Climate scientist Michael Mann was awarded more than $1 million on Thursday in a defamation lawsuit against two conservative bloggers — Mark Steyn, a National Review contributor, and Rand Simberg, a former adjunct scholar — over comments about his work.

The case goes back 12 years, during a time when global warming’s existence was hotly debated in the “blogosphere,” reported The New York Times.

The unanimous verdict in District of Columbia Superior Court was decided by a six-member jury following a four-week trial. Steyn and Simberg were both found guilty of defamation for making false statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”

Punitive damages were levied against both defendants — Steyn was ordered to pay $1 million, Simberg $1,000.

“I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech,” Mann said in a statement posted on social media.

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Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph published in Nature in 1998 showed the sharp upward trend of northern hemisphere temperatures in the 20th century, The Guardian reported.

In 2001, Mann’s illustration was included in a United Nations climate panel report, as well as featured in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary on climate change.

Claims by climate deniers of data manipulation were raised against Mann after a leak of emails between Mann and other scientists in 2009 — known as “Climategate.”

Mann was cleared of the charges after an investigation by Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) — where Mann was a professor at the time — and an evaluation of the correspondence by The Associated Press.

Then, in 2012, a blogpost by Simberg was published by libertarian think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in which the Penn State investigation was compared with a case involving convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data,” Simberg wrote in the blogpost, as reported by The Associated Press.

Later, in National Review, Steyn called Mann’s research “fraudulent,” referencing Simberg’s article.

During the trial, Mann had to show that the writings of the defendants were published with “actual malice,” under the 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan. The case held that public officials were limited in their ability to sue for defamation under the freedom of speech protections of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Mann said the blog posts had caused his reputation to suffer and for him to lose grant funding, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, the defendants asserted that Mann continued to be successful in his field.

“Today’s verdict vindicates Mike Mann’s good name and reputation. It also is a big victory for truth and scientists everywhere who dedicate their lives answering vital scientific questions impacting human health and the planet,” said Peter Fontaine, a member of Mann’s legal team, in the statement.

The post Climate Scientist Michael Mann Awarded $1 Million in Defamation Lawsuit appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new study has revealed that the chemicals in air pollution may be disrupting plant reproduction, as the pollutants mask the scent of flowering plants and make them more difficult for pollinators to find.

The study, published in the journal Science, showed how nitrate radicals (NO₃), which can form from combustion in gas-fueled vehicles and coal and gas power plants, and ozone pollutants can degrade the natural chemical scents of flowers.

“When you smell a rose, you’re smelling a diverse bouquet composed of different types of chemicals,” Jeff Riffell, a co-lead author of the study and biology professor at the University of Washington, explained in a statement. “The same is true for almost any flower. Each has its own scent made up of a specific chemical recipe.”

Researchers analyzed the scent samples from evening primrose flowers, then observed how each natural chemical in the flowers’ scents reacted with the pollutants in wind tunnels and field experiments. The researchers found that the nitrate radicals masked certain chemicals, including monoterpenes, which are particularly attractive to moths.

While both nitrate radicals and ozone pollutants had an effect on the flowers’ scents, nitrate radicals had a bigger impact on the monoterpenes that moths rely on to find and pollinate flowers.

The researchers found that in the wind tunnel experiments, tobacco hawkmoths were 50% less accurate in locating the flowers, and white-lined sphinx moths weren’t able to find the flowers at all. In the field experiments, moths had up to a 70% decline in accuracy of finding the flower sources when nitrate radicals were introduced.

“The NO3 is really reducing a flower’s ‘reach’ — how far its scent can travel and attract a pollinator before it gets broken down and is undetectable,” Riffell explained.

According to the researchers, primroses could experience more difficulty in producing seeds, by about 28%, because of the inability of moths to find the flowers, Popular Science reported. This estimate applied only to the affect of the disruption to moths pollinating primroses, so negative implications could be more widespread. 

