist at the Ocean University of China, and international colleagues argue that this extraordinary heating is the result of a dramatic cleanup of Chinese air pollution. The decline in smog particles, which shield the planet from the sun’s rays, has accelerated warming and set off a chain of atmospheric events across the Pacific that have, in effect, cooked the ocean.

Other researchers spoken to by Yale Environment 360 see the finding, made with the help of in-depth climate modeling, as having potentially critical implications for future climate in the Pacific and elsewhere. Emissions of the tiny particles that cause smogs, collectively known as aerosols, are in decline across most of the world — apart from South Asia and Africa. Scientists are concerned that the cleanups will both heat the global atmosphere and lead to more intense regional ocean heat waves.

Yangyang Xu, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University not involved in the study, said it shows that “aerosol reductions will perturb the climate system in ways we have not experienced before. It will give us surprises.”

Indeed, that may already be happening in the Atlantic. Some researchers we spoke to argue that the exceptional heat wave that spread across the North Atlantic from spring last year until April this year, sending fish fleeing for cooler Arctic waters, may have owed its intensity to international efforts to reduce aerosol emissions from ships crossing the ocean.

The idea that cleaning up air pollution can worsen atmospheric warming sounds counterintuitive. But small particles suspended in the atmosphere, collectively known as aerosols, are very different from greenhouse gases. Instead of warming the planet by trapping solar radiation, they shade it by scattering incoming sunlight and sometimes creating clouds.

They don’t stick around in the air for more than a few days. But climate modelers calculate that while they are there, they fend off as much as a third of greenhouse warming.

In recent years, however, this cooling influence has begun to decline in much of the world. Thanks to clean air legislation intended to protect public health, aerosol emissions have been reduced in Europe and North America since the 1980s. And over the past decade, the same has happened in China, where tough government controls on dirty industries, introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, have cut overall aerosol emissions by 70 percent, according to Zheng.

Globally, there are now fewer anthropogenic aerosols in the air at any one time than for decades. Susanne Bauer, a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says this “turning point of the aerosol era” occurred in the first decade of this century, and seems set to continue, as more countries seek to banish smogs.

As a result, scientists say, the aerosol mask is slipping, causing a boost to global warming in many regions. “We are currently experiencing greenhouse gas-driven global warming enhanced by aerosol removal,” says Ben Booth, a climate modeler at the U.K. Met Office.

The climatic repercussions of this are not unexpected. Predicted declines in aerosol cooling are already factored into projections of future global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. But Zheng’s new findings on the cause of the warm Pacific blob suggest that we can also expect more and bigger regional climatic surprises.

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Why so? The answer lies in the fact that aerosols do not remain aloft for long enough in the air to mix thoroughly in the atmosphere. So national pollution cleanups will create radically new maps of aerosol distribution.

Some areas will heat much more than others, and this differential warming has the potential to destabilize atmospheric circulation patterns, which are largely heat-driven. This is what appears to have been happening in the northeast Pacific, says Zheng.

When he and Hai Wang, also of the Ocean University of China, along with colleagues in the United States and Germany, modeled the likely impacts on circulation systems of the recent cleaning of the air over eastern China, they found that clearing the country’s smogs caused exceptional atmospheric heating downwind over the Pacific.

This altered air pressures and intensified the Aleutian Low, a semi-permanent area of low pressure in the Bering Sea. This in turn reduced wind speeds further east, limiting the ability of the winds to cool the ocean below, providing “a favorable condition for extreme ocean warming.”

Zheng and colleagues warn that the findings are a harbinger of future “disproportionately large” warm-blob events.

Aerosols come in many shapes and sizes, from dust and soot to tiny particles invisible to the eye. They have many natural sources, such as forest fires and dust storms. But since the Industrial Revolution the aerosol load in the atmosphere has been dramatically increased by anthropogenic sources, primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil.

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These emissions include large volumes of sulfur dioxide, or SO2, a gas that reacts readily with other compounds in the air to create tiny particles that both shade the planet and can act as condensation nuclei that cause atmospheric moisture to coalesce into water droplets that form clouds.

