23/04/2020

(US) The Western U.S. Is Locked In The Grips Of The First Human-Caused Megadrought, Study Finds

Washington Post - Andrew Freedman | Darryl Fears

Only one drought in the past 1,200 years comes close to the ongoing, global warming-driven event

Water levels at the Ward Creek Reservoir in Grand Mesa, Colo., have gone down in recent years because of persistent drought conditions. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

A vast region of the western United States, extending from California, Arizona and New Mexico north to Oregon and Idaho, is in the grips of the first climate change-induced megadrought observed in the past 1,200 years, a study shows.

The finding means the phenomenon is no longer a threat for millions to worry about in the future, but is already here.

The megadrought has emerged while thirsty, expanding cities are on a collision course with the water demands of farmers and with environmental interests, posing nightmare scenarios for water managers in fast-growing states.

A megadrought is broadly defined as a severe drought that occurs across a broad region for a long duration, typically multiple decades.

Unlike historical megadroughts triggered by natural climate cycles, emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have contributed to the current one, the study finds.

Warming temperatures and increasing evaporation, along with earlier spring snowmelt, have pushed the Southwest into its second-worst drought in more than a millennium of observations.

The study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, compares modern soil moisture data with historical records gleaned from tree rings, and finds that when compared with all droughts seen since the year 800 across western North America, the 19-year drought that began in 2000 and continued through 2018 (this drought is still ongoing, though the study’s data is analyzed through 2018) was worse than almost all other megadroughts in this region.

The researchers, who painstakingly reconstructed soil moisture records from 1,586 tree-ring chronologies to determine drought severity, found only one megadrought that occurred in the late 1500s was more intense.

Historical megadroughts, spanning vast regions and multiple decades, were triggered by natural fluctuations in tropical ocean conditions, such as La Niña, the cyclic cooling of waters in the tropical Pacific.

“The megadrought era seems to be reemerging, but for a different reason than the [past] megadroughts,” said Park Williams, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Although many areas in the West had a productive wet season in 2019 and some this year, “you can’t go anywhere in the West without having suffered drought on a millennial scale,” Williams said, noting that megadroughts contain relatively wet periods interspersed between parched years.

“I think the important lesson that comes out of this is that climate change is not a future problem,” said Benjamin I. Cook, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the study. “Climate change is a problem today. The more we look, the more we find this event was worse because of climate change.”

The study is part scientific grunt work, involving sifting through drought records to find past instances of comparable conditions, and part sophisticated sleuthing that employs computer models to determine how climate change is altering the likelihood of an event like this one.

Cook said the researchers analyzed climate models for the region, which showed warming trends and changes in precipitation. They compared soil moisture with and without global warming-induced trends, “and we were able to determine that 30 to 50 percent of the current drought is attributable to climate change.”

That conclusion is a first, says Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Michigan who did not participate in the new study.

“They are the first to show conclusively that we’re experiencing our nation’s first megadrought of the instrumental era,” he said via email.

“The real take home,” Overpeck said, “is that the Southwest is being baked by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, and the future implications are dire if we don’t stop climate change.”

Looking for a megadrought, only to find it’s already here
Fire crews look for remaining hot spots left over by the Getty Fire, which destroyed a dozen homes, during the early morning hours in Brentwood, Calif., in October. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post


In 2015, Cook took part in a study that predicted a megadrought would grip the American Southwest starting about 2050 and persist for 35 years, with a few wet years to break long dry spells.

At the time, California was experiencing a severe four-year drought. As it dragged past a fifth year, Cook and others asked a question: “Are these changes in drought patterns that we expected in the future already beginning to happen?”

They then set out to answer that question.

For the study, the authors started from scratch, analyzing tree-ring data rather than relying solely on archived information. They took apart calculations already in the record and modified them where needed. Not only was a megadrought happening, they concluded, it had been in progress since the turn of the century.

The same year that Cook and other researchers published their first study, a Stanford University scientist, Noah Diffenbaugh, led a separate study that said rising temperatures and significant declines in snow and rainfall will parch California for years to come.

Diffenbaugh, a professor and senior fellow who studies the Southwest, had also analyzed data showing that the region was becoming hotter and drier. He said Thursday’s study, which he was not involved with, is a breakthrough because of its comparison of droughts in the past two decades to those in the previous thousand years.

“Placing the two-decade period in the whole region in the context of the last millennium is very striking, very powerful,” Diffenbaugh said. “We can conclude that without the warming, this period would not have produced such a severe, regionwide drought.”

What this means for the West

 Valerie Trouet, a researcher at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, says that the megadroughts of the past brought about major societal impacts, particularly those that persisted for decades.

For example, the megadrought seen in the late 800s is thought to have instigated the downfall of the Mayan civilization. The severe drought in the 16th century may have contributed to the Chichimeca War in Mexico, during which Native Americans and European settlers fought for decades.

“All of these past megadroughts have had severe impacts,” Trouet said in an interview. “We can expect there to be societal impacts now, too.”

These effects may not be as devastating in the future, however. Modern humans have more ways to adapt, Cook said.