“Pollinators play a huge role in community ecology; they’re critical for the fitness of plants. If you affect that, then you’re going to have ecosystem-wide impacts,” Riffell told Popular Science. “Pollinators are also critical for our food system and food security.” 

In January, scientists published a separate study on the potential impacts of air pollution on insect pollination. That study similarly noted how air pollutants can hinder floral scents as well as visual cues, such as plant petal size and potentially color. 

The growing research on how air pollutants impact pollinators and plants highlights the urgency of reducing human-caused pollution. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, 40% of global insect pollinators are endangered. If pollutants are altering the insects’ ability to find plants, it further threatens the pollinators and the plants’ reproduction.

The post Air Pollution Makes Flowering Plants Harder to Locate for Pollinators, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

It’s Super Bowl weekend in Las Vegas. The city’s bright lights and grand marquees are shining as thousands of fans arrive by air and by car. Taylor Swift almost certainly will fly in aboard her jet, one of about 1,000 private planes expected at local airports. Come Sunday, untold numbers of vehicles will inch into parking lots. Once inside Allegiant Stadium, fans will be greeted by lights and more than 2,200 screens. They’ll order cold beers and hot coffee, scarf down burgers and nachos and other grilled and fried and broiled snacks. The whole place, all 1.8 million square feet of it, is climate controlled for the comfort of 65,000 fans and the players they’ll be cheering on. 

In short, the day’s festivities will suck down a lot of energy, around 28 megawatt-hours by the estimate of NZero, the company the Las Vegas Raiders hired to keep tabs on its stadium’s emissions.

That’s a lot of power no matter how you look at it, and the NFL, which is nothing if not quite mindful of its image, has recently rebranded itself as a champion of sustainability. Over the past few years, it has initiated waste-reduction programs, and 23 percent of stadiums are powered by solar energy in some way. Yet even by that measure, the league is touting this year’s Super Bowl, featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, as the greenest yet, because it will be powered entirely by renewables. The company’s sustainability arm, NFL Green, works with each year’s host city to offset other emissions through community gardens and tree plantings.

“We work to leave a positive ‘green legacy’ in the communities that host our events and tailor our greening projects to the needs of each community,” NFL Green director Susan Groh told Forbes.

The Las Vegas Raiders, which moved into Allegiant Stadium in 2020, have a 25-year contract to buy electricity from NV Energy, which maintains a 621,000-panel solar farm in the desert northwest of Las Vegas. The amount of energy flowing from the panels, along with a smattering of wind, geothermal, and hydro sources, to the game is enough to allow 46,000 homes nationwide to watch the four-hour game, according to the utility.

The NFL doesn’t have much say in the energy mix of a given arena, and Allegiant Stadium, like almost everything else in Las Vegas, will draw from a grid that also relies upon natural gas. But the amount of energy the Super Bowl is expected to use this weekend is roughly equal to the capacity of the solar farm it draws from, says Jonathan Casper, who studies, among other things, the intersection of sports and sustainability at North Carolina State University. The stadium arranged in advance for the massive power usage with NV Energy, and has batteries on site to store the power after sundown. 

“The teams look at energy as a major expense,” said Casper. While there might be a little greenwashing going on with the “100 percent renewable” claim, he says it remains a positive sign that sports leagues and their teams are increasingly serious about decarbonization.  

“It’s becoming a norm in stadium-building that sustainability is important,” he said. 

Most new stadiums are, like the Las Vegas Raiders’ $1.9 billion home, LEED-certified, meaning they do things like source and dispose of food more sustainably, embrace recycling, and use energy-saving tricks like LED lights and water-efficient plumbing. Such things were rare even a few years ago. The Raiders hired NZero to track and independently verify its full scope of emissions, from those generated by its air conditioning and award-winning (really) lighting to the emissions involved in getting everyone there on game days. 

