A new study shows that climate change is causing more instability in jet streams and making wind speeds faster, with turbulence predicted to triple in frequency between 2050 and 2080. What do you think?
“I can’t wait to take this out on a flight attendant!”
Jeremy Coit, Herb Farmer
“Can’t they just fly above the climate?”
Eleanor Rebadon, Detritus Collector
“Finally, an incentive to tackle climate change.”
Aaron Bauserman, Synopsizer
NEW YORK—Noting that there would be no reason to be concerned for the future of the planet again until tomorrow morning at the earliest, climate scientists at Columbia University announced Thursday that Earth was doing pretty good today, so everyone could take the afternoon off and have fun. “If anything, Earth could use a little extra carbon today,” said researcher Theodore Kneece, who encouraged climate change activists to take a break from their efforts for the remainder of the day, noting that the planet was doing surprisingly “A-okay” “Throw your soda cans in the trash. Buy a Keurig. Book a private jet. Trust me, the Earth will be fine—for today, that is. Let me be clear, we’ll still be facing a mass extinction in the near future, but today? Hit the beach!” At press time, Kneece added that activists might as well take a climate cheat day tomorrow, too.
This photograph taken on May 11, 2022 shows Shivaram, a villager walking through the cracked bottom of a dried-out pond on a hot summer day at Bandai village in Pali district. – Every day dozens of villagers, mostly women and children, wait with blue plastic jerry cans and metal pots for a special train bringing precious water to people suffering a heatwave in India’s desert state of Rajasthan.
Prakash Singh | Afp | Getty Images
Scientists from Africa, Asia and South America are getting a new infusion of $900,000 to study the effects of reflecting sunlight to cool the Earth and mitigate the impacts of global warming. The money comes from Open Philanthropy, a venture funded primarily by billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and Asana, and his wife, Cari Tuna.
Sunlight reflection involves releasing aerosols like sulfur dioxide high in the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back into space, temporarily mitigating global warming. (It’s sometimes called solar radiation modification or solar geoengineering.)
The idea has been around for decades, but it is being taken more seriously as the effects of climate change become more apparent. While volcanic eruptions have proven that the technique can work, there are significant risks as well, including damage to the ozone layer, acid rain and increased respiratory illness.
On Tuesday, nonprofit research organization The Degrees Initiative and the United Nation’s World Academy of Sciences announced they are distributing more than $900,000 to scientists across Africa, Asia and South America to study solar radiation modification in a program called “The Degrees Modelling Fund.” The Degrees Initiative has been funded by various donors over the years, but the biggest has been Open Philanthropy and all of the $900,000 disbursement announced Tuesday came from that group, Degrees Initiative co-founder and CEO Andy Parker told CNBC.
The money will go to 81 scientists in Benin, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Thailand and Uganda working on 15 solar geoengineering modeling projects.
Sunlight reflection is getting more attention as scientists have started suggesting that its negative effects may not be as bad as the harm from climate change will be in the future. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is coordinating a five-year research plan into solar geoengineering and in January, the quadrennial U.N.-backed Montreal Protocol assessment report included an entire chapter addressing stratospheric aerosol injection for the first time ever.
“Like anyone else sensible, when I first heard about the idea of blocking out the sun, I thought it was a terrible idea. As time goes by, the view didn’t really change it. It’s a horrible idea,” Parker told CNBC. “But it may prove to be less horrible than not using it and allowing temperatures to keep rising if we don’t cut our emissions far enough.”
I liken the decision to chemotherapy. Chemotherapy to treat cancer is also a horrible idea. It’s very dangerous. It’s unpleasant. It’s risky. And no one would ever consider doing it unless they feared the alternative. might be worse. And so it goes for solar geoengineering.
Andy Parker
CEO of The Degrees Initiative
Sunlight reflection is not a solution to climate change or global warming. It is a relatively fast and inexpensive way to temporarily cool the Earth. We know it works: In the 15 months following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, the average global temperature was about 1 degree Fahrenheit lower, according to NASA. Releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere from retrofitted planes would essentially mimic the way a volcano releases large quantities of aerosols into the atmosphere.
“It’s not a pleasant idea. It’s not a fun thing to work on. But it’s potentially important, it could be very, very helpful, it could be disastrous,” Parker told CNBC.
“I liken the decision to chemotherapy. Chemotherapy to treat cancer is also a horrible idea. It’s very dangerous. It’s unpleasant. It’s risky. And no one would ever consider doing it unless they feared the alternative might be worse. And so it goes for solar geoengineering,” he said.
Before launching The Degrees Initiative, Parker led the production of a 98-page report on geoengineering for The Royal Society, an independent science academy in the United Kingdom, and has done research at Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany.
A giant volcanic mushroom cloud explodes some 20 kilometers high from Mount Pinatubo above almost deserted US Clark Air Base, on June 12, 1991 followed by another more powerful explosion. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991 was the second largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century.
Arlan Naeg | Afp | Getty Images
One of Parker’s goals with the Degrees Initiative is to ensure that scientists from developing countries in the global south will be part of international conversations about sunlight reflection, he told CNBC.
“If it can work well to reduce the impacts of climate change, then they’ve got the most to gain because they’re on the frontlines of global warming,” he said. “If, on the other hand, it all goes wrong and there are nasty side effects, or perhaps if it’s rejected prematurely, when it could have helped, then developing countries have got the most to lose.”
But without philanthropic donations, research and decisions about solar geoengineering would be primarily relegated to the parts of the world that can afford it, like North America, the European Union and Japan, Parker said.
The $900,000 announced Tuesday is the second round of funding of this kind. In 2018, The Degrees Modelling Fund distributed $900,000 to 11 projects in Argentina, Bangladesh, Benin, Indonesia, Iran, the Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Kenya, Philippines and South Africa.
The money goes out in grants of up to $75,000, of which $60,000 is for salary and $15,000 is for the tools that a local research team would need, Parker told CNBC. Each scientific team should suggest its own proposal in the application for the grant money, he said. But broadly, the task for each team is to use computer models to predict the weather and their regional impacts — both with and without sunlight reflection.
“By comparing the two, they can start to generate evidence on what the impact of solar radiation modification might be on things that matter locally,” Parker said.
Scientists who have had their work funded by The Degrees Modelling Fund at a recent research-planning workshop for old and new teams in Istanbul.
Photo courtesy The Degrees Initiative
Ines Camilloni, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, has received two Degrees Initiative grants and is also getting funded by the government of Argentina. With the funding, Camilloni is researching how solar radiation modification would affect the hydroclimate of La Plata Basin, the fifth largest water basin in the world, covering parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, she told CNBC.
“A large fraction of the economic activities within the basin relies on water availability, including agriculture, river navigability and hydroelectric production, and therefore any variations in the water cycle of the basin could have significant impacts on the economy of each country,” Camilloni told CNBC.
Prof. Inés Camilloni speaking at the 2022 Paris Peace Forum.
Photo courtesy The Degrees Initiative
Camilloni says her research has so far showed that sunlight reflection could be helpful to some parts of the La Plata Basin region, but particularly harmful to others. Large rivers that power hydroelectric dams could see higher flows and increased energy production, balanced by a risk of more flooding.
In Buenos Aires, awareness of sunlight reflection has grown in the oast couple years, and it spurs strong emotions.
“The range of feelings that solar radiation modification generates goes from disbelief to fear. Everyone perceives it to be controversial,” Camilloni told CNBC.
Clear communication is critical, though, because even research proponents do not see it as a climate change silver bullet.
“This is no one’s Plan A for how you deal with climate risk, and whatever happens, we have to cut our emissions,” Parker told CNBC. “But people are finally starting to seriously address the question: What do we do if we don’t do enough with emissions cuts, if they prove insufficient to avoid very dangerous climate change? What are our options? And that leaves people regretfully, but necessarily, to think about things like solar radiation modification.”
Correction: Andy Parker is the co-founder and CEO of The Degrees Initiative. An earlier version didn’t attribute some quotes to him.
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Given an energy crisis in Europe and progress made in helping climate victims, the new climate chief for the United Nations said he’ll settle for a lack of new emissions-cutting action coming out of the now-concluded climate talks in Egypt.
It could have been worse, UN Executive Secretary for Climate Simon Stiell said in a seaside interview with The Associated Press. The talks did achieve the historic creation of a fund for poor nations that are victims of climate disasters, he said.
The progress made last year at the global climate meeting in Glasgow was maintained. “There was no backtracking. Which as a result, one could say, is highly unambitious. And I would actually agree,” a tired Stiell said hours after the Egyptian climate talks finished with one last around-the-clock push.
“To say that … we have, stood still. Yeah, that’s not great,” Stiell said. But he still likes the overall outcome of the first set of climate talks he oversaw, in particular the long-sought compensation fund for nations that didn’t cause warming.
Outside experts agree with Stiell that nothing was done on the central issue of reducing emissions that cause climate change and disasters like flooding in Pakistan.
