Tuesday, April 9th - 2023

Author: Sam Rubinstein

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Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists


 
By:  - The Guardian

If the anomaly does not stabilise by August, ‘the world will be in uncharted territory’, says climate expert

Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.

Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1C higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels.

This, at least temporarily, exceeds the 1.5C benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement but that landmark deal will not be considered breached unless this trend continues on a decadal scale.

The UK Met Office previously predicted the 1.5C goal could be surpassed over the period of a year and other leading climate monitoring organisations said the current levels of heating remain within the bounds anticipated by computer models.

However the sharp increase in temperatures over the past year has surprised many scientists, and prompted concerns about a possible acceleration of heating.

Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, one of the vice-chairs of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), noted the planet has been warming at a pace of 0.3C per decade over the past 15 years, almost double the 0.18C per decade trend since the 1970s. “Is this within the range of climate variability or signal of accelerated warming? My concern is it might be too late if we just wait to see,” she tweeted.

Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted that temperature records are being broken each month by up to 0.2C. “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has,” the successor to Jim Hansen wrote in a recent article for Nature.

Schmidt listed several plausible causes of the anomaly – the El Niño effect, reductions in cooling sulphur dioxide particles due to pollution controls, fallout from the January 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption in Tonga, and the ramping up of solar activity in the run-up to a predicted solar maximum.

But based on preliminary analyses, he said these factors were not sufficient to account for the 0.2C increase: “If the anomaly does not stabilise by August – a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events – then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”

The core of the problem – fossil fuel emissions – is well known and largely uncontested in the scientific community. A survey of nearly 90,000 climate-related studies shows a 99.9% consensus that humans are altering the climate by burning gas, oil, coal and trees.

“Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Michael E Mann, the scientist whose 1999 “hockey-stick graph” showed the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial age, said the current trends were to be expected given the continuing rise in emissions. But he said that should not be a source of comfort. “The world is warming AS FAST as we predicted – and that’s bad enough,” he tweeted.

Opposition to this view comes not from science, but the fossil fuel industry – in particular the 57 companies linked to 80% of emissions – which stands to lose trillions of dollars. Last month, Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser was applauded at an oil industry conference in Houston for declaring: “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.” This was despite the fact that his country and others had agreed just four months earlier to move away from fossil fuels at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai.

Source

Texas solar surpasses coal production for first time

By: 

Solar production in Texas’ Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) territory surpassed coal for the first time this March, generating 3.26 million MWh, compared to coal’s 2.96 million MWh.

Additionally, coal’s market share in Texas fell below 10% for the first time, landing at 9%, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) noted. Coal’s share had been declining for more than a decade, the IEEFA said, but the trend accelerated in 2016-2017, when ERCOT’s data began to incorporate solar.

In 2017, solar accounted for 0.6% of ERCOT’s demand, the IEEFA said, at 2.26 million MWh. This year’s increase has pushed solar generation’s share to above 10% for the first time, and the growth is expected to continue throughout the year and beyond. Solar generation this March showed an increase of 1.17 million MWh compared to last March, a 56% increase, the IEEFA said. Additionally, while ERCOT currently has 22,710 MW of operational solar capacity, 7,168 MW is expected to be added by the end of the year, an increase of almost one-third.

Coal’s apparent decline in the ERCOT territory doesn’t seem to be an anomaly caused by a few months of low generation, IEEFA says. Even during the hot summer months, coal production never surpassed 20% in 2022, or 15% in 2023, and that trend is unlikely to change this year, IEEFA says.

Source

Climate change is rewiring fish brains — and probably ours, too

Acidifying oceans are leading to sensory loss in fish. Scientists fear people might be next.

Imagine you are a clown fish. A juvenile clown fish, specifically, in the year 2100. You live near a coral reef. You are orange and white, which doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you have these little ear stones called otoliths in your inner ear, and when sound waves pass through the water and then through your body, these otoliths move and displace tiny hair cells, which trigger electrochemical signals in your auditory nerve. Nemo, you are hearing.

But you are not hearing well. In this version of century’s end, humankind has managed to pump the climate brakes a smidge, but it has not reversed the trends that were apparent a hundred years earlier. In this 2100, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 400 parts per million at the turn of the millennium to 600 parts per million — a middle‑of‑the-road forecast. For you and your otoliths, this increase in carbon dioxide is significant, because your ear stones are made of calcium carbonate, a carbon-based salt, and ocean acidification makes them grow larger. Your ear stones are big and clunky, and the clicks and chirps of resident crustaceans and all the larger reef fish have gone all screwy. Normally, you would avoid these noises, because they suggest predatory danger. Instead, you swim toward them, as a person wearing headphones might walk into an intersection, oblivious to the honking truck with the faulty brakes. Nobody will make a movie about your life, Nemo, because nobody will find you.
 

