17/03/2021

Plant Fossils Found On A Cold War Expedition Contain An Ominous Climate Message

Gizmodo - Molly Taft

Icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland. (Photo: Felipe Dana, AP)
Jars of dirt taken from a Cold War-era military caper and lost in a freezer for decades could hold crucial new information about climate change and sea level rise.

A study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists says that plant fossils found in a sample of dirt collected from a mile beneath the ice in the mid-1960s suggest that the world’s pre-human climate was at one point warm enough to completely melt the Greenland ice sheet.

The dirt researchers inspected is a sediment sample from the bottom of an ice core, retrieved by drilling down into the ice sheet that covers the majority of Greenland. It’s pretty hard to actually reach all the way down to bedrock when taking samples due to the incredible pressure from the ice, explained Drew Christ, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont.

There are only a few expeditions that have actually gotten sediment from the bottom of the glacier. “We have less of this [sediment] than moon rocks,” Christ said.

This particular sample yielded a lot of plant matter, some of which was visible to the naked eye. “It’s like if you went hiking, and got a bunch of twigs and forest floor stuff in the bottom of your boot and poured it out at the end of the day,” Christ said. “It’s kind of like that, but it’s been frozen for 1 million years.”

Christ and the team behind the study used isotope analyses of various elements that helped the researchers tease out the last time the samples were exposed to the sun and cosmic rays. The dating showed the plant matter is roughly 1 million years old.

Stunning new evidence suggests the Arctic Ocean was covered by a thick layer of ice and filled with fresh water on at least two occasions during the past 150,000 years. The observation could finally explain strange and dramatic climate anomalies associated with these glacial periods. Read more

Before analysing this particular sample, Christ said, scientists had “circumstantial” evidence that the Greenland ice sheet had once melted away completely.
 
But the discovery of these fossils definitively suggests that Greenland was once ice-free enough to provide a home for a variety of plants. And that’s bad news for us right now.

The Greenland ice sheet is a ticking climate bomb, with some estimates projecting that the sheet could raise sea levels by 6.1 metres if it fully melted. While it’s not slated to completely melt tomorrow, the ice sheet is now melting six times faster than it was in the 1980s.

The changes put in motion by rising carbon dioxide will take centuries to play out as the climate adjusts to a new equilibrium. Knowing its history is crucial to understanding the ice sheet’s future.

“The Greenland ice sheet has disappeared in a climate system that didn’t have any human influence,” Christ explained.

“Before humans added hundreds of parts per million of fossil fuels to the atmosphere, our climate was able to melt away the ice sheet. In the future as we continue to warm the planet at an uncontrollable rate, we could force the Greenland ice sheet past some threshold and melt it and raise sea levels.”

A microscopic view of twigs and moss from the dirt sample. (Image: University of Vermont)

The dirt sample Christ and his team used to reach these conclusions has its own incredible backstory, including that it was almost lost to history. The sample was originally recovered from the first ice core of Greenland ever taken during a 1966 expedition to a military base called Camp Century.

The actual purpose of the expedition was a top-secret James Bond-esque style mission called Project Iceworm (yes, really) to try and hide nuclear missiles under the ice near the Soviet Union (we’re not making this up). The scientific part of the expedition, while valid, was created mostly to give cover to this Cold War caper. 

Project Iceworm eventually failed, but at least we got this fascinating ice core out of this. (On the downside, though, climate change is melting out Camp Century, and could cause a toxic waste spill from leftover Cold War-era supplies and chemicals.)

Even though the dirt sample is itself remarkable, since the Camp Century attempt was the first ice core ever retrieved from Greenland, researchers were mostly interested in what the ice itself could tell them, and less invested in the dirt that came with the core.

“I was pulling out inch-long twigs out of this stuff. We could see with our bare eyes, like, this is definitely plant material,” Christ said. “Looking at this as someone who was born way after any of this went down, it’s like, how did [the scientists] not think to look more carefully? I think they had more of a priority to analyse the ice and then the soil didn’t get analysed.”

In what Christ describes as a “weird trick of history,” the soil was such a low-level priority for researchers that it eventually got lost when the expedition got home. The samples were shoved in the back of an army freezer at the University of Buffalo, then moved incognito with a bunch of other material to another freezer at a research facility in Denmark in the 1990s.