“In the shadow of the energy crisis, there were no major new climate protection commitments at the conference,” said climate scientist Niklas Hohne, founder of the NewClimate Institute in Germany. “Glasgow a year ago was a small but important step in the right direction, with many new national targets and new international initiatives. None of that happened this year.”
That’s despite the fact that more than 90 nations repeatedly asked — many of them publicly — for the agreement to include a phase down of oil and gas use. The Glasgow agreement calls for a phase down of “unabated coal” — that is, coal burning where the carbon goes into the atmosphere rather than being captured somehow. Poor nations point out that they rely more on coal whereas oil and gas are used more in rich countries. These should also be required to phase down they said. In closing remarks at the talks, Stiell himself called for a phase down of oil and gas.
But the Egyptian presidency never put the proposal, which came from India, in any of the decision documents. The country that hosts and runs the climate talks has the power to make that choice.
Critics — including negotiators during the talks — blasted the Egyptian presidency and its agenda setting. Environmental groups repeatedly pointed out Egypt’s dependence on exports of natural gas, its role as operator of Suez Canal petroleum traffic and income from neighboring oil states. Oil and natural gas are both principal contributors to climate change.
Next year’s climate talks will be held in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil power. Environmental advocates and outside experts fear that oil and gas phase down language won’t get a fair shake next year either.
Asked about the wisdom of having fossil fuel exporting countries host and control climate talks, Stiell said: “They are part of the problem, but they are also part of the solution.” To try to manage this process without their involvement, would give “an incomplete picture,” he said.
“The global economy is still based certainly on oil and gas. And that is the challenge,” Stiell said.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, a climate scientist, called this a serious problem.
“The massive presence of oil and gas interests at the COP undermines the integrity of the UN climate process and could be slowly eroding its legitimacy,” Hare said. “The suspected influence of petrol states and oil and gas lobbyists on the Egyptian presidency Is unhealthy to say the least.”
Analyst Alex Scott of E3G said Egypt showed “a sense of willful ignorance” in not considering a document with a call for oil and gas phase down. The influence of petro states on the presidency happens out of site and “is the right question to ask,” she said.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, the climate talks president, didn’t answer a shouted question Sunday about oil and gas phase down language.
Stiell said countries have to keep coming back and putting pressure on each other to include language calling for a phase down on oil and gas. That worked for this year’s key accomplishment — the establishment of a fund for poor nations that are victims of climate disasters.
But that also took more than 30 years.
While critics bash Egypt and cite the influence of fossil fuel interests in the lack of action on reducing emissions, also known as mitigation, Stiell attributed the inaction to other things going on.
He said there were complaints that last year’s climate talks were too mitigation oriented and this year’s talks restored balance.
“You cannot do too much mitigation!” Hohne responded in an email. The global goal of limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, “remains in intensive care as conditions deteriorate. The conference met the minimum requirements, but that is far from enough.”
But getting the climate fund was a big and all-consuming accomplishment, Stiell said. Before he took the UN climate chief job this summer, he had been working on it as a cabinet minister for the small island nation of Grenada.
“This is a 30-year discussion,” Stiell said. “I’ve been involved in that for ten years as a Grenadian minister, hearing just how ‘this can’t be done’ and how ‘this is impossible’.”
Mohamed Adow of the environmental group Powershift Africa agreed. “COP27 was a surprise precisely because for once the needs of the vulnerable were actually listened to,” he said.
As he looks back, Stiell said he still has great hope.
“So progress: incremental, slight, insufficient. A lot more to be done,” Stiell said summing up climate change fighting efforts. “We’re still right there in the middle of crisis mode.”
Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Given an energy crisis in Europe and progress made in helping climate victims, the new climate chief for the United Nations said he’ll settle for a lack of new emissions-cutting action coming out of the now-concluded climate talks in Egypt.
It could have been worse, UN Executive Secretary for Climate Simon Stiell said in a seaside interview with The Associated Press. The talks did achieve the historic creation of a fund for poor nations that are victims of climate disasters, he said.
The progress made last year at the global climate meeting in Glasgow was maintained. “There was no backtracking. Which as a result, one could say, is highly unambitious. And I would actually agree,” a tired Stiell said hours after the Egyptian climate talks finished with one last around-the-clock push.
“To say that … we have, stood still. Yeah, that’s not great,” Stiell said. But he still likes the overall outcome of the first set of climate talks he oversaw, in particular the long-sought compensation fund for nations that didn’t cause warming.
Outside experts agree with Stiell that nothing was done on the central issue of reducing emissions that cause climate change and disasters like flooding in Pakistan.
“In the shadow of the energy crisis, there were no major new climate protection commitments at the conference,” said climate scientist Niklas Hohne, founder of the NewClimate Institute in Germany. “Glasgow a year ago was a small but important step in the right direction, with many new national targets and new international initiatives. None of that happened this year.”
That’s despite the fact that more than 90 nations repeatedly asked — many of them publicly — for the agreement to include a phase down of oil and gas use. The Glasgow agreement calls for a phase down of “unabated coal” — that is, coal burning where the carbon goes into the atmosphere rather than being captured somehow. Poor nations point out that they rely more on coal whereas oil and gas are used more in rich countries. These should also be required to phase down they said. In closing remarks at the talks, Stiell himself called for a phase down of oil and gas.
But the Egyptian presidency never put the proposal, which came from India, in any of the decision documents. The country that hosts and runs the climate talks has the power to make that choice.
Critics — including negotiators during the talks — blasted the Egyptian presidency and its agenda setting. Environmental groups repeatedly pointed out Egypt’s dependence on exports of natural gas, its role as operator of Suez Canal petroleum traffic and income from neighboring oil states. Oil and natural gas are both principal contributors to climate change.
Next year’s climate talks will be held in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil power. Environmental advocates and outside experts fear that oil and gas phase down language won’t get a fair shake next year either.
Asked about the wisdom of having fossil fuel exporting countries host and control climate talks, Stiell said: “They are part of the problem, but they are also part of the solution.” To try to manage this process without their involvement, would give “an incomplete picture,” he said.
“The global economy is still based certainly on oil and gas. And that is the challenge,” Stiell said.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, a climate scientist, called this a serious problem.
“The massive presence of oil and gas interests at the COP undermines the integrity of the UN climate process and could be slowly eroding its legitimacy,” Hare said. “The suspected influence of petrol states and oil and gas lobbyists on the Egyptian presidency Is unhealthy to say the least.”
Analyst Alex Scott of E3G said Egypt showed “a sense of willful ignorance” in not considering a document with a call for oil and gas phase down. The influence of petro states on the presidency happens out of site and “is the right question to ask,” she said.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, the climate talks president, didn’t answer a shouted question Sunday about oil and gas phase down language.
Stiell said countries have to keep coming back and putting pressure on each other to include language calling for a phase down on oil and gas. That worked for this year’s key accomplishment — the establishment of a fund for poor nations that are victims of climate disasters.
But that also took more than 30 years.
While critics bash Egypt and cite the influence of fossil fuel interests in the lack of action on reducing emissions, also known as mitigation, Stiell attributed the inaction to other things going on.
He said there were complaints that last year’s climate talks were too mitigation oriented and this year’s talks restored balance.
“You cannot do too much mitigation!” Hohne responded in an email. The global goal of limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, “remains in intensive care as conditions deteriorate. The conference met the minimum requirements, but that is far from enough.”
But getting the climate fund was a big and all-consuming accomplishment, Stiell said. Before he took the UN climate chief job this summer, he had been working on it as a cabinet minister for the small island nation of Grenada.
“This is a 30-year discussion,” Stiell said. “I’ve been involved in that for ten years as a Grenadian minister, hearing just how ‘this can’t be done’ and how ‘this is impossible’.”
Mohamed Adow of the environmental group Powershift Africa agreed. “COP27 was a surprise precisely because for once the needs of the vulnerable were actually listened to,” he said.
As he looks back, Stiell said he still has great hope.
“So progress: incremental, slight, insufficient. A lot more to be done,” Stiell said summing up climate change fighting efforts. “We’re still right there in the middle of crisis mode.”
Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
KONOMIE ISLAND, Australia — Below the turquoise waters off the coast of Australia is one of the world’s natural wonders, an underwater rainbow jungle teeming with life that scientists say is showing some of the clearest signs yet of climate change.
The Great Barrier Reef, battered but not broken by climate change impacts, is inspiring hope and worry alike as researchers race to understand how it can survive a warming world. Authorities are trying to buy the reef time by combining ancient knowledge with new technology. They are studying coral reproduction in hopes to accelerate regrowth and adapt it to handle hotter and rougher seas.
Underwater heat waves and cyclones driven in part by runaway greenhouse gas emissions have devastated some of the 3,000 coral reefs making up the Great Barrier Reef. Pollution fouls its waters, and outbreaks of crown of thorns starfish have ravaged its corals.
Researchers say climate change is already challenging the vibrant marine superstructure and all that depend upon it — and that more destruction is to come.
“This is a clear climate change signal. It’s going to happen again and again,” said Anne Hoggett, director of the Lizard Island Research Station, on the continuing damage to the reef from stronger storms and marine heat waves. “It’s going to be a rollercoaster.”
