Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part II
The glut of recent revelations regarding the ongoing mass extinction requires another survey, which is by no means comprehensive but should serve as a relatively compelling and distressing snapshot.
Source: Professor Eliot Jacobson (@EliotJacobson)
This is part II to an earlier compendium of disturbing and startling news and analysis related to the ongoing destruction of the biosphere I put together in May. Responding to Biden’s grossly inadequate climate proposal, which does not begin to take into consideration the catastrophic nature of the emergency, climate scientist and author Peter Kalmus analyzed the bill’s woeful inadequacy:
The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.
In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say.
Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”
Massive methane leaks, known as super-emitter events, have been taking place at oil and gas fields all over the world, from the United States to Turkmenistan. The releases, most of which can be traced to equipment failures, can last for weeks. One outside of a storage facility in Los Angeles in 2015 hemorrhaged almost 100,000 tonnes of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere over the course of four months.
In June, researchers at Spain’s Polytechnic University of Valencia, said they uncovered the latest known super-emitter event at an oil and gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The installation discharged 40,000 tonnes of methane during a 17-day spell in December 2021 — equivalent to 3 per cent of Mexico’s annual oil and gas emissions. Researchers said the release may never have been known to the public if not for the fact that it was captured by a European Space Agency satellite.
While the discharge was caught, it remains challenging to trace emissions of methane, which is colourless, odourless and responsible for more than 25 per cent of the global warming the Earth is experiencing today. Due to its structure, methane traps more heat in the atmosphere per molecule than carbon dioxide (CO2) making it 80 times more harmful than CO2 during the 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere.
To the naked eye, the Mako Compressor Station outside the dusty West Texas crossroads of Lenorah appears unremarkable, similar to tens of thousands of oil and gas operations scattered throughout the oil-rich Permian Basin.
What’s not visible through the chain-link fence is the plume of invisible gas, primarily methane, billowing from the gleaming white storage tanks up into the cloudless blue sky.
The Mako station, owned by a subsidiary of West Texas Gas Inc., was observed releasing an estimated 870 kilograms of methane – an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere each hour. That’s the equivalent impact on the climate of burning seven tanker trucks full of gasoline every day.
But Mako’s outsized emissions aren’t illegal, or even regulated. And it was only one of 533 methane “super emitters” detected during a 2021 aerial survey of the Permian conducted by Carbon Mapper, a partnership of university researchers and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The group documented massive amounts of methane venting into the atmosphere from oil and gas operations across the Permian, a 250-mile-wide bone-dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border that a billion years ago was the bottom of a shallow sea. Hundreds of those sites were seen spewing the gas over and over again. Ongoing leaks, gushers, going unfixed.
Methane is four times more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, a new study shows. The result helps to explain the rapid growth in methane in recent years and suggests that, if left unchecked, methane related warming will escalate in the decades to come.
The growth of this greenhouse gas – which over a 20 year timespan is more than 80 times as potent than carbon dioxide – had been slowing since the turn of the millennium but since 2007 has undergone a rapid rise, with measurements from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recording it passing 1,900 parts a billion last year, nearly triple pre-industrial levels.
“What has been particularly puzzling has been the fact that methane emissions have been increasing at even greater rates in the last two years, despite the global pandemic, when anthropogenic sources were assumed to be less significant,” said Simon Redfern, an earth scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Stranne and his associates from Linnaeus University and Stockholm University have combined a new model of the biological behavior as well as vertical movements of this microbial filter with existing models of the physical behavior of seafloor sediments in a recent study, which was just published in Communications Earth and Environment. The model's physical components depict processes like crack formation and methane's ability to move through silt after the methane hydrates melt.
Stranne explains that suddenly more methane is rising through the sediment, as might occur if the methane hydrate starts to melt more quickly. The filter may need decades to adjust to start consuming methane at the new speed. Their most recent research demonstrates that significant amounts of methane can seep past the filter and into the ocean water when it is not restored.
Even after this window of opportunity, additional methane-destructive processes must take place before melting hydrates' methane enters the seawater. Due to these procedures, it is almost impossible for significant amounts of methane produced during the melting of methane hydrates to enter the atmosphere.
Most of the world’s mountain glaciers are retreating because of the climate crisis, but those in the European Alps are especially vulnerable. Smaller and with less ice cover, this year they are on track for their highest loss of mass in at least 60 years of record keeping
From the way 45-year-old Swiss glaciologist Andreas Linsbauer bounds over icy crevasses, you would never guess he was carrying 10kg of steel equipment needed to chart the decline of Switzerland’s glaciers.