“There are a lot of things we can do about it. People in the West are dealing with this drought in a number of ways,” Cook said.

California has already provided a model for living in a warmer and drier region, although it has involved sacrifice at times. Amid its drought in 2015, the state took aggressive steps to preserve water and limit wildfires on thirsty land with varying success. Former governor Jerry Brown (D) imposed the first water restrictions in state history and declared that watering lawns was going to be “a thing of the past” in California.

Water utilities essentially rationed supply, telling residents to dramatically cut the minutes they showered to no longer than 12 and all but mandating more efficient machines for laundry and dish washing.

Utilities encouraged homeowners to purchase new appliances with rebates subsidized by the state, water bills spiked and penalties were imposed on any household that went over their limits. Neighbors spied on neighbors who washed cars, watered grass and sprayed driveways, all outlawed.

A swimming pool contrasts with the drought-dried landscape in East Porterville, Calif., in 2015. With access to water limited, the pool's owner doesn't drain it, instead using chemicals to keep it clean. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

East Porterville, Calif., in the Central Valley became a town without water. A church set up a shower trailer so residents whose wells went dry could wash. The state placed water tanks outside homes so their toilets would flush. Laundering clothes, washing hands and brushing teeth became luxuries.

The drought and the drive to save water had environmental consequences, as well. It resulted in the death of trees that improved air quality, provided animal habitats and beautified urban areas across California. Urban trees joined about 12.5 million wild trees that died in dry California forests during 2015’s drought, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Such serious drought effects happened with only about 1 degree Celsius of warming since the industrial revolution, Diffenbaugh said. “The impacts we’ve already seen from one degree of warming really highlights the intensification of what’s coming,” he said.


Extreme weather, like the polar vortex, is becoming more common as the Arctic continues to be disrupted by climate change. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

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(US) Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming

New York Times - Rhiana Gunn-Wright

Addressing climate change is a big-enough idea to revive the economy.

A home in Baton Rouge, La., near an ExxonMobil oil refinery. Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times

Rhiana Gunn-Wright is the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute.
She has worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the creation of the Green New Deal.
Gunn-Wright was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in 2013. 
On the last Friday in March, I lost hope. I have always believed in America: not in our inherent goodness — I am too black for that — but in our sheer animal will to survive.

Crisis after crisis, our country has evolved to meet the moment, even if that meant changing the way we thought the world worked or striving to upend the imbalance of power.

But on that Friday, I was on my couch working when the messages started to pour in.

Friends sent me video after video of Republican senators debating stimulus measures to address the coronavirus crisis, standing in the Senate chamber, saying that the Green New Deal — a proposal that I helped create — was the reason millions of Americans would not receive the help that they need.

I was furious. Of the nearly $2 trillion in aid proposed in that first version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act, $500 billion went toward a business-relief fund with little to no oversight. Fifty-eight billion of this was earmarked for airlines, and a lax definition of eligible businesses created a loophole for oil and gas.

The bill included no climate protections, so the claim that it was being held up over Green New Deal provisions was absurd. And the changes proposed by Democrats — emissions reductions for airlines, limiting bailouts for fossil fuel industries, protections for airline workers — were modest.

The senators I saw did not mention those things. Nor did they mention that the airlines had requested $50 billion after spending $45 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years.

They did not mention that emissions reductions requested would not be required until 2025 or that when they were, the reductions would be less than 3 percent per year. And no one stood up and asked why corporations should be exempt from loan terms when the rest of us are not.

Why is it “opportunism” when we try to design policy that would address more than one problem at a time, but it’s “efficiency” when businesses do the same? (The final version of the CARES Act does not provide targeted funding for fossil fuels and reduced the aid for passenger airlines to $25 billion. None of the climate policies mentioned were included in the final version of the bill.)

Covid-19 and the economic collapse it has caused have laid bare how connected our problems are. Congress and the Federal Reserve are not going to lay out trillions of dollars, over and over, in perpetuity.

Refusing to include measures related to climate and environmental justice in economic stimulus packages related to the coronavirus is not neutral when there is no guarantee of other opportunities to do so later.

We need to design the stimulus not only to help the U.S. economy recover but to also become more resilient to the climate crisis, the next multitrillion-dollar crisis headed our way.

Pandemics like the coronavirus may occur more often when climate change is unabated. Warming and changing weather patterns shift the vectors and spread of disease. Heavily polluting industries also contribute to disease transmission.

 Studies have linked factory farming — one of the largest sources of methane emissions — to faster-mutating, more virulent pathogens. The same corporations that exacerbated the climate crisis are literally helping to create deadlier diseases, more quickly, in a world that keeps changing how they spread.

Similarly, the same populations that are bearing the brunt of the health and economic effects of the coronavirus are the same populations that bear the brunt of fossil fuel pollution — which, in turn, makes them more vulnerable to serious complications.

In three of the states with the highest number of Covid-19 cases — Illinois, Michigan and Louisiana — African-Americans made up 40 to 70 percent of deaths from the disease, far outpacing the percentage of black people in each state. Many of the black communities ravaged by Covid-19 are “front-line communities” — where residents live adjacent to heavily polluting industries.

