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Northern Lights to Be Visible in U.S. States as Far South as Kansas

This week, U.S. States as far south as Kansas will have the opportunity to catch sight of the brilliant aurora borealis — known as the “Northern Lights” — when a solar storm dips far south enough to be seen in cities like Seattle and Boise.

The vibrant, multi-colored light show, created when solar wind collides with Earth’s atmosphere, is part of a solar cycle that started in 2019 and is expected to climax next year, reported The Associated Press.

The Northern Lights are often visible in the polar regions of Canada, Scandinavia, Iceland and Alaska, but are rarely seen so far south.

According to the University of Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute, Thursday’s aurora display could be seen in parts of states including Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

Any reading of the Kp or planetary index above a five — the scale ranges from zero to nine — qualifies as a geomagnetic storm. The Geophysical Institute has predicted Thursday’s display to register as a six.

The term “aurora borealis” comes from the Latin “aurora,” which means “dawn” and “borealis,” which means “north,” Earth.com reported.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, ideal viewing times for this week’s Northern Lights display are from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. local time.

“The aurora does not need to be directly overhead but can be observed from as much as a 1000 km away when the aurora is bright and if conditions are right,” according to the Space Weather Prediction Center. “It is the only way for most people to actually experience space weather.”

In late April of this year, a major geomagnetic storm brought spectacular lights displays as far south as Arizona, Iowa and North Dakota.

The turbulent activity of the sun can sometimes be strong enough to tug at our planet’s magnetic field, but then it recoils, creating what are called Alfvén waves about 80,000 miles up, reported NPR. When electrons get attached to a wave, they rush down toward Earth at speeds of up to 45 million miles per hour.

“Think about surfing,” said Jim Schroeder, an assistant professor of physics at Wheaton College, as NPR reported. “In order to surf, you need to paddle up to the right speed for an ocean wave to pick you up and accelerate you, and we found that electrons were surfing.”

You will not need binoculars to see this week’s auroras, but a spot with less light pollution at a higher elevation is best. Though they are called the Northern Lights, these dazzling lights are visible from all directions.

The post Northern Lights to Be Visible in U.S. States as Far South as Kansas appeared first on EcoWatch.

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Birds Around the World Are Building Their Nests With Trash

A new study has found that 176 bird species around the world are building their nests with trash from humans, such as cigarette butts, candy wrappers and plastic string. Birds on all continents except Antarctica were found to make nests with this waste, which could harm the birds and the chicks.

Researchers analyzed nearly 35,000 nests and found human-generated trash in the nests of many types of birds as this waste becomes more ubiquitous on land and in marine environments. The study was published online in a special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

“A wide variety of bird species included anthropogenic materials into their nests,” Zuzanna Jagiełło, an ornithologist at the University of Warsaw and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “This is worrying because it is becoming increasingly apparent that such materials can harm nestlings and even adult birds.”

The study found that some species used particular types of waste. Blackbirds used plastic string or plastic bags to build up their nests, and storks had nests built in part with plastic string as well as cardboard and foil, The Guardian reported. Seabirds were found to add fishing nets, and birds in cities in South America added cigarette butts.

Although some of these materials may offer benefits, such as plastics that help better insulate the nests or cigarette butts that contain compounds to repel parasites, these waste pieces are also dangerous to the birds and their chicks. Chicks can choke on the trash when they mistake it for food, plastic strings can entangle the birds, and some trash can introduce toxins to the nest, exposing the birds to harmful chemicals. Brightly colored trash may also attract predators to the nest.

The scientists have theorized that birds may be using certain types of trash to attract mates, but they haven’t found links between bird age or nest placement with specific waste items.

The study authors said more research is needed to find how many more bird species are using trash to build nests. The researchers are also calling on citizen scientists for help furthering the research.

“Birds are wonderful bio-monitoring tools,” Jim Reynolds, study co-author and an ornithologist at the University of Birmingham, told The Guardian. “We’re asking people to show an interest in this and go and take a photograph of a nest in their garden, wherever they might live.”

The post Birds Around the World Are Building Their Nests With Trash appeared first on EcoWatch.

