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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: The U.S. may soon have its first-ever climate science denying Secretary of State; World leaders sound alarm over global water scarcity crisis; Black lung disease surges back in Coal Country; Toymaker LEGO goes greener with plant-based plastics; PLUS: Seven years after the meltdown, Japan struggles to contain Fukushima’s radioactive wastewater… All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): Oil giant Statoil begins transition to renewables, scrubs ‘oil’ from its name; Fast-melting Arctic is already messing with the ocean’s circulation; Bottled water contaminated with microplastics; Floods flushed 43 billion plastic pieces out to sea in UK; Climate science goes to court next week; Judge rules U.S. Army Corp liable for floods linked to habitat projects; FEMA flood maps underestimate real risks; Pruitt warns ‘California is not the arbiter’ of U.S. emissions standards; Zinke pretends to worry that wind turbines kill birds, but his agency just made it easier…. PLUS: Stephen Hawking’s dire warning about what Trump’s policies will do to the Earth… and much, MUCH more! …
STORIES DISCUSSED ON TODAY’S ‘GREEN NEWS REPORT’…
- Mike Pompeo could be the first-ever climate change denying US Sec. of State:
- VIDEO: Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) rejects global scientific consensus: (C-SPAN)
- Mike Pompeo may be the first climate-denying secretary of state. (The New Republic)
- Pompeo, Trump’s Pick for Secretary of State, Is a ‘Great Climate Skeptic’ (NY Times)
- Meet Mike Pompeo: The Congressional Candidate Spawned By The ‘Kochtopus’ (Think Progress)
- Tillerson exit might bring climate disbelief to State (E&E News, 11/30/2017):
[W]hile Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO, raised environmentalists’ hopes last year with his belief in man-made climate change and support for continued U.S. involvement in the Paris climate accord, Pompeo has a history of disputing that humans play a significant role in global warming…During his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Pompeo said President Obama’s suggestion that climate change is a top-tier national security threat was “ignorant, dangerous and absolutely unbelievable.”
- Trump’s Pick To Replace Former Exxon CEO As Secretary Of State Is A Bigger Climate Denier (Huffington Post)
- World leaders warn of looming global water crisis:
- UN-World Bank panel report calls for ‘fundamental shift’ in water management (United Nations)
- 12 World Leaders Issue Clarion Call for Accelerated Action on Water (World Bank):
“World leaders now recognize that we face a global water crisis and that we need to reassess how we value and manage water,†said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “The panel’s recommendations can help to safeguard water resources and make access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation a reality for all.â€
- Report: Making Every Drop Count – An Agenda for Water Action (PDF] (United Nations)
- World leaders sound alarm over global water crisis (CBS News)
- Call for fundamental shift in global water management (RTE Daily)
- UN chief urges water action as world leaders warn of new crisis (Xinhua)
- Black lung disease surges back in Coal Country:
- Progressive Massive Fibrosis in Coal Miners From 3 Clinics in Virginia (JAMA)
- AUDIO: Black Lung Study Finds Biggest Cluster Ever Of Fatal Coal Miners’ Disease (NPR) [emphasis added]:
Epidemiologists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health say they’ve identified the largest cluster of advanced black lung disease ever reported, a cluster that was first uncovered by NPR 14 months ago…”This is the largest cluster of progressive massive fibrosis ever reported in the scientific literature,” says Scott Laney, a NIOSH epidemiologist involved in the study. “We’ve gone from having nearly eradicated PMF in the mid-1990s to the highest concentration of cases that anyone has ever seen,” he said
- Black Lung Disease Comes Storming Back in Coal Country (NY Times):
Federal investigators this month identified the largest cluster of advanced black lung cases ever officially recorded. More than 400 coal miners frequenting three clinics in southwestern Virginia between 2013 and 2017 were found to have complicated black lung disease, an extreme form characterized by dense masses of scar tissue in the lungs.
