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Tag: American Geophysical Union (AGU)

  • UN-led study finds Bitcoin mining has “concerning” effects on land, water, and carbon.

    UN-led study finds Bitcoin mining has “concerning” effects on land, water, and carbon.

    By the numbers, global bitcoin mining in 2020-2021:

    • Used 173 terawatt hours of electricity (more than most nations)
    • Emitted 86 megatons of carbon (like burning 8.5 billion pounds of coal)
    • Required 1.65 cubic kilometers of water (more than the domestic use of 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa)
    • Affected 1,870 square kilometers of land (1.4 times the size of Los Angeles)
    • Got 67% of its energy from fossil fuels, with coal contributing 45%

    Newswise — WASHINGTON — As bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have grown in market share, they’ve been criticized for their heavy carbon footprint: Cryptocurrency mining is an energy-intensive endeavor. Mining has massive water and land footprints as well, according to a new study that is the first to detail country-by-country environmental impacts of bitcoin mining. It serves as the foundation for a new United Nations (UN) report on bitcoin mining, also published today.

    The study reveals how each country’s mix of energy sources defines the environmental footprint of its bitcoin mining and highlights the top 10 countries for energy, carbon, water and land use. The work was published in Earth’s Future, which publishes interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.

    “A lot of our exciting new technologies have hidden costs we don’t realize at the onset,” said Kaveh Madani, a Director at United Nations University who led the new study. “We introduce something, it gets adopted, and only then do we realize that there are consequences.”

    Madani and his co-authors used energy, carbon, water and land use data from 2020 to 2021 to calculate country-specific environmental impacts for 76 countries known to mine bitcoin. They focused on bitcoin because it’s older, popular and more well-established/widely used than other cryptocurrencies.

    Madani said the results were “very interesting and very concerning,” in part because demand is rising so quickly. But even with more energy-efficient mining approaches, if demand continues to grow, so too will mining’s environmental footprints, he said.

    Electricity and carbon

    If bitcoin mining were a country, it would be ranked 27th in energy use globally. Overall, bitcoin mining consumed about 173 terawatt hours of electricity in the two years from January 2020 to December 2021, about 60% more than the energy used for bitcoin mining in 2018-2019, the study found. Bitcoin mining emitted about 86 megatons of carbon, largely because of the dominance of fossil fuel-based energy in bitcoin-mining countries.

    The environmental impact of bitcoin mining fluctuates along with energy supply and demand in a country. When energy is inexpensive, the profitability of mining bitcoin goes up. But when energy is expensive, the value of bitcoin must be high enough to make the cost of mining worth it to the miner, whether it’s an individual, a company or a government.

    China, the U.S. and Kazakhstan had the largest energy and carbon footprints in 2020-2021.

    Water

    Globally, bitcoin mining used 1.65 million liters (about 426,000 gallons) of water in 2020-2021, enough to fill more than 660,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. China, the U.S. and Canada had the largest water footprints. Kazakhstan and Iran, which along with the U.S. and China have suffered from water shortages, were also in the top-10 list for water footprint.

    “These are very, very worrying numbers,” Madani said. “Even hydropower, which some countries consider a clean source of renewable energy, has a huge footprint.”

    Land use

    The study analyzed land use by considering the area of land affected to produce energy for mining. The land footprint of server farms is negligible, Kaveh said. The global land use footprint of bitcoin mining is 1,870 square kilometers (722 square miles), with China’s footprint alone taking up 913 square kilometers (353 square miles). The U.S.’ land footprint is 303 square kilometers (117 square miles), and likely growing while China’s is shrinking.

    Most impacted countries

    China and the United States, which have two of the largest economies and populations in the world, take the top two spots across all environmental factors. A mix of other countries make up the other 8 spots in the top 10. Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Iran and Thailand — countries to which servers are outsourced and, in some cases, where cryptocurrency mining is subsidized by the government — appear as well. Canada, Germany and Russia have some of the largest footprints across all categories. Each country engaged in large-scale bitcoin mining affects countries around the world by their carbon emissions, Kaveh noted.

