16/05/2017

Trump Is Deleting Climate Change, One Site At A Time

The Guardian - 

During inauguration day on 20 January, as Donald Trump was adding "American carnage" to the presidential lexicon, the new administration also took a hammer to official recognition that climate change exists and poses a threat to the US.
One of the starkest alterations to the White House's website following Trump's assumption of office was the scrapping of an entire section on climate change, stuffed with graphs on renewable energy growth and pictures of Barack Obama gazing at shriveling glaciers, to be replaced by a perfunctory page entitled "An America first energy plan".

Key



Under Obama
President Obama believes that no challenge poses a greater threat to our children, our planet, and future generations than climate change
Sources: Obama White House Archive and White House

 Under Trump
President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule. 
Sources: Obama White House Archive and White House

In the more than 100 days since, the administration has largely opted for a chisel and scalpel approach to refashioning its online content, but the end result is much the same – mentions of climate change have been excised, buried or stripped of any importance.
Federal government websites are being combed through to apply new verbiage. The state department’s office of global change, for example, has removed links to the Obama administration’s 2013 climate action report and mention of the latest UN meeting on climate change. Text relating to climate change and greenhouse gases has also been purged.

Under Obama
The climate action plan, announced in 2014, highlights unprecedented efforts by the United States to reduce carbon pollution, promote clean sources of energy that create jobs, protect communities from the impacts of climate change, and work with partners to lead international climate change efforts. The working partnerships the United States has created or strengthened with other major economies has reinforced the importance of results-drive action both internationally and domestically and are achieving measurable impacts now to help countries reduce their long-term greenhouse gas emissions.
Source: The old US Department of State page for Office of Global Change (dated Jan 20) 

Trump’s desire to champion the coal industry is reflected in the Department of Energy’s online pages aimed at educating children. Sentences that point out the harmful health consequences of burning coal and other impacts of fossil fuels have gone.

Under Obama
In the United States, most of the coal consumed is used as a fuel to generate electricity. Burning coal produces, emissions that adversely affect the environment and human health.
Source: EIA Kids website, page on Coal 

Under Obama
Underground mines have less of an impact on the environment compared to surface mines. The largest impact of underground mining maybe the methane gas that must be vented out of mines to make the mines a safe place. Surface mines contributed about 2% of total U.S. methane emissions.
Source: EIA Kids website, page on Coal

Under Trump
Underground mines generally have a less effect on the landscape compared to surface mines. However the ground above mine tunnels can collapse, and acidic water can drain from abandoned underground mines.

Alterations to the Department of the Interior’s climate section weren’t quite as subtle. A nine-paragraph description of melting glaciers, wildfires and invasive species driven by climate change has been pared down to a single, noncommittal line.

Under Obama
The impacts of climate change are forcing us to change how we manage these resources. Climate change may dramatically affect water supplies in certain watersheds, impact coastal wetlands and barrier islands, cause relocation of and stress on wildlife, increase wildland fires, further spread invasive species, and more.
Source: The old Department of Interior website under Obama, and the existing one

Under Trump
The impacts of climate change have led the department to focus on how we manage our nation’s public lands and resources

And then there’s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the target of severe cuts to its climate programs by the administration and led by an administrator, Scott Pruitt, who has defied basic scientific understanding of climate change.
On 28 April, the EPA announced in as quiet a way possible – it was a Friday at 7pm – that its website was “undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction” under Trump and Pruitt. This would involve “updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership”.

Under Trump
We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.
Source: EPA

Immediately, the EPA’s climate change section disappeared, to be replaced by a static holding page. This page linked to a “snapshot” from 19 January that includes copious information on the basics of climate change, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted in the US, temperature data and how the EPA is helping tamp down emissions.