If you’re black or Latinx — and especially if you’re poor — it is difficult not to live in a front-line community. Oil, gas and petrochemical industries have concentrated so heavily in low-income, majority-black-and-brown areas that black people are 75 percent more likely to live near industrial facilities than the average American.

Metro Detroit, the epicenter of Michigan’s Covid-19 outbreak, is home to steel mills, waste-processing plants and the only oil refinery in the state — all in or near low-income, black and Latinx neighborhoods.

The people most likely to die from toxic fumes are the same people most likely to die from Covid-19. It’s like we are watching a preview of the worst possible impacts of the climate crisis roll right before our eyes.

Emissions from the Marathon oil refinery in Detroit have been an ongoing concern for the neighborhoods within its range.  Credit...Erin Kirkland for The New York Times

Leaders on both sides of the aisle have argued that folding policies to address climate and environmental injustice into coronavirus-related legislative packages would distract from efforts to provide immediate relief.

But addressing climate change and environmental injustice will not diffuse efforts to address the virus and its economic fallout if we apply intersectional policies such as the Green New Deal.

They are designed to address connected issues in a way that protects the most vulnerable while building a more just and sustainable economy. Some states have already begun to connect the coronavirus to climate action. New York, for example, passed the Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act on April 3.

The legislation comes on the heels of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act — sometimes referred to as New York’s Green New Deal. And if New York’s response is any indication, none of this appears to have detracted from efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Addressing climate change doesn’t have to slow down the economic recovery, either. In fact, it can push it forward. No one knows the depth of the recession, but it is hard to see how we will put the 16 million people who have filed for unemployment back to work without significant public investment.

If history is any indication, rebounding from an economic disruption this large requires an equally large spike in demand and production.

Outside of war, climate change is the only issue large enough to provide such a spike. Now is the time to create policies that provide immediate relief to communities, such as federal assistance to transition homes and businesses to renewable energy; give “green” fiscal aid to states; and fuel economic recovery with the creation of federally funded green jobs. But none of this can happen so long as our leaders keep convincing themselves that the greatest country in the world cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

A climate-focused economic recovery — much less a coronavirus response that acknowledges the climate crisis — could require a new Congress and a new president, a tall order in an America this divided.

But maybe it is time to stop acting as though politics is a force of nature when we are facing actual and deadly forces of nature. It’s past time to elect leaders who are fit to handle the crises we face, instead of hoping for problems small enough to fit the leaders we have.

The Americans I know would like to survive, even if it means our country has to evolve — which many of us have been ready for long before the pandemic.

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(AU) We Just Spent Two Weeks Surveying The Great Barrier Reef. What We Saw Was An Utter Tragedy

The Conversation -  | 

Author supplied

Authors
  • Terry Hughes
    Distinguished Professor, James Cook University
  • Morgan Pratchett
    Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University
The Australian summer just gone will be remembered as the moment when human-caused climate change struck hard. First came drought, then deadly bushfires, and now a bout of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef – the third in just five years.

Tragically, the 2020 bleaching is severe and the most widespread we have ever recorded.

Coral bleaching at regional scales is caused by spikes in sea temperatures during unusually hot summers. The first recorded mass bleaching event along Great Barrier Reef occurred in 1998, then the hottest year on record.

Since then we’ve seen four more mass bleaching events – and more temperature records broken – in 2002, 2016, 2017, and again in 2020.

This year, February had the highest monthly sea surface temperatures ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef since the Bureau of Meteorology’s records began in 1900.

Source: Australian Academy of Science.

Not a pretty picture

We surveyed 1,036 reefs from the air during the last two weeks in March, to measure the extent and severity of coral bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef region. Two observers, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, scored each reef visually, repeating the same procedures developed during early bleaching events.

The accuracy of the aerial scores is verified by underwater surveys on reefs that are lightly and heavily bleached. While underwater, we also measure how bleaching changes between shallow and deeper reefs.

Of the reefs we surveyed from the air, 39.8% had little or no bleaching (the green reefs in the map). However, 25.1% of reefs were severely affected (red reefs) – that is, on each reef more than 60% of corals were bleached. A further 35% had more modest levels of bleaching.

Bleaching isn’t necessarily fatal for coral, and it affects some species more than others. A pale or lightly bleached coral typically regains its colour within a few weeks or months and survives.

The 2020 coral bleaching event was the second-worst in more than two decades. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

But when bleaching is severe, many corals die. In 2016, half of the shallow water corals died on the northern region of the Great Barrier Reef between March and November. Later this year, we’ll go underwater to assess the losses of corals during this most recent event.

Compared to the four previous bleaching events, there are fewer unbleached or lightly bleached reefs in 2020 than in 1998, 2002 and 2017, but more than in 2016. Similarly, the proportion of severely bleached reefs in 2020 is exceeded only by 2016. By both of these metrics, 2020 is the second-worst mass bleaching event of the five experienced by the Great Barrier Reef since 1998.