“As the biggest sports stage in the U.S., it’s showing we can bring renewable energy to sporting events,” said Adam Kramer, the CEO of NZero.  He added that agreements with utilities are a necessary part of this, as it would take a staggering sixty acres of solar panels onsite to achieve the same amount of energy capacity.

What’s happening in the NFL reflects the global momentum pushing sports sustainability forward. A group called the Green Sports Alliance joined the U.N. Sports for Climate Action Framework in 2019, and major teams like the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees have signed its pledge to reduce emissions. In Europe, teams are beginning to track their their carbon footprints, with some hoping a more standardized accountability system may be on its way. Fans are encouraged to join the effort by cycling to the game or taking public transportation. Many of the European football, or soccer, clubs have seen their emissions drop as a result, according to one report, though only direct emissions are easily measurable. 

Transportation-related emissions are by far the biggest contributor to the sports industry’s carbon footprint. The biggest events, Casper said, will have trouble managing that, because all of the fans being there is part of what makes events like the Super Bowl or Olympics fun.

Turning a ship as large as the NFL or any other sports league can take a long time, but a change in course of a few degrees can go a long way toward raising public awareness of the need for, and benefits of, decarbonization, Casper said. Even if the claim that this year’s Super Bowl is powered entirely by renewables may lean a bit too heavily on PR spin, it does help sell the idea of clean energy in general to 60,000 fans in the stands and millions more watching on TV. 

“There are only a few chances where this many people can come together and see that,” Casper said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The clean energy Super Bowl is here on Feb 9, 2024.

Change is hard. Change takes courage. And change starts with turning to face the challenge….

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Face the Change appeared first on Earth911.

Though it is internationally known for its catastrophic wildfires and earthquakes, California is no stranger to floods — particularly during the heavy rains that accompany its winters. In fact, 7 million Californians live in flood-prone areas. Despite this, just one in four Golden State homes sitting in what the federal government considers a flood hazard zone are covered by flood insurance. That gap spells trouble for thousands of homeowners in Southern California, which has been battered by a series of storms over the last week. 

The torrential rain and wind are the result of what’s called an atmospheric river, a channel of moisture that can be up to 375 miles wide and carry the equivalent of two Amazon Rivers’ worth of water. Downed trees and mudslides that resulted from the downpour killed nine people, and half a million homes and businesses went without power across the state in recent weeks.

San Diego and Los Angeles, where the river stalled out and dumped more than 10 inches of rain, were hit the hardest. Thousands of homeowners trying to repair the water damage are now in for a rude surprise when they discover that their standard-issue home insurance doesn’t cover floods. The lack of protection stems not only from misperceptions about the likelihood of flooding in sunny California and common misunderstandings of what basic home insurance covers, but also regulatory shortcomings by the federal government, which is supposed to ensure that all the country’s high-risk homes are insured in the event of floods. As climate change intensifies the state’s atmospheric river storms, the problem is only poised to grow.

“[Flood insurance] uptake in California is half the national average,” said Jeffrey Mount, a geomorphologist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California. “We’re really bad when it comes to that.”

In the eight Southern California counties where the governor has declared an emergency, roughly 52,000 homes and businesses are covered by flood insurance. That’s less than 1 percent of the total number of homes in the region. One reason is cost: A yearly flood policy can cost between $500 and $1,000. In a state with a housing crunch and high cost of living, purchasing flood insurance may be out of reach for many residents who already struggle with the required cost of homeownership, including standard home insurance. Mount added that severe flooding events are quickly forgotten even by those who have lived through them, especially in a state where so many other ecological crises are constantly in the headlines. 

“Disaster fatigue is a real thing,” said Mount. “People wear out hearing they’re going to die from earthquakes, fires, and floods, and they get numb, and they don’t take actions to protect themselves.”

Such concerns are only likely to increase in a warming world. A warmer atmosphere and ocean mean an atmospheric river can pick up more water as it crosses the ocean before dumping water on land. The presence of a strong El Niño, a weather pattern that is characterized by warmer Pacific Ocean temperatures, also supercharged the atmospheric river that hit California this month. 