Burning fossil fuels produces both planet-warming carbon dioxide and aerosols that mask much of the warming. Atmospheric temperatures depend on the balance between the two. The last IPCC assessment of climate science, published in 2021, calculated that greenhouse gases were producing a warming effect of around 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), with 0.4 degrees C (0.7 degrees F) of this masked by aerosols.

“Without the cooling effect of the aerosols, the world would already have reached the 1.5-degree temperature threshold of ‘dangerous’ climate change as set out by the Paris agreement,” says Johannes Quaas, a meteorologist at the University of Leipzig and former IPCC lead author.

But the balance is shifting as ever more countries act to reduce aerosol emissions.

They do so because of a growing awareness of the public health impacts of aerosols, which the World Health Organization calculates cause more than 4 million premature deaths from cancers and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases each year. Air pollution reduced life expectancy in parts of China by up to five years, according to a 2013 study.

Countries are requiring power companies, industries, and vehicle manufacturers to filter particulates and either burn low-sulfur fuel or fit equipment to strip SO2 from stack emissions — thus cleaning up aerosol and SO2 emissions without reducing the energy produced by burning the fuel.

Europe and North America have had clean air laws in place for almost half a century. Since 2013 — following a run of debilitating smogs in many cities — China has followed, at breakneck speed. Its anthropogenic aerosol emissions have fallen by 70 percent in a decade, and SO2 emissions have been reduced even more, from 20.4 million tons in 2013 to 2.4 million tons in 2022.

Chinese researchers have tracked the impact of this on local climate in some detail. Yang Yang, an atmospheric physicist at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, calculates that by 2017, it had boosted the existing greenhouse warming trend in eastern China by 0.1 degrees C (0.2 degrees F). As the cleanup extends, including to transportation, he expects this extra heating to increase to between 0.2 and 0.5 degrees C (0.4 and 0.7 degrees F) by 2030, and to more than 0.5 degrees C (0.9 degrees F) by 2060.

Yang predicts it will also trigger changes in local atmospheric circulation that will result in more rainfall over southern China and beyond, in nearby countries such as the Philippines. Zheng’s new research suggests that the effects are already far more long-ranging, stretching across the Pacific to create The Blob on the shores of the U.S.

Where else can we expect disrupting local climate change? Outside of China, researchers are exploring the potential for oceanic climate surprises arising from recent efforts to cut SO2 emissions from shipping.

Dirty, sulfurous diesel has long been the fuel of choice in ships’ boilers. As a result, the world’s shipping fleets until recently emitted more than 10 million tons of SO2 annually, contributing between 10 and 20 percent of the total anthropogenic climate “forcing” from aerosols, says Michael Diamond, who studies aerosols and climate at Florida State University.

Ships are a major cause of aerosol buildup over oceans, where there are usually few other anthropogenic sources. Satellite images show clear tracks of clouds stretching along major shipping routes.

Burning ships’ fuel also emits carbon dioxide, of course. But until recently, ships’ aerosol emissions have probably cooled the planet more than their greenhouse gas emissions have warmed it. That is changing, however. Ships seem set to turn from planetary coolers to planetary warmers.

In 2020, the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization, or IMO, responded to rising pressure to clear the air around ports by reducing the sulfur content allowed in shipping fuel from 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent. Reduced ships’ SO2 emissions have already resulted in fewer clouds over shipping lanes and and higher ocean temperatures.

Diamond says he has a paper currently under peer review whose “takeaway is that something like a third of the North Atlantic marine heat wave [of the past year] might be attributable to the IMO regulations.” Booth, meanwhile, is co-author of a paper preprinted online this month that argues that shipping emissions reductions “may help explain part of the rapid jump in global temperatures over the last 12 months.”

Where are we headed?

If the world works successfully toward lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades, while also continuing to curb aerosols, then we can still expect continued warming for which aerosol reductions are a growing cause.