The placeholder snapshot of the EPA’s climate change webpage pre-Trump administration. Photograph: EPA
These changes have caused deep alarm among environmental groups and some scientists, who fear that tweaked online language may soon morph into reams of climate data being deleted. While the record-keeping rules of the EPA and other agencies demand that data is retained, there is little to stop the administration hiding it from public view, only to be obtained via freedom of information laws.
Groups such as DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) have swung into action to monitor and archive climate and other data, just in case. EDGI uses a team of volunteer analysts to track changes to around 25,000 pages across multiple government agencies.
Maya Anjur-Dietrich, member of EDGI’s website tracking committee, said the initiative has “observed several emerging patterns, which notably concern climate change and renewable energy”.
“Across multiple agency websites, we have seen a reduction in usage of terms like ‘climate change’ and ‘greenhouse gases’, and an overall reduction in access to information pertaining to climate change,” she said.
“In a few cases, we have also observed shifts in economy- and business-oriented language, where the descriptions of the office focuses have increased their mentions of helping to grow infrastructure, create jobs, and stimulate the economy.
“On certain DOE (Department of Energy) pages, in particular, we have seen a shift in emphasis away from renewable energy and, in some cases, towards usage of fossil fuels.”
Anjur-Dietrich pointed out that federal government websites have always been regularly updated, either during an administration or its transition. But unless care is taken, broad, important themes such as climate change can become obscured.
“It is when web pages are changed without transparency, explanation, or careful documentation that the public’s access to information – and thus the ability to understand the implications of that information – is imperiled,” she said.
Activists have sought to resurrect removed information through the so-called Beetlejuice provision, which is where three separate freedom of information requests for the same thing requires the content to be publicly displayed.
The Beetlejuice tactic has been used on a range of agencies – including Nasa and the EPA – for climate data, renewable energy information and other content. Researchers fret that changes to online generalities aimed at the public may ultimately grow to become threat to their work.
“It’s a serious concern that we will lose this information because long-term, large-scale environmental data is very hard to come by,” said Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University who submitted one of the freedom of information requests.
“At this stage it’s a fear – I haven’t had colleagues saying they tried to get data and it’s no longer there. But this has to be viewed in the context of an administration that’s very hostile to science. I mean, we have a president who has said climate change is a Chinese plot.”
Amy Atwood, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, added: “Scrubbing information about climate change will not make it any less dangerous.
“We’re going to fight the Trump administration’s efforts to bury the science showing the dangerous impacts of climate change at every turn.”

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Ocean Oxygen Decline Greater Than Predicted

Climate News Network - Tim Radford

Circulation changes caused by warming waters and melting polar ice are the most probable explanations for the rapidly falling levels of oxygen in the ocean.
The systematic study of the oceans began only relatively recently. Image: Emrys Roberts via Flickr
US scientists who have been warning that warmer oceans are more likely to be poorer in dissolved oxygen have now sounded the alarm: ocean oxygen levels are indeed falling, and seemingly falling faster than the corresponding rise in water temperature.
That colder water can hold more dissolved gas than warmer water is a commonplace of physics: it is one reason why polar seas are teeming with marine life and tropical oceans are blue, clear and often relatively impoverished.
In 2013, an international consortium of marine scientists warned that oxygen levels in the oceans could fall by between 1% and 7% by the century’s end. And this could, other scientists predicted, lead to what they politely called “respiratory stress” for some marine life.