The unbleached and lightly bleached (green) reefs in 2020 are predominantly offshore, mostly close to the edge of the continental shelf in the northern and southern Great Barrier Reef. However, offshore reefs in the central region were severely bleached again. Coastal reefs are also badly bleached at almost all locations, stretching from the Torres Strait in the north to the southern boundary of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

CC BY-ND

For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef – the northern, central and now large parts of the southern sectors. The north was the worst affected region in 2016, followed by the centre in 2017.

In 2020, the cumulative footprint of bleaching has expanded further, to include the south. The distinctive footprint of each bleaching event closely matches the location of hotter and cooler conditions in different years.

Poor prognosis

Of the five mass bleaching events we’ve seen so far, only 1998 and 2016 occurred during an El Niño – a weather pattern that spurs warmer air temperatures in Australia.

But as summers grow hotter under climate change, we no longer need an El Niño to trigger mass bleaching at the scale of the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve already seen the first example of back-to-back bleaching, in the consecutive summers of 2016 and 2017. The gap between recurrent bleaching events is shrinking, hindering a full recovery.

For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

After five bleaching events, the number of reefs that have escaped severe bleaching continues to dwindle. Those reefs are located offshore, in the far north and in remote parts of the south.

The Great Barrier Reef will continue to lose corals from heat stress, until global emissions of greenhouse gasses are reduced to net zero, and sea temperatures stabilise. Without urgent action to achieve this outcome, it’s clear our coral reefs will not survive business-as-usual emissions.

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19/04/2020

Greta's World

Rolling Stone - 

How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement 

Jack Davison for Rolling Stone

There is persona and there is reality in Greta Thunberg. It is Valentine’s Day in her hometown of Stockholm, but there’s only wind, no hearts and flowers. A few hundred kids mill about, with a smattering of adults. If there were not signs reading “Our Earth, We Only Have One,” it could be mistaken for a field trip to the ABBA museum.

But where is Greta? I find a scrum of reporters interviewing a child in a purple puffer jacket, pink mittens, and a homemade-looking knit hat. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s Greta. She is 17, but could pass for 12. I can’t quite square the fiery speaker with the micro teen in front of me. She seems in need of protection.

Of course, this is emphatically wrong. Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s, which, she says, gives her pinpoint focus on climate minutiae while parrying and discarding even the smallest attempt at flattery. We stand near the Swedish Parliament house, where less than two years ago Thunberg started her Skolstrejk för klimatet, School Strike for Climate.

Back then, it was just Greta, a sign, and a lunch of bean pasta in a reusable glass jar. Then it was two people, and then a dozen, and then an international movement. I mention the bravery of her speeches, but she waves me away. She wants to talk about the loss of will among the olds.

“It seems like the people in power have given up,” says Thunberg, taking her hat off and pushing back her mussed up brown-blond hair. She remains on message despite the tourists and teens taking her picture and mugging behind us. “They say it’s too hard — it’s too much of a challenge. But that’s what we are doing here. We have not given up because this is a matter of life and death for countless people.”

It was my second encounter with Greta in three weeks. Back in January, before the Coronavirus brought the world to its knees, forcing Greta to move her Friday protests online, she was in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum, where billionaires helo into the Swiss resort town and talk about solving the world’s problems without making their lives any harder. Thunberg had appeared last year and made her now iconic “Our House Is on Fire” speech, in which she declared the climate crisis to be the mortal threat to our planet. Solve it or all the other causes — feminism, human rights, and economic justice — would not matter.

“Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t,” said Thunberg with cold precision. “That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”

The speech made Thunberg the unlikely and reluctant hero of the climate crisis. She crossed the ocean in a sailboat — she doesn’t fly for environmental reasons — to speak before the United Nations. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, conjuring the manic jealousy of Donald Trump, who called the honor “so ridiculous” and suggested she go to the movies and chill out.

In Davos, the illuminati prattled on about planting a trillion trees, even as we are still clear-cutting actual trees from the Amazon all the way to Thunberg’s beloved Sweden. This did not amuse nor placate the hoodie-wearing Greta. She seemed irritated and perhaps a little sick; she canceled an appearance the day before because she wasn’t feeling well. She was in no mood for flattery and nonsense. So when Time editor Edward Felsenthal asked her how she dealt with all the haters, Greta didn’t even try to answer diplomatically.

“I would like to say something that I think people need to know more than how I deal with haters,” she answered, before launching into details from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report. She mentioned that if we are to have even a 67 percent chance of limiting global temperature change to under 1.5 C, the point where catastrophic changes begin, we have less than 420 gigatons of CO2 that we can emit before we pass the no-going-back line. Thunberg stated that, at the current rate, we have eight years to change everything.

Thunberg’s face was controlled fury. This was the persona: an adolescent iron-willed truth teller. The Davos one-percenters clapped and rattled their Rolexes. It has become a disconcerting pattern for Thunberg appearances that would be repeated at the European Commission: Greta tells the adults they are fools and their plans are lame and shortsighted. They still give her a standing ovation. A few minutes later, she was gone and the audience dispersed into a fleet of black BMWs and Mercedes, belching diesel into the Alpine sky.