- Doctors floored by epidemic levels of black lung in Appalachian coal miners (Ars Technica)
- Japan stuggles to contain Fukushima’s radioactive wastewater:
- VIDEO: Tepco’s ‘ice wall’ fails to freeze Fukushima’s toxic water buildup (Reuters):
A costly “ice wall†is failing to keep groundwater from seeping into the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, data from operator Tokyo Electric Power Co shows, preventing it from removing radioactive melted fuel at the site seven years after the disaster.
- Third court rules Tepco, government liable over Fukushima disaster: media (Reuters)
- Fukushima ice wall yields limited benefit for its cost (Nikkei Asian Review)
- Lego toymaker goes green-er with bio-plastics
- First sustainable LEGO bricks will be launched in 2018 (LEGO)
- Lego announces launch of bioplastic pieces (Treehugger):
The new pieces, made from a bioplastic sourced from Brazilian sugarcane, will start appearing in Lego kits this year. Currently, the pieces are limited to Lego’s trees, bushes, and leaves, a.k.a. ‘botanical elements’, but the company’s eventual goal is to use plant sources for all of its beloved building bricks.
- First sustainable Lego pieces to go on sale (Guardian UK):
The new-style Lego elements are made from polyethylene – a soft, durable and flexible plastic that can now be made with ethanol extracted from sugar cane material and, Lego claims, is as durable as conventional plastic. As a bio-plastic, it can be recycled many times, though it is unlikely to be 100% biodegradable.
- Lego Is Making Sustainable Eco-Friendly Blocks Made of Sugar Cane Bioplastic (Newsweek)
‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (Stuff we didn’t have time for in today’s audio report)…
For a comprehensive roundup of daily environmental news you can trust, see the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Daily Headlines page
- Oil giant Statoil begins transition to renewables, scrubs ‘oil’ from its name (Climate Progress)
- The fast-melting Arctic is already messing with the ocean’s circulation, scientists say (Washington Post)
- Bottled water not safe from microplastic contamination (Deustche-Welle)
- Flooding has flushed 43 billion plastic pieces out to sea in UK (Science)
- Stephen Hawking’s dire warning about what Trump’s policies will do to the Earth (Climate Progress)
- Climate Science Goes to Court Next Week (Earther)
- Judge: U.S. Army Corp Responsible For Floods Linked To Habitat Projects (E&E News)
- FEMA Flood Maps Underestimate Real Risks: Study. Florida’s A Hot Spot. (Miami Herald)
- Zinke Defends Hiking Park Fees Amid Travel Spending Flap (AP)
- Pruitt Says ‘California Is Not The Arbiter’ Of U.S. Emissions Standards (Washington Post)
- Ryan Zinke Worries Wind Turbines Kill Birds. His Agency Just Made It Easier. (Huffington Post)
- Wildfire Risk: Areas where homes, forests mix increased rapidly over two decades (US Forest Service)
- AUDIO: An Inconvenient ‘BradCast’ with Al Gore (The BRAD BLOG):
Guest Host Angie Coiro’s exclusive interview with the former Vice President on elections, pollution, persuasion, activism, and hope…
- The Climate Risks We Face (NY Times):
To stabilize global temperature, net carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to zero. The window of time is rapidly closing to reduce emissions and limit warming to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the goal set in the Paris climate accord. The further we push the climate system beyond historical conditions, the greater the risks of potentially unforeseen and even catastrophic changes to the climate – so every reduction in emissions helps.
- The Uninhabitable Earth: When will climate change make earth too hot for humans? (New York Magazine):
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak – sooner than you think.
- A beginner’s guide to the debate over 100% renewable energy (Vox):
Clean-energy enthusiasts frequently claim that we can go bigger, that it’s possible for the whole world to run on renewables – we merely lack the “political will.” So, is it true? Do we know how get to an all-renewables system? Not yet. Not really.
- No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously (Vox):
If we mean what we say, no more new fossil fuels, anywhere.