“The combination of a warming atmosphere and co-occurrence of the El Niño event both conspired to generate the conditions we’ve seen now along with a healthy dose of random luck,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Although attribution studies have not yet been conducted on the atmospheric river that has doused California in the last week, Swain estimated that absent climate change, precipitation levels would have been 5 to 15 percent lower.

“That’s not a small number,” said Swain. “We’re talking about a couple extra inches of rain, and two inches of rain in Los Angeles would be a pretty big storm in its own right in a typical year.”

Flood coverage is mandatory for those obtaining a federally-backed mortgage in a part of the state that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has deemed a “special hazard flood area.” The policy is supposed to protect both homeowners taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and the federal government, which ultimately bears the risk when a borrower defaults. However, FEMA, which runs the national flood insurance program, does not keep track of compliance with the rule. Neither do lenders. As a result, a homeowner may purchase a flood policy when they secure a mortgage but fail to renew it in subsequent years. A 2006 FEMA study found that compliance with the requirement ranged between 43 percent in the midwest and 88 percent in western states. 

California, however, may be the exception in this latter region. Mount, the water policy expert, found that just a quarter of homes in parts of the state with high flood risk comply with the federal rule.

“Nobody’s policing it,” said Mount. “There’s no mechanism to go in and threaten people and say, ‘If you don’t get flood insurance, we’re going to take your mortgage away from you.’”

Mount added that the floods California has seen in the past month are “not floods of the affluent.” People with low economic resilience are often hit hardest by flooding because they tend not to be able to afford insurance and have limited resources to get back on their feet. For instance, in San Diego, which experienced its rainiest day since 1850 last month, low-income communities and communities of color were among the worst affected by flooding. 

“This is a social justice issue,” said Mount. “The people who can least afford it are the ones that usually get whacked, and those same communities can’t come up with the money to try and fix their infrastructure.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Atmospheric rivers are battering California. Why don’t residents have flood insurance? on Feb 9, 2024.

Samantha Gonsalves-Wetherell, a senior at the University of Arizona, has spent years urging university officials to take climate change seriously. As a leader of UArizona Divest, she and her classmates have been pushing the university toward three goals: to divest from fossil fuels by 2029; commit to no further investments in fossil fuels; and to implement socially responsible investing goals. 

“It’s hard to both combat the climate crisis and also fund it,” said Gonsalves-Wetherell. She has met with university officials to ask them what stocks the university has invested in and how much revenue oil and gas investments bring in. 

But until now, she had no idea that the university, like more than a dozen other land-grant universities created through the Morrill Act, earned millions more through another route: nearly 700,000 acres of land taken from Indigenous nations that is set aside for oil, gas and mineral leases.

A Grist investigation published earlier this week reported that 14 universities — including the University of Arizona — receive millions in annual income from more than 8 million acres of surface and subsurface land taken from 123 Native nations. Over the past five years, these properties have generated more than $2.2 billion. Nearly a fourth of the trust lands are dedicated to fossil fuels or mineral mining including coal mining. 

University activists who have been lobbying their universities to pull their endowments out of fossil fuels say Grist’s findings are in line with what they’ve come to expect from their schools: a willingness to overlook their complicity in climate change and societal injustice. 

When Claire Sullivan, a senior at Colorado State University, learned of Grist’s findings, she thought of the land acknowledgement she’s seen on every syllabus and plastered on many walls all over campus. 

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The two-paragraph statement ends with this note: “Our founding came at a dire cost to Native Nations and peoples whose land this University was built upon. This acknowledgment is the education and inclusion we must practice in recognizing our institutional history, responsibility, and commitment.”

According to Sullivan, CSU says all of its fossil fuel investments are indirect, but it hasn’t made any promises to avoid direct investments or phase out any existing ones, despite the disproportionate harm that climate change is wreaking on Native peoples. Sullivan’s exasperation at the university’s intractable stance is topped only by her awe at what she describes as their hypocrisy. 