Normally, he heads down this path on the massive Morteratsch glacier in late September, the end of the summer melt season in the Alps. But exceptionally high ice loss this year has brought him to this 15 sq km (six sq mile) amphitheatre of ice two months early for emergency maintenance work.
The measuring poles he uses to track changes in the depth of the pack are at risk of dislodging entirely as the ice melts away, and he needs to drill new holes.
Climate breakdown made the recent record UK heatwave 10 times more likely, researchers have found. Analysis by World Weather Attribution reveals that temperatures in the UK during the heatwave, when it hit 40.3C, were higher than those simulated by climate models.
The researchers say extreme temperatures in western Europe are rising faster than expected. …
Climate experts are concerned this means the impacts of global heating will be even more drastic than previously thought.
Friederike Otto, a senior climate lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London, said: “In Europe and other parts of the world we are seeing more and more record-breaking heatwaves causing extreme temperatures that have become hotter faster than in most climate models.
“It’s a worrying finding that suggests that if carbon emissions are not rapidly cut, the consequences of climate change on extreme heat in Europe, which already is extremely deadly, could be even worse than we previously thought.”
This land of towering trees is home to forest elephants, bonobos and millions of people; it helps regulate our climate and slows climate change by removing 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.
The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo speculates that up to 16 billion barrels of oil may lie under the rainforest. In addition to accelerating the climate crisis, oil exploration here would be a pollution disaster for communities that depend on it and for wildlife. It could also become a major new source of civil unrest in an already unstable country. Given that the 1998-2003 Congo War and its aftermath killed more people than any conflict since World War II, everything possible should be done to avoid conflict in Congo.
The Congo government is reportedly auctioning exploratory oil drilling rights across an immense area on July 28 and 29. Of the 16 blocks on sale, nine are in the “central basin” rainforest region, covering roughly 59 million acres of land. That’s more land than the states of New York and Maine combined. This is a hastily arranged sale, probably driven by Congo’s coming presidential election and a hope of attracting oil companies with windfall profits driven by the Ukraine war. …
Once accessible and degraded, the rainforests would most likely succumb to rampant deforestation, increasing carbon emissions. In the peatlands, this disturbance would begin the release of carbon from the peat: up to 5.8 billion tons from the oil concession areas.
If oil production turns out to be viable, new dangers will surely follow. Data from drilling in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest gives an indication of what could happen. Bringing oil to the surface produces three barrels of toxic wastewater for every barrel of oil. In the Peruvian Amazon, this is most likely poisoning wildlife and people. In one study, 98.6 percent of children living in an oil production zone exceeded the safe limits for the cancer-causing heavy metal cadmium in their blood.
Increasingly hot temperatures will of course greatly reduce agricultural production, but it will also wreak havoc on livestock:
Top U.S. cattle feeding companies sent 1,000-pound carcasses to a Kansas landfill, where they were flattened by loader machines and mixed with trash, after a June heatwave killed thousands of cows, documents seen by Reuters show.
Other cattle were buried in unlined graves, a feeding company said.
Neither is a typical method for disposing of bodies. But so many cows died in the unusual heat and humidity that facilities that normally convert carcasses into pet food and fertilizer products were overwhelmed, prompting the state government and cattle feeders to take emergency measures
The mass deaths and subsequent scramble to deal with decaying bodies sparked a push for changes in the meat industry in Kansas, the third-largest U.S. cattle state.
Kansas is forecast to see more high temperatures that can stress and potentially kill cattle this summer, adding to the myriad problems caused by increasingly extreme weather linked to climate change.
Admirers of coral reefs, such as those at the southernmost point of Israel, have long thought that deep ones serve as a lifeline for shallow-water reefs, which suffer significant damage from human activities and climate change.
But researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat have found that the ability of soft coral to reproduce and grow is much weaker where reefs are in deeper waters and not shallow waters. The study suggests that some deep reef coral populations actually depend on shallow-water populations to thrive.
A new Tel Aviv University study, in collaboration with the has found that coral spawning events in the Gulf of Aqaba and Eilat, Red Sea, at the deep end of the focal species’ depth range (~30–45 m) occur at much lower intensities than those at shallow water (0–30 m). The study was recently published in the prominent journal Ecology under the title “Soft coral reproductive phenology along a depth gradient: Can “going deeper” provide a viable refuge?”
