pollution – Page 15 – Desdemona Despair

Projections of annual counts of high-tide flooding (HTF) days for the NOAA Intermediate Sea Level Rise (SLR) scenario. The NOAA minor flooding threshold is used for Honolulu, San Diego and St. Petersburg. The NOAA moderate flooding threshold is used for Boston to highlight a threshold that is not yet routinely exceeded, which is not the case for the Boston minor threshold. The 50th percentile from the ensemble of projections (blue line) and the 10th–90th percentile range (blue shading, with the 90th percentile highlighted in orange) show increasing numbers of HTF days per year. The year of inflection (YOI, open black circle) for each projection corresponds to abrupt increases in the frequency of HTF days, which are highlighted by comparing the projected increases (Δ) over two adjacent ten-year periods (dashed and solid black lines). Graphic: Thompson, et al., 2021 / Nature Climate Change

August 16, 2021

Sunny-day flooding is about to become more than a nuisance – “What’s scary about this paper is the idea of the inflection point. Can we adapt fast enough to keep pace?”

By Jim Morrison 2 August 2021 (WIRED) – During the summer of 2017, the tide rose to historic heights again and again in Honolulu, higher than at any time in the 112 years that records had been kept. Philip Thompson, director of the Sea Level Center at the University of Hawaii, wanted to know why. […]

Time series of climate-related responses to anthropogenic drivers, 1990-2020. Out of the 31 tracked planetary vital signs, 18 were at new all-time record lows or highs in 2020. Data obtained before and after the publication of Ripple and colleagues (2020) are shown in gray and red respectively. For variables with relatively high variability, local regression trend lines are shown in black. The variables were measured at various frequencies (e.g., annual, monthly, weekly). The labels on the x-axis correspond to midpoints of years. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in the supplemental material. Graphic: Ripple, et al., 2021 / BioScience

July 31, 2021

World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021 – Humans face untold suffering from “the consequences of unrelenting business as usual”

28 July 2021 (BioScience) – In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of […]

Firefighters work at the scene of forest fire near Andreyevsky village outside Tyumen, western Siberia, Russia, on 16 June 2021. Wildfires in Siberia are releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases, scientists say, contributing to global warming. Photo: Maksim Slutsky / AP Photo

July 25, 2021

Siberia hit by unprecedented wildfires – 1.5 million hectares burn after driest weather in 150 years – “Everything is on fire”

By Andrew Roth 20 July 2021 MOSCOW (The Guardian) – Every morning and evening for the last few days, shifts of young villagers have headed out into the taiga forest around Teryut with a seemingly impossible task: to quell the raging fires that have burned closer and closer for a month, shrouding this remote eastern […]

Black carbon mass density over North America from GEOS-5, 21 July 2021. Smoke from wildfires in the U.S. West poured into the eastern U.S. on 20-21 July 2021. In New York City, levels of fine particulate pollution rose above 170 on the air quality index, a level considered harmful even for healthy people. Data: GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC. Graphic: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

July 25, 2021

Skies turn hazy from Pittsburgh to Washington to Boston, as smoke from fires in Canada pour into the U.S. Northeast

By Adam Voiland 23 July 2021 (NASA) – While plumes of wildfire smoke from western North America have passed over the northeastern U.S. and Canada multiple times each summer in recent years, they often go unnoticed. That is because smoke that spreads far from its source typically moves at a fairly high altitude—between 5 and 10 kilometers—as […]

Satellite view of the Great Salt Lake on 24 September 2011 and 9 July 2021. Photo: ESA / Sentinel 2 / NASA Worldview / LANDSAT 5

July 19, 2021

Great Salt Lake is shrinking fast – Scientists demand action before it becomes a toxic dustbin – “We’re on the doorstep of a catastrophe”

By Lucy Kafanov, Leslie Perrot, and Eliott C. McLaughlin 17 July 2021 Great Salt Lake, Utah (CNN) – Great Salt Lake is also known as America’s Dead Sea — owing to a likeness to its much smaller Middle Eastern counterpart — but scientists worry the moniker could soon take new meaning. Human water consumption and […]