“It’s just crazy that you could be making this commitment outwardly and just be doing the opposite in practice,” she said.

Not every divestment campaign has been so frustrating. Many university activists, such as at Harvard and Yale, have seen success. Gracelyn McClure is a senior and environmental sciences major at the University of Minnesota. She was only a sophomore when school officials decided to withdraw its investments from fossil fuels by 2028. It was a huge victory, but McClure said the group’s advocacy work isn’t over. 

The group has been meeting with university officials to try to ensure that as contracts for fossil fuel investments expire, the money is being shifted into investments that aren’t similarly harmful. For example, they’ve asked the school not to reinvest in mining that’s opposed by Indigenous peoples.

Even though the initial campaign was successful, the students haven’t yet been able to garner any new promises to avoid nuclear energy or other mining that they fear could harm Native peoples. “They’re not super receptive all the time to our asks,” McClure said of the administration. But she thinks working with Native nations to ensure that reinvestment isn’t negatively affecting their communities isn’t asking for much. 

“It’s the least that the university can do, considering how much they profited from Native land, and bodies too,” she said. 

A spokesman for the University of Minnesota said the university has been working with tribal nations to address its history of stolen land, including returning about 3,400 acres to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The spokesman also cited the school’s investments in Native student tuition waivers, Indigenous language revitalization and staff training. 

He added that the school can’t speak to land managed by the state. The University of Arizona and Colorado State University did not comment on the trust lands revenue.

Many students at universities that have pledged to divest from fossil fuels have been turning their attention to different but related causes, says Alicia Colomer, managing director at Campus Climate Network, which supports student climate activists. She worked on the successful New York University divestment campaign and says some of the newer student demands include asking schools to stop putting fossil fuel executives on their boards and stop accepting research money from oil companies. 

To her, learning about the trust lands revenue feels like more of the same problem: “shocking but not shocking.”

She hopes students can sway their institutions to stop practices that are harmful to Indigenous lands and people.

Nadira Mitchell, a Navajo student at University of Arizona, hopes to be part of that change. She’s studying natural resources at the university in the hopes that she will be able to work for her tribal nation one day and make a difference. It has felt isolating to be one of the only Native students in her environmental courses. 

Now, she’s struck by the juxtaposition between how Indigenous people like her own are disproportionately harmed by climate change and university’s investments in fossil fuels.

“It’s mind-boggling,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Campus divestment activists eye fossil fuel profits on stolen land on Feb 9, 2024.

In a win for farmers and endangered plants and wildlife, an Arizona district court has revoked the approval of the destructive pesticide dicamba, saying the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law when it allowed it to be on the market.

Dicamba-based weedkillers have been widely used on soybean and cotton crops genetically engineered by Bayer (formerly Monsanto), a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity — who brought the lawsuit — said.

“This is a vital victory for farmers and the environment,” said George Kimbrell, legal director for the Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case, in the press release. “Time and time again, the evidence has shown that dicamba cannot be used without causing massive and unprecedented harm to farms as well as endangering plants and pollinators. The court today resoundingly reaffirmed what we have always maintained: the EPA’s and Monsanto’s claims of dicamba’s safety were irresponsible and unlawful.”

Dicamba has a tendency to drift, damaging millions of acres of wild plants, animals and crops for which it was not intended. The EPA first approved the harmful pesticide in 2017 for use on crops that were genetically engineered to be able to withstand what would be a deadly dose for other plants.

The United States District Court for the District of Arizona’s ruling overturned the reapproval of dicamba by the EPA in 2020, which specified application restrictions that did not prevent damage caused by persistent drifting.

The EPA has estimated that three-fourths of cotton crops and two-thirds of soybean crops — 65 million acres — are resistant to dicamba. Roughly half those acres were actually sprayed with the toxin.