On 15 January, Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted under the sea, rocking the South Pacific nation and sending tsunamis racing around the world. The eruption was the most powerful ever recorded, causing an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe four times, and sending a plume of debris more than 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. But it didn’t stop there.
The ash and gasses punching into the sky also shot billions of kilograms of water into the atmosphere, a new study concludes. That water will likely remain there for years, where it could eat away at the ozone layer and perhaps even warm Earth. …
In all, the plume shot approximately 146 billion kilograms of water into Earth’s stratosphere, an arid layer of the atmosphere that begins several miles above sea level, the authors report this month in Geophysical Research Letters. That’s equivalent to about 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, or about 10% of the entire water content of the stratosphere, Millán says.
Other volcanoes have added measurable amounts of water vapor to Earth’s atmosphere, he says, but the scale this time was unprecedented. That’s likely because of the eruption’s magnitude and underwater location, he says. The water will probably remain in the stratosphere for half a decade or more, he says. …
That could make Earth warmer for years and accelerate the warming from greenhouse gasses, Toohey says. “We’ll kind of just jump forward by a few years.”
The US military, one of the world’s worst polluters, continues to brutalize and poison the world with essentially no accountability or tracking (it is exempt from Biden’s order to cut federal emissions):
In the fall of 2018, Neta C. Crawford, a political science professor at Boston University, prepared to teach a class on climate change designed to help students think about the issue in a big-picture way. Crawford’s research expertise is in war, so she wanted to include a statistic on the military’s contribution to greenhouse gases.
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should just tell them what the emissions are for the U.S. military,’” Crawford says. “It was meant to be a line on a slide in a lecture.”
But when she went to look up the figure, she couldn’t find anything reliable. Instead, she found scattered and incomplete data on how much fuel the military consumed and how much carbon it emitted. The information that did exist largely didn’t include overseas operations, even though the United States had been at war for nearly two decades. Major categories of fuel consumption, like much of the fuel used for aviation, seemed to be missing.
In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol—the world’s first legally binding, international climate treaty—created a reporting loophole for militaries, exempting many of the greenhouse gases emitted during military operations from counting against a country’s emissions totals. While the 2015 Paris Accords did away with this exemption, they didn’t replace it with an obligation. Rather, the decision of whether to report military emissions—and how to calculate them—was left up to individual countries.
The result is a gap in our understanding of the United States’ climate footprint. Research from academics like Crawford, who now studies the issue, shows that the Department of Defense is a major producer of greenhouse gases, with more emissions than many industrialized nations. The United States—and other countries—have said they are committed to reducing military emissions, and earlier this summer, NATO released its Action Plan on Climate Change and Security, acknowledging that better emissions data would help guide member states’ military planning. But there is no consistent methodology and reporting requirement for these emissions. As the United States and other countries work toward net-zero emissions by 2050, Crawford and others say, the lack of clear data from the U.S. Defense Department—the world’s largest employer—and other militaries is a major stumbling block.
But some on the neighbouring islands, including indigenous Chamoru people, hold grave concerns for the military’s impact on their environment, especially the use of sonar for anti-submarine warfare training, which may be causing whales to beach themselves and die.
In particular, Cuvier’s beaked whales, known for deep dives documented to last for hours, may be acutely vulnerable to sonar.
Able to dive to nearly 3,000 meters, Cuvier’s beaked whales can feed beyond the reach of competitors and predators, but not out of range of navy sonar.
Since 1998, fisheries biologist with Guam’s department of agriculture, Brent Tibbatts, has documented 30 marine mammal strandings – 13 of them since 2010. The timing of the strandings, and their proximity to sonar, have led him to believe they are related.
The towers, also called flare stacks, are used by oil refineries across the globe to burn the byproducts of oil extraction. Such flaring releases a menagerie of hazardous pollutants into the air, including soot, also known as black carbon. “The smoke coats our skin and homes with black soot,” says Rashid. Many villagers keep their windows shut and try to remain indoors whenever possible.
Rashid’s neighbor, 29-year-old Bilah Tasim Mahmoud, joins her on the porch. The younger woman is holding a beat-up notebook with the names of women from Agolan who have miscarried. “No one is counting, but I am,” she says, flipping through the notebook’s pages. “We have had 300 miscarriages in this village since the oil field was developed,” she says, adding that she has been collecting this data but has no one official to take it to.