    But the benefits of bitcoin mining may not accrue to the country, or the individuals, doing the work. Cryptocurrency mining is an extractive and, by design, difficult to trace process, so geographic distribution of environmental impacts cannot be assumed to be a map of the biggest digital asset owners.

    “It’s hard to know exactly who is benefiting from this,” Madani said. “The issue now is who is suffering from this.”

    Already, some countries have potentially seen their resources impacted by cryptocurrency mining. In 2021, Iran faced blackouts. The government blamed bitcoin mining for excessively draining hydropower during a drought and periodically banned the practice.

    China in June 2021 banned bitcoin mining and transactions in the country; other countries, such as the U.S. and Kazakhstan, have taken up the slack and had their shares in bitcoin increase by 34% and 10%, respectively.

    Madani said the study is not meant to indict bitcoin or other cryptocurrency mining. “We’re getting used to these technologies, and they have hidden costs we don’t realize,” he said. “We want to inform people and industries about what these costs might be before it’s too late.”

    Notes for journalists:

    This study is published in Earth’s Future, an open-access journal. View and download a pdf of the study here. The authors’ policy-related comments do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Geophysical Union.

    This study provides the peer-reviewed data serving as a foundation for the U.N. report, “The Hidden Environmental Cost of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin Mining Impacts Climate, Water and Land,” published on the same day as this study. The report includes additional data that have not been peer-reviewed by Earth’s Future. View the U.N. press release here.

    Paper title:

    “The environmental footprint of bitcoin mining across the globe: Call for urgent action”

    Authors:

    • Sanaz Chamanara, United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
    • S. Arman Ghaffarizadeh, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
    • Kaveh Madani (corresponding author), Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

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    AGU (www.agu.org) is a global community supporting more than half a million advocates and professionals in Earth and space sciences. Through broad and inclusive partnerships, AGU aims to advance discovery and solution science that accelerate knowledge and create solutions that are ethical, unbiased and respectful of communities and their values. Our programs include serving as a scholarly publisher, convening virtual and in-person events and providing career support. We live our values in everything we do, such as our net zero energy renovated building in Washington, D.C. and our Ethics and Equity Center, which fosters a diverse and inclusive geoscience community to ensure responsible conduct.

    American Geophysical Union (AGU)

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  • Combining Rock Placement on Farms with Emissions Reductions Could Assist in Achieving Crucial IPCC Carbon Removal Objective

    Combining Rock Placement on Farms with Emissions Reductions Could Assist in Achieving Crucial IPCC Carbon Removal Objective

    Key points:

    • Enhanced rock weathering makes use of a natural geologic process to store carbon long term
    • Applying 10 tons of basalt dust per hectare of crop land globally could sequester up to 217 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 75 years, above the IPCC’s lower threshold of carbon dioxide removal needed to reach climate goals, along with emissions reductions
    • Farms in the tropics have the biggest and fastest return on investment

    Newswise — WASHINGTON — Farmers around the world could help the planet reach a key carbon removal goal set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by mixing crushed volcanic rocks into their fields, a new study reports. The study also highlights wet, warm tropics as the most promising locations for this climate intervention strategy.

    The study provides one of the first global estimates of the potential carbon dioxide drawdown from basalt application on agricultural fields worldwide. It was published in Earth’s Future, AGU’s journal for interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.

    This type of climate intervention is called enhanced rock weathering. It takes advantage of the weathering process, which naturally sequesters carbon dioxide in carbonate minerals. The idea is simple: speed up weathering in a way that also benefits people. When used in parallel with emissions reductions, it can help slow the pace of climate change.

    And it may be a safer bet than other carbon drawdown approaches, according to the study authors.