Yang recently co-authored a paper that forecasts a midcentury world in which the warming impact of the clearer air will “far outweigh those of greenhouse gases.” There will be “increased humid heat waves with longer duration and stronger amplitudes,” he says.

So what can be done? Can the world have clean air while also keeping warming to bearable levels and avoiding worsening ocean heat waves?

Most scientists spoken to for this article agreed that the best route remains doubling down on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But Diamond suggests the aerosol dilemma shines a spotlight on the need to give priority to cutting methane emissions.

This virulent greenhouse gas is second to carbon dioxide in importance as a planetary warmer. Right now, notes Diamond, its warming effect is almost identical to the average cooling effect of continued aerosol emissions. And because methane is a relatively short-lived greenhouse gas, persisting in the atmosphere for only around a decade, its elimination can provide a quick fix for some of the impacts of the lost aerosols. Luckily, there is low-hanging fruit to achieve this: The easiest and cheapest actions include preventing the venting of methane from gas and oil wells and pipelines.

To be clear, nobody — but nobody — suggests that we should stop the cleanup of aerosols. The death toll would just be too great.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The pollution paradox: How cleaning up smog drives ocean warming on Jun 5, 2024.

Before you head to the mall for that new summer trend, take a second look…

The post DIY Summer Style Ideas appeared first on Earth911.

The future is not written, we can make a better, sustainable future for our children…

The post Best of Earth911 Podcast: Author Chunka Mui on Building a Perfect Future for Our Children appeared first on Earth911.

A new report from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA) and the Center for Energy Poverty and Climate (CEPC) anticipates that households in the U.S. will see about a 7.9% increase in their electric bills this summer as temperatures increase. This summer also follows the record-hot summer of 2023.

Households could pay an average of $719 from June through September, according to the report. By comparison, U.S. households paid $661 on average in electricity during June through September 2023. Ten years ago, the average payment for this same time period (June through September) was around $476, NEADA reported.

For low-income households, the increasing electric bill prices will put families at higher risks of extreme heat. For one, low-income households are more likely to live in heat island areas and have less access to methods of cooling that are affordable, NEADA reported. There have also been $2 billion of cuts in funding from the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) from 2023 to 2024, despite last summer being the hottest on record.

“We must treat access to cooling like we treat access to heating. We must develop programs that enable low-income families to stay safe and in their homes during extreme temperatures,” Mark Wolfe, lead author of the report and executive director of NEADA, said in a press release. “Our current strategies, including access to cooling centers, may have been appropriate when they were designed in the 1970s when summer temperatures were lower and heat waves were sporadic. They are inadequate to provide relief from the record-breaking high temperatures and continuous heat waves that have become our new normal in the summer months.”

About one million households are expected to lose access to the heating and cooling benefits provided through LIHEAP. Most of the program’s funding goes toward heating, leaving more families vulnerable to the extreme heat expected for this summer.

NEADA and CEPC are asking Congress to restore funding to LIHEAP ahead of this summer, or at the latest, before summer 2025. Further, they are recommending that states establish shut-off protections and invest in improving the energy-efficiency of low-income households through retrofitting, solar panels and heat pumps. As NEADA pointed out, these upgrades could be made possible through the High Efficiency Electric Home Rebate Program (HEEHRA), part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

“If people can’t afford air conditioners in the summer, we shouldn’t be surprised that people become ill and go to hospitals,” Wolfe told The Guardian. “Now with extended heatwaves, more families need access to affordable cooling.”

The post U.S. Electric Bills Could Increase 8% This Summer Amid Rising Temperatures appeared first on EcoWatch.

Lisa Hendrickson is almost out of sand.

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

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

This perilous situation is the result of a standoff between local residents and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that handles flood prevention and protects many of the nation’s beaches. The Corps often rebuilds eroded beaches by hauling in thousands of tons of sand, but the agency is refusing to deliver $42 million of new sand to Pinellas County unless the area’s coastal property owners grant public access to the slivers of beach behind their homes. Hundreds of these property owners, however, are in turn refusing to sign documents that grant these points of access, which are known as easements. The faceoff has brought the area’s storm recovery to a near standstill.