Greta Thunberg illustration by Shepard Fairey. Based on a photograph by Markus Schreiber/AP Images/Shutterstock

My Greta travels featured a Vancouver-Zurich round trip and then an L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I fly from Vancouver to L.A. for another story. It’s the job, but I take stock in horror and calculate that my three flights burn more carbon than the yearly usage of the average citizen of more than 200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.

“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has come to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta moment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say you understand the science, but I don’t believe you. Because if you did and then you continue to act as you do, that would mean you’re evil. And I don’t believe that.’” Gore shook his head in wonderment. “Wow.” He then gives a history lesson: “There have been other times in human history when the moment a morally-based social movement reached the tipping point was the moment when the younger generation made it their own. Here we are.”

Activist-actress Jane Fonda was so inspired by Greta that she has been hosting a series of Fire Drill Fridays. “I was just filled with depression and hopelessness, and then I started reading about Greta,” Fonda tells me one winter afternoon in Los Angeles. “She inspired me to get out there and do more.”

But in Stockholm, the world of presidential taunts, former vice presidents slathering praise, and Oscar winners rhapsodizing seems far away.

Outside of the Parliament building, Greta tells me she doesn’t worry about her safety despite Trump and others speaking cruelly about her on social media. (According to her mother, locals have shoved excrement into the family mailbox.) Later in February, she would march in Bristol, England, and be met by social media posts suggesting she deserved to be sexually assaulted.

“It’s just the people with 10 accounts who sit and write anonymously on Twitter and so on,” Greta says. “It’s nothing you can take seriously.”

Still, all is not rotten. America has come up with the Green New Deal. In Trumplandia, that seems like a beacon of hope, right?

Nope.

“If you look at the graphs to stay below the 1.5 degree Celsius global average temperature and you read the Green New Deal, you see that it doesn’t add up,” says Thunberg with some impatience. She references her Davos speech about how the world only has 420 gigatons of CO2 to burn over the next eight years or the 1.5 goal becomes impossible. “If we are to be in line with the carbon-dioxide budget, we need to focus on doing things now instead of making commitments like 10, or 20, 30 years from now. Of course, the Green New Deal is not in line with our carbon-dioxide budget.”

Meanwhile, the main criticism of the Green New Deal at home is that it moves too fast in getting the United States to zero carbon emission by 2050. But Greta doesn’t do politics.

“At least it has got people to start talking about the climate crisis more,” says Thunberg in a tone that suggests the slightest of praise. “That of course is a step in the right direction, I guess.”

There’s more to say, but now it’s time to march. The children’s crusade forms into a regimented mob. Greta moves to the front and holds a Skolstrejk för klimatet banner with some other teens. The taller kids lift it too high, and she nearly vanishes. All you can see is Greta’s winter hat and her gray eyes. That’s enough.

Al Gore was right. A child leads us.

Technically, Greta Thunberg’s childhood continues for another year. But she hasn’t been a kid for some time. She is one of two daughters of Malena Ernman, an opera-singer-turned-Eurovision-contestant, and Svante Thunberg, an actor. According to the family’s book, Our House Is on Fire, the bohemian clan has endured a scroll of psychological disorders beginning with Malena, who suffered from bulimia and still deals with ADHD. Greta’s younger sister, Beata, was diagnosed with OCD and ADHD, and has an acute noise sensitivity, which has meant at times the rest of the family eating in a guest room with plastic plates to keep noise to a minimum. When Beata went to dance class, Malena wasn’t allowed to move during the two-hour session lest Beata have a tearful meltdown.

Greta battled her own life-threatening demons. When she was 11, she stopped eating and rarely spoke to anyone outside of her family for months. Sometimes she would come home after being bullied at school — recess was spent hiding out in the bathroom — and either spend hours petting her dogs or crying at her own pain. She lost 20 pounds as her parents chronicled her food intake. (“Five pieces of gnocchi in two hours.”)

Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the climate’s demise.

“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”

Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.

“I thought what the Parkland students did was so brave,” says Thunberg. “Of course, it was not the only thing that got me out of that feeling. I did it because I was tired of sitting and waiting. I tried to get others to join me, but no one was interested and no one wanted to do that. So I said, ‘I’m going to do this alone if no one else wants to do it.’ ”

So in August 2018, Greta and her father bicycled down to the Swedish Parliament, across the cobblestone street from where Greta and I now stand. She propped up the first Skolstrejk för klimatet sign, which she’d made from scrap wood. Greta also wrote up an information sheet with climate data and a hint of the defiant humor that eventually led her to make her Twitter profile read, “A teenager working on her anger management problem,” after Trump told her to chill out. Her bio was simple:

“Because you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future, neither do I. My name is Greta, I am in ninth grade, and I am going on strike from school for the climate.”