It was only in 2017, as JP Steffensen, one of Christ’s mentors and an author on the paper, was doing inventory helping that facility prepare its freezer for a move, that the samples were rediscovered and able to be more fully analysed.

And even though researchers in the 1960s may not have known what they got when they dug up ancient dirt, Christ is grateful that their work provided him with one of the more exciting moments of his scientific career.

“The day that we found the fossils was one of those ‘eureka’ moments. I never thought that those days actually happen for scientists, but it did happen for me,” he said, describing how he first saw specks of plant material as his team was cleaning the sediment samples for analysis. “I was jumping around in the lab. It was so exciting.”

Links
at No comments:

(AU) Former Health Chiefs Turn Focus To Climate

Canberra Times - Rebecca Gredley AAP

Health experts say a cleaner environment will reduce deaths from air pollution by phasing out coal.

Former chief state health officers are among a raft of experts calling for climate action to protect the wellbeing of Australians.

Queensland's former chief health officer Gerard FitzGerald and Tasmania's Roscoe Taylor will on Tuesday take their calls to Parliament House in Canberra.

The pair are among a group of 30 leaders in health who want a national strategy on climate health and wellbeing.

Emeritus Professor FitzGerald says politicians have turned to chief health officers during the coronavirus pandemic to help steer the emergency response.

"Today we are asking them to keep listening to the advice of leading health voices and swiftly act on the health emergency of climate change," he said.

Dr Taylor has worked in public health for more than three decades.

"I have witnessed the rising harms and costs of climate change," he said.

"Unless all governments, and particularly the federal government, takes health advice seriously, the preventable harms of climate change will only worsen and more people will lose their lives or suffer ill-health."

Climate and Health Alliance director Fiona Armstrong says health leaders don't use the word emergency lightly.

"Across the country, doctors, nurses and health practitioners are already treating the health impacts caused by worsening climate change," she said.

The Climate and Health Alliance has previously released a framework for a national strategy, which makes a raft of policy recommendations including tougher emissions reduction targets.

It also urges the government to evaluate the economic savings associated with health benefits from a cleaner environment, and to reduce deaths from air pollution by phasing out coal.

Links
at No comments:

‘Inequalities Will Become Even More Entrenched’: Why Climate Change Is A Feminist Issue

The Independent - Natasha Preskey

Climate change is already here, and it’s having a disproportionate impact on women around the world. Natasha Preskey asks experts why

Getty Images/iStockphoto

There’s an old saying that guns make us all the same size.

Similarly, the climate emergency feels - by definition - like something that should be a universal experience, a unifying threat to the home that we all share. But, like almost all other crises, we might all be floating in the same sea of uncertainty but we are certainly not in the same boat. 

Just as with coronavirus, which disproportionately impacts black, Asian and minority ethnic communities (and has hit women harder economically than men), the climate crisis poses more urgent problems for some people than for others. The effects will be felt more quickly, and more deeply, by some, and solutions that are accessible to many are a world away for others.

In 2021, as we get ever closer to the Paris Agreement deadline of 2050 for a climate-neutral world, we can already see that women, particularly women of colour, are experiencing the climate emergency’s worst effects. And for some, this half-century point will come too late.

In much of the global north, climate change isn’t yet impacting everyone’s day-to-day lives in a way that inspires sufficient urgency. Although we are seeing more localised events like historic flooding and freak storms in places like Texas, the situation is much worse in many other regions where the climate emergency is already affecting people’s livelihoods. 

Figures from the United Nations (UN) suggest that 80 per cent of people displaced by climate change worldwide are women. According to a review of 130 studies by the Global Gender and Climate Alliance in 2016, women are more likely to suffer food insecurity as a result of the climate crisis.

Following extreme weather events, women are also more likely to experience mental illness and partner violence. Professor Nitya Rao of the University of East Anglia (UEA) researches gender equality in parts of Africa and Asia which have already been severely affected by climate change.

She says in many of the rural areas where she conducts research, in countries like Nepal and India, droughts and floods can decimate crops and make the outcomes of agricultural labour unpredictable.  The climate crisis means that these sorts of unusual weather events are becoming more common - increasing the likelihood of this change in working status.