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RELATED: Damage and regrowth on the Great Barrier Reef
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Billions of microscopic animals called polyps have built this breathtaking 1,400-mile long colossus that is visible from space and perhaps a million years old. It is home to thousands of known plant and animal species and boasts a $6.4 billion annual tourism industry.
“The corals are the engineers. They build shelter and food for countless animals,” said Mike Emslie, head of the Long-Term Monitoring Program of the reef at the Australian Institute for Marine Science.
Emslie’s team have seen disasters get bigger, and hit more and more frequently over 37 years of underwater surveys.
Heat waves in recent years drove corals to expel countless tiny organisms that power the reefs through photosynthesis, causing branches to lose their color or “bleach.” Without these algae, corals don’t grow, can become brittle, and provide less for the nearly 9,000 reef-dependent species. Cyclones in the past dozen years smashed acres of corals. Each of these were historic catastrophes in their own right, but without time to recover between events, the reef couldn’t regrow.
In the last heat wave however, Emslie’s team at AIMS noticed new corals sprouting up faster than expected.
“The reef is not dead,” he said. “It is an amazing, beautiful, complex, and remarkable system that has the ability to recover if it gets a chance – and the best way we can give it a chance is by cutting carbon emissions.”
The first step in the government’s reef restoration plan is to understand better the enigmatic life cycle of the coral itself.
For that, dozens of Australian researchers take to the seas across the reef when conditions are ripe for reproduction in a spawning event that is the only time each year when coral polyps naturally reproduce as winter warms into spring.
But scientists say that is too slow if corals are to survive global warming. So they don scuba gear to gather coral eggs and sperm during the spawning. Back in labs, they test ways to speed up corals’ reproductive cycle and boost genes that survive higher temperatures.
One such lab, a ferry retrofitted into a “sci-barge”, floats off the coast of Konomie Island, also known as North Keppel Island, a two-hour boat ride from the mainland in Queensland state.
One recent blustery afternoon, Carly Randall, who heads the AIMS coral restoration program, stood amidst buckets filled with coral specimens and experimental coral-planting technologies. She said the long-term plan is to grow “tens to hundreds of millions” of baby corals every year and plant them across the reef.
Randall compared it to tree-planting with drones but underwater.
Her colleagues at AIMS have successfully bred corals in a lab off-season, a crucial first step in being able to at scale introduce genetic adaptions like heat-resistance.
Engineers are designing robots to fit in a mothership that would deploy underwater drones. Those drones would attach genetically-selected corals to the reef with boomerang-shaped clips. Corals in specific targets will enhance the reef’s “natural recovery processes” which would eventually “overtake the work that we’ve been doing to keep it going through climate change,” she said.
Australia has recently been slammed by historic wildfires, floods, and cyclones exacerbated by climate instability.
That has driven a political shift in the country as voters have grown more concerned with climate change, helping sweep in new national leadership in this year’s federal elections, said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics.
The nation’s previous prime minister, Scott Morrison, was a conservative who was chided for minimizing the need to address climate change.
The new center-left government of Anthony Albanese passed legislation to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and includes 43% green house gas reductions by 2030. Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of coal and liquefied natural gas, and lags behind major industrial countries’ emission targets.
The new government has blocked a coal plant from being opened near the Great Barrier Reef, yet recently allowed other coal plants new permits.
It is also continuing investment to boost the reef’s natural ability to adapt to rapidly warming climate.
The Italy-sized reef is managed like a national park by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
GBRMPA chief scientist David Wachenfeld said that “despite recent impacts from climate change, the Great Barrier Reef is still a vast, diverse, beautiful and resilient ecosystem.”
However, that is today, in a world warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).
“As we approach two degrees (Celsius) and certainly as we pass it, we will lose the world’s coral reefs and all the benefits that they give to humanity,” Wachenfeld said. He added that as home to over 30% of marine biodiversity, coral reefs are essential for the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people all over the tropics.
The reef is “part of the national identity of Australians and of enormous spiritual and cultural significance for our First Nations people,” Wachenfeld said.
After long mistreatment and neglect by the federal government, Indigenous groups now have a growing role in management of the reef. The government seeks their permission for projects there and hires from the communities to study and repair it.
Multiple members of the Yirrganydji and Gunggandji communities work as guides, sea rangers and researchers on reef protection and restoration projects.
After scuba diving through turquoise waters teeming with fish and vibrant corals, Tarquin Singleton said his people hold memories more than 60,000 years old of this “sea country” — including previous climatic changes.
“That connection is ingrained in our DNA,” said Singleton, who is from the Yirrganydji people native to the area around Cairns. He now works as a cultural officer with Reef Cooperative, a joint venture of tourism agencies, the government and Indigenous groups.
“Utilizing that today can actually preserve what we have for future generations.”
The Woppaburra people native to Konomie and Woppa islands barely survived Australian colonization. Now they’re forging a new kind of unity “in a way that wouldn’t happen normally” by sharing ancient oral histories and working on research vessels, said Bob Muir, an Indigenous elder working as a community liaison with AIMS.
For now, reef-wide farming and planting corals is plausible science fiction. It’s too expensive now to scale up to levels needed to “buy the reef time” as humanity cuts emissions, Randall said.
But she said that within 10 to 15 years the drones could be in the water.
But Randall warns that robots, coral farms and skilled divers “will absolutely not work if we don’t get emissions under control.”
“This is one of many tools in the toolkit being developed,” she said. “But unless we can get emissions under control, we don’t have much hope for the reef ecosystem.”
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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment and Sam McNeil on Twitter @stmcneil
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Ninety percent of the counties in the United States suffered a weather disaster between 2011 and 2021, according to a report published Wednesday.
Some endured as many as 12 federally-declared disasters over those 11 years. More than 300 million people — 93% of the country’s population — live in these counties.
Rebuild by Design, which published the report, is a nonprofit that researches ways to prepare for and adapt to climate change. It was started by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the catastrophic storm that slammed into the eastern U.S. just over ten years ago, causing $62.5 billion in damage.
Researchers had access to data from contractors who work closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, allowing them to analyze disasters and payouts down to the county level. The report includes some 250 maps. They also looked at who is most vulnerable, and compared how long people in different places are left without power after extreme weather.
California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee had the most disasters, at least 20 each, including severe storms, wildfire, flooding, and landslides. But entirely different states — Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, North Dakota and Vermont — received the most disaster funding per person over the 11-year period.
Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design and co-author of the report, said she was surprised to see some states are getting more money to rebuild than others. Partly it’s that cost of living differs among states. So does the monetary value of what gets damaged or destroyed.
“Disaster funding is oftentimes skewed toward communities that are more affluent and have the most resources,” said Robert Bullard, an environmental and climate justice professor at Texas Southern University, who was not part of the team that wrote the report. Bullard wrote a book, “The Wrong Complexion for Protection” in 2012 with another environmental and climate justice expert, Beverly Wright, about how federal responses to disasters often exclude black communities.
The new report seems to support that. People who are most vulnerable to the effects of these extreme weather events are not receiving much of the money, the report said. Those areas of the country also endure the longest electric outages.
“When disasters hit …. funding doesn’t get to the places of greatest need,” Bullard said.
Another reason for the unevenness of funds could be that heat waves are excluded from federal disaster law and don’t trigger government aid. If they did, states in the southwest like Arizona and Nevada might rank higher on spending per person.
REPORT OVERSTEPS
The report was prepared by policy advocates, not scientists, and oversteps in attributing every weather disaster to climate change. That is inaccurate. Climate change has turbocharged the climate and made some hurricanes stronger and disaster more frequent, said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to call every every disaster we’ve experienced in the last 40 years a climate disaster.”
Even though all the weather disasters compiled aren’t attributable to climate change, Jackson said the collection could still have value.
“I do think there is a service to highlighting that weather disasters affect essentially all Americans now, no matter where we live.”
The annual costs of disasters has skyrocketed, he said, to over $100 billion in 2020. The National Centers for Environmental Information tallied more than $150 billion for 2021.
POLICY CHANGE
The federal government provided counties a total $91 billion to recover after extreme events over the 11 years, the researchers found. That only includes spending from two programs run by FEMA and HUD, not individual assistance or insurance payouts from the agency. Nor does it include help from other agencies like the Small Business Administration or Army Corps of Engineers.
Chester said that if all these federal disaster relief programs were included, the total would be far higher. The National Centers for Environmental Information estimate over $1 trillion was spent on weather and climate events between 2011 and 2021.
The report recommends the federal government shift to preventing disasters rather than waiting for events to happen. It cites the National Institute of Building Sciences which says that every dollar invested in mitigating natural disaster by building levees or doing prescribed burns saves the country $6.
“The key takeaway for us is that our government continues to invest in places that have already suffered instead of investing in the areas with the highest social and physical vulnerability,” Chester said.
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Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate slammed world leaders Tuesday who persist in backing new fossil fuel projects despite science warnings that this will push temperatures across the planet to dangerous highs.
Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris climate accord to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century if possible. But scientists say that with about 1.2 Celsius (21. Fahrenheit) of warming already reached, that target is likely to be missed.
“The focus for many leaders is about making deals for fossil fuel lobbyists, surviving the next election cycle and grabbing as much short-term profit as possible,” Nakate said at an event on the sidelines of the U.N. climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
She warned that the annual meeting is being infiltrated by oil and gas representatives who are turning it into “a sales and marketing conference for more pollution and more destruction and more devastation.”
Environmental groups have counted more than 600 delegates with links to the fossil fuel industry at the two-week meeting.
Nakate cited research from the International Energy Agency stating that there can be no new investment in coal, oil or gas if the world is to stay below 1.5 C.
This was being undermined by massive public spending on fossil fuel subsidies, partly as a result of the fallout from Russia’s attack on Ukraine which has triggered a scramble for alternative sources of oil and gas.
“You are sowing the wind and frontline communities are reaping the whirlwind,” she said. “You are sowing seeds of coal, oil and gas while frontline communities are reaping havoc, devastation and destruction.”
Many developing nations are disproportionately impacted by climate change as they are less able to adapt to extreme weather exacerbated by global warming.
Nakate called out those countries that have issued new licenses for oil and gas exploitation in their territorial waters, or promised investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure in Africa.
Jochen Flasbarth, a long-time German climate negotiator, said Nakate was right to highlight the urgency of tackling climate change but questioned her criticism of politicians concerned about elections.
“You might be right that politicians sometimes have a short-term view, but (you should) still make the best out of these elections,” he said, adding that “it is young people who increasingly did not go to elections over the last ten years” in many democratic nations.
Flasbarth told Nakate that young people “need to collaborate” with democratic processes to help “strengthen democracy around the world.”
Nakate’s speech came as negotiators at the conference haggle over numerous thorny issues including increasing efforts to cut greenhouse gases and providing more financial help to poor nations.
Ministers began arriving in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday to provide a push for the meeting to clinch a substantial deal by its schedule close on Friday.
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Hydrogen cars and vehicles that capture their tailpipe pollutants. Computer mice made from recycled ocean waste plastic. Hundreds of millions of trees planted in the desert. Saudi Arabia’s vision of an environmentally friendly future is on display just a short drive from the venue of the U.N. climate summit being held in Egypt.
What’s not highlighted in the glossy gallery are the earth-warming fossil fuels that the country continues to pump out of the ground for global export. Fossil fuel emissions are the reason why negotiators from nearly 200 countries have gathered at the annual two-week conference, haggling over how pollution can be cut and how fast to do it.
In and around the conference, Saudi Arabia is presenting itself as a leader in green energies and eco-friendly practices, with flashy pavilions, glossy presentations and optimistic assessments of technologies like carbon capture, which can remove carbon dioxide from the air but is costly and years away from being deployed at scale.
“We have hugely ambitious goals and targets,” Saudi climate envoy Adel al-Jubeir said at the two-day Saudi Green Initiative Forum on COP27′s sidelines. “We want to be an example to the world in terms of what can be done.”
The effort is part of a large push by Saudi Arabia, which has some of the world’s largest reserves of oil and is a leader of the OPEC oil cartel, to make the case that the nation should be part of the transition to renewable energies while holding on to its role as the top global crude oil exporter. That vision is sharply contested by climate scientists and environmental experts, who argue that Saudi Arabia and other countries with large reserves of oil simply want to distract the world to continue with business as usual.
The Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman al Saud, announced a raft of new green projects or updates to existing ones, from beefed up tree planting pledges to fresh solar energy energy projects in the pipeline.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched his Saudi Green Initiative ahead of last year’s COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, with a target for “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2060.
Still, energy exports are the Saudi economy’s mainstay, earning $150 billion in annual revenue, despite efforts to diversify revenue as the global transition away from fossil fuel reliance accelerates.
At the Saudi forum, officials and invited guest speakers from renewable energy companies held forth on topics like clean hydrogen, greening the desert, and a futuristic desert city project called Neom.
State-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco’s CEO, Amin Nasser, said the world needs more investment in oil and gas, not less, a message at odds with the sentiment among many country delegations and climate experts and activists attending COP27.
“I’m concerned because of lack of investment in the oil and gas in particular,” said Nasser, touching on a frequent theme. Saudi Arabia has resisted calls to urgently phase out fossil fuels, warning that a premature switch has led to price spikes and shortages.
“Yes, there is good investment happening in the alternatives,” such as wind and solar power, he said, adding that the amount of money spent on oil production capacity has fallen to $400 billion a year from $700 billion in 2014.
“That is not enough to meet global demand in the mid to long term,” he said.
An Aramco spokesman said Nasser wasn’t available for an interview.
Among the Saudi announcements, there were plans to set up a regional center to “advance emissions reductions” and one to host a regional climate week ahead of next year’s COP meeting.
Saudi Arabia is also set to build 13 renewable energy projects with a total generating capacity of 11.4 gigawatts, though experts said that’s a step back from numbers announced in previous years.
Once they’re up and running, the new energy projects will cut carbon dioxide emissions by about 20 million tons a year.
Saudi Aramco plans to build the world’s biggest carbon capture and storage hub, which will store up to 9 million tons of carbon dioxide when its up and running in 2027.
It’s all part of the kingdom’s pledged to cut emissions by 278 million tons a year by 2030. That’s still small compared to about 10 billion metric tons of carbon spewed globally into the air annually.
The kingdom also upgraded its tree planting goal to 600 million by 2030, including mangroves, up from its 450 million initial target.
Climate experts weren’t convinced.
“Saudi Arabia would be better placed to focus on cutting emissions rather than relying on carbon capture and storage and questionable reductions from planting trees, the offsets of which would simply allow them to continue increasing emissions from burning fossil fuels,” said Mia Moisio, a an energy policy expert focusing on Middle East and North Africa at the New Climate Institute think tank.
“To keep emissions on a 1.5˚C pathway, all governments must focus on cutting fossil fuel emissions, not offsetting them.”
The Climate Action Tracker, operated by the institute and its partners, rates Saudi Arabia as “highly insufficient.”
The tracker analyzes nations’ climate targets and policies compared to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement that spells out ideally limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).
Saudi authorities are promoting what they call a “circular carbon economy” to cut emissions from oil and gas operations, but the tracker says this it “only addresses a fraction of relevant emissions in Saudi Arabia and globally, as most emissions related to oil and gas come from fuel combustion rather than extraction and processing.”
Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas assets spew 900 million tons of emissions a year, according to an inventory of top known sources of greenhouse gas emitters compiled by the Climate TRACE coalition and launched at COP27.
There’s also a plan for a greenhouse gas crediting and offsetting scheme next year, with few details. Carbon credits, which allow countries and companies to pay to reduce their carbon footprints, say by planting trees, have become increasingly controversial, with critics saying they’re a license for polluting companies to keep polluting.
At least year’s talks in Glasgow, Saudi Arabia faced accusations that its negotiators were working to block climate measures that would threaten demand for oil – a charge that the energy minister called a lie.
As negotiations on the final agreement head into their second and final week, watchdog groups warned about the influence of so-called petrostates and industry lobbyists. They counted 636 people linked to fossil fuel companies on the meeting’s provisional list of participants, a quarter more than last year’s tally.
“The Saudis may well be coming to COP27 with a green hat on and extolling the virtues of planting trees, but this is a state that continues to profit wildly from the destructive practices causing the climate crisis,” said Alice Harrison, a campaigner at Global Witness, one of the groups that did the count. “Any exhibitions, talks or shows to the contrary are pure greenwashing.”
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — As the U.N. climate talks in Egypt near the half-way point, negotiators are working hard to draft deals on a wide range of issues they’ll put to ministers next week in the hope of getting a substantial result by the end.
The two-week meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh started with strong appeals from world leaders for greater efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and help poor nations cope with global warming.
Scientists say the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere needs to be halved by 2030 to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord. The 2015 pact set a target of ideally limiting temperature rise to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, but left it up to countries to decide how they want to do so.
With impacts from climate change already felt across the globe, particularly by the world’s poorest, there has also been a push by campaigners and developing nations for rich polluters to stump up more cash. This would be used to help developing countries shift to clean energy and adapt to global warming; increasingly there are also calls for compensation to pay for climate-related losses.
Here is a look at the main issues on the table at the COP27 talks and how they might be reflected in a final agreement.
KEEPING COOL
The hosts of last year’s talks in Glasgow said they managed to “keep 1.5 alive,” including by getting countries to endorse the target in the outcome document. But U.N. chief Antonio Guterres has warned that the temperature goal is on life support “and the machines are rattling.” And campaigners were disappointed that agenda this year doesn’t explicitly cite the threshold after pushback from some major oil and gas exporting nations. The talks’ chair, Egypt, can still convene discussions on putting it in the final agreement.