Photograph by Jack Davison for Rolling Stone

Her dad left, and she sat alone. She posted a couple of images to Instagram. It was passed on by a few of her followers. Then a reporter noticed. And then local activists from Greenpeace. Within two months, there were hundreds of fellow travelers, and the news spread through Scandinavia to Europe and on to America. Within a year, climate student strikes attracted tens of thousands, from London to New York.

Greta’s rise was the activist version of a perfect storm. Her ascension from bullied Swedish student to global climate icon has been driven by both a loss and a regaining of hope. It is not a coincidence that her ascent happened immediately in the aftermath of the election of Trump. It’s impossible to see a Greta-like phenomena emerging during the Obama-driven run up to the Paris climate talks, when it actually looked like nations of the world were getting their shit together to deal with global warming. It became obvious after Trump and the Paris implosion that 30 years of rhetoric and meetings had created very little except more talk.

And then you had the natural disasters. California could not stop burning. Floods ravaged Europe. We now watch glaciers melt and collapse in real time. The dawn of 2020 brought the Australian calamity, with images of scorched earth, koalas and kangaroos burned alive, and the death of a way of life.

The irony of the Greta Age is that we now have options, but refuse to take them. Clean-energy technology has evolved to a point where old arguments that fossil fuels remain the cheapest way to create energy are now obviously nonsense. The cost of clean energy is no longer a barrier to change. Over the past decade, it became an obvious truth: Burning fossil fuels no longer made economic sense anywhere, anytime. What remains is the power and influence of the energy conglomerate superpowers to maintain the status quo. No politician has the courage to face them down. By 2018, it became even clearer that politicians could not be trusted. Talk was wasted. Companies would continue to put profits before nature. We were on our own.

And that’s when Greta came along.

Thunberg’s perceived psychological weakness became her superpower. Her flat, affectless, blunt voice was the perfect counterpoint to the bureaucratic bullshit of the climate negotiators. It cut through all the gobbledygook about offsets and the economic necessity of coal and cost curves of solar power. She put it in simple human language: We are losing our planet. Unlike many activists before her, she is not political. She is not interested in reforming the process. Her voice is unabashedly and explicitly moral — “How dare you.”

“I think she is extraordinary in her determination,” says Eva Jones, an American high school senior who recently spent a week protesting for climate justice in Davos. “When you hear her speak, she doesn’t do vanity interviews. It’s never like, ‘So what do your friends think about this?’ She’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about my friends, I want to talk about the crisis.’ She’s absolutely insane about getting reporters and getting politicians and getting whoever’s talking to her back to the subject.”

All of this from a teenager who sometimes still wears her hair in pigtails.

Thunberg and her fellow protesters head toward Medborgarplatsen (Citizen Square), in central Stockholm. They pass over a bridge by the harbor, where massive renovations are being done so the city can host even more waste-multiplying mega cruise ships. The kids chant in Swedish, “What do we want? Climate justice! When? Now! When? Now, now, now!” At the square, the squirrelly tweens play tag and are entertained by a rapper in a ski mask (some things don’t translate).

Eventually, Greta takes the stage. She speaks in her native Swedish, and her tone is faster and more emotional than in English. She mentions that temperatures in Sweden have been 5 to 10 degrees Celsius above normal this winter, and how globally 19 of the past 20 years have been the warmest on record.

“I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people from all over the globe,” says Greta. “I can say that it looks nearly the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people in charge, despite the science being crystal clear. We don’t want to hear one more politician say that this is important but afterward do nothing to change it. We don’t want more empty words from people pretending to take our future seriously.”

She pauses, and her face goes grim. “It shouldn’t be up to us children and teenagers to make people wake up around the world. The ones in charge should be ashamed.”

The crowd chants, “Greta, Greta, Greta.…”

She must hate that.

Greta keeps moving. In January, it was Davos. This week it is Stockholm. Next Friday is Hamburg. It’s a debilitating schedule since she doesn’t fly. Greta says it won’t go on forever. And she’s right. Within a few weeks, the world would shut down for the coronavirus, with Greta and her father both falling ill (neither of them was tested for the virus, but she said she thought it was “extremely likely” that they had it, given her schedule). Besides, she is nearing the end of her gap year, between high school and university. “I really hope that we can solve this thing now because I want to get back to studying,” says Thunberg, shivering a bit in the Stockholm wind. I can’t tell if she is joking or is having a rare moment of optimism.

Still, she is so small, and the world is so big. I wonder how she continues forward as the world pays lip service and not much else.

For the first time, Thunberg softens.

“I’m very weak in a sense,” says Thunberg quietly. “I’m very tiny and I am very emotional, and that is not something people usually associate with strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also needed because we don’t have to be the loudest, we don’t have to take up the most amount of space, and we don’t have to earn the most money.”

A friend comes over and whispers in her ear. It’s time to go, maybe home for a silent walk with her two dogs, Moses and Roxy. But she isn’t quite finished.

“We don’t need to have the biggest car, and we don’t need to get the most attention. We just need to…”

Mighty Greta’s voice trails off as if she is lost in thought or searching for the right word in English. Then, she looks up, locks eyes, and smiles for the first time.

“We need to care about each other more.”



