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Temperatures in the waters off the coast of southern Florida and the Florida Keys this month have been as high as 97 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Data Buoy Center.
In the summer, waters in the Keys are normally reminiscent of bath water, but temperatures that high can threaten coral reefs. And it’s still fairly early in the season. Heat stress usually affects corals the most in August and September, reported The New York Times.
“We’re entering uncharted territories,” said Derek Manzello, an ecologist and the coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program, as The New York Times reported.
The longer exceptionally high temperatures last, the more stressed corals can get, reported The Conversation. Part of the reason is that, unlike other marine animals, corals can’t swim in search of a cooler spot.
Coral reefs are so colorful and vibrant because they have the most biodiversity of any marine ecosystem, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Though they only cover 0.2 percent of the seabed, coral reefs support approximately 25 percent of all ocean life.
Coral reefs like those in the Florida Keys support the economy by attracting tourists, and also support the fish and fisheries that feed millions.
Warming waters due to climate change can be so damaging to corals because they are so sensitive to changes of even a degree or two.
The planet’s oceans absorb the excess heat generated by the burning of fossil fuels, and when water temperatures get too high, it causes corals to expel the algae they feed upon, turning them white, The New York Times reported. If the waters stay warm for too long, or bleaching events happen too close together, corals may not recover.
According to one study, the world has lost half its living corals since the 1950s.
Corals “host a microscopic symbiotic algae called zooxanthella that photosynthesizes just like plants, providing food to the coral. When the surrounding waters get too warm for too long, the zooxanthellae leave the coral, and the coral can turn pale or white,” Ian Enochs, a research ecologist with NOAA, wrote in The Conversation. “If corals stay bleached, they can become energetically compromised and ultimately die. When corals die or their growth slows, these beautiful, complex reef habitats start disappearing and can eventually erode to sand.”
About 70 percent of Florida Keys reefs have become “net erosional,” research published in November of last year found, which means more habitat is being lost than built.
“Building these reefs has taken corals tens of thousands of years. Decimating them has taken humans mere decades. Since the late 1970s, healthy coral cover in the Florida Keys has fallen 90 percent,” reported Climate.gov.
Coral bleaching has been seen recently in other parts of the world, including in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Columbia, Belize and Panama, The Conversation reported.
The overarching cause of the current marine heat wave is human-caused global warming, which has been exacerbated by El Niño. Thankfully, mass coral death hasn’t been seen with this extreme bout of ocean warming yet.
“Coral bleaching on a large scale has really been documented only since the early 1980s. When I talk to people who have been fishing and diving in the Florida Keys since before I was born, they have amazing stories of how vibrant the reefs used to be. They know firsthand how bad things have become because they have lived it,” Enochs wrote in The Conversation. “There isn’t currently a single silver-bullet solution, but ignoring the harm being done is not an option. There is simply too much at stake.”
The post Extreme Water Temperatures in Florida Keys Cause Coral Reefs to Bleach Weeks Early, Scientists Say appeared first on EcoWatch.
A wildfire that started in Klickitat County, Washington, on Friday afternoon destroyed more than 30,000 acres in less than a day and continues to grow as it feeds on brush, grass and forest vegetation.
Fire crews are working to extinguish the Newell Road Wildfire near Bickleton, which has resulted in the evacuation of residents in the rural area, and is threatening farms, livestock, homes and wind and solar farms, reported KOMO News.
“It’s very difficult terrain to fight fire,” said Allen Lebovitz, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Natural Resources, as Reuters reported. “We are under a red flag warning. That’s a firefighter’s worst nightmare because the humidity is dropping precipitously. The winds are picking up. And so the fire carries extremely fast.”
The wildfire is burning just to the north of where the Oregon-Washington border is represented by the Columbia River. It has destroyed several structures and is threatening a natural gas pipeline.
Lebovitz said the fire was heading in the direction of the Yakama Indian Reservation.
Officials haven’t announced what caused the fire, and there have been no injuries or deaths reported.
“The climate change problem, the fuse has been burning for decades, and now the climate change bomb has gone off. The scientists are telling us that this is the new age,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said yesterday, according to The Independent.
According to the National Interagency Fire Center, there are currently 36 large fires burning throughout the country, including eight new large fires as of yesterday in Arizona, Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming.
“Since January, 28,470 wildfires have burned 847,349 acres across the United States, still below the 10-year average of 32,686 wildfires and 3,393,317 acres burned,” the National Interagency Fire Center website said.
Fire officials warned the public against using drones to get a look at wildfires, the fire center said.