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Earth911 Podcast: Crown Holding’s Jennifer Bogs on Making Aluminum More Sustainable

How can we make one of the most recycled materials more sustainable? Meet Jennifer Bogs,…

The post Earth911 Podcast: Crown Holding’s Jennifer Bogs on Making Aluminum More Sustainable appeared first on Earth911.

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How the Western drought has increased carbon emissions

At the turn of the 20th century, as the United States developed the West, the federal government built hundreds of hydroelectric dams on major rivers in the region. These dams destroyed river ecosystems and flooded Indigenous land, but they also provided a cheap and abundant source of renewable energy for tens of millions of people. Hydropower today meets around a quarter of the region’s energy needs.

But the hydroelectric fleet in the West has taken a beating over the past 20 years as a series of devastating droughts have battered the area. When major rivers dry up, less water flows through hydroelectric dam turbines — and dams produce less electricity as a result. At the same time, the heat waves that often accompany dry periods lead to more demand for power as people crank up their air-conditioning. That’s bad news for grid operators, who have to find an alternate source of electricity just as dams are falling short.

This decline in hydropower leads to a significant surge in fossil fuel emissions, according to a new study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a leading scientific journal. After looking at power generation across the West between 2001 and 2021, the authors of the study found that coal and gas plants ramped up their activity during dry months to replace lost hydropower, leading to more carbon emissions and more local air pollution. While that finding was expected, the scale of the increase in fossil fuel emissions surprised the researchers.

“The effect on the power mix is actually pretty large,” said Minghao Qiu, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University who is the lead author of the study.

All in all, the decline in hydropower caused an extra 121 million metric tons of carbon emissions between 2001 and 2021 — about the same as if an additional 1.3 million cars had been on the road during the same period. The size of the change varied from grid to grid and from power plant to power plant, but it was considerable everywhere. Fossil fuel emissions rose by 11 percent in the Northwest during the driest months, and by a whopping 30 percent in California. At some plants, generation jumped as much as 65 percent above normal levels during dry spells.

During the driest years, this increase had staggering consequences for the climate: In 2001, for instance, a decline in hydropower caused fossil-powered plants in the West to emit 27 million tons more carbon dioxide than they otherwise would have, or about 10 percent of their total emissions from that year. 

Because coal and natural gas tend to be more expensive to produce than hydropower, droughts likely led to higher energy costs for customers in the West. But the study also argues that declines in hydropower generation have come with big costs for the environment and public health — to the tune of more than $20 billion so far this century. Not only did the drought-driven rise in carbon emissions cause future warming that will lead to more climate disasters, but air pollution around fossil fuel plants also made nearby residents sicker, which will lead to greater public health costs later on. 

In 2001, for instance, California’s natural gas plants ramped up to offset a drought-driven decline in hydropower across the region, leading to a more than 40 percent surge in emissions of toxic chemicals such as sulfur dioxide and nitric oxide.

These negative health effects didn’t always occur in the same places where a drought happened. When the hydropower fleet in a state like Washington faltered, grid operators imported electricity from other states, ferrying electrons over long transmission wires that crisscross the region. This replacement energy came from coal plants in Montana and gas plants in California, and people near those distant facilities bore the health costs as those plants burned more fossil fuels. The study found that more than half of the increase in fossil fuel generation from 2001 to 2021 happened in states that weren’t themselves experiencing drought.

“A climate shock in one place can really cause damages in faraway places, because the energy grid is so connected,” Qiu told Grist.

In an interesting twist, the study found that even a rapid renewable buildout might not fix the problem of more pollution during drought times. Western states are racing to build more solar and wind, and the Biden administration is pushing to build more of these facilities on the region’s abundant public land. But Qiu’s study found that fossil fuel plants will still provide backup power when other sources like hydropower fall short, since they can ramp up on short notice, unlike renewable sources that are dependent on the amount of sun and wind available. In order to tamp down fossil fuel emissions during dry spells, according to Qiu, states and the federal government need to work on developing better storage options, such as enhanced batteries, to preserve extra energy produced by renewables.

“We’re looking at the generators that increase their generation while there is a demand increase due to a heat wave or a supply decrease due to drought,” he told Grist. “If there is a future drought, it’s still going to be fossil fuel power plants that increase their generation to meet that gap of electricity.”

Update: This story has been updated to include a cumulative figure for carbon emissions attributable to hydropower loss.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the Western drought has increased carbon emissions on Jul 10, 2023.