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Youth Climate Activist Jamie Margolin On Why We’re Caught In A Climate Emergency

Rolling Stone - 

She founded Zero Hour, organized a national climate march, wrote ‘Youth to Power,’ and still goes to high school



Between founding a youth climate coalition, organizing a national climate march, writing a book, and going to high school, 18-year-old Jamie Margolin’s schedule is pretty packed. “What am I doing to address climate change?” asks Margolin. “Girl, what am I not doing to address climate change is the real question.”

The engaged teenager started working on issues surrounding the climate crisis when she was a freshmen in high school in Seattle. She testified on and lobbied for legislation at the city and state levels, gave speeches, and organized and attended events.

“Then after about a little over a year of doing this, I was growingly frustrated that the work I was doing locally was not enough; people were not taking enough action,” Margolin explains. She took to social media and started an organization called Zero Hour to put together a youth climate march in Washington, D.C., and around the world, which took place on July 21, 2018.

According to Margolin, governments should be treating the climate crisis as an emergency of the same importance as COVID-19. “I’m not saying that they’re acting perfectly, because a lot of governments, including the United States government, have been making a lot of mistakes in the handling of it. But the general idea of the way that they’re treating the coronavirus — with that urgency, that, ‘Oh, my god, this is an emergency, we need to act!’ — that’s how they need to be treating the climate crisis.”

She points to fossil-fuel divestment, lowering emissions, reforestation, protecting wildlife, investing in renewable energy, and investing in and listening to communities of color and low-income and indigenous people as all much-needed solutions.

For individuals to feel empowered, Margolin implores others to focus on systemic change over individual change. “We can’t blame someone for using a plastic utensil if that’s all they have,” says Margolin. “We’re not in this climate crisis because a couple of individuals were irresponsible. We’re in this climate crisis because there has been mass systematic oppression, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism. All of these systems have been pushing people down for so long, and communities are suffering.”



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20 Things You Didn't Know About ... Trees

Discover - Gemma Tarlach

These organisms have played an important role in how our world was shaped, and they can even record history.

 A ghost forest on Oregon’s coast Credit: WRITTEN IN SILVER VISUALS/SHUTTERSTOCK

  1. I think that I shall never see an organism as vital as a tree. Without these woody, perennial members of the plant kingdom, we might still be squirming around the seafloor.

  2. About 400 million years ago, early trees transformed terrestrial environments by reducing atmospheric carbon. The result: more hospitable ecosystems for marine animals experimenting with the landlubber life.

  3. Researchers described one such inviting habitat in December in Current Biology: The find, the earliest forest in the fossil record, is roughly 385 million years old. The site included primitive, fernlike cladoxylopsids as well as species once thought to have evolved millions of years later.

  4. Some of these more advanced varieties also had extensive root systems spreading out more than 30 feet across, suggesting trees got bigger earlier than previously documented.

  5. Today’s biggest of the big are California’s towering redwoods; the tallest is about 380 feet. But don’t sell Australia’s Eucalyptus regnans short. Also known as the mountain ash, one specimen in 1881 measured 374 feet.

  6. The calculation, done by a professional surveyor, is considered credible — though they cut the tree down to verify it.

  7. The tallest living mountain ash, found in Tasmania, is about 330 feet tall. A 2019 forest fire damaged the mighty tree, known as Centurion, but it survived. More than a dozen other giants on the Australian island were not so lucky.

  8. Climate change is fueling extreme fire events, threatening trees of all sizes. At the same time, trees are key assets in the fight to save the planet. American forests, for example, offset up to 20 percent of our annual carbon emissions, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

  9. So are more trees the answer to our current crisis? Maybe. In July, a study in Science declared “global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date.”

  10. The authors identified an additional 2.2 billion acres of land worldwide — an area about the size of the entire U.S., including Alaska — that could be turned into forest without infringing on current urban or agricultural areas.

  11. Other researchers raised concerns about haphazard tree planting, however. For example, depending on the locality, adding more trees could increase fire risk, stretch already-limited water supplies and wreck established ecosystems.

  12. Plus, most current reforestation projects focus on creating tree plantations, or mixing crops with trees, rather than allowing a forest to regenerate naturally. Per acre, natural forests store six times more carbon than agroforestry zones and 40 times more than plantations.

  13. Trees are important for the planet’s future, but they’re also great historians. Even minor fluctuations in temperature, precipitation and other factors change cell size and density in tree rings as they form, allowing researchers to reconstruct ancient climate patterns.

  14. Otherworldly phenomena can also leave a mark. In October, researchers reported a significant radiocarbon increase in growth rings dated to the year 660 B.C. in southeastern Poland.

  15. The radioactive isotope spike may reflect a surge in the number of cosmic rays bombarding Earth when the rings formed. While physicists still debate the source of these high-energy particles, they could be remnants of violent cosmic events, such as supernovas.

  16. Trees can also record Earth’s violent inner workings. For example, the Pacific Northwest was long considered to be at low to moderate earthquake risk. In the 1980s, however, researchers studying “ghost forests” along its coast came to a disturbing realization.