CUTTING EMISSIONS
Negotiators are trying to put together a mitigation work program that would capture the various measures countries have committed to reducing emissions, including for specific sectors such as energy and transport. Many of these pledges are not formally part of the U.N. process, meaning they cannot easily be scrutinized at the annual meeting. A proposed draft agreement circulated early Saturday had more than 200 square brackets, meaning large sections were still unresolved. Some countries want the plan to be valid only for one year, while others say a longer-term roadmap is needed. Expect fireworks in the days ahead.
SHUNNING FOSSIL FUELS
Last year’s meeting almost collapsed over a demand to explicitly state in the final agreement that coal should be phased out. In the end, countries agreed on several loopholes, and there are concerns among climate campaigners that negotiators from nations which are heavily dependent on fossil fuels for their energy needs or as revenue might try to roll back previous commitments.
MONEY MATTERS
Rich countries have fallen short on a pledge to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 in climate finance for poor nations. This has opened up a rift of distrust that negotiators are hoping to close with fresh pledges. But needs are growing and a new, higher target needs to be set from 2025 onward.
COMPENSATION
The subject of climate compensation was once considered taboo, due to concerns from rich countries that they might be on the hook for vast sums. But intense pressure from developing countries forced the issue of ‘loss and damage’ onto the formal agenda at the talks for the first time this year. Whether there will be a deal to promote further technical work or the creation of an actual fund remains to be seen. This could become a key flashpoint in the talks.
MORE DONORS
One way to raise additional cash and resolve the thorny issue of polluter payment would be for those countries that have seen an economic boom in the past three decades to step up. The focus is chiefly on China, the world’s biggest emitter, but others could be asked to open their purses too. Broadening the donor base isn’t formally on the agenda but developed countries want reassurances about that in the final texts.
CASH CONSTRAINTS
Countries such as Britain and Germany want all financial flows to align with the long-term goals of the Paris accord. Other nations object to such a rule, fearing they may have money withheld if they don’t meet the strict targets. But there is chatter that the issue may get broader support next week if it helps unlock other areas of the negotiations.
SIDE DEALS
Last year’s meeting saw a raft of agreements signed which weren’t formally part of the talks. Some have also been unveiled in Egypt, though hopes for a series of announcements on so-called Just Transition Partnerships — where developed countries help poorer nations wean themselves off fossil fuels — aren’t likely to bear fruit until after COP27.
HOPE TILL THE END
Jennifer Morgan, a former head of Greenpeace who recently became Germany’s climate envoy, called the talks this year “challenging.”
“But I can promise you we will be working until the very last second to ensure that we can reach an ambitious and equitable outcome,” she said. “We are reaching for the stars while keeping our feet on the ground.”
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Members of a Republican Congressional delegation took the stage at this year’s U.N. climate talks Friday to tout the benefits of fossil fuels — a bold move at a meeting that’s all about curbing carbon emissions for the good of humanity.
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that heat-trapping gases such as those released from the combustion of coal, oil and gas are pushing up global temperatures, thereby causing sea-level rise, extreme weather and species extinctions.
Yet Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, said it would be wrong to demonize fossil fuels.
“I think we need to decide as a world: Do we hate greenhouse gas emissions or do we hate fossil fuels,” said Curtis, who is known for founding the Conservative Climate Caucus. “It’s not the same thing.”
Like Curtis, Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., suggested fossil fuels can be a form of clean energy, if only the carbon released by extracting and burning them could be captured and stored safely.
“One of the things we ought to be doing is not attacking oil and gas, it’s to be attacking the emissions associated with it, to where it can be indistinguishable from other renewable energy technologies,” he told an audience in the U.S. pavilion at the climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh.
This, Graves argued, would make fossil fuels “an arrow in the quiver as we try to address our objectives of energy affordability, reliability, cleanliness, exportability and security of supply chain.”
Their comments echo industry efforts in recent years to separate carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in public perception. House Republicans’ views are likely to become more important given the expected turnover of the House to Republican control.
Andrea Dutton, a professor of geoscience and MacArthur Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that’s not possible.
“Burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases that are causing temperatures to rise rapidly, and this is the major contributor to the global warming we are experiencing,” she said in an email. “This is not a matter of belief but rather a matter of scientific evidence.”
While the fossil fuel industry has made some advances in reducing emissions per unit of fuel burned — largely due to government regulation and pressure from those concerned about climate change — neither coal, oil nor gas are anywhere near being a clean source of energy.
One solution promoted by industry is the idea of carbon capture, to prevent emissions from reaching the atmosphere, usually storing the exhaust gases underground. There is also “direct air capture,” in a nascent stage, that would be able to remove emissions once they are in the air.
Nobody has demonstrated a cost-effective way of doing either at scale, said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.
“Renewables are presently the cheapest energy — even without carbon capture on fossil fuels — so adding carbon capture is never going to be the economically superior solution,” he said.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, said that replacing one fossil fuel — coal — with a slightly cleaner one — natural gas — would already result in big emissions cuts.
In the United States natural gas has already displaced coal in many cases and is responsible for substantial reductions of one main greehouse gas, carbon dioxide, in recent years.
“Let them build the pipelines they need, let them build the export terminals they need,” Crenshaw told the audience in Egypt, adding that the effect would be “the equivalent of giving every American solar panels, giving every American a Tesla, and doubling our wind capacity.”
Several experts contacted by The Associated Press said that was not an ideal solution. Natural gas is made up mostly of methane. Satelites show the powerful greenhouse gas leaking from equipment at every stage of production.
“To solve the climate crisis we have to stop emitting carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere,” said Jonathan T. Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. “The production and use of natural gas does both, so we have to stop using natural gas as soon as we can.”
Overpeck warned that all fossil fuel infrastructure now being built, including for natural gas, risks becoming a stranded asset if governments want to make good on their pledges to curb climate change.
“This is why we must leapfrog the gas-based solutions to renewable energy-based solutions, plus battery storage, plus hydrogen,” he said in an email to The AP.
Crenshaw, the lawmaker from Texas, accused “radical environmentalists” of exaggerating the threat posed by climate change and misstating the science.
“Let’s not lie to our children and scare them to death, then tell them they’re going to burn alive because of this,” he said.
Donald Wuebbles, a University of Illinois professor of atmospheric sciences, past assistant director of the Office of Science, Technology and Policy at the White House and former lead author on the U.N.’s independent climate science panel, said the allegation was misplaced.
“Nobody’s out there saying children are going to burn to death,” Wuebbles wrote. “What we are saying is this is an extremely serious problem, perhaps the most serious problem humanity has ever faced and we need to deal with it.”
The Republican delegation spoke shortly before U.S. President Joe Biden delivered a speech in a packed hall at the same venue, where he announced additional measures to crack down on methane emissions and promoted his administration’s recent climate bill that’s designed to boost rooftop solar and electric car uptake.
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — U.S. President Joe Biden is coming to international climate talks in Egypt this week with a message that historic American action to fight climate change won’t shift into reverse, as happened twice before when Democrats lost power.
Current and former Biden top climate officials said the vast majority of the summer’s incentive-laden $375 billion climate-and-health spending package — by far the biggest law passed by Congress to fight global warming — was crafted in a way that will make it hard and unpalatable for future Republican Congresses or presidents to reverse it.
Outside experts agree, but say other parts of the Biden climate agenda can be stalled by a Republican Congress and courts.
Twice in the 30-year history of climate negotiations, Democratic administrations helped forged an international agreement, but when they lost the White House, their Republican successors pulled out of those pacts.
And after decades of American promises at past climate summits but little congressional action, the United States for the first time has actual legislation to point to. The climate and health law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, was approved without a single Republican vote, prompting some advocates to worry it may not withstand GOP attacks if Republicans gain control of the House or Senate.
Then Tuesday’s election happened, with a razor-thin contest for control of Congress.
Results are still not quite known, but Democrats showed surprising strength. Sierra Club President Ramon Cruz at the climate summit Wednesday claimed a victory of sorts, saying, “We see in a way that people in the U.S. actually do understand and do support climate action.”
If Republicans grab control of Congress, they won’t have a veto-proof majority, and even if a Republican takes over the White House in the next few years the tax credits will be in place and spur industry, said Samantha Gross, head of climate and energy studies at the centrist Brookings Institution.
“It’s a lot of tax credits and goodies that make it hard to repeal,” Gross said.
At the climate negotiations in Egypt, where Biden arrives Friday, his special climate envoy John Kerry said, “Most of what we’re doing cannot be changed by anyone else who comes to Washington because most of what we do is in the private sector. The marketplace has made its decision to do what we need to do.”
It’s all by design, said Gina McCarthy, who until recently was Biden’s domestic climate czar.
“About 70% of the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act are about (tax) credits that directly benefit” industries, McCarthy said in an interview with The Associated Press at the climate negotiations.
She said it will be difficult for Republicans to “change the dynamic” to significantly undermine the act. “It is passed, is beneficial. We have Republicans all throughout the country actually doing ribbon cuttings.”
Studies show most of the money, new jobs, are going into Republican states, said climate policy analyst Alden Meyer of the E3G think-tank. McCarthy and Kerry are “largely correct” in claiming the law can’t be rolled back, he said, and Gross agreed.
Several analyses, inside and outside the government, said the law would cut U.S. emissions by 40% by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, which is not quite the official U.S. goal of 50% to 52% cuts by that time.
But McCarthy is saying, wait, there’s more. She said that upcoming but not yet announced carbon pollution regulations and advances by private industries, states and cities will allow the United States to achieve and even exceed that goal, something outside experts are far more skeptical about.
Republicans are likely to push for a sharp increase in oversight of Biden administration policies, including incentives for electric vehicles and loans for clean energy projects such as battery manufacturers, wind and solar farms and production of “clean” hydrogen.
“Republicans are looking for the next Solyndra,’’ said Joseph Brazauskas, a former Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency official, referring to a California solar company that failed soon after receiving more than $500 million in federal aid under the Obama administration.
“Certainly, congressional oversight is likely to ramp up considerably’’ under a GOP-led House or Senate, said Brazauskas, who led the Trump EPA’s congressional relations office and now is a principal with the Bracewell LLP law firm.
Republicans support many of the tax credits approved under the climate law. But they complain Biden is moving too fast to replace gas-engine cars with electric vehicles and say he hasn’t done enough to counter China’s influence in the renewable energy supply chain.
Republicans also are likely to probe EPA actions on climate change, air quality and wetlands, citing a Supreme Court ruling last summer that curbed the EPA’s authority to address climate change, Brazauskas said. The decision, known as West Virginia v. EPA, “has really opened a window for regulatory scrutiny at the agency,” he said.
Democrats say they learned important lessons from the Solyndra episode and don’t intend to repeat past mistakes. The loan program that helped Solyndra turned a profit and generates an estimated $500 million in interest income for the federal government every year.
Even with a Democratic Congress, the Biden Administration couldn’t dramatically increase climate aid to poor nations. The rich countries of the world in 2009 promised $100 billion a year to help poorer nations switch to green energy sources and adapt to a warmer world. T hey haven’t fulfilled that promise, with the United States donating far less than Europe.
That money doesn’t include the hottest topic at the Egyptian climate talks: Loss and damage, meaning reparations for climate-related disasters. The United States is historically the No. 1 carbon polluter, while poorer nations with small carbon emissions bear the brunt of climate disasters, like Pakistan, where devastating flooding submerged a third of the nation and displaced millions of people.
Dozens of protesters called for reparations at a demonstration on Wednesday.
“I think the regulatory agenda is tougher and the international climate finance landscape will be very, very bleak,” Meyer said.
The U.S. government also released a new draft report about what climate change is doing to America, determining that over the past 50 years, the United States has warmed 68% faster than the planet as a whole. Since 1970, the continental U.S. has experienced 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, well above the average for the planet, according to a draft of the National Climate Assessment, which is the U.S. government’s definitive report on the effects of climate change and represents a range of federal agencies.
The changes in the U.S. reflect a broader global pattern in which land areas and higher latitudes warm faster than the ocean and lower latitudes, the report says.
The effects of human-caused climate change on the United States “are already far-reaching and worsening,’’ the draft report says, but every added amount of warming that can be avoided or delayed will reduce harmful impacts.
The congressionally mandated assessment was last issued under the Trump administration in 2018 and the Biden administration put out a draft of the newer version this week, seeking public comment and peer review. The final report is expected next year.
Risks from accelerating temperatures and precipitation, sea-level rise, climate-fueled extreme weather and other impacts increase as the planet warms, the report says.
“The things Americans value most are at risk,’’ the report says.
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Daly reported from Washington.
As Sharon Wilson pulled up to the BP site in Texas last June, production tanks towered above the windblown grass roughly 60 miles southeast of San Antonio. Cows and pumpjacks lined the roadsides.
All looked placid. But when Wilson flipped on a high-tech video camera, a disquieting image became visible: A long black plume poured from a flare pipe. Her camera, designed to detect hydrocarbons, had revealed what appeared to be a stream of methane — a potent climate-warming gas, gushing from the very equipment that is supposed to prevent such emissions.
“It’s very discouraging and depressing, but mostly it’s infuriating,” said Wilson, a field advocate for Earthworks, which promotes alternatives to fossil fuels. “Our government is not taking the action that needs to be taken.”
Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas. Measured over a 20-year period, scientists say, it packs about 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide. And according to the International Energy Agency, methane is to blame for roughly 30% of the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Aerial surveys have documented huge amounts of methane wafting from oil and gas fields in the United States and beyond.
It’s a problem the Biden administration has sought to attack in its recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. One of the law’s provisions threatens fines of up to $1,500 per ton of methane released, to be imposed against the worst polluters. Perhaps most crucially, the law provides $1.55 billion in funding for companies to upgrade equipment to more effectively contain emissions — equipment that could, in theory, help the operators avoid fines.
Yet some of the best equipment for reducing emissions is already installed on oil and gas infrastructure, including at the BP site that Wilson filmed. And critics say such equipment is failing to capture much of the methane and casting doubt on whether the Biden plan would go far to correct the problem.
What Wilson saw at the BP site was an unlit flare. It’s among the types of equipment the EPA recommends companies consider installing to reduce methane emissions. Resembling a tall pipe, a flare is supposed to burn off methane before it can escape. Flames typically burn from the top of the flares.
But in this case, the flame had gone out, so methane was pouring from the pipe. The flare’s mechanisms are supposed to alert the operator if it stopped working. That didn’t happen in this case, according to a report by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
“Energy companies have made pledges, but I’ve got to tell you, I haven’t seen anything from a practical standpoint that makes me believe there’s any reality to reductions on the ground,” said Tim Doty, an environmental scientist and former air quality inspector for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. “Maybe they’re making progress, but are they making enough progress to slow down climate change? I don’t think so.”
The spewing methane that Wilson detected was among more than a dozen such scenes she documented over three days in the Eagle Ford Shale, an oil and gas field in south Texas. The methane poured from unlit or broken flares, storage tanks, vapor recovery units and compressors. She found it escaping at sites owned by companies including BP and Marathon Oil, both of which have pledged to reduce methane emissions.
“They have the technology, but for some reason, whether they don’t maintain it, whether the technology doesn’t work, I don’t know, but if find it not working,” Wilson said.
BP did not respond to questions about the methane leaks Wilson documented. The company says it plans to eliminate routine flaring in U.S. onshore operations by 2025 and is advocating for policies to reduce methane emissions.
Marathon Oil disputed that it violated any regulations. A spokeswoman said the company recognizes the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the global climate and prioritizes concern for the environment.
Sometimes, methane escapes because the equipment designed to contain it hasn’t been properly calibrated or maintained. Emissions aren’t immediately stopped once new equipment is installed. Companies must still invest in properly designing the system and continuously monitoring and maintaining the equipment. This requires money and staff, which experts say many companies neglect.
The Biden administration hasn’t yet specified which types of equipment it recommends. But the EPA, which is working with the administration on the law’s methane reduction program, has recommended technologies for reducing methane emissions. Whether that equipment actually succeeds in capping emissions is an open question.
“There’s lots of technologies, but the reality in the field is it just doesn’t work,” Doty said.
That’s frequently also the case with another type of equipment the EPA recommends: vapor recovery units. These are systems of pipes and seals that are supposed to capture methane before it can escape from tanks. In Doty’s field work, which spans decades, he estimates that he’s seen vapor recovery units leaking some amount of methane or other hydrocarbons 75% to 85% of the time.
And hydrocarbons like methane, because they are corrosive, inevitably degrade the tanks, pipes and equipment that are supposed to contain them.
“All this stuff is going to be prone to leak — that’s just the way it is,” said Coyne Gibson, who spent about two decades as an engineer inspecting oil and gas equipment. “That’s mechanics. And there’s there’s not really any way to avoid it.”
One reason it’s hard for the industry to control methane emissions is that many leaks come from the nation’s vast gas distribution network. Millions of miles of pipelines are next to impossible to completely monitor. What’s more, Gibson said, pipelines are often buried, making leaks harder to detect.
That gas distribution network, which includes pipelines and compressor stations, is responsible for most methane emissions in the energy industry, said Antoine Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros, an energy analytics company. Using satellite data, Kayrros identified one compressor station — which adjusts the pressure of gas to move it through pipelines — that emitted methane continuously for eight days.
“It’s way too common,” Halff said.
Some large companies have invested in infrared cameras, like Wilson’s, that can detect methane leaks at facilities. They use them on the ground, or on drones or aircraft.
The process can help operators find and fix leaks. But it’s typically done only periodically, with cameras that don’t run continuously. Every few months, some companies will send a team with an infrared camera to check for leaks from the ground or a helicopter.
Much of the time, though, there is no such surveillance. Leaks or even planned methane releases can occur during these periods, as when companies open a stretch of pipeline to release methane before doing repairs. The staffing it would take to continuously survey the nation’s 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines would likely be prohibitively expensive.
