Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part V
As 2022 nears a close, it is prudent to examine recent developments in the ongoing Anthropocene extinction, which continues to accelerate and be ignored by those who have the capability to address it.
Source: @ZLabe
Previous entries:
Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part I
Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part II
Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part III
First, another entry in the crowded genre of “Always More, Always Worse, Always Sooner Than Expected” news:
Current predictions of ice melt in the Arctic are probably way off. According to an updated model, glaciers in the icy north could be slipping into the sea up to 100 times faster than previously forecasted…
Their findings suggest that when Arctic glaciers dip their icy fingers and toes into the sea, they become particularly vulnerable to underwater melt.
Bathed in deep warm waters, sometimes a hundred meters under the surface, their extremities gradually melt away at a constant, weak background rate.
Given that the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, researchers suspect submarine melt is worse here than in Antarctica.
"Melting by deep, warm waters increases undercutting of glacier termini, thereby inducing calving and glacier front retreat," Schulz and colleagues write, "leading to a dynamic mass loss that adds to sea level rise."
In a dire future scenario, where all the permanent ice in Greenland melts away, sea levels will rise by more than 7 meters, and studies already suggest 1 foot of sea level rise is locked in.
Each year, the Arctic region goes through an annual health checkup — and the results are in: From a rapid decline in snow cover to an unprecedented late season melting event to another year of seabird die-offs, the Arctic has once again shown clear symptoms of an ailing planet.
A report published Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that this vast and significant northern biome is dramatically shifting, with snow cover declining at an alarming rate of about 20% per decade. It continues to warm four times faster than the rest of Earth, with the last seven years being the warmest on record, according to the report.
Authored by more than 140 scientists around the globe, the Arctic Report Card examined the region’s “vital signs” between October 2021 and September 2022, including changes in snow cover, sea ice volume, air and ocean temperatures, as well as a new pulse-check on precipitation events.
The report describes an increase in commercial activities and vessels venturing deeper into the Arctic on sea routes opened up by melting ice. These ships increase noise pollution in the region, altering its soundscape and interfering with the ability of marine mammals to communicate.
Two-thirds of Antarctica’s native species, including emperor penguins, are under threat of extinction or major population declines by 2100 under current trajectories of global heating, according to new research that outlines priorities for protecting the continent’s biodiversity.
The study, an international collaboration between scientists, conservationists and policymakers from 28 institutions in 12 countries, identified emperor penguins as the Antarctic species at greatest risk of extinction, followed by other seabirds and dry soil nematodes.
“Up to 80% of emperor penguin colonies are projected to be quasi-extinct by 2100 [population declines of more than 90%] with business-as-usual increases in greenhouse gas emissions,” it found.
When Joe Biden was a candidate to be his party’s nominee for President, he ran as one of the biggest foes of fossil fuels ever to make a credible run for the White House. He pledged to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050, ween the country off dirty sources of energy and “end fossil fuel.” He canceled the high-profile Keystone XL pipeline, took millions of acres of possible drilling off the table by scrapping leases to oil and gas companies, and banned imports of Russian oil. He even threatened oil firms with a windfall tax and likened them to war profiteers.
Environmental groups went gaga over his rhetoric and action alike, buoying his political alliances and giving climate change activists heart after years of broken promises.
And yet, a unique alignment of political and geological confluences may spur Biden in the coming days to do something that will leave those same green allies seeing red.
Biden’s administration is nearing a final decision on a potentially game-changing oil and gas project that has now been under consideration across five presidencies. The proposed Willow project in the northeast section of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska would produce 180,000 barrels of oil each day, create $10 billion in tax and royalty revenues, and create 2,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent ones. The massive project would require as many as five drilling sites, a processing facility, 50 miles of new roads, seven bridges, and an airstrip.
The Senate passed the $1.7 billion omnibus spending bill Thursday, averting a government shutdown, but climate change activists are upset that a key promise of President Biden’s won’t be included in the package: $11.4 billion in climate aid per year to developing countries.