FOR MORE on Climate Science and Climate Change, go to our Green News Report: Essential Background Page
global thermohaline circulation shutting down NS
New Scientist March 17, 2018 page 6
This Week
Circulation in meltdown (thermohaline circulation shutting down)
Polar ice melt may shut down the Atlantic current that warms Europe
Colin Barras
The ocean current that gives western and northern Europe a relatively mild climate might be at greater risk of shutdown than we thought. If the North Atlantic current – the northern segment of the Gulf Stream – does grind to a halt, the effects could be severe, from greater sea level rise on Atlantic coasts to more intense droughts in Africa.
During the winter months, seawater in the Arctic cools and sinks, causing warm water to flow into the region from the tropics.
But this convection of water to the depths is threatened by the rapid warming in polar regions. To investigate, Marilena Oltmanns and her colleagues at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research In Kiel, Germany, studied seawater salinity and temperature data collected in the Irminger Sea to the south of Greenland between 2002 and 2014. In some summers, the seawater at the surface had an unusually high temperature and low salinity – particularly in 2010. This is a sign that more fresh water was flooding into the region, perhaps from melting ice in Greenland or the Arctic Ocean.
The fresh water poses a threat to convection because, being less dense than seawater, it has to be cooled to a greater degree before it will sink. To make matters worse, Oltmanns’s team also found evidence that the summers featuring the largest bodies of fresh water are followed by winters that are too mild to provide adequate chilling.
Measurements taken during the northern hemisphere winter of 2010-2011 confirmed the significance of the problem. Conditions were mild, and so much fresh water had accumulated during the previous summer that 40 per cent of it still remained In the upper 200 meters of the water column when spring arrived.
“We were very surprised that so much remained after winter,†says Oltmanns. “It shows that the fresh water clearly impeded convection.â€
It was a similar story in other years. For seven of the 12 winters examined, more than 25 per cent of the fresh water that pooled in the summer remained in place at the end of winter (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/cmbw). Oltmanns says that if several unusually warm years occur in succession, so much fresh water could build up that it would become impossible for convection to begin at all in winter. In effect, part of the North Atlantic current might shut down (see map, left).
No one knows for sure what would happen in the event of such a shutdown. Oltmanns says some people think it might spell the end of the North Atlantic’s relatively mild climate.
Eirik Galaasen at the University of Bergen, Norway, says we could expect other impacts too. Some models suggest that a breakdown in ocean circulation would trigger a sea level rise of 40 centimeters or more around Europe and eastern North America.
Others conclude that a shutdown would worsen the severity of droughts in West Africa. And some climate scientists argue that effects could be seen even further afield: South America might experience greater droughts, which could be bad news for the region’s rainforests.
Some argue that a shutdown could be permanent, says Oltmanns, representing a tipping point that leaves the climate fundamentally and irreversibly changed. Galaasen, however, points to evidence that convection has stopped a number of times in the past. “The Atlantic recovered every time,†he says.
For instance, about 8400 years ago a vast glacial lake In North America burst, dumping at least 150,000 cubic kilometers of fresh water into the North Atlantic. Circulation halted, but Galaasen says it restarted within roughly a century – barely anything in geological terms but quite a long period of time in human terms.
Not everyone is convinced. The new research suggests that a shutdown – even a temporary one – is imminent. “The implications are physically conceivable,†says Carl Wunsch at Harvard University – but he says we can only speculate about how the entire ocean convection system would respond. “If North Atlantic convection slows down or stops because of local freshening, will there be an increased – or decreased – import of much saltier water from the south?†Michael Alexander at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Colorado says making broad conclusions on the basis of limited data is speculative at best. But he thinks that the connections Oltmanns’s team makes are interesting and important.
Oltmanns agrees that it is wise not to infer too much about ocean currents from this. But she says the study still gives us valuable information about ocean convection. “Until now, models have predicted that fresh water will threaten convection in the future,†she says. “It is already affecting convection to a greater extent than we thought.†•
Our instrumentation to detect ocean events needs improvement (Ocean Bottom Pressure Data – 2).
“It can happen.”