It’s not a toy example. In 2011, an international team of researchers led by Hong Young Yan at the Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, simulated these kinds of future acidic conditions in seawater tanks. A previous study had found that ocean acidification could compromise young fishes’ abilities to distinguish between odors of friends and foes, leaving them attracted to smells they’d usually avoid. At the highest levels of acidification, the fish failed to respond to olfactory signals at all. Hong and his colleagues suspected the same phenomenon might apply to fish ears. Rearing dozens of clown fish in tanks of varying carbon dioxide concentrations, the researchers tested their hypothesis by placing waterproof speakers in the water, playing recordings from predator-rich reefs, and assessing whether the fish avoided the source of the sounds. In all but the present-day control conditions, the fish failed to swim away. It was like they couldn’t hear the danger.

In Hong’s study, though, it’s not exactly clear if the whole story is a story of otolith inflation. Other experiments had indeed found that high ocean acidity could spur growth in fish ear stones, but Hong and his colleagues hadn’t actually noticed any in theirs. Besides, marine biologists who later mathematically modeled the effects of oversize otoliths concluded that bigger stones would likely increase the sensitivity of fish ears — which, who knows, “could prove to be beneficial or detrimental, depending on how a fish perceives this increased sensitivity.” The ability to attune to distant sounds could be useful for navigation. On the other hand, maybe ear stones would just pick up more background noise from the sea, and the din of this marine cocktail party would drown out useful vibrations. The researchers didn’t know.

The uncertainty with the otoliths led Hong and his colleagues to conclude that perhaps the carbon dioxide was doing something else — something more sinister in its subtlety. Perhaps, instead, the gas was directly interfering with the fishes’ nervous systems: Perhaps the trouble with their hearing wasn’t exclusively a problem of sensory organs, but rather a manifestation of something more fundamental. Perhaps the fish brains couldn’t process the auditory signals they were receiving from their inner ears.

The following year, a colleague of Hong’s, one Philip Munday at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, appeared to confirm this suspicion. His theory had the look of a hijacking.

A neuron is like a house: insulated, occasionally permeable, maybe a little leaky. Just as one might open a window during a stuffy party to let in a bit of cool air, brain cells take advantage of physical differences across their walls in order to keep the neural conversation flowing. In the case of nervous systems, the differentials don’t come with respect to temperature, though; they’re electrical. Within living bodies float various ions — potassium, sodium, chloride, and the like — and because they’ve gained or lost an electron here or there, they’re all electrically charged. The relative balance of these atoms inside and outside a given neuron induces a voltage difference across the cell’s membrane: Compared to the outside, the inside of most neurons is more negatively charged. But a brain cell’s walls have windows too, and when you open them, ions can flow through, spurring electrical changes.

In practice, a neuron’s windows are proteins spanning their membranes. Like a house’s, they come in a cornucopia of shapes and sizes, and while you can’t fit a couch through a porthole, a window is still a window when it comes to those physical differentials. If it’s hot inside and cold outside, opening one will always cool you down.

Until it doesn’t.

Read full article 

New York is suing the world’s biggest meat company. It might be a tipping point for greenwashing

Letitia James’s lawsuit accuses JBS of deceiving customers about being climate-friendly – and the implications could be far-reaching

Swiss farmers dump dead sheep in protest against rising wolf numbers


By: Nadeem Badshah

Farmers lay carcasses in front of government building in Lausanne to press for resumption of wolf cul


Farmers in Switzerland dumped the carcasses of sheep that were killed by wolves in front of a regional government building on Saturday as part of a protest to demand more action against the predators.

About a dozen breeders came from the Saint-Barthélemy area in the western Swiss canton of Vaud to lay 12 carcasses in front of Lausanne’s Chateau Saint-Maire, the regional government headquarters, AFP reported.

“These sheep were killed last night,” Eric Herb, a member of a Swiss association demanding the regulation of big predators, told the Keystone-ATS news agency.

“It is really time to act. The breeders have played nice until now, but this time it was too much.”

He said the protesters wanted to increase the pressure on the Vaud government environment minister, Vassilis Venizelos of the Green party.

Patrick Perroud, a farmer and butcher from the nearby municipality of Oulens, said: “We are sick of this. We want the wolf killed.

“Cohabitation is not possible. Our territory is too small.”

The breeders had negotiated with regional police before being allowed to lay down the animal carcasses on tarpaulin in front of the chateau.

Participants in the protest, which was supported by the regional chapter of the populist rightwing Swiss People’s party – the country’s largest party – said they were losing sheep.

After being wiped out more than a century ago, wolves have in recent decades returned to Switzerland and to other European countries.

Since the first pack was spotted in the wealthy Alpine nation in 2012, the number of packs has swelled to 32 with a population of about 300.

Last year, Swiss authorities relaxed the rules for hunting the protected species and allowed large preventive culls in the most affected cantons.

However, in December the wolf cull was put on hold by the courts, which ordered some of the packs – which have endearing Swiss names such as Jatzhorn, Stagias, Hauts-Forts or Isérables-Fou – to be spared.

Farmers had argued the proposed cull was vital to protect livestock and the future of Alpine communities while environmental groups said the cull went far further than the law allows and could decimate the wolf population.

The population of hybrid wolfdogs is increasing in parts of Europe, the Guardian reported last month.

Read full article 

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