  17. These dead, upright tree trunks, clustered in tidal zones, were similar to ghost forests in Alaska that were created when a massive earthquake caused coastal areas to sink several feet and flood with tree-killing saltwater.

  18. Analysis of Washington’s and Oregon’s ghost forests revealed the real danger of the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ), a fault that stretches from Canada’s Vancouver Island to the Northern California coast.

  19. Dating the dead trees helped researchers discover that the CSZ produces megathrust earthquakes — the most powerful kind — about every 400 to 600 years. (It’s been 320 years since the last one, which was big enough to send a tsunami to Japan.)

  20. Ghost forests aside, many mythologies reference a “Tree of Life.” The concept thrives in modern science, too. Biologists employ cladistics — a method that organizes species on schematic trees — to understand how life diversified over time. That’s right: Trees made us possible, and now help us trace how we happened.
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18/04/2020

(AU) Scientists Trial Cloud Brightening Equipment To Shade And Cool Great Barrier Reef

The Guardian -  

Exclusive: experiment uses a modified turbine to spray trillions of nano-sized salt crystals into the air from a barge


Can cloud-brightening help save the Great Barrier Reef? Trials have begun.

Scientists have carried out a trial of prototype cloud brightening equipment on the Great Barrier Reef they hope could be scaled up to shade and cool corals and protect them from bleaching caused by rising global temperatures.

The experiment used a modified turbine with 100 high-pressure nozzles to spray trillions of nano-sized ocean salt crystals into the air from the back of a barge.

In theory, the tiny salt crystals are able to mix with low-altitude clouds, making them brighter and reflecting more sunlight away from the ocean surface.

The trial was not designed to test the effectiveness of cloud-brightening itself, but Daniel Harrison of Southern Cross University, who led the project, told Guardian Australia it had successfully demonstrated that the delivery system worked.

Between 25 and 28 March, Harrison and a small team of researchers from the university and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science carried out the experiment beside Broadhurst reef off Townsville, in Queensland.

Researchers from the University of Sydney and Queensland University of Technology were also on hand to test the prototype, developed in partnership with EmiControls of Italy. Several other researchers, including an EmiControls representative, were unable to join the crew as planned because of Covid-19 travel restrictions.

A seperate vessel 5km away carrying atmospheric modelling equipment was able to detect the mist created by the prototype. Future experiments will measure if the salt particles do brighten clouds.

The cloud-brightening approach is just one of 43 concepts being funded under a $150m government-backed research and development program announced on Thursday.

Scientists are racing to find measures that could be used to reduce the impact of rising ocean temperatures on corals caused by global heating.

In 2020, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its third outbreak of mass coral bleaching in five years. Tropical coral reefs are especially sensitive to global heating. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says 70-90% of coral reefs will die as global heating gets to 1.5C.

Harrison said the technology, deployed in March under a permit from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, had promise because it was relatively cheap, could be deployed at scale and kick-started a process that occurs naturally.

“Nature does most of the work for you,” he said. “This makes a nano-sized salt crystal at hundreds of trillions per second. They get into a cloud and grow a cloud droplet that reflects a lot more sunlight.”

Harrison said the technique was effectively boosting a natural process, because clouds mostly form over the ocean when moisture gathers around salt crystals stirred up by winds from the ocean surface.

He said while a cloud of mist was visible off the back of the boat, about 99% of the particles created by the nozzles were too small to see. However, they could be detected by atmospheric measuring equipment on the accompanying vessel.

A trial on the Great Barrier Reef of cloud brightening equipment. Photograph: Brendan Kelaher/Southern Cross University

“We thought we might only be able to detect it a couple of kilometres downwind, but we detected it 5km downwind,” Harrison said.Scientists on the barge said they could see corals “bleaching around us” as they carried out the experiment.

Harrison and the core team drove 3,600km north to Townsville from Coffs Harbour, and back, camping and preparing their own food along the way to remain isolated from others not involved in the project as Covid-19 travel restrictions began to be rolled out.

Future research will also examine any downstream risks from the technique, and any local impacts on rainfall.

Manduburra traditional owner Usop Drahm, who joined the expedition, said: “We welcome scientific research where Indigenous people and the rest of Australia work together to maintain the reef ecosystem for future generations.

“This technology might help prevent bleaching and we like that it uses no chemicals and relies on natural processes.”

Harrison said while the trial was not set up to detect if clouds had been brightened, “the theory says [the particles] would have mixed up to the heights of low-level clouds about 800 metres up”.

The salt crystals would have remained in the air for only one or two days in the initial experiment, he said. The approach does not make clouds, but brightens those already in the atmosphere.

There are plans to scale up the experiment using more and larger turbines so that their output is about 10 times larger.

This, Harrison said, could cover an area of hundreds of square kilometres – a scale large enough to slightly cool ocean temperatures.

Within four years, Harrison said, it was hoped the project would show a brightening response in the clouds.

But he said the success of such projects would depend on action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

He said as temperatures went up, the cloud brightening technique became less and less effective at protecting corals from mass bleaching.

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