Above, stuff you stumble across while looking for other stuff. Scientists from Oregon State U exploring a Methane seep in Antarctica.
Amazing images. Narration leaves me with many questions. I’ll be exploring more on methane in an upcoming video, stay tuned.
Below, my 2018 interview with Carolyn Ruppel of the US Geological Survey helps shed some light on methane’s reaction with ocean waters. I broke out 6 short clips from our chat, which you can access here.
Carbon emissions will be down some 8 or so percent this year globally. Climate deniers have jumped on this as evidence of what a carbon constrained world will be – permanent recession – and sometimes climate advocates have scored own goals by playing into that messaging, celebrating a little too much about the consequences of a global catastrophe.
What we have in mind is something a bit different – lowering carbon emissions by switching a healthy economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Whether you want to reduce the greenhouse gases your home produces or lower the cost of your utilities, a heat pump might seem like a good idea. Here are some important factors to consider before you make a purchase.
A Heat pump is both a Heater and an Air Conditioner.
The most commonly installed are air-source heat pumps, which resemble air conditioner units that sit outside your house. During winter, a liquid refrigerant in a copper coil extracts heat from the atmosphere as warm air naturally moves toward the cold. The heat transforms the refrigerant into a cold gas and a compressor then pressurizes the gas, raising its temperature and heating the air inside the house. The reverse happens in hot months, when heat inside the house is absorbed and transferred outside. That’s increasingly useful in temperate areas of the U.S., where people typically don’t have air conditioners but are being hit with climate-change-fueled heat waves.
Just over a decade ago, the American Farm Bureau Federation declared war on legislation to slow down global warming. The organization, a lobbying powerhouse,argued that a “cap-and-trade” proposal making its way through Congress would make fuel and fertilizer more expensive and put farmers out of business.
Farmers swarmed Capitol Hill wearing caps with the words “Don’t Cap Our Future.” And it worked. The legislation died, derailing the boldest plan Congress had crafted to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, the Farm Bureau might be changing course. This week, it announced that it had formed a coalition that plans to push the government to adopt dozens of policy changesthat would make it easier for farmers to reduce emissions from agriculture.
“We’re going to have a real common sense, science-based discussion about how we protect the climate, and our farmers want to be part of that,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the Farm Bureau.
The proposals don’t entail regulation or mandatory cuts to agricultural greenhouse gases. Instead, they are voluntary and sometimes involve paying farmers to reduce emissions. Still, the new Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance brings together groups that have often butted heads on environmental policy, from agricultural lobbies, like the Farm Bureau and the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, to climate advocates, like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy.
Media reports and public polls suggest that young people in many countries are increasingly factoring climate change into their reproductive choices, but empirical evidence about this phenomenon is lacking. This article reviews the scholarship on this subject and discusses the results of the first empirical study focused on it, a quantitative and qualitative survey of 607 US-Americans between the ages of 27 and 45. While 59.8% of respondents reported being “very” or “extremely concerned” about the carbon footprint of procreation, 96.5% of respondents were “very” or “extremely concerned” about the well-being of their existing, expected, or hypothetical children in a climate-changed world. This was largely due to an overwhelmingly negative expectation of the future with climate change. Younger respondents were more concerned about the climate impacts their children would experience than older respondents, and there was no statistically significant difference between the eco-reproductive concerns of male and female respondents. These and other results are situated within scholarship about growing climate concern in the USA, the concept of the carbon footprint, the carbon footprint of procreation, individual actions in response to climate change, temporal perceptions of climate change, and expectations about the future in the USA. Potential implications for future research in environmental psychology, environmental sociology, the sociology of reproduction, demography, and climate mitigation are discussed.
More than half of child and adolescent psychiatrists in England are seeing patients distressed about the state of the environment, a survey has revealed.
The findings showed that the climate crisis is taking a toll on the mental health of young people. The levels of eco-anxiety observed were notably higher among the young than the general population, according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which has just launched its first resources to help children and their parents cope with fears about environmental breakdown.
In a survey of its members working in the NHS in early September, the organisation asked: “In the last year have you seen patients who are distressed about environmental and ecological issues?”
As promised, a little history. The new video this week, which should be nearby, features Scripps Institution of Oceanography Ice Ace, Jeff Severinghaus.