In a September 2021 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Biden pledged to increase U.S. assistance to low-income nations for combating climate change through building their clean energy economies and adapting to the dangerous effects of climate change, such as sea level rise, to $11.4 billion. Biden later moved his request to Congress up to 2023 — the fiscal year currently under consideration — including $2 billion the U.S. already owes the Green Climate Fund, a U.N. initiative that distributes climate financing.
But, despite Biden’s fellow Democrats holding slim majorities in both houses of Congress, the spending package includes just $1.057 billion for international climate change aid. That is “only $900,000 more than the previous year’s already woefully short amount,” climate policy experts at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) lamented in a blog post on Wednesday.
Congressional Democrats had sought $3.4 billion for global climate programs this year, but Republicans blocked what Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee called “radical environmental and climate policies.”
“Congress just bankrolled an $857 billion defense bill but failed to provide a single penny to meet our commitments to the Green Climate Fund — a step that would truly help us defend our country and our planet from chaos and instability,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said on Twitter.
The Sri Lanka cleanup is just one of about 50 projects AEPW says it’s supporting around the world. When it was formed in January 2019, the Alliance announced plans to invest up to $1.5 billion over five years to “advance solutions to eliminate plastic waste in the environment.”
But an investigation by Bloomberg Green has found that the organization, based in Singapore, is dominated by petrochemical companies that have a stake in keeping the world hooked on plastic, and that its efforts are scarcely making an impact. This story is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with AEPW’s work, as well as internal documents that have never been reported…
According to people familiar with the group’s operations, who were not authorized to speak publicly, Exxon and its fellow oil giants have played an outsize role in ensuring AEPW focuses on “downstream” solutions, like collection and recycling, rather than the one thing many environmentalists believe would truly ameliorate the global plastic waste crisis: promoting alternatives to the material. That’s consistent with the agenda of the ACC, which tried to steer recent UN talks on a global plastics treaty away from caps on production, as proposed by some governments. The ACC called such caps a “misguided approach” that would “hinder progress towards a more sustainable, lower-carbon future.”
Like many initiatives to reduce plastic waste, the Alliance has barely made a dent in the problem. Almost four years after its creation, it says it’s “diverted” 34,000 tons of plastic from the environment. That’s about 0.2% of its original target of removing 15 million tons over five years. Jacob Duer, AEPW’s chief executive officer, said in an interview that the goal was “too ambitious” and had been abandoned.
The GBF includes four goals and 23 targets to protect biodiversity by 2030. Perhaps the biggest of these goals is the 30x30 Conservation Plan, which requires “effective conservation and management” of at least 30 percent of the world’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems—with more focus placed on biodiverse and other vital areas.
In terms of money, the GBF stipulates that the world’s governments “phase out or reform” subsidies that harm biodiversity, with cuts on the scale of at least $500 billion per year, and increase incentives for sustainable use of ecosystems and conservation efforts. Countries also agreed to mobilize at least $200 billion in public and private funding for domestic and international biodiversity efforts.
The world is spending at least $1.8tn (£1.3tn) every year on subsidies driving the annihilation of wildlife and a rise in global heating, according to a new study, prompting warnings that humanity is financing its own extinction.
From tax breaks for beef production in the Amazon to financial support for unsustainable groundwater pumping in the Middle East, billions of pounds of government spending and other subsidies are harming the environment, says the first cross-sector assessment for more than a decade.
This government support, equivalent to 2% of global GDP, is directly working against the goals of the Paris agreement and draft targets on reversing biodiversity loss, the research on explicit subsidies found, effectively financing water pollution, land subsidence and deforestation with state money.
The authors, who are leading subsidies experts, say a significant portion of the $1.8tn could be repurposed to support policies that are beneficial for nature and a transition to net zero, amid growing political division about the cost of decarbonising the global economy.
Targets to clean up the majority of England’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters suffering from a cocktail of agricultural and sewage pollution have been pushed back from 2027 to 2063.
Not one English waterway, including rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters is in good ecological and chemical health at present, with pollution from water treatment plants and agriculture the key sources of the damage. The Environment Agency said on Thursday £5.3bn was being invested for the next five years to stop the further deterioration of waterways.
But the summary documents within the plan reveal the target for all 3,651 water bodies to achieve good chemical and ecological status – a state in which they are as close to their natural state as possible – was now decades away in 2063.
Until Brexit the UK government was signed up to the water framework directive, which required countries to make sure all their waters achieved “good” chemical and ecological status by 2027 at the latest. The UK government later reduced the target to 75% of waterways reaching the single test of good ecological status by 2027 at the latest. The target for the majority of waterways to achieve good status in both chemical and ecological tests has now been pushed back to 2063, according to the documents.
By 2027, only 4% of waters are currently on track to be in good overall condition.
For the kind of person who has spent the past few years increasingly alarmed about climate, it might be strange to think of anything as looming larger than warming, which in recent decades has seemed to subsume not only all other ecological crises in the collective cultural imagination but also the existential fate of the species and the planet. The United Nations’ 15th international biodiversity conference just concluded in Montreal, and it received only a fraction of the press coverage lavished on the COP27 climate conference recently held in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. That imbalance may seem intuitive, given one of the core principles of climate action in the post-Paris-agreement era: that decarbonization should be the environmental goal above all others, and might even offer a silver bullet to solve (or at least alleviate) all sorts of other problems, from mass extinction and insect collapse to air pollution and global inequality.
For the cause of climate, this notion has been an undeniable boon, growing the movement by somewhat sidelining legacy concerns about conservation and forging alliances instead with forces that embrace technology, development and even “eco-modernism.” These years have also seen the rise of “degrowth,” and in recent intramural fights over permitting reform, climate centrists have argued that one major roadblock is sentimental old-guard activism, which amounts to a kind of climate NIMBYism. But in the long sweep of environmentalist history, the opposite story is more striking: “green” groups growing less attached to the natural world for its own sake and more invested in efforts to limit temperature rise for the sake of human flourishing.
“We have a really tough time simulating with any fidelity how clouds actually behave in the real world,” said Timothy Myers, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
But in recent years, scientists have gained increasing clarity on what will happen – and what is already happening – to clouds as the planet warms.
First, the high, wispy cirrus clouds that trap the Earth’s radiation are expected to shift upward in the atmosphere, to lower temperature zones. Thanks to a complicated relationship between clouds and the radiation of the Earth, that will increase the amount of radiation that the cirrus clouds trap in the atmosphere.
“When they rise, their greenhouse effect, or warming effect, on the Earth tends to increase,” Myers said.
That result has been known for about a decade, and indicates that clouds are likely to amplify global warming. But just in the past few years, researchers have also discovered that the number of low-level stratus or stratocumulus clouds are expected to decrease as the planet continues to warm.
The jet stream’s delivery of the cold straight from the Arctic is also providing half of the fuel the winter storm crossing the US will need to explode into a meteorological bomb cyclone. The other half is the abnormally warm moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, which like the Atlantic as a whole is “running a fever,” Francis said. “Those huge temperature contrasts are the stuff bomb cyclones are made of.”
The storm will hurl gusts up to 45 miles per hour at Chicago late Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. Boston is forecast to get gusts of 65 mph Friday, New York 48 mph, and Portland, Maine, could reach 70 mph — enough to knock down tree limbs and cause widespread outages.
It will also blow a heavy storm surge into coastal New England just as tides are at their highest because of the new moon. Masters warned that Portland could also see some of its highest storm surge tides since 1978, when a massive blizzard buried the Northeast under feet of snow — all thanks to an unusually sharp bend in the jet stream.
Most adults in the United States – including a large majority of Christians and people who identify with other religions – consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it.
But highly religious Americans – those who pray daily, regularly attend religious services and consider religion crucial in their lives -- are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about global warming.
Those are among the key findings in a comprehensive report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 10,156 U.S. adults from April 11 to April 17. It’s margin of error for the full sample of respondents is plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.
The survey says religious Americans tend to be less concerned about climate change for several reasons.
“First and foremost is politics: The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion,” the report says.
The amount of textbook real estate devoted to climate change has continually expanded since the 1990s, according to the paper from researchers at North Carolina State University, published Wednesday in PLOS.
But since then, the material has moved ever further into the back of the books and become increasingly detached from practical solutions, researchers found, a change that tracks a broader pivot in the field of biology away from organisms and ecosystems and toward cells and microbes.