How to change your parents’ minds on climate change - by the Gen Zers who’ve done it
In order to reduce overall risk to the household’s income, men, who have access to a wider range of jobs, will often migrate to other areas - particularly urban areas away from land-based incomes - with women staying to care for children and continue agricultural work.

When this work isn’t fruitful, women often end up having to take on multiple jobs, says Rao.  

“They will have their farm, but they will also try and do something else: set up a small shop or some kind of enterprise or maybe wage labour for a richer landlord in order to ensure that there is at least some income in the household for their everyday needs,” Rao tells The Independent from India, where she is currently conducting research. 

She goes on to explain that, although men will often send money home from their new jobs, this change in circumstance means women are under pressure: “Especially at the time when men are absent, they may send money once a month, or once in two months, or three months. In the meantime, women will have to manage - so they end up working much harder.”

Although these effects of the climate crisis are already a day-to-day reality for women in some parts of the globe - and are starting to impact their economic output and options, women in the UK haven’t yet felt noticeable disparities in how they are affected against their male peers. 

But Professor Julie Doyle of the University of Brighton, whose work involves examining the role of media and communication in fighting climate change, says that this will likely manifest with time. Drawing on the pandemic to illustrate how crises affect people differently across existing power lines of gender, race and class, Doyle points out that “inequality is rife in the UK”.

“Women have borne the brunt of caring, housework and homeschooling responsibilities in the UK [during the pandemic], and are more likely to have lost their jobs than men,” she tells The Independent. 
“Women have borne the brunt of caring, housework and homeschooling responsibilities” - Professor Julie Doyle
Research from the Women’s Budget Group, published in November 2020, found that around 133,000 more women were furloughed than men across the UK during the first wave of Covid. Similarly, a study from the University of Exeter, published in July, found women were twice as likely to have lost a job during the first lockdown.

Dr Clare Wenham, assistant professor of global health policy at LSE, previously toldThe Independent that, during times of crisis, “gender norms become more entrenched”. She cited examples of pandemics including coronavirus, Ebola and Zika, in which women’s employment was disproportionately affected. 

Doyle says, just as we’ve seen the pandemic change circumstances for women, as the pressure of the climate crisis increases, we will likely see this again.

“As climate change increasingly impacts the UK in relation to localised flooding, heatwaves and ability to access food and other resources from climate impact countries across the globe, then these inequalities will become even more entrenched, limiting our ability to respond to such impacts in equitable and just ways.”

As climate change worsens in the UK, we will continue to see increased flooding. AFP via Getty Images

A 2010 study, published in journal Environmental Health, found that women in several European cities, including London, were already more likely than men to die during heatwaves.

Its authors suggested possible reasons for this may be “attributable to the social conditions of elderly women living alone and to physiological differences, such as a reduced sweating capacity that affects the ability to respond to heat stress”.

What, if anything, can be done to mitigate the impact of climate change on women?

According to Doyle, it’s important we frame the climate crisis as “an issue of justice” and teach it in schools from primary age onwards with this in mind. In taking action against global warming, we mustn’t treat “climate action as separate from gender equality”, she says, encouraging people to view these as intersectional issues.
“I’m very against the view that women are, somehow, becoming the victims of climate change” - Professor Nitya Rao
Rao emphasises that women are “resilient” and are adapting to cope with climate change but that they need support on a structural level to help mitigate the issues they face. She points to things like improving public health and sanitation, as well as food access.

“I’m very against the view that women are, somehow, becoming the victims of climate change,” she says. “They are showing resilience, but we need to support and enable them to do what they’re doing.”

Doyle adds that, in order to fight the gendered impacts of climate, we need more women in power. In fact, research earlier this year by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum found that countries led by women experienced significantly fewer Covid deaths, with women being more “risk averse” around loss of life but “more willing to take risks in the domain of the economy”.

“Women and girls, particularly of colour, need to be at the forefront of decision-making on climate change at the local, regional, national and international level,” Doyle concludes. “Climate change should not be discussed without reference to gender, racial and class inequalities.”

Links between gender inequality and the impacts of the climate crisis aren’t always immediately obvious to those whose day-to-day lives haven’t yet been upturned by global warming.

But to prevent gender disparities further deepening, an understanding of climate change and its complex relationship to human power structures is key.

Links
at No comments: