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Image of the Day: Why Did the Turtles Cross the Road?

2012-05-27T10:30:31+00:00

Why did the turtles cross the road? To escape climate change. As if baby leatherback turtles didn’t have it rough enough, climate change is threatening the critically endangered leatherback sea turtles in the Pacific. When conditions are hot and dry, researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia discovered eggs desiccate as the sand baked in the sun, and the baby turtles were unable to break through the packed, scalding sand. Another problem is that hot conditions produce mostly females, and then those surviving babies are predominantly female, tipping the population mix.

Image of the Day: Ride ‘Em if You Got ‘Em

2012-05-26T10:00:19+00:00

Americans are saving $4.6 billion a year by riding bicycles instead of driving, according to a new report from the League of American Bicyclists, Sierra Club, and National Council of La Raza (NCLR). League President Andy Clarke said there are many reasons people ride bikes from improving their health to the environment. He added, “But, especially in tough economic times, bicycling can also be an economic catalyst, keeping billions of dollars in the pockets of American families.”

Credit: Ken Mayer, Creative Commons

Southwest Wildfires Expand; Dangerous Weekend Ahead

2012-05-25T15:54:08+00:00

Weather conditions got the best of firefighters in New Mexico this week, as two wildfires that had been burning separately for more than a week merged and grew in size, destroying at least 12 homes, and burning more than 80,000 acres to date.

The Whitewater-Baldy Fire Complex grew to a total of 82,252 acres on Thursday, according to Inciweb, a U.S. Forest Service wildfire coordination website. A highly trained "fire management team" was ordered to assume command of the fire complex this weekend, "due to extreme fire behavior, proximity to private land, and continued high winds forecasted" the website said. Albuquerque, N.M., officials have issued an air quality alert through Sunday, anticipating that the smoke from the fire would move directly toward the city.

NASA satellite image of the Whitewater-Baldy Fire Complex burning out of control in New Mexico on May 24, 2012. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

The Associated Press reported that strong winds made it impossible for firefighters to protect the forest cabins that were lost to the blaze.

"The fire had been around about 10 days, lurking and creeping and then kaboom, it exploded," said Tabitha Sims, secretary of the Willow Creek Landowners Association. "They made a heroic effort at trying to build a break, but I think it was unfortunate that this wind event happened to come right at the worst time."

According to Reuters, wildfires have also been burning in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, with at least 170 square miles of land burned since mid-month.

The New Mexico wildfire has been the toughest blaze to contain, due to the combination of high winds that have repeatedly swept across the state, as well as steep terrain. The Whitewater-Baldy fire is listed as having a "high" likelihood of expanding further.

Firefighters did make progress in Arizona, though, bringing the Gladiator fire, located about 40 miles north of Phoenix, up to about 30 percent containment. Reuters reported that winds there helped bring in a more humid air mass, which helped firefighting efforts on the ground and from the air.

As Climate Central reported on May 23, long-term drought conditions along with warmer-than-average temperatures are setting the Southwest up for a very active wildfire season. Seasonal climate outlooks for the summer show that unusually hot and dry conditions are likely to continue, at least until the typical Southwest summer monsoon season kicks in sometime in mid to late July.

Image of the Day: Parched from the Sun; Praying for Rain

2012-05-25T10:30:10+00:00

A boy and his goat walk past a dried pond on the outskirts of the Indian city of Bhubaneswar. The annual monsoon season, which the India Meteorological Department says is most likely to be on time this year reports MSNBC, will be a welcomed relief for farmers whose lands have turned dry.

Credit: Biswaranjan Rout/AP

Early Season Heat Wave for Memorial Day Weekend

2012-05-24T15:06:51+00:00

Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial start of summer, but a large swath of the U.S. will skip right to mid-summer heat this weekend, likely breaking records and leading to one of the hottest Indy 500 races on record.

Forecasts for Sunday's Indianapolis 500 call for a high of 93°F. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), only five Indy 500 race days had highs in the 90s, and the all-time record high for the month of May is 96°F. That means that Sunday's forecast would rank as one of the warmest race days in history, and one of the warmest days in May on record.

In Indianapolis, high temperatures may reach or exceed 90°F on at least two consecutive days this Memorial Day weekend. That has only occurred 18 times during the month of May since weather records began there in 1871, the NWS reported.