    “Enhanced rock weathering poses fewer risks compared to other climate interventions,” said S. Hun Baek, a climate scientist at Yale University who led the study. “It also provides some key benefits, like rejuvenating depleted soils and countering ocean acidification, that may make it more socially desirable.”

    The new study explores the potential of applying crushed basalt, a fast-weathering rock that forms as lava cools, to agricultural fields around the world and highlights which regions can most efficiently break down the rocks.

    “There’s tremendous potential here,” said Noah Planavsky, a geochemist at Yale University who co-authored the study. “Although we still have things to learn from a basic science perspective, there is promise, and we need to focus on what we can do from market and finance perspectives.”

    A previous study used a separate method of calculating carbon dioxide removal to estimate carbon drawdown by the year 2050, but the researchers wanted to look beyond country borders and further into the future.

    The researchers used a new biogeochemical model to simulate how applying crushed basalt to global croplands would draw down carbon dioxide, to test the sensitivity of enhanced rock weathering to climate and to pinpoint the areas where the method could be most effective.

    The new model simulated enhanced rock weathering on 1,000 agricultural sites around the world under two emissions scenarios from 2006 to 2080. They found that in the 75-year study period, those agricultural sites would draw down 64 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Extrapolating that to all agricultural fields, representing the world’s total potential application of this strategy, up to 217 gigatons of carbon could be sequestered in that time period.

    “The latest IPCC report said we need to remove 100 to 1,000 gigatons of carbon by 2100 in addition to steeply reducing emissions to keep global temperature from rising more than one and a half degrees Celsius,” said Baek. “Scaling up to global croplands, the estimates of carbon removal we found are roughly comparable to the lower end of that range needed to have a fighting chance of meeting those climate goals.”

    Because weathering progresses more quickly in hot and wet environments, enhanced rock weathering would work more quickly in tropical regions than higher latitudes, the study highlights. Farmers and companies looking to invest in carbon drawdown solutions make cost- and carbon-efficient choices by targeting basalt application in tropical fields.

    The model revealed another promising result: Enhanced rock weathering works just as well, if not a little better, in warmer temperatures. Some other carbon drawdown approaches, such as those that rely on soil organic carbon storage, become less effective with continual warming.

    “Enhanced rock weathering is surprisingly resilient to climate change,” Baek said. “Our results show that it’s relatively insensitive to climate change and works about the same under moderate and severe global warming scenarios. This gives us confidence in its potential as a long-term strategy.”

    Farmers already apply millions of tons of limestone (a calcium carbonate rock that can either be a carbon source or sink) to their fields to deliver nutrients and control soil acidity, so gradually changing the rock type could mean a smooth transition to implementing enhanced rock weathering at scale, Planavsky said.

    Enhanced rock weathering has been applied on small scales on farms around the world. The next step is working toward “realistic implementation,” Planavsky said.

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    American Geophysical Union (AGU)

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  • The world’s atmospheric rivers now have an intensity ranking like hurricanes

    The world’s atmospheric rivers now have an intensity ranking like hurricanes

    Newswise — WASHINGTON — Atmospheric rivers, which are long, narrow bands of water vapor, are becoming more intense and frequent with climate change. A new study demonstrates that a recently developed scale for atmospheric river intensity (akin to the hurricane scale) can be used to rank atmospheric rivers and identify hotspots of the most intense atmospheric rivers not only along the U.S. West Coast but also worldwide.

    Atmospheric rivers typically form when warm temperatures create moist packets of air, which strong winds then transport across the ocean; some make landfall. The intensity scale ranks these atmospheric rivers from AR-1 to AR-5 (with AR-5 being the most intense) based on how long they last and how much moisture they transport.

    In part because some West Coast weather outlets are using the intensity scale, “atmospheric river” is no longer an obscure meteorological term but brings sharply to mind unending rain and dangerous flooding, the authors said. The string of atmospheric rivers that hit California in December and January, for instance, at times reached AR-4. Earlier in 2022, the atmospheric river that contributed to disastrous flooding in Pakistan was an AR-5, the most damaging, most intense atmospheric river rating.