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Parts of the climate system are reaching tipping points, June extremes suggest

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

June 2023 may be remembered as the start of a big change in the climate system, with many key global indicators flashing red warning lights amid signs that some systems are tipping toward a new state from which they may not recover.

Earth’s critical reflective polar ice caps are at their lowest extent on record in the satellite era, with the sea ice around Antarctica at a record-low extent by far, spurring worried scientists to share dramatic charts of the missing ice repeatedly. In the Arctic, the month ended with the Greenland Ice Sheet experiencing one of the largest June melt events ever recorded, and with scientists reporting that June 2023 was the hottest June ever measured, breaking the 2019 record by a “staggering” 0.16 degrees Celsius.

“With the record warmth in June, 2023 as a whole is now the odds-on favorite to be the warmest year on record,” climate scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote on Twitter. 

Globally, the oceans set records for warmth on the surface and down to more than 6,000 feet deep throughout the month, with temperatures so far above the norm that the conditions elicited more graphs showing the anomaly. They’ve been shared thousands of times by scientists, policymakers, and the public. And in Canada, forest areas about the size of Kentucky have burned, choking huge swaths of central and eastern North America with acrid wildfire smoke, with some of the haze even reaching Europe. 

There was record-breaking heat on nearly every continent during the month, according to independent climate statistician Maximilian Herrera. Along with the deadly late June heat in Mexico and the South-central United States, extreme readings have been widespread in remote Siberia, with hundreds of daily heat records, including readings higher than 95 degrees Celsius close to the Arctic Circle. “The heat will just get worse,” he posted on Twitter.

Herrera also tracks notable regional extremes, like a historic mountain heatwave in Iran, where temperatures in late June spiked to between 100 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit at elevations between 1,500 and 5,000 feet above sea level that are normally far cooler.  During the first week of July, temperatures in Iraq are forecast to breach 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

“These extraordinary extremes could be an early warning of tipping points towards different weather or sea ice or fire regimes,” said University of Exeter climate researcher Tim Lenton. “We call it ‘flickering’ when a complex system starts to briefly sample a new regime before tipping into it. Let’s hope I’m wrong on that.”

In the meantime, the tropical Pacific Ocean is shifting into the warm El Niño phase of a two- to seven-year Pacific Ocean cycle that can boost the average global temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius, enough to stoke the planet’s fever to a dangerous new high.

“The onset of El Niño will greatly increase the likelihood of breaking temperature records and triggering more extreme heat in many parts of the world and in the ocean,” said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. “Early warnings and anticipatory action of extreme weather events associated with this major climate phenomenon are vital to save lives and livelihoods.”

“I expect a step change to higher global mean temperatures starting this year,” said atmospheric scientist Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and honorary faculty at the University of Auckland. “And next year will be the warmest on record, either 1.4 or 1.5C above pre-industrial.”

The higher of those levels is the amount to which the United Nations’ 2015 Paris Agreement aspired to limit climate change, but the continued upward trajectory of global temperatures could make that goal impossible to reach. 

“I expect it then to oscillate about that value and not come down again,” he said. 

The El Niño temperature nudge comes against a backdrop of record-high carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, he said, adding that the rate of increase is as high as it has ever been and continues to accelerate.

“In other words, there is no bending down of the CO2 record, as should happen with all the new actions being taken in the U.S. and elsewhere,” he said. “The problem is that China and India are accelerating their coal-fired power stations and overwhelming all other cuts.”

Antarctic sea ice decline has a cascade of impacts

The persistence of the startling Antarctic sea ice decline may be one of the most puzzling and worrisome of the recent cluster of climate extremes. Until recently, researchers expected less sudden changes in Antarctica, because it’s such a vast reservoir of coldness, and surrounded by a continual swirl of ocean currents and winds that have buffered the continent to some degree.

But at the end of June, getting into the heart of the Southern Hemisphere winter, an area of ice about the size of Texas and Alaska, nearly 1 million square miles, was missing. As the Southern Hemisphere’s winter set in, the sea ice grew more slowly than ever observed in the satellite era.

Sometimes, anomalies are just a one-time regional snapshot, but the Antarctic sea ice extent has been far below average at least since January, when Antarctic climate expert Ted Scambos, a senior scientist with Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, called the conditions extreme. “Frankly, we are still working to understand it,” he said.

But nearly every new study implicates human-caused warming, as measurements of winds and ocean currents show how the global temperature increase has pushed the Antarctic wind belt poleward, which also shifted relatively warmer water closer to the icy edges of the frozen continent.

Other recent research shows that the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica and extending northward to 60 degrees south latitude, stored a disproportionately large percentage of the heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases and then absorbed by the world’s oceans between 2005 and 2017. The study showed the Southern Ocean took up 45 to 62 percent of the heat absorbed by the world’s oceans, even though it makes up only 6.25 percent of the global ocean surface area.

In the absence of its reflective sea ice cover, the darker-colored ocean can absorb even more heat, potentially leading to earlier and more extensive melting during the next Austral summer. And as the fringe of ice around Antarctica gets smaller, warmer ocean water can more easily flow toward the floating ice shelves that buttress vast areas of inland ice that could start flowing into the sea faster to speed sea level rise.

There are also ecosystem impacts. The abundance of certain types of plankton and krill, at the base of the ocean food chain, is linked with the Antarctic sea ice. A disruption to those organisms ripples up through the ecosystem, because the feeding and breeding cycles of many other species, including seals and seabirds, is closely linked with sea ice.

A heat dome settles on North America

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said there is probably a global warming fingerprint on the deadly dome of stagnant, hot air that is baking large parts of Mexico, the Southwestern and central United States and Canada

“Also playing a role in the extreme weather we’re seeing, including the (south-central U.S. heat dome and the Canadian wildfires) is what appears to be another resonance event,” he said, referencing research that shows how the warming climate favors planetary atmospheric wave patterns that “can give rise to persistent summer weather extremes. In this case, it is likely behind many of the extreme conditions we’re seeing right now in North America and Eurasia.”

Another part of the heat dome settled over Canada, where wildfires had released 160 million tons of carbon by the end of June, the highest annual total estimated emissions for Canada since satellite monitoring began in 2003, scientists with the EU’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service reported. And there’s also new research suggesting links between vanishing ice and snow in the planet’s polar reaches and climate extremes in the mid-latitudes, where most people live. 

“The pile of evidence linking a rapidly warming Arctic with extreme summer weather events continues to grow,” climate scientist Jennifer Francis wrote on Twitter on June 30, sharing a link to a new peer-reviewed study in Nature Communications that solidifies the hypothesis that changes in the Arctic can lead to a wavier jet stream that can trap heat domes in place.

In recent years, those patterns have sometimes persisted for months with only short pauses, including last summer, when a heat dome over Europe lasted several months and fueled that continent’s hottest summer on record.

Earth’s energy imbalance disrupts the climate system

At the top of the planet, scientists have been watching an extreme ocean heat wave in the North Atlantic just as carefully, because it could be a symptom of disruption to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a critical part of the global climate system that transports cold and warm ocean water between the poles. Sea surface temperatures about 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average in the region could also contribute to heatwaves over adjacent land areas.

Record-breaking ocean temperatures in regions around the globe are not surprising Trenberth, who specializes in analyzing deep ocean heat content, down to more than 6,000 feet below sea level, where more than 90 percent of all the heat trapped in the atmosphere by carbon pollution has been absorbed.

That heat is measured as energy rather than as a temperature value, and it’s equivalent at this point to the energy of five nuclear bombs exploding in the ocean each second, or about 100 times more energy than all the electricity produced in 2021 globally.

For Trenberth, that global energy imbalance, building steadily since the start of the fossil-fueled industrial age, is the best measure of how humans have affected the climate, because the energy balance isn’t affected by seasonal or annual variations, or by shifts in regional climate patterns.

And if the heat building that energy imbalance in the oceans was to stop, many of its impacts would rapidly decrease, even though the water is warmer.

“It is not global temperature that matters but Earth’s energy imbalance. If you have a pot of water on the stove, while heating, convection occurs,” he said. “Ultimately it boils off water as steam. But as soon as you turn off the heat source, all that behavior stops. The temperature is the same, but the heating is no more.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Parts of the climate system are reaching tipping points, June extremes suggest on Jul 9, 2023.

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