Indianapolis won't be alone. The heat will stretch from the southern Plains to the Mid-Atlantic, affecting cities ranging from Kansas City to Washington, D.C. The weather system responsible for the heat is an area of high pressure that will establish itself over the Southeastern U.S., pumping hot and humid air northward around the backside of its clockwise circulation. Thunderstorms will flare up around this high, dumping heavy rains with the threat of damaging winds across the Upper Midwest, in particular.

In Peoria, Ill., the normal high temperature for Memorial Day is 78°F, and the all-time record high for the holiday is 98°F, which occurred in 1934. The forecast for this Memorial Day calls for a high of 89°F.

In Chicago, Memorial Day temperatures typically range from 70°F to 79°F, the NWS reported. The highest temperature on record for the holiday is 93 degrees, which occurred in 1942 and 1953. Last year, on May 30th, 2011, the high temperature was 88°F. The current forecast for Memorial Day calls for a high temperature near 90°F in the Windy City.

Other cities likely to be affected include Little Rock, Ark., Louisville, Ky., and St. Louis. According to The Weather Channel, if Memphis reaches 97°F or greater this weekend it would break the record for the hottest temperature so early in the season.

Studies have shown that early season heat waves carry more public health risks than those that occur during mid-summer, largely because people have not yet acclimated to warmer weather. Climate change studies show that extreme heat events are becoming more likely as overall temperatures warm, although this particular taste of mid-summer will be brief.

‘Killer Summer Heat’ Report Grabs Attention

2012-05-24T15:00:28+00:00

It’s one thing to project that climate change will bring more intense and more frequent heat waves as we move through the 21^st century, which climate scientists do. It’s another and more meaningful thing to put a number on the toll this will take on people — and that’s what a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council has done. Titled “Killer Summer Heat,” it combines population projections and heat projections to calculate the likely number of extra deaths due to heat in America’s 40 biggest cities.

The number comes out to more than 150,000, many of them elderly, and especially among those with cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, lung disease and other ailments common to older people.

By coming up with actual numbers and breaking them down by city, the authors managed to grab peoples’ attention in a way some vague statistic wouldn’t have done. “Killer heat projected in Minneapolis by end of century,” proclaimed the headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose story led with the fact that “the Twin Cities are could see eight times as many deaths due to extreme heat as it does now.” In Detroit, the Free Press announced: “Metro Detroit to see spike in heat-related deaths unless action is taken, study says,” noting that Motown is projected to have the second-highest increase, with nearly 18,000 extra deaths by 2100, after Louisville.

That dubious honor did not escape Kentucky’s largest city, where the Courier-Journal reported: “As many as 19,000 Louisville residents will die of heat-related causes by the end of the century — topping 40 large American cities, according to a new environmental report.” The story went on to explain that the NRDC estimates the current rate of heat-related deaths at 39 per year; the rate by 2050 could soar to 257 annually in 2050 and 376 by 2100, for a grand total over the century of nearly 19,000 extra deaths. In Cleveland, meanwhile, which came in at No. 3, the online Cleveland Leader broke the bad news to locals that the city can expect more than 16,500 extra deaths by century’s end thanks to climate change.

As most of the coverage notes, NRDC’s grim projections are based on one important assumption: that the amount of heat-trapping CO₂and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will double by the end of the century. This isn’t inevitable — but given the lack of significant action taken so far, it’s a pretty plausible assumption.

To see if where you live is on the list, and how many local deaths you can expect, NRDC has put together a table showing figures for all 40 cities in the study.

The Issue of Population is More Than a Little Radioactive

2012-05-23T10:30:12+00:00

COMMENTARY
By Michael D. Lemonick

Talk to people who care about the environment and you’ll hear plenty about pollution, deforestation, sustainability and climate change. What you won’t hear is the word “population,” unless it refers to populations of endangered species.

But if you think about it, the Earth’s booming human population is at the root of just about every environmental crisis that threatens the natural world. Last October 31, Earth’s population reached 7 billion people (unofficially, because there’s no way to pinpoint the actual day, but it was in the ballpark). Every last one of them taps into the planet’s resources as they eat, work and create waste in a myriad of different forms. By 2027 we’ll be up to 8 billion, and the U.N. predicts we’ll hit 9 billion in 2047.

Credit: flickr/MegMoggington

Even now, however, the pressure on Earth’s resources is already extreme, and more people will only make it worse. Deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction, for example, are mostly the result of all those billions of people clearing land for places to live and grow food. Destroy natural habitats and you throw ecosystems out of whack, to say nothing of wiping species off the planet at such an alarming rate that scientists believe we may be seeing Earth’s sixth mass extinction (the previous five were caused by things like asteroid impacts or gigantic volcanic eruptions). All those billions of people burning wood and coal and oil, for heating, transportation, electricity and manufacturing, moreover, generate air pollution, including heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Most of us never stop to think about the flip side of that equation, however: if the world had significantly fewer people, all of these strains on the planet would be much less. Two thousand years ago, the world’s population stood at about 300 million people, according to the U.N., and by 500 years ago, that number had climbed to half a billion, or one fourteenth of today’s population.

What if it had just stayed there? Would our current environmental problems be slashed by a factor of 14? Well, OK, probably not. Back in 1500, even the richest people had a standard of living far below what people in the U.S. have now: they had no electricity, no motorized transportation, a monotonous and not very nutritious diet. As a result, their impact on the planet was far less than what a half-billion people living at modern U.S. standards would be — and even so, the impact of pre-industrial civilization was hardly zero.

It’s also true that in the modern world, the richest people consume vastly more resources, and contribute vastly more to the planet’s environmental ills, than the poorest. By some estimates, fully 50 percent of all human CO₂emissions come from the richest 500 million people, while the poorest 3 billion generate a mere 7 percent. If those billions can raise their standard of living significantly, as they have every right to do, the impacts of all that consumption and those emissions will become vastly worse.

It would be simplistic, then, to put all the blame for the planet’s environmental woes on population. Nevertheless, it’s clear that if the Earth’s population were to magically drop from 7 billion to, say, 1 billion (“magically,” because you could do it with a horrifying disease or some other catastrophe, but I’d just as soon not), most of the issues environmentalists worry about would become easier to manage, even though they’d hardly disappear.

So why aren’t policymakers talking more about population? Why aren’t the media reporting more about it? One reason is that it’s a very touchy subject. Plenty of religious leaders have a real problem with family planning in any form, and China’s infamous one-child policy has led to forced abortions, forced sterilization and, thanks to a strong preference for boys, a severe gender imbalance. In large part, it was his opposition to the excesses of the one-child policy that got Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng in trouble with authorities earlier this year.

The issue of population is, in short, more than a little radioactive. Besides, fertility rates have been dropping in recent decades thanks largely to the education of women, so the problem clearly isn’t as bad as it could be. In fact, the U.N. was projecting 15 billion people by the middle of this century only a couple of decades ago, so we’re moving in the right direction. But the U.N. also acknowledges that just the slightest uptick in those rates could drive the number drastically upward again. A problem that appears to have stabilized could destabilize very quickly.

That’s why at least one environmental group has taken on the issue of overpopulation: last year, the Center for Biological Diversity began talking about population growth as a key factor in environmental degradation. According to an article in the New York Times, the group is, among other things, handing out condoms in packages with endangered animals on them and emblazoned with slogans including “Wrap with care, save the polar bear,” and “Wear a condom now, save the spotted owl.”

OK, it’s a bit silly (although not as silly as this condom promo video from India), and there’s nothing much we can do to reduce the population by any significant amount. But as July’s World Population Day approaches, it’s worth remembering that the sheer number of people on Earth makes every threat to the environment worse than it would otherwise be.

And it wouldn’t be a bad thing if more of us were talking about it.

Image of the Day: The Elephant in the Living Room

2012-05-23T09:59:16+00:00

A mother and her baby elephants enjoying a walk in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Even though these elephants are protected, they still face the same threats as other elephants due to climate change. Many projections indicate that the elephant’s habitat will become hotter and drier, which will result in poor vegetation for foraging food and conditions would make it harder for elephant calves to survive.

Credit: Ding Haitao/Corbis

Image of the Day: Hitch a Slow Ride, Take it Easy

2012-05-22T10:00:46+00:00

A brown booby hitching a ride on an Olive Ridley sea turtle near Los Cobanos beach in El Salvador. According to the journal Biological Conservation, birds are an excellent indicator for learning the effects of climate change, especially in tropical ecosystems. Some birds are particularly susceptible to extreme weather events such as increased rainfall, heat waves, cold spells and cyclones.

Credit: Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images

Rare Solar Eclipse - In Pictures

2012-05-21T13:22:27+00:00

The moon is endlessly creative in finding ways to amuse us. Just two weeks ago, the Earth’s only natural satellite was unusually close to us, and looked bigger and brighter than normal. The result was a Supermoon, which dazzled skywatchers across the U.S.

Now its orbit has taken the moon farther away than average, just in time it to pass directly in front of the sun this past Sunday, fittingly enough. Ordinarily, that would have caused a total solar eclipse, with the moon blotting out the sun entirely for a few minutes. But the moon appeared smaller than normal — small enough, in fact, that it couldn't block the entire sun, even when they were lined up perfectly.

So instead, the lucky folks who lived in a swath of the country from Northern California into Nevada got to see what’s known as an annular eclipse, late Sunday afternoon, the first visible in the U.S. in 18 years. What it means is that when the moon was dead-center in front of the sun, a fiery ring of sunlight surrounded the moon’s silhouette (“annulus” is Latin for “ring”).

Image of the Day: Four Degrees of Preparation

2012-05-21T10:00:51+00:00

That’s 4 degrees Celsius, which is a 7.2 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase to us on the other side of the pond. Greater Manchester, in the U.K., is on the forefront of developing a blueprint for EcoCities in light of manmade climate change, which could mean hotter and drier summers and colder and wetter winters. EcoCities is a dual initiative with the University of Manchester and the property company Bruntwood. The project will look at the impacts of climate change and how cities can adapt to the challenges and opportunities that go along with a changing climate.

Credit: hassellstudio

Image of the Day: Saudi Arabia Eyes Going Solar

2012-05-20T10:00:26+00:00

A sunset over the Saudi city of Hail. Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, now wants to become a leader in renewable energy. According to Bloomberg, the country aims to have 41,000 megawatts of solar capacity within two decades, a shift that could potentially save 523,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, in an attempt to pare back on oil used for desalinization and power plants.

Credit: Hassan Ammar/AFP/Getty Images

Image of the Day: Cherries Anyone?

2012-05-19T11:30:14+00:00

Researchers say climate change could dramatically change fruit and nut industries around the world as trees like cherries, almonds, apples, and pistachios struggle to adapt to rising temperatures. Above, a pint of fresh cherries in Northborough, Mass.

Credit: sushiesque/flickr

Image of the Day: They Can’t Monkey with Climate Change

2012-05-18T10:00:11+00:00

A new study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that hundreds of Western Hemisphere mammals may not be able to keep up with the projected speed of climate change, including the Emperor Tamarin pictured above.

"Due to the unprecedented rapidity of projected climatic changes, some species may not be able to move their ranges fast enough to track shifts in suitable climates and associated habitats" says the authors of the study. According to USAToday, out of the of 493 mammals studied, in some places as many as 39 percent may not be able to keep pace with climate change.

Climate Negotiators Try to Make Headway in Bonn Talks

2012-05-17T14:45:08+00:00

The latest round of U.N. climate talks are underway in Bonn, Germany, in preparation for higher-profile negotiations in Doha, Qatar later this year. The Bonn talks follow from last year's discussions in Durban, South Africa, during which many countries agreed to extend the life of the Kyoto Protocol, while also working on a new legally binding deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which would go into effect by 2020.

That new treaty is supposed to apply to industrialized and developing nations alike, whereas Kyoto only mandated emissions cuts by industrialized countries.

In Bonn, negotiators are trying to hammer out a roadmap for writing the new treaty, and are working to finalize provisions under which industrialized countries would finance climate adaptation and mitigation work in the developing world. In Durban, countries agreed to a Green Climate Fund that would commit up to $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries hard hit by climate change.

Yet to date, no financing has been provided under this fund.

In addition, diplomats need to hammer out the terms under which Kyoto will be extended. The Bonn talks are scheduled to continue through May 25, with one more round of talks expected prior to the Doha meeting in December.

These talks are taking place in a climate of growing pessimism that global warming can be limited to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, a goal that world leaders, including U.S. President Obama, committed to in 2009.

Here's a roundup of news coverage of the Bonn talks:

REUTERS: Door to 2 degree temperature limit is closing - IEA

GUARDIAN / BUSINESS GREEN: Bonn climate talks: EU plays down Kyoto Protocol rift

TIMES OF INDIA: Rich nations stall talks on their record of cutting emissions

REUTERS: Climate deal milestones should be set this year: U.N.

BLOOMBERG: Qatar Climate-Change Negotiations May Spur Gulf Effort, NGO Says

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Climate negotiators back at table after some progress in Durban

AFP: Duration of ‘Kyoto 2′ threatens rift at U.N. climate talks

AFP: Climate talks open in Bonn to tackle emissions targets

BBC: Europe Struggles for Climate Lead