This standoff highlights growing tensions between the federal government and homeowners in coastal areas that are threatened by climate change. As sea levels have risen and strong storms have caused greater damage than ever before, the costs of protecting and insuring beach fronts in Florida and other states have increased rapidly. Agencies like the Corps have had to weigh these costs against the interests of property owners in places like the Tampa Bay region. When those interests come into conflict, populated coastal areas can be left exposed or uninsured, making them sitting ducks for the next climate-fueled storm.

“Our coastlines are the first line of defense against storms, and our Gulf beaches are just eroding away,” Hendrickson told Grist. “I don’t know where we go with it now, or how we come together to work through it.”

The Corps put the easement policy in place decades ago to ensure that it didn’t spend public money to restore private beaches, but the agency didn’t begin enforcing the rule in earnest until after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. When the Corps tried to replace disintegrated beaches in New Jersey, it discovered that it didn’t have all the easements it needed. Local governments spent years trying to obtain them, and the state government had to use eminent domain to seize portions of the beach in order to satisfy the agency.

In the years since, the agency has warned Pinellas County and other local governments that they won’t get any more sand unless they get easements from all the property owners on their beaches. The Corps says it first raised the issue with Pinellas back in 2017, but tensions started rising last year after Idalia eroded the area’s beaches to a dangerous degree, creating a desperate need for new protective sand.

The Corps requires that easements be “perpetual,” which means that the public will always be able to access the beach area behind an owner’s property. The agency says this is only so that it has the ability to help out after future storms: When a hurricane wipes out a beach, the Corps often swoops in to pay for an emergency beach replenishment just weeks later, ensuring homes don’t wash away. The agency says that it can’t commit to doing this emergency work unless it can be sure that beach access will remain public for good. It also says that it needs easements from all property owners in a given area, because nourishment projects don’t work unless they’re continuous along an entire stretch of sand.

Pinellas County officials tried their best to obtain these easements, even going from door to door and pleading with residents to “sign for sand.” Nevertheless, around half of the 461 property owners along the barrier island have refused to grant them. County officials are still urging residents to submit, but they have obtained few new easements since late last year.

The strange thing about the easement controversy is that these waterfront residents don’t fully own the beaches behind their homes — in fact, most of the county’s beaches are already public. State law provides that all Florida beaches with artificial sand are public up to the “erosion control line,” which is about the same as that which marks high tide. In other words, everything from the water to the high tide line is open for anyone to walk, tan, or spread a blanket. The land in dispute between the Corps and the homeowners is only the section of sand between the backside of a beach house and the high tide line, which in many cases is just a few dozen feet.

“For most of the project, the beach is wide open to the public,” said John Bishop, Pinellas County’s coastal management coordinator. “A lot of the easement areas aren’t even on the beach, they’re in the dune behind the beach.”

Owners’ reasons for refusing easements are numerous, but most cite a fear that granting public access to the sand behind their property will encourage tourists to venture up on their dunes or sit on the sea walls behind their homes. Sure, they can’t stop tourists and beachgoers from using the beach that sits between the erosion line and the water — but they don’t want them coming any closer.

Even those property owners who have granted their easements haven’t yet seen any benefit from doing so, since the Corps won’t deliver sand until everyone complies.

Andrew Youngman, the property manager at the Sea Oats resort condominium in Redington Shores, says the board of his 40-unit building was initially eager to grant the Corps an easement for beach nourishment last year. But when residents learned they wouldn’t get new sand unless the county secured easements from all property owners, they figured it would never happen, so they never finished the paperwork. Since then, Youngman has watched the area around his property erode.

“We’re probably in the best shape in the vicinity, because we have a dune of our own out there,” Youngman told Grist. “Everyone else is just flat from their building to the water.”