“Unauthorized drone flights pose serious risks to firefighter and public safety operations and the effectiveness of wildfire suppression efforts. When your drone is in the air near a wildfire, our aircraft must be grounded, putting the lives of firefighters at risk and can cause wildfires to become larger and more costly,” the fire center website said.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, climate change is making wildfire seasons more intense.
“I don’t think the U.S. has enough firefighters for these fires, and Canada most certainly does not,” said Daniel Perrakis, a fire research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service in British Columbia, as reported by NPR. “Climate change is very significant. We’ve got drought levels that are… at least in the extreme category, and the fire season’s [arriving] early.”
The post Washington State Wildfires Threaten Animals, Homes, Crops, Renewable Energy Farms appeared first on EcoWatch.
After the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that last month was the hottest June on record, a climate expert at NASA is now predicting that July could be Earth’s hottest month on record.
Gavin Schmidt, director of Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, warned at a NASA meeting on climate and recent extreme weather events that July could be the warmest in centuries or millennia.
“We are seeing unprecedented changes all over the world — the heat waves that we are seeing in the U.S., in Europe, in China are demolishing records left, right and center,” Schmidt said, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. “This last June was the warmest June on record, and we anticipate, with the understanding of what’s going on on a day-by-day basis, that July is likely to be the warmest absolute month on record.”
In early July, Earth passed the highest average global temperature record three days in a row. Currently, much of the world is experiencing extreme heat, wildfires and flooding. Last week, NPR reported that about one-third of people in the U.S. were under excessive heat warnings, particularly as a heat wave came across the Southwest. In Phoenix, Arizona, temperatures have soared over 110°F for 20 days and counting in what could be the worst recorded heat wave for the desert city.
Scientists predicted a strong El Niño this year, and the World Meteorological Organization reported in June that this year’s El Niño could continue with moderate or greater strength through the end of the year. That could mean more extreme heat and increasing ocean surface temperatures. Ocean surface temperatures already broke records earlier this year.
“Pretty much everywhere, particularly in the oceans, we’ve been seeing record-breaking sea-surface temperatures — even outside of the tropics,” Schmidt said, as Space.com reported. “We anticipate that is going to continue, and the reason why is because we continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Until we stop doing that, temperatures will keep on rising.”
Schmidt also predicted that 2023 could be the warmest year on record, as El Niño could impact temperatures over the next couple of years and global warming continues to cause rising temperature averages. Schmidt pointed out that the extreme heat is not surprising, as temperatures have been rising each decade for the past 40 years.
“What we know from science is that human activity and principally greenhouse gas emissions are unavoidably causing the warming that we’re seeing on our planet,” senior climate adviser Kate Calvin said in the meeting, as reported by The Guardian. “This is impacting people and ecosystems around the world.”
In addition to warning about the potential record-breaking temperatures, the scientists in the meeting shared NASA’s climate work, which includes missions to track greenhouse gas emissions. The agency also shared its new Earth Information Center, where people will be able to access real-time climate data from NASA’s satellites.
The post July Could Be Earth’s Hottest Month on Record, Climate Expert Warns appeared first on EcoWatch.
It’s just a plastic fork, just a takeout container, just one water bottle.
Not exactly.
Indulging in the modern convenience of single-use plastics seems harmless, but the consequences to our health, wildlife, and oceans will be with us for a long time to come. Globally, we produce 300 million tons of plastic annually, about half of which is single-use items — and 8 million tons of that plastic reaches oceans every year. By 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the sea.
One reason for plastic’s well-deserved bad reputation is that it never truly breaks down — rather, it breaks apart into increasingly tinier pieces through the forces of light, heat, and other environmental factors until it becomes microplastics. These microscopic pieces have reached virtually every corner of the Earth: the deepest oceans, highest mountains, the tissues of the fish and animals that we consume, and even our own blood and lungs.
Sure, recycling is one important solution to our plastic crisis, but only 9% of plastic actually gets recycled. Therefore, it’s crucial that we curb our production and consumption of plastic, and fast.
That’s where Plastic Free July comes in: a global challenge to reduce single-use plastics. The project was begun by Rebecca Prince-Ruiz in Australia in 2011, and is now a part of the nonprofit Plastic Free Foundation, formed in 2017. On the organization’s website, people can take the pledge to reduce their plastic waste at any level: for a day, a week, a month; to avoid single-use packaging exclusively, or go completely plastic free.
But how do you get started? Use this simple guide to consider areas of your life and home in which you can easily reduce plastic waste with a few swaps to reusables, or different methods that sidestep plastic altogether. Remember: Plastic Free July isn’t about being perfect. It’s very difficult to completely remove plastic from your life — especially given accessibility and economic barriers to some elements of sustainable living — but about reducing your consumption wherever you are able.