“We were shocked that textbook passages addressing climate change remained so short, even in recent decades, and that the coverage of solutions actually decreased,” the authors said in a statement.
“The information in these textbooks educated generations; the minimal content about climate change reflects how little the topic has been valued,” they added.
The researchers said they think science education failures may help to explain why a majority of Americans — 57 percent — don’t believe climate change will be a “serious” threat in their lifetimes, according to a 2021 Gallup poll.
In the western United States, natural periods of fire and snow are cyclical. The summer brings wildfire season, and the winter brings ski season. But as the globe warms, these cycles have become erratic and less reliable, with dramatic impacts on the region’s vital water supply.
Now, researchers have shown that severe wildfires are diminishing many snowpacks on mountain slopes by leaving them exposed to sun and soot, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As those winter blankets shrink, the communities that rely on the mountains as both a source of water and recreation are facing deeper droughts – and higher fire risks.
“We’re seeing that these fires are hotter and larger, and they’re having a bigger impact on our water resources and water availability,” said Steven Fassnacht, a snow hydrologist at Colorado State University and co-author of the study.
Wildfires are particularly increasing in the snowiest parts of the western U.S. In 2020, for example, more than 4 million hectares burned during the summer and fall, casting a smoky haze over the region.
Finally, as written previously, even non-violent attempts to preserve any of the natural world will be met with increasingly draconian punishments as a warning to others not to take part in any actions that might actually make a difference:
Six people in Atlanta have been charged with domestic terrorism for taking part in protests against a massive new police training facility known as Cop City. The protesters were taking part in a months-long encampment in a forested area of Atlanta where the city wants to build a $90 million, 85-acre training center on the site of a former prison farm. Conservationists have long wanted to protect the area, the South River Forest, from future development. Protesters are also urging the city to invest in alternatives to more policing. “This is basically a boondoggle that’s been given to the police to make them feel better,” says Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, which is a part of a coalition trying to stop the construction of Cop City in Atlanta.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we end today’s show in Atlanta, where five people have been charged with domestic terrorism for taking part in protests against a massive new police training facility known as Cop City. The protesters were taking part in a months-long encampment in a forested area of Atlanta where the city wants to build a $90 million, 85-acre training center on the site of a former prison farm.
Conservationists have long fought to protect the area, the South River Forest, from future development. Protesters are also urging Atlanta officials to invest in communities, not more policing. This is Jasmine Burnett of the group Community Movement Builders.
JASMINE BURNETT: People are asking for affordable housing, paving the streets — right? — having sidewalks, better access to MARTA. And instead, they are supporting a project, a $90 million project, to construct the largest urban warfare training facility in this country.
And while we understand that this is a very local issue — right? — it’s happening right here — we also know that this is a national problem, this is a global problem. The same tactics that they’re using against Forest Defenders are the same tactics that the Israeli government is using against Palestinians — right? — the same tactics that the U.S. military is employing in Africa through the AFRICOM program. Right? This is a global struggle against the occupation of our communities.
And a story of wise but “too little, too late” surrender to the irreversible changes, which is going to become more common as we collectively fail to address the root cause of the ongoing environmental transformation or even adequately prepare ourselves to deal with it:
Against the ravaging seas, Quebec's coastal communities have learned through bitter experience that the way to advance against climate change is to retreat.
Over the past decade, civilization has been pulled back from the water's edge where possible along the eastern stretch of the Gaspe Peninsula where coastline is particularly vulnerable to erosion. Defenses erected against the sea ages ago have been dismantled, rock by rock, concrete chunk by chunk.
Forillon National Park, nearly 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Perce, removed a road that the ocean turned into heaving chunks of asphalt and scattered with boulders year after year as winters warmed and the shore's protective sea ice vanished.
In Perce, a town of several thousand that swells with summer visitors drawn to the majestic seascape, a manmade beach was “nourished” with pebbles and given to nature to sculpt. After extreme storms wrecked the town's old seaside boardwalk, a new one was built farther from the water and without the concrete wall that had only added to storm wave fury.
When you try to wall off the sea, communities here learned, the sea prevails. Less destruction happens when waves have less to destroy.