Miscarriages, of course, are common everywhere, and while pollution writ large is known to be deadly in the aggregate, linking specific health outcomes to local ambient pollution is a notoriously difficult task. Even so, few places on earth beg such questions as desperately as modern Iraq, a country devastated from the northern refineries of Kurdistan to the Mesopotamian marshes of the south — and nearly everywhere in between — by decades of war, poverty, and fossil fuel extraction.
As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, it is easy to find soil and water polluted by depleted uranium, dioxin and other hazardous materials, and extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau — one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency.
According to Iraqi physicians, the many overlapping environmental insults could account for the country’s high rates of cancer, birth defects, and other diseases. Preliminary research by local scientists supports these claims, but the country lacks the money and technology needed to investigate on its own. To get a better handle on the scale and severity of the contamination, as well as any health impacts, they say, international teams will need to assist in comprehensive investigations. With the recent close of the ISIS caliphate, experts say, a window has opened.
Related (Kalmus again about Biden’s climate proposal):
One oft-cited optimist solution to climate change, the worldwide transition to clean energy (never a realistic or even sufficiently effective possibility) is now further imperiled:
The world is headed for a severe shortage of copper crucial to the green-energy transition as new mines become increasingly difficult to build, according to the new head of Anglo American Plc.
“I genuinely don’t see where all of this copper is going to come from at this point in time,” Anglo Chief Executive Officer Duncan Wanblad said in an interview in London on Thursday.
The copper price has slumped in recent months as inflationary fears hit western markets and China’s demand was curbed by sweeping Covid controls, but many investors remain bullish on the longer-term picture. The metal, which hit a record above $10,000 a ton earlier this year, is an essential part of the world’s efforts to decarbonize and new supply is constrained globally.
Neither can our crumbling, ill-maintained infrastructure handle the coming extreme heat events:
It's been so hot that a runway at London Luton Airport on the capital's outskirts had to be closed off as it melted in the heat.
"Flights are temporarily suspended to allow for an essential runway repair after high surface temperatures caused a small section to lift," the airport tweeted Monday.
Heat causes materials to expand and crack when temperatures rise, according to the Pennsylvania State University College of Engineering -- concrete and asphalt, found on runways and roads, are no exception.
AKW Beznau has to reduce the power (translated)
In contrast to the other two nuclear power plants in Gösgen and Leibstadt, Beznau does not have a cooling tower. It therefore uses the Aare water for cooling. Less electricity now has to be produced because otherwise the Aare would get too warm.
At the end of last week, the Beznau nuclear power plant had already slightly reduced its output. This was done as a precaution to ensure that the water downstream of the Aare does not get warmer than 25 degrees, says Axpo media spokesman Antonio Sommavilla: "You look at how the temperatures are developing and take preventive measures."
The measure is intended to protect fish that cannot withstand warmer water than 25 degrees for a longer period of time.
The high temperatures continued to cause problems for the nuclear power plant, said Sommavilla: "We expect that further power reductions will be possible in the next few days due to the rising temperatures."
If the upper limit of 25 degrees were exceeded for more than three days and if it remained hot, then the two reactors in Beznau would have to be shut down completely.
Germany’s Rhine, one of Europe’s key waterways, is just days away from being closed to commercial traffic because of very low levels caused by drought, authorities and industry have warned.
Crucially, the impending crisis could lead energy companies to cut their output, one of the country’s biggest gas companies has said.
Businesses located along the Rhine or dependent on it to transport or receive goods are warning that they have been forced to scale back activities and reduce loads drastically – and are now on the verge of having to close some production if cargo ships are no longer able to access the river.
The monarch butterfly fluttered a step closer to extinction Thursday, as scientists put the iconic orange-and-black insect on the endangered list because of its fast dwindling numbers.
"It's just a devastating decline," said Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University who was not involved in the new listing. "This is one of the most recognizable butterflies in the world."
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature added the migrating monarch butterfly for the first time to its "red list" of threatened species and categorized it as "endangered" — two steps from extinct.
The group estimates that the population of monarch butterflies in North America has declined between 22% and 72% over 10 years, depending on the measurement method.
Climate news is “Always More, Always Worse, Always Sooner Than Expected.” It is time to treat the end of our civilization with the gravitas it deserves: either work to save what is left of our system and fix it in the process (heavily socialize it), or let it die a deserved death with millions of lives as unfortunate collateral. Thus far, our leaders have chosen the latter, scrabbling to preserve their lives and wealth and dreaming of ways to pacify and control the population as it is immiserated and killed. Biden’s climate plan does nothing to change this trajectory.