The local government and the Army Corps of Engineers have kept up this staring contest for almost a year now, and some political heavyweights have gotten involved on the county’s side. Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, all Republicans, have accused the Corps of holding up the beach project on bureaucratic grounds. Last month Scott sent a letter to the Corps saying that his constituents “have seen enough inaction.” The letter urged the Corps to relax its easement policy and said that “further delays on these projects could cause catastrophic damage to … coastal communities.”

In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for the Corps gave no indication that the agency will budge on its policy, which it has begun to enforce elsewhere in Florida and in other coastal states like South Carolina.

Even when Pinellas County tried to obtain separate temporary easements to build new emergency dunes at the top of its beaches, many residents still refused, in part out of a concern that new dunes would block their ocean views. This further stalemate with homeowners has forced the county to build a piecemeal dune behind coastal properties, leaving holes in front of the homes and hotels where the owners didn’t want to grant an easement. 

This broken dune won’t do much come storm season, according to René Flowers, a Pinellas County commissioner who has been pushing the Corps to deliver the sand.

“When you have a break in the chain, then all of the work that you’re doing is not as impactful in protecting as it would be,” she said.  

Rob Young, a professor of geology at Western Carolina University and a frequent critic of beach nourishment projects, says Pinellas County should fund the nourishment itself through sales tax increases rather than relying on the federal government to pay for new sand. He pointed out that some beach towns on the Outer Banks of North Carolina have taxed tourism to pay for sand after the federal government stopped covering the costs.

“For a lot of people, the privacy is more important to them than the risk of destruction,” he said, referring to residents who refused to grant easements. “The solution is very easy — pay for your own risk.” Young added that many nourishment projects don’t seem to be worth the money they cost. He pointed to the Jersey Shore, where a $1 million beach nourishment project washed away in just one year.

The knowledge that beach nourishment might not be a good investment doesn’t do much to help local leaders like Flowers, the Pinellas County commissioner, who is bracing herself for a hurricane season that meteorologists predict will be one of the most active in decades.

“I’m very concerned for those homeowners out there who will be impacted because perhaps their neighbor has opted not to allow access,” she said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The homeowner mutiny leaving Florida cities defenseless against hurricanes on Jun 4, 2024.

Every year ahead of hurricane season’s official start in June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases the forecast for the Atlantic Ocean’s tempestuous season ahead. In a predictable cycle, articles start swirling in to answer familiar queries: What will these hurricanes be called? Who picks their names? Why do hurricanes get named like people, anyway? This year, the first will be named Alberto, then Beryl, Chris, Debby, and so on all the way to William, the end of the alphabet in terms of desirable letters meteorologists trust they can wrest intelligible names out of.

It’s likely that a few of these monikers will get retired, an honor bestowed upon particularly deadly, destructive storms whose reuse “on a different storm would be inappropriate for obvious reasons of sensitivity,” according to NOAA. This year’s season is predicted to be the busiest on record because of record-hot waters in the Atlantic, which can stir up stronger hurricanes, and the predicted shift from an El Niño climate pattern to a La Niña one whose weaker high-altitude winds make it easier for hurricanes to form. NOAA recently projected that 17 to 25 named storms will appear this year, with four to seven reaching the status of major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher.

The official naming of hurricanes dates back to 1953, when the U.S. Weather Bureau started labeling tropical storms to get the public’s attention, reduce confusion between storms, and indicate a level of severity (storms don’t make the cut unless their winds reach 39 miles per hour). The personality of hurricane names makes them memorable, but the practice comes with weird side effects, since names are loaded with cultural baggage that can affect how people talk about, or even prepare for, a storm barreling toward them. “Naming plays a huge impact in both how we view and respond to hazards,” said Liz Skilton, a historian at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the author of the book Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture.