It was my first face to face interview with Jeff, but we interacted a decade ago when I was working on my “Crock of the Week” series, when he assured me that my narrative was accurate in relation to his work. It was a big confidence builder because the subject, how the planet warms and cools into and out of glacial periods, is complex.
Rewatching it today, it’s pretty wonky stuff, but I think it holds up.
Below, Caerbannog666 on Twitter shares this Severinghaus talk, where he covers this topic at about 31:00.
Severinghaus is a very good public speaker. He even knows how to put Fox News to good use: https://t.co/HEXNYfo2GW
Half the country is living in an imaginary Universe. How is that? The War on Science conducted against climate scientists over the last 40 years is a huge part, I believe the most important underlying driver, behind America, and the World’s, disconnect from science, journalism, and respect for factual information.
I bagged a long sought after interview late last March, with Jeff Severinghaus (we have a connection I’ll explain tomorrow) of Scripps Oceanographic Institute. Big Ice guy.
Jeff has some current research that I’ll be examining in coming videos, but as I spoke to Jeff he was just returning from a stay in Antarctica, so I asked him to summarize the best assessments.
Then of course, Covid hit, and my county in Michigan got devastated by a dam failure, and a whole load of the madness that is 2020 got in the way – but I finally came back around to this. I matched Jeff’s clips with some from Richard Alley and Eric Rignot, well known to readers here. They spoke to me in New Orleans in 2017.
I had also talked to Susheel Adusumilli, also of Scripps, and I featured prominently the new work from Stef Lhermitte, of Delft University of Technology. Then I wrapped it with a summary from Twila Moon of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. My Yale Climate Connections colleague Karen Kirk also had a pass at this research as well, her @CC_Yale piece:
Climate researchers have long monitored ice sheet dynamics in the Amundsen Sea, focusing specifically on the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers. The two sit side by side on Antarctica’s western peninsula covering an area roughly the size of nine U.S. coastal states stretching from Maine to Maryland. The two glaciers alone store ice that could account for about 4 feet (1.2 meters) of global sea level rise. Their “seaboard” location may help bring increased public attention and interest to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which if it melted could raise seas by a catastrophic 11 feet (3.4 meters).
An international effort led by the British Antarctic Survey recently published two papers (Hogan et al. and Jordan et al.) showing the first detailed maps of the seafloor at the edge of the Thwaites Glacier. The team mapped deep submarine channels that have been funneling warm water to this vulnerable location. High-resolution imagery pinpoints the pathways that allow warm water to undermine the ice shelf. Lead author Kelly Hogan of the British Antarctic Survey says the findings will improve estimates of sea-level rise from Thwaites Glacier. “We can go ahead and make those calculations about how much warm water can get under the ice and melt it,” Hogan said.
The other researchers, led by Stef Lhermitte, found stark visual confirmation of glacier disintegration using decades of time-lapse satellite imagery. Their work sheds light on the accelerating feedback process, wherein the rapid loss of ice is opening the door to ever-increasing melting.
– Clearly prohibit political interference and censorship. Unfortunately, a number of agency policies focus only on “traditional” areas of misconduct, such as plagiarism and data fraud, and do not even address censorship or other political interference. For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) are missing these critical provisions—which means that even the most blatant efforts to undermine science can go uncontested. If ever it was clear why protecting CDC and NIH science and scientists protects the public, surely it is thefederalpandemicresponse.
– Similarly, protect scientists’ communication rights. Scientists must have clear rights to speak directly to journalists and members of the public, including correcting agency communications that reference their work. Agencies vary widely in the sorts of communication rights that scientists have, which can lead to disastrous results—such as when the Trump administration successfully prevented scientists at the CDC (where scientists have weak communication rights) from speaking about the looming COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020. Preventing scientists from speaking directly to the public not only muzzles scientists but prevents the public from making informed decisions about their health and safety.
– Acknowledge that attempts to violate scientific integrity, even if ultimately not fruitful, are still violations. In one notable case, attempts to censor a climate report at the National Parks Service were found to be perfectly within the scientific integrity policy because the report was ultimately published intact. Meanwhile, the scientist who authored the study—and who had fought valiantly for publication—was terminated from her position. Imagine if attempted murder were not a crime, and only “successful” murders were prosecuted.