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions under current policy with energy market and economic uncertainty, 2005-2021 and projected to 2030. Under current trends, the U.S. will miss both of its Paris Agreement reduction targets in 2025 and 2030. Graphic: Rhodium Group

July 18, 2021

Taking Stock 2021: U.S. will miss Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets – Cheap natural gas threatens renewable energy transition

By Hannah Pitt, Kate Larsen, Hannah Kolus, Ben King, Alfredo Rivera, Emily Wimberger, Whitney Herndon, John Larsen, and Galen Hiltbrand 15 July 2021 (Rhodium Group) – For the past seven years, Rhodium Group has provided an independent annual outlook for US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under current federal and state policy. This current policy baseline […]

Total greenhouse gas emissions from China and OECD nations, 1990-2019. In 2019, China’s GHG emissions passed the 14 gigaton threshold for the first time, reaching 14,093 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMt CO2e). This represents a more than tripling of 1990 levels, and a 25 percent increase over the past decade. As a result, China’s share of the 2019 global emissions total of 52 gigatons rose to 27 percent. Data: Rhodium Group / UNFCCC. Graphic: Rhodium Group

July 8, 2021

China’s greenhouse gas emissions exceeded the developed world for the first time in 2019

By Kate Larsen, Hannah Pitt, Mikhail Grant, and Trevor Houser 6 May 2021 (Rhodium Group) – Each year Rhodium Group provides the most up-to-date global and country-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions estimates through the ClimateDeck (a partnership with Breakthrough Energy). In addition to our preliminary US and China GHG estimates for 2020, Rhodium provides annual estimates of economy-wide emissions—including all […]

Seasonal honey bee colony loss rates in the United States, 2008-2021. Annual loss estimates (from one 1 April to the next 1 April) combine winter (1 October – 1 April) and summer (1 April – 1 October) losses. The loss rate was calculated as the total number of colonies lost divided by the number of colonies “at risk” during the season. Colonies at risk were composed of viable colonies and new colonies made or acquired, while excluding colonies sold or parted with. Graphic: Bee Informed Partnership

June 25, 2021

U.S. honey bee colonies hit by second-highest annual loss on record in 2021

By Nathalie Steinhauer, Dan Aurell, Selina Bruckner, Mikayla Wilson, Karen Rennich, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, and Geoffrey Williams 23 June 2021 (Bee Informed Partnership) – The Bee Informed Partnership (http://beeinformed.org) is a non-profit organization that works alongside beekeepers to improve honey bee colony health and survivorship across the United States. One of the organization’s longest running programs, […]

Risk levels for climate-sensitive health outcomes based on different greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation scenarios. Graphic: IPCC WG 2 Sixth Assessment Report / AFP

June 23, 2021

Hunger, drought, disease: UN climate report reveals dire health threats – “The basis for our health is sustained by three pillars: the food we eat, access to water, and shelter. These pillars are totally vulnerable and about to collapse.”

By Patrick Galey 23 June 2021 (AFP) – Hunger, drought and disease will afflict tens of millions more people within decades, according to a draft UN assessment that lays bare the dire human health consequences of a warming planet. After a pandemic year that saw the world turned on its head, a forthcoming report by […]

Graph showing Earth Overshoot Day, 1970-2021. Each year, Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year. Humanity currently uses 74% more than what the planet’s ecosystems can regenerate—or “1.7 Earths.” From Earth Overshoot Day until the end of the year, humanity operates on ecological deficit spending. This spending is currently some of the largest since the world entered into ecological overshoot in the early 1970s, according to the National Footprint & Biocapacity Accounts (NFA) based on UN datasets. Graphic: Global Footprint Network

June 20, 2021

Earth Overshoot Day creeps back to July 29 in 2021 – “With almost half a year remaining, we will already have used up our quota of the Earth’s biological resources for 2021 by July 29th”

GLASGOW, UK, 4 June 2021 (Global Footprint Network) – Earth Overshoot Day 2021 lands on July 29, Councillor Susan Aitken, the Leader of Glasgow City Council, announced today on behalf of Global Footprint Network and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). “With almost half a year remaining, we will already have used up our quota […]