It works the other way around, too, with particularly bad hurricanes swaying what people name their babies. It’s well-documented that catastrophic storms resulted in fewer babies named Betsy (1965) and Harvey (2017), since most parents flinched at giving their kid a name associated with a catastrophe. Some even plan ahead: “Is it a bad idea to use an upcoming hurricane name?” one prospective parent asked on Reddit a couple years ago, worried the baby name they loved would be sullied. (The same names are rotated through every six years until they get retired by association with a terrible storm.) While the consensus on Reddit was that they were overthinking it, the hurricane association can cause problems for people with unique names. After Hurricane Katrina killed around 1,400 people in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, one trauma recovery psychologist who worked with survivors went by her initials, K.H., because introducing herself with her real name, Katrina, resulted in “a visceral reaction.”

Oddly enough, research suggests that baby names that sound similar to a much-talked hurricane tend to spike in its aftermath. One analysis found that names that began with A became 7 percent more common after Hurricane Andrew caused billions of dollars of damage in 1992, and those that started with K rose 9 percent after Hurricane Katrina. The researchers chalked it up to the influence of hearing those names so frequently, which altered what kind of names sounded good to people.

Before hurricanes got human names, they were christened haphazardly, often depending on when or where they struck, like the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. The practice of naming hurricanes after women started with Clement Lindley Wragge, an Australian weather forecaster, in 1896. Wragge’s idea went on to inspire George R. Stewart’s hit novel in 1941, Storm, starring a meteorologist who secretly named hurricanes after girls he knew. The notion gradually caught on, and the Weather Bureau decided to test it out nationwide.

The devastating storms of the 1954 season, Carol, Edna, and Hazel, became known as “the Bad Girls of ’54.” Reporters clamored at the chance to write about storms as dramatic feminine characters, depicting them as howling, shrieking, and playing coy. “Hurricanes were not just female — they were exemplars of the worst kind of womanhood imaginable,” Skilton wrote in Tempest. There was pushback from the start, and it only intensified in the 1970s, with Roxcy Bolton leading the feminist charge. “I’m sick of reading headlines such as ‘[Hurricane] Camille Was No Lady,’” she told the press. 

Skilton, who researched the language used to talk about hurricanes in thousands of newspaper articles over the decades, found that when storms struck, local reporters used the most gender-specific language. For example, when Hurricane Diane made landfall in North Carolina in 1955, 18 percent of articles in the surrounding states referred to the storm as a woman, either using she/her pronouns or nouns like “lady,” twice as often as articles in the rest of the country. Similarly, when Hurricane Camille barreled into Mississippi in 1969, articles in Gulf Coast states were more than three times as likely as other areas to specify the storm’s gender. Naming a storm imbues it with imagined, humanlike qualities, providing a target for people to express their anger “towards this natural object that has caused so much damage or destruction” where they live, Skilton said.

In 1979, a new system alternated between men and women’s names, at the order of President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Commerce, Juanita Kreps. At the same time, control of the naming convention was handed to the World Meteorological Organization, which still maintains the list. The Atlantic storms started rotating between English, French, and Spanish names, reflecting the blend of ancestry in the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast. It’s common practice around the world to give storms names that reflect the ethnicities in the regions they affect, said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

With names like Allen and Frederic thrown into the mix, hurricanes seemed to pick up more aggressive, even warlike personalities. Hurricane David, the first big storm in 1979, a period in which serial killers cast a shadow over the national mood, was called a “killer” that “ripped” and “razed” the coastline, diabolical and determined in “his” attack. These kinds of associations with names and gender can have real-world effects: A study in 2014 found that survey respondents perceived female-named storms as less deadly than their male counterparts, and, therefore, less worthy of evacuation. That correlation was reflected in historical death tolls, the authors found, with storms named after women causing more damage. The study received criticism, with some scholars raising questions about the methods, but Skilton said the research should lead people “to question whether the storm names are influencing us in a harmful way.”

As the climate changes, amping up hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, people are urging government agencies to give names to other kinds of severe weather, from “Winter Storm Archer” to “Heat Wave Zoe.” It’s opening up a new avenue in disaster communication — and, if history repeats itself, new complications.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who’s afraid of Hurricane Debby? The peculiar importance of a storm’s name. on Jun 4, 2024.

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