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Not long ago, the world’s biggest companies were making splashy promises to tackle climate change. Even those in the business of selling fossil fuels — like BP and Shell — were vowing to slash their emissions. Amazon named an iconic Seattle sports center “Climate Pledge Arena” so neither hockey nor basketball fans could ignore the company’s promise to zero out its emissions by 2040.
But the past year has brought a change of pace, with BP, Amazon, and other companies scaling back some of their targets. Amid this shift, another trend has emerged: Some companies are choosing not to publicize their climate goals, a strategy that’s being called “greenhushing.”
“It is really, for us, highly concerning,” said Nadia Kähkönen, global director of communications at South Pole, a Switzerland-based climate consultancy and carbon offset developer. “Now is not the time to stay tight-lipped on how we’re progressing.”
The word is a play on “greenwashing,” a well-established marketing tactic in which companies overstate their environmental credentials. In a way, one has led to the other. Governments are cracking down on greenwashing, and the list of lawsuits over deceptive environmental marketing is growing. It’s not surprising that some companies are reacting to this new landscape with silence, rather than risking a costly court case. But keeping quiet makes it hard to scrutinize what companies are doing, and also makes it more difficult for them to learn from one another’s mistakes.
Some people anticipated that pouncing on greenwashing would result in companies hiding their good environmental practices. Before “greenhushing,” there was “greenmuting,” coined by a former McDonald’s executive in 2007. “I agree there are dangers associated with environmental marketing, but I actually think many companies are reluctant to talk about their environmental efforts because they are concerned they will only be met with criticism,” wrote Bob Langert, then the vice president of sustainability at McDonald’s, in a blog post in response to a report critiquing the “sins” of greenwashing. Langert argued that this “greenmuting” could impede environmental progress by stifling public discourse.
Fifteen years later, Langert’s concern appears justified. Nearly a quarter of large companies from around the globe have decided not to publicize their milestones on climate action, according to a report from South Pole last fall. Of course, as the subject was “greenhushing,” the data was collected anonymously — South Pole conducted interviews with sustainability experts at companies in 15 different sectors, including information technology, finance, and health care. That report popularized the term “greenhushing,” which has recently made the rounds at prominent news outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post. “We definitely brought it into the mainstream,” Kähkönen said.
The silence isn’t the result of fewer companies making climate goals. In fact, according to Kähkönen, there was an “avalanche” of corporate commitments last year, along with budget increases for sustainability initiatives as companies realized that reaching net-zero emissions was going to be harder than they thought.
More and more countries are crafting regulations aimed at countering greenwashing. Companies based in France, one of the few countries that already has an explicit regulation that limits greenwashing, were among the least likely to publicize their climate goals, South Pole found. “Companies may be unsure about how to comply with this legislation and are afraid of being sued: they therefore give up talking about their targets altogether,” the report says.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has begun the process of updating the “Green Guides,” the rules that govern environmental marketing. Clarifying those guidelines could make for stronger legal cases against companies that violate them, but lawyers aren’t waiting around for the FTC. In March, a class-action lawsuit in California alleged that Delta Air Lines had misrepresented itself to customers by claiming to be carbon-neutral in advertisements, when in reality it relied on imperfect carbon offsets.
That same month, the European Union released a detailed set of rules, called the Green Claims Directive, aimed at reining in false advertising around sustainability. Since each E.U. member state can meet those requirements in their own way, it’s creating an atmosphere of uncertainty for companies, said Austin Whitman, the CEO of Climate Neutral, a nonprofit that evaluates and certifies climate pledges.
“We really, really, really need a lot more disclosure of all the environmental actions that companies are taking, and we need it to be disclosed regularly and transparently, and we need it to be disclosed quantitatively,” Whitman said. “And companies need to feel like they’re able to disclose in a way that is not going to backfire.” He called for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to speed up the development of a framework that would force companies to disclose emissions data in a standardized way.
Yet another factor at play could be the result of Republican backlash against “woke investing.” Investment giants like BlackRock and Vanguard have scrubbed references to their climate goals on their websites over the last year, according to a recent report from the Washington Post. But Whitman sees the drama over environmentally-friendly investing as mostly separate from corporate sustainability. “I don’t see it as affecting consumer brands as directly as it does asset managers,” he said.
Whatever the reasons for greenhushing, it’s not all bad news. The companies that were blasting everyone with misleading information about their climate progress finally have a reason to stop, Whitman said. “They should be worried about litigation, regulation, and consumer pressure, and they should shut up about it.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Greenhushing, explained: Why companies have stopped talking about their climate pledges on Jul 24, 2023.