    The scale helps communities know whether an atmospheric river will bring benefit or cause chaos: The storms can deliver much-needed rain or snow, but if they’re too intense, they can cause flooding, landslides and power outages, as California and Pakistan experienced. The most severe atmospheric rivers can cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage in days in the western U.S.; damage in other regions has yet to be comprehensively assessed.

    “Atmospheric rivers are the hurricanes of the West Coast when it comes to the public’s situational awareness,” said F. Martin Ralph, an atmospheric scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a coauthor on the new study. People need to know when they’re coming, have a sense for how extreme the storm will be, and know how to prepare, he said. “This scale is designed to help answer all those questions.”

    Ralph and his colleagues originally developed the scale for the U.S. West Coast. The new study demonstrates that atmospheric river events can be directly compared globally using the intensity scale, which is how the researchers identified where the most intense events (AR-5) form and fizzle out, and how many of those make landfall.

    The researchers used climate data and their previously developed algorithm for identifying and tracking atmospheric rivers to build a database of intensity-ranked atmospheric river events around the globe over 40 years (1979/1980 to 2019/2020). The study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, which publishes research that advances understanding of Earth’s atmosphere and its interaction with other components of the Earth system.

    “This study is a first step toward making the atmospheric river scale a globally useful tool for meteorologists and city planners,” said Bin Guan, an atmospheric scientist at the Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, a collaboration between University of California-Los Angeles and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the study. “By mapping out the footprints of each atmospheric river rank globally, we can start to better understand the societal impacts of these events in many different regions.”

    The authors also found that more intense atmospheric rivers (AR-4 and AR-5) are less common than weaker events, with AR-5 events occurring only once every two to three years when globally averaged. The most intense atmospheric rivers are also less likely to make landfall, and when they do, they are unlikely to maintain their strength for long and penetrate farther inland. “They tend to dissipate soon after landfall, leaving their impacts most felt in coastal areas,” said Guan.

    The study found four “centers,” or hotspots, of where AR-5s tend to die, in the extratropical North Pacific and Atlantic, Southeast Pacific, and Southeast Atlantic. Cities on the coasts within these hotspots, such as San Francisco and Lisbon, are most likely to see intense AR-5s make landfall. Midlatitudes in general are the most likely regions to have atmospheric rivers of any rank.

    Strong El Niño years are more likely to have more atmospheric rivers, and stronger ones at that, which is noteworthy because NOAA recently forecasted that an El Niño condition is likely to develop by the end of the summer this year.

    While local meteorologists, news outlets and other West Coasters may have incorporated “atmospheric river” and the intensity scale into their lives, adoption has been slower elsewhere, Ralph said. He hopes to see, within five years or so, meteorologists on TV around the world incorporating the atmospheric river intensity scale into their forecasts, telling people whether the atmospheric river will be beneficial or if they need to prepare for a serious storm.

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    AGU (www.agu.org) is a global community supporting more than half a million advocates and professionals in Earth and space sciences. Through broad and inclusive partnerships, AGU aims to advance discovery and solution science that accelerate knowledge and create solutions that are ethical, unbiased and respectful of communities and their values. Our programs include serving as a scholarly publisher, convening virtual and in-person events and providing career support. We live our values in everything we do, such as our net zero energy renovated building in Washington, D.C. and our Ethics and Equity Center, which fosters a diverse and inclusive geoscience community to ensure responsible conduct.

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    Notes for Journalists:

    This study is published with open access and is freely available. Download a pdf copy of the paper here.

    Paper title:

    “Global application of the atmospheric river scale”

    Authors:

    • Bin Guan (corresponding author), Duane E. Waliser, Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA
    • F. Martin Ralph, Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, USA

    American Geophysical Union (AGU)

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