Malfunctioning flares like the one Wilson found are also a major contributor to methane pollution. Flaring is supposed to burn off 98% of the methane that would otherwise shoot directly into the atmosphere. But whether because of malfunctions or poor design, flares are releasing five times that amount of methane into the atmosphere, according to a study by the University of Michigan.
“Flares often go out,” said David Lyon, senior scientist with Environmental Defense Fund. “They’ll be unlit and venting all the gas. Or they’ll just not be burning the gas properly. So that’s that’s a really big source of methane. And often I think the operators are not aware that the flare’s out.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is writing rules on methane reduction that will further detail what would be required of companies starting in 2024 under the Inflation Reduction Act.
The American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying group for the oil and gas industry, says methane emissions intensity declined by nearly 60 percent across the nation’s major producing regions from 2011 to 2020. But companies base their reported methane emissions on estimates, not actual measurements, another custom that the Inflation Reduction Act seeks to change.
Climate scientists have shown, using satellite data, that methane emissions are often two or three times above what companies reported. Under the new law, companies would have to actually measure and report their methane emissions. But it’s still unclear how such a measurement program would work.
“Us and many others in this field, over and over again, have shown the huge gap between reporting by countries and companies and what can actually be detected,” Halff said.
Even so, he thinks there’s reason to hope that the methane provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act will make some difference.
“Emissions keep going up,” he said. “We’re moving in the wrong direction…but the potential, the conditions, to change course seem to be here.”
Most of the world’s population has been affected in some way by climate change — 85% of the world, in fact. But the effects of climate change haven’t been equally felt by all. Some communities have seen a slight rise in temperature here and there, but others have had their entire communities wiped out.
As the rise of global temperatures and sea-level continues to affect the world with increasingly frequency and intensity, who are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change?
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.
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The answer is clear, according to climate scientists, climate and environmental justice experts and international research efforts on the question. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found in a 2022 report that vulnerability to climate change is “exacerbated by inequity and marginalization linked to gender, ethnicity, low income or combinations thereof.”
“(The) poor, ethnic minorities, and women are very clearly the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change that we are already seeing today: heat waves; displacement and smoke due to fires; and price shocks due to supply chain interruptions, higher energy prices,” Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley and a coordinating lead author on IPCC reports, told The Associated Press.
These populations are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change because of racism, sexism and pursuit of profits over protection of people, according to Bineshi Albert, co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance.
“Due to the continued search for profits by our current economic system and (by) the fossil fuel industry in particular, there are entire neighborhoods that are deemed worthy of becoming sacrifice zones, and this breaks down every time around race, class, and national lines,” she said.
Research also shows that disabled people are more vulnerable to effects of climate change than abled bodied people.
The increased vulnerability to climate change experienced by these populations and who is to blame for causing these inequities have become increasing topics of conversation at the international level. Debate about loss and damage — the climate harm caused by some nations to others, how much and what should be done about it — has waged on since at least COP23.
A study published in July 2022 found that richer nations like the U.S. caused climate harm to poorer countries.
In terms of repairing damage already caused to vulnerable populations and countries and helping them become less vulnerable, experts told the AP that it starts with including them in developing policies.
“A natural start is to develop policies to target these underserved communities with enhanced attention and support,” Kammen said.
Albert said it should go a step further with direct economic investments in communities most vulnerable to climate change.
“Economic resources should go directly to those on the frontlines of the climate crisis to develop and implement their own community-led solutions,” she said. “Communities rather than profits must be the motive if we are truly going to solve the climate crisis.”
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Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Can people’s individual actions make a difference in how much carbon dioxide is emitted on an international scale? International organizations like the United Nations have called on individuals to limit their carbon footprint and live more sustainably, along with governments and corporations.
Some argue it would be more effective to focus on changing government and corporate policy to limit emissions from the energy and agriculture sectors than asking individuals to limit their carbon footprint, but experts say that while that’s true, every bit of emissions reduction helps.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.
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“We should all be the most responsible citizens we can be in every sense of the word and contribute to a sustainable existence on this planet,” said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann. He said that means, in part, minimizing our carbon footprints as individuals.
And that can take a lot of different forms.
The United Nations Act Now campaign for individual climate action suggests people can minimize their personal carbon footprint directly by changing their energy and transportation use and food consumption. Other, less direct methods for reducing carbon emissions include divesting from fossil fuel companies in retirement plans, protesting to support climate action and lobbying government officials to pass environmentally sustainable policies.
Kim Cobb, a Brown University climate scientist, said there are consequences to individuals having “outsized” carbon footprints. And still there are people who engage in the environmental movement who don’t consider their personal carbon footprint.
“I think we’re living in an anti-gravity moment where people are able to say, ‘I’m not concerned about my first, personal carbon footprint. Collective action matters the most,’” she said. In the future, though, “there will be a moral and social cost to bear by those individuals.”
Still, there are some climate impacts that people aren’t individually responsible for and can’t change on their own. Over 70% of all greenhouse gas emissions produced between 1988 and 2015 came from 100 fossil fuel companies, according a 2017 report by CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project.
And despite the United Nations’ warnings to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, countries are planning on extracting double the amount of fossil fuels than what would be consistent with keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), even as they pledge to make ambitious cuts.
So, although there are things individuals can do to minimize their personal carbon footprints, Mann said, “we must not allow … polluters to reframe the discussion so that it falls entirely upon individuals, which takes the pressure off of them.”
“We can’t pass legislation ourselves that incentivizes renewable energy or that blocks new fossil fuel infrastructure. We can’t impose regulations on industry. We can’t negotiate directly with international partners. We need our policymakers to do that,” Mann said. “Those things can only be enacted at the systematic level, and that’s why we have to keep the pressure on policymakers and on corporations and those who are in a position to make the changes that we can’t make ourselves.”
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Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER — Adam Thomas starts harvesting soybeans on his Illinois farm when the dew burns off in the morning. This year, dry weather accelerated the work, allowing him to start early. His problem was getting the soybeans to market.
About 60% of the Midwest and northern Great Plain states are in a drought. Nearly the entire stretch of the Mississippi River — from Minnesota to the river’s mouth in Louisiana — has experienced below average rainfall over the past two months. As a result, water levels on the river have dropped to near-record lows, disrupting ship and barge traffic that is critical for moving recently harvested agricultural goods such as soybeans and corn downriver for export.
Although scientists say climate change is raising temperatures and making droughts more common and intense, a weather expert says this latest drought affecting the central United States is more likely a short-term weather phenomenon.
The lack of rain has seriously affected commerce. The river moves more than half of all U.S. grain exports but the drought has reduced the flow of goods by about 45%, according to industry estimates cited by the federal government. Prices for rail shipments, an alternative for sending goods by barge, are also up.
“It just means lower income, basically,” said Mike Doherty, a senior economist with the Illinois Farm Bureau.
Thomas farms at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and doesn’t own enough grain storage to wait out the high costs of shipping.
“I’ve had to take a price discount,” he said.
Climate change is generally driving wetter conditions in the Upper Mississippi River region but in recent months, lower water levels have revealed parts that are usually inaccessible. Thousands of visitors last weekend walked across typically submerged riverbed to Tower Rock, a protruding formation about 100 miles (161 kilometers) southeast of St. Louis. It’s the first time since 2012 that tourists could make the trek and stay dry. On the border of Tennessee and Missouri where the river is a half-mile wide, four-wheeler tracks snake across vast stretches of exposed riverbed.
In a badly needed break from the dry weather earlier this week, the region finally received some rain.
“It is kind of taking the edge off the pain of the low water, but it is not going to completely alleviate it,” said Kai Roth of the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center, adding that the river needs several rounds of “good, soaking rain.”
Barges are at risk of hitting bottom and getting stuck in the mud. Earlier this month, the U.S. Coast Guard said there had been at least eight such “groundings.” Some barges touch the bottom but don’t get stuck. Others need salvage companies to help them out. Barges are cautioned to lighten their loads to prevent them from sinking too deep in the water, but that means they can carry fewer goods.
To ensure that vessels can travel safely, federal officials regularly meet, consider the depth of the river and talk to the shipping industry to determine local closures and traffic restrictions. When a stretch is temporarily closed, hundreds of barges may line up to wait.
“It’s very dynamic: Things are changing constantly,” said Eric Carrero, the Coast Guard’s director of western rivers and waterways. “Every day, when we are doing our surveys, we’re finding areas that are shallow and they need to dredge.”
After a closed-down section is dredged, officials mark a safe channel and barges can once again pass through.
In some places, storage at barge terminals is filling up, preventing more goods from coming in, according to Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition. He said the influx of grain into a compromised river transportation system is like “attaching a garden hose to a fire hydrant.” High costs for farmers have led some to wait to ship their goods, he added.
For tourists, much of the river is still accessible. Cruise ships are built to withstand the river’s extremes: Big engines fight fast currents in the spring and shallow drafts keep the boats moving in a drought, said Charles Robertson, president and CEO of American Cruise Lines, which operates five cruise ships that can carry 150 to 190 passengers each.
Nighttime operations are limited, however, to help ships avoid new obstacles that the drought has exposed. And some landing areas aren’t accessible because of low water — the river is dried out along the edges. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, a cruise ship couldn’t get to a ramp that typically loads passengers, so the city, with help from townspeople, laid gravel and plywood to create a makeshift walkway. For some, it adds to the adventure.
“They’re experiencing the headlines that most of the rest of the country is reading,” Robertson said.
Drought is a prolonged problem in California, which just recorded its driest three-year stretch on record, a situation that has stressed water supplies and increased wildfire risk. Climate change is raising temperatures and making droughts more common and worse.
“The drier areas are going to continue to get drier and the wetter areas are going to continue to get wetter,” said Jen Brady, a data analyst at Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and researchers that reports on climate change.
Brad Pugh, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said however, that the current drought in the Midwest is likely “driven by short-term weather patterns” and he wouldn’t link it to climate change.
In the Midwest, climate change is increasing the intensity of some rainstorms. Flood severity on the upper Mississippi River is growing faster than any other area of the country, according to NOAA.
Some worry that fertilizer and manure have accumulated on farms and could quickly wash off in a hard rain, reducing oxygen levels in rivers and streams and threatening aquatic life.
In rare cases, communities are moving to alternate sources of drinking water away from the Mississippi. The drought also is threatening to dry out drinking-water wells in Iowa and Nebraska, NOAA says.
It’s unclear how much longer the drought will last. In the near term, there is a chance for rain, but NOAA notes that in November, below average rainfall is more likely in central states such as Missouri, which would extend shipping problems on the river. In some northern states including Michigan, the winter may bring more moisture, but less rain is expected in southern states.
“It does take a lot of rainfall to really get the river to rise,” Roth said.
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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
LISBON, Portugal — A prize worth 1 million euros ($970,000) is being awarded to two intergovernmental bodies for their work on climate change.
Organizers of the annual Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity announced Thursday that this year’s winners are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is president of the prize’s jury, said the award would help keep the issue of climate change in the public mind even as Russia’s war in Ukraine and its consequences compete for attention.
The IPCC is a U.N. body which since 1998 has encouraged scientific research and supported government efforts to combat climate change. It shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
The IPBES is an independent organization established in 2012 to smooth the transfer of information between scientists and governments.
The prize was created in 2020 by the Lisbon, Portugal-based Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to recognize important contributions toward mitigating and adapting to climate change.
It has previously honored climate activist Greta Thunberg.
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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.
But if they existed, these simple life forms would have altered the atmosphere so profoundly that they triggered a Martian Ice Age and snuffed themselves out, the researchers concluded.
The findings provide a bleak view of the ways of the cosmos. Life — even simple life like microbes — “might actually commonly cause its own demise,” said the study’s lead author, Boris Sauterey, now a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University.
The results “are a bit gloomy, but I think they are also very stimulating.,” he said in an email. “They challenge us to rethink the way a biosphere and its planet interact.”
In a study in the journal Nature Astronomy, Sauterey and his team said they used climate and terrain models to evaluate the habitability of the Martian crust some 4 billion years ago when the red planet was thought to be flush with water and much more hospitable than today.
They surmised that hydrogen-gobbling, methane-producing microbes might have flourished just beneath the surface back then, with several inches (a few tens of centimeters) of dirt, more than enough to protect them against harsh incoming radiation. Anywhere free of ice on Mars could have been swarming with these organisms, according to Sauterey, just as they did on early Earth.
Early Mars’ presumably moist, warm climate, however, would have been jeopardized by so much hydrogen sucked out of the thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, Sauterey said. As temperatures plunged by nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 degrees Celsius), any organisms at or near the surface likely would have buried deeper in an attempt to survive.
By contrast, microbes on Earth may have helped maintain temperate conditions, given the nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, the researchers said.
The SETI Institute’s Kaveh Pahlevan said future models of Mars’ climate need to consider the French research.
Pahlevan led a separate recent study suggesting Mars was born wet with warm oceans lasting millions of years. The atmosphere would have been dense and mostly hydrogen back then, serving as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that eventually was transported to higher altitudes and lost to space, his team concluded.
The French study investigated the climate effects of possible microbes when Mars’ atmosphere was dominated by carbon dioxide and so is not applicable to the earlier times, Pahlevan said.
“What their study makes clear, however, is that if (this) life were present on Mars” during this earlier period, “they would have had a major influence on the prevailing climate,” he added in an email.
The best places to look for traces of this past life? The French researchers suggest the unexplored Hellas Planita, or plain, and Jezero Crater on the northwestern edge of Isidis Planita, where NASA’s Perseverance rover currently is collecting rocks for return to Earth in a decade.
Next on Sauterey’s to-do list: looking into the possibility that microbial life could still exist deep within Mars.
“Could Mars still be inhabited today by micro-organisms descending from this primitive biosphere?” he said. “If so, where?”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.
But if they existed, these simple life forms would have altered the atmosphere so profoundly that they triggered a Martian Ice Age and snuffed themselves out, the researchers concluded.
The findings provide a bleak view of the ways of the cosmos. Life — even simple life like microbes — “might actually commonly cause its own demise,” said the study’s lead author, Boris Sauterey, now a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University.
The results “are a bit gloomy, but I think they are also very stimulating.,” he said in an email. “They challenge us to rethink the way a biosphere and its planet interact.”
In a study in the journal Nature Astronomy, Sauterey and his team said they used climate and terrain models to evaluate the habitability of the Martian crust some 4 billion years ago when the red planet was thought to be flush with water and much more hospitable than today.
They surmised that hydrogen-gobbling, methane-producing microbes might have flourished just beneath the surface back then, with several inches (a few tens of centimeters) of dirt, more than enough to protect them against harsh incoming radiation. Anywhere free of ice on Mars could have been swarming with these organisms, according to Sauterey, just as they did on early Earth.
Early Mars’ presumably moist, warm climate, however, would have been jeopardized by so much hydrogen sucked out of the thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, Sauterey said. As temperatures plunged by nearly minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-200 degrees Celsius), any organisms at or near the surface likely would have buried deeper in an attempt to survive.
By contrast, microbes on Earth may have helped maintain temperate conditions, given the nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, the researchers said.
The SETI Institute’s Kaveh Pahlevan said future models of Mars’ climate need to consider the French research.
Pahlevan led a separate recent study suggesting Mars was born wet with warm oceans lasting millions of years. The atmosphere would have been dense and mostly hydrogen back then, serving as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that eventually was transported to higher altitudes and lost to space, his team concluded.
The French study investigated the climate effects of possible microbes when Mars’ atmosphere was dominated by carbon dioxide and so is not applicable to the earlier times, Pahlevan said.
“What their study makes clear, however, is that if (this) life were present on Mars” during this earlier period, “they would have had a major influence on the prevailing climate,” he added in an email.
The best places to look for traces of this past life? The French researchers suggest the unexplored Hellas Planita, or plain, and Jezero Crater on the northwestern edge of Isidis Planita, where NASA’s Perseverance rover currently is collecting rocks for return to Earth in a decade.
Next on Sauterey’s to-do list: looking into the possibility that microbial life could still exist deep within Mars.
“Could Mars still be inhabited today by micro-organisms descending from this primitive biosphere? he said. “If so, where?”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Drought that stretched across three continents this summer — drying out large parts of Europe, the United States and China — was made 20 times more likely by climate change, according to a new study.
Drought dried up major rivers, destroyed crops, sparked wildfire, threatened aquatic species and led to water restrictions in Europe. It struck places already plagued by drying in the U.S., like the West, but also places where drought is more rare, like the Northeast. China also just had its driest summer in 60 years, leaving its famous Yangtze river half its normal width.
Researchers from World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists from around the world who study the link between extreme weather and climate change, say this type of drought would only happen once every 400 years across the Northern Hemisphere if not for human-caused climate change. Now they expect these conditions to repeat every 20 years, given how much the climate has warmed.
Ecological disasters like the widespread drought and then massive flooding in Pakistan, are the “fingerprints of climate change,” Maarten van Aalst, a climate scientist at Columbia University and study co-author, said.
“The impacts are very clear to people and are hitting hard,” he said, “not just in poor countries, like the flooding Pakistan …. but also in some of the richest parts of the world, like western central Europe.”
To figure out the influence of climate change on drying in the Northern Hemisphere, scientists analyzed weather data, computer simulations and soil moisture throughout the regions, excluding tropical areas. They found that climate change made dry soil conditions much more likely over the last several months.
This analysis was done using the warming the climate has already experienced so far, 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit), but climate scientists have warned the climate will get warmer, and the authors of the study accounted for that.
With an additional 0.8 degrees C degrees warming, this type of drought will happen once every 10 years in western Central Europe and every year throughout the Northern Hemisphere, said Dominik Schumacher, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, a university in Switzerland.
“We’re seeing these compounding and cascading effect across sectors and across regions,” van Aalst said. “One way to reduce those impacts (is) to reduce emissions.”
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Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