Some farmers have even gone so far as to plant crops “defensively” to avoid drift damage from dicamba.

The district court ruled that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act had been violated by the EPA, saying the breach was “very serious,” since the EPA had previously been ruled against by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for failing to consider the significant risks of excessive dicamba use when issuing the previous registration.

“I hope the court’s emphatic rejection of the EPA’s reckless approval of dicamba will spur the agency to finally stop ignoring the far-reaching harm caused by this dangerous pesticide,” said Nathan Donley, the Center for Biological Diversity’s director of environmental health science, in the press release. “Endangered butterflies and bee populations will keep tanking if the EPA keeps twisting itself into a pretzel to approve this product just to appease the pesticide industry.”

Farmers whose crops are unable to withstand dicamba’s intense effects were happy with the ruling.

“Every summer since the approval of dicamba, our farm has suffered significant damage to a wide range of vegetable crops,” said farmer Rob Faux, who is also a communications manager with Pesticide Action Network, in the press release. “Today’s decision provides much needed and overdue protection for farmers and the environment.”

The pesticide threatens endangered species like the rusty patched bumblebee. Beekeepers have reported steep declines in honey production because of dicamba drift, which suppresses the flowering plants bees need to survive.

“We are grateful that the court held the EPA and Monsanto accountable for the massive damage from dicamba to farmers, farmworkers and the environment, and halted its use,” said Lisa Griffith, an outreach and communications coordinator with the National Family Farm Coalition. “The pesticide system that Monsanto sells should not be sprayed as it cannot be sprayed safely.”

The post In ‘Vital Victory for Farmers and the Environment,’ Arizona Court Cancels EPA’s Approval of Dicamba Pesticide appeared first on EcoWatch.

The estimated number of monarch butterflies migrating to Mexico for winter has reached its second-lowest level ever for the 2023 to 2024 overwintering season. The estimate, based on the size of the butterflies’ hibernating forest area, has dropped by about 59% from the previous year, according to officials.

Experts are pointing to extensive heat and drought as well as climate change for the major decline.

Recent years have seen some hope for the migrating monarch butterflies, with a 35% increase in the number of butterflies observed overwintering in Mexico during the 2021 to 2022 season compared to the previous year. 

But monarch butterflies face three primary threats, including habitat loss for their breeding and overwintering; the use of pesticides, which can be toxic to the butterflies or can kill their food source, milkweed; and climate change, which can shift their migratory patterns. By the 2022 to 2023 overwintering season, World Wildlife Fund reported a 22% drop in the amount of overwintering monarch butterflies in Mexico.

According to WWF, monarch butterflies once covered about 45 acres of forested land in Mexico during their 1996 to 1997 overwintering season. Last year, they covered 5.5 acres. With the 59% decline, the 2023 overwintering season saw the butterflies covering just 2.2 acres, The Associated Press reported. The lowest coverage ever recorded was 1.65 acres from 2013 to 2014.

The largest amount of butterflies observed for the current overwintering season were around the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve.

“This is not the first time we’ve observed changes in the locations of the largest monarch colonies,” Jorge Rickards, general director of WWF Mexico, said in a statement. “It’s telling us that we need to intensify conservation and restoration measures not only in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, but also outside of it.”

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, monarch butterflies have declined by 85% in the past 20 years. The eastern monarch butterflies migrate from Canada and the U.S. to Mexico for overwintering. Western monarchs, which overwinter in California, have declined 99% in the past two decades.

Monarch butterflies do not currently have federal protections. In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that these butterflies do warrant protections under the Endangered Species Act, but there were higher-priority species to consider for listing. Biologist Ryan Drum, who works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told The Associated Press that the latest count would be considered this year when officials consider whether to list migratory monarch butterflies as threatened or even endangered. 

According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, monarch butterflies are expected to receive protections later in 2024.

The post Monarch Butterflies Wintering in Mexico Drop to Second-Lowest Level Ever Recorded appeared first on EcoWatch.