Ocean warming
Ocean ecologists in the US and Germany warned last year that parts of the deep oceans were already showing signs of oxygen deprivation with corresponding dead zones.
Earlier this year, another research group looked at the computer simulations for the years 1920 to 2100 and predicted that the hazards were likely to increase with warming.
Now the team have returned to the issue. They report in Geophysical Research Letters that they looked at data for the last 50 years and found the oxygen levels started dropping in the 1980s, as ocean temperatures began to climb – and falling unexpectedly rapidly.
“The trend of oxygen falling is about two to three times faster than what we predicted from the decrease of solubility associated with ocean warming,” says Takamitsu Ito, of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who led the study.
“This is most likely due to the changes in ocean circulation and mixing associated with the heating of the near-surface waters and the melting of polar ice.”
“If it is a warming signal, we should expect to seecontinued widespread declines in oceanic O2. The impact of ocean deoxygenation may be profound.”
The sea’s oxygen content comes from air absorbed at the surface or released by phytoplankton photosynthesis, and carried deeper by ocean currents. But as water warms it becomes more buoyant, which means mixing with cooler subsurface waters becomes less likely. And melting ice delivers more fresh water to the ocean surface, which also interferes with the pattern of circulation.
“After the mid-2000s, this trend became apparent, consistent and statistically significant – beyond the envelope of year-to-year fluctuations,” Dr Ito says. “The trends are particularly strong in the tropics, eastern margins of each basin and the sub-polar North Pacific.”
That the oceans are warming is well established. That the seas are becoming more acidic as extra carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions increases in the atmosphere is now widely accepted.

Oxygen loss
That the oceans are at risk of oxygen loss is harder to establish: the oceans cover seven-tenths of the planet, and systematic study of the oceans began only relatively recently. And, of course, such research is bedevilled by natural patterns of local variation: it becomes harder to make any link with manmade global warming.
But, the researchers conclude, “the evidence is consistent with anthropogenic warming acting as the primary driver of long-term trends in ocean O2. The trends we document are suggestive of the effects of warming beginning to supersede natural variability and emerge as a recognisable signal.”
And, they add: “If it is a warming signal, we should expect to see continued widespread declines in oceanic O2. The impact of ocean deoxygenation may be profound.”

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Carbon Pollution Is Suffocating Ocean Life And Speeding Up The Next Mass Extinction

ThinkProgress - Joe Romm

Oxygen levels ‘falling 2 to 3 times faster than predicted’ in our warming oceans, study finds
Much of the ocean is seeing sharp drops in oxygen levels (purple). CREDIT: Georgia Tech
Depletion of dissolved oxygen in our oceans, which can cause dead zones, is occurring much faster than expected, a new study finds.
And by combining oxygen loss with ever-worsening ocean warming and acidification, humans are re-creating the conditions that led to the worst-ever extinction, which killed over 90 percent of marine life 252 million years ago.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology reviewed ocean data going back to 1958 and “found that oxygen levels started dropping in the 1980s as ocean temperatures began to climb.”
Scientists have long predicted that as carbon pollution warms the globe, the amount of oxygen in our oceans would drop, since warmer water can’t hold as much dissolved gas as colder water. And, Georgia Tech researchers point out, falling oxygen levels have recently led to more frequent low-oxygen events that “killed or displaced populations of fish, crabs and many other organisms.”
But what is especially worrisome about this new research is how quickly it is happening. “The trend of oxygen falling is about two to three times faster than what we predicted from the decrease of solubility associated with the ocean warming,” said lead researcher Prof. Taka Ito. “This is most likely due to the changes in ocean circulation and mixing associated with the heating of the near-surface waters and melting of polar ice.”
Global warming drives ocean stratification — the separation of the ocean into relatively distinct layers. This in turn speeds up oxygen loss, as explained in this 2015 video.

A 2011 study, “Rapid expansion of oceanic anoxia immediately before the end-Permian mass extinction,” found that rapid and widespread anoxia (absence of oxygen) preceded “the largest mass extinction in Earth history, with the demise of an estimated 90 percent of all marine species.”
As National Geographic reported in 2015, we’re already starting to see the impacts of anoxia. “The waters of the Pacific Northwest, starting in 2002, intermittently have gotten so low in oxygen that at times they’ve smothered sea cucumbers, sea stars, anemones, and Dungeness crabs,” the magazine reported.
Finally, a 2015 study found there is no techno-fix to prevent a catastrophic collapse of ocean life for centuries if not millennia if we continue current CO2 emissions trends through 2050.
If we don’t start slashing carbon pollution, then, as co-author John Schellnhuber put it, “we will not be able to preserve ocean life as we know it.”

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