Environment – Page 122 – The Tarbabys Blog

Rain turns Miami street into ‘a river,’ but it’s at the end of the list for flood fixes

Miami Herald

Rain turns Miami street into ‘a river,’ but it’s at the end of the list for flood fixes

Alex Harris May 28, 2021

The area of Fourth Street and Fourth Terrace is a charming pocket of Flagami. It’s near good schools, has beautiful old trees and is the kind of place where neighbors will cook hot meals for the whole block when the power goes out.

It also floods. A lot. And half a dozen residents agree: it’s gotten worse recently.

But this neighborhood is last in line for fixes in Miami’s $3.8 billion storm-water master plan, the city’s road map for surviving the two feet of sea rise that threatens by 2060. It might be a decade or longer before residents could see fixes, and they aren’t happy.

A 30-minute rainstorm is enough to swamp the streets and half a front yard. A major rain event, like the rainstorm last May, ruins homes.

Judy Torrez, 36, said floodwaters often reach the door handles of cars. She captured video with her doorbell camera of a car driving down the submerged street last year. The wake it caused sent her car floating and bumping into the fence.

“It’s at the point where my kids, when it starts raining, they pick up their toys so they don’t get wet,” she said.

Miami’s sea level rise bill is $4 billion by 2060. It won’t keep every neighborhood dry.

Sometimes the floods are so bad she has to keep them home from school. Leaving isn’t an option, because the road is lower than her driveway, and she needs to keep her belongings dry.

“You have to stay put til the water goes down,” she said. “We have to stay and make sure we don’t lose anything.”

The list of losses across both streets is long: Appliances, cars, furniture, electronics, books, documents, precious photos.

Neighbors have tried all sorts of tricks to cope. Several added extra dirt to raise the height of their front yards. Many use sandbags. Torrez’s family added a short brick fence at their lot line to keep the water out. Most have invested in higher cars and SUVs to survive the water.

What they want is a solution from the city, like a storm-water pump with a generator that will keep their homes and streets dry.

A strong rainstorm is enough to turn Fourth Terrace in Flagami into ‘a river,’ and residents want the city to fix the problems soon.

Why so low on the list?

The city of Miami does have a plan to fix the flooding that plagues this area — and the broader neighborhood of South Grapeland Heights directly south of the airport — permanently.

It’s estimated to cost $276 million, or north of $400 million if the city wants to protect it even more. And according to the city’s consultant-created storm-water master plan project list, it’s last in line. Planners say it could take five to 10 years to address the first group of projects, and the South Grapeland Heights project is in the fourth group.

Neighbors want a solution now, and so does their commissioner.

“My district is not going to wait for 15 years to remedy the flooding that we have, they deserve better,” said Commissioner Manolo Reyes. “Every time it rains a lot we have to go with pumps and pump it out, and you’re telling me there’s not an immediate need there? Then your analysis is faulty.”

Reyes and his constituents argue they should be in the first group of projects, which includes fixing flooding issues in places like Shorecrest, Brickell and Jose Marti Park.

The city says the list of projects is flexible, and staffers are currently working with each commissioner to see which projects they want to prioritize in their districts. But planners say the main thing keeping projects in the western side of the city so low on the list isn’t political preference, it’s gravity.

“A lot of these areas, especially to the west, they require downstream improvements to happen in order to handle upstream,” said Chris Bennett, the city’s deputy chief resilience officer.

The Flagami streets in question are lower than the surrounding area, which sends all nearby rain draining to the bowl formation on Fourth Street and Fourth Terrace, he said. Pumping it out after the May rainstorm last year took a full week.

It’s a question of where you can put the water, said Alan Dodd, Miami’s chief resilience officer.

The main solution in the citywide master plan is thousands of injection wells that shoot water deep beneath the aquifer, but those types of wells can’t be drilled that far west in the county because they could pollute the water supply.

The city can’t drain the extra floodwater into the Blue Lagoon, the lake near the Miami airport, nor the canals and rivers managed by the South Florida Water Management District, and there’s no empty space to build a retention pond.

“There’s no place for the water to go, so we need to build a series of pump stations to get the water where it needs to go,” he said.

That requires building pump stations (and the jumbo pipes to go with them) in the eastern half of the city first, which will likely take years.

In the meantime, Bennett said the city is “exploring options” for a band-aid solution for the Flagami neighborhood.

“It won’t fix, it won’t eliminate, it will improve. How can we make the flood depths shallower, how can we make them less frequent, how can we get the water out of there faster?” he said.

‘We cannot sell’

Every time the streets flood, residents don’t just worry about the physical damage to their homes, they worry about property values.

Neighbors say one woman who lived on their street had a particularly hard time with the flooding. She told neighbors that every time the floodwaters rose, sewage spewed out of her toilet and shower and popped the tiles off her floor.

She couldn’t take it anymore and sold it to an investor last year “the minute it dried out,” neighbors said. The investor who bought it fixed it up and quickly resold it.

Her new house floods. Under Texas law, she would have been warned, but not in Florida.

Another home a block over sat on the market for months before finally selling — in the dry season.

“We cannot sell because of the flooding,” one neighbor who declined to give her name told city officials at a public meeting.

Another worry for homes that repeatedly flood is the price of flood insurance. When a home has four flood insurance claims of at least $5,000, the National Flood Insurance Program deems it a “severe repetitive loss.” The price of flood insurance soars, and the only way to bring it back to earth is by elevating the home.

Some neighbors seemed receptive to the idea of elevating their home proactively, provided the city foots the bill.

A strong rainstorm is enough to flood 4th Street in Flagami, and residents want the city to fix the problems soon.

“As long as someone else pays for it, sure,” joked 30-year-old Maydeline Ramos, who says she sometimes has to wade through knee-high water to get home after her 16-hour shift at the hospital.

Other cities have experimented with solutions for this exact issue. North Miami has several repetitive loss properties within city limits, and in 2019 the city turned one of them into a park that absorbed excess water from the rest of the street, alleviating flooding.

North Miami bought her flooded home. Now it’s going to become a park to fight sea rise

Flagami residents said that sounded like a good idea, but the half dozen who spoke with the Miami Herald said they’d never sell their houses.

“I wouldn’t sell for a billion dollars,” said Maria Lopez, 61, who sometimes wakes her husband up at 2 a.m. to move her car to higher ground if she hears the rain. “This is my home. It has sentimental value.”

Dodd said the city has not looked into buyouts, despite the fact that the city’s master plan clearly identified several parts of the city where even hundreds of millions of dollars of engineering investment couldn’t save them from predicted flooding in the latter half of the century.

He said staff will continue meeting with commissioners before it takes the first group of projects to city commission for approval later this year.

“The city at some point in time is going to make a hard decision on what to spend their money on first. The more people involved in that decision the better it will become,” Dodd said.

A house has an elevated wall to stop water from encroaching on the house during a heavy rain, May 26, 2021. The Fourth Street and Fourth Terrace corner of Flagami, south of the airport, experiences intense flooding after strong rainstorms. Residents say water gets into their homes, floods their cars and ruins their belongings.

‘Sea snot’ is clogging up Turkey’s coasts, suffocating marine life, and devastating fisheries

Business Insider

‘Sea snot’ is clogging up Turkey’s coasts, suffocating marine life, and devastating fisheries

Morgan McFall-Johnsen May 28, 2021

sea snot turkey coast dock harbor sea of marmara

A goopy substance called sea snot has been clogging Turkish coasts in the Sea of Marmara for months.
The mucus has been filling fishing nets, suffocating coral, and killing marine life.
Climate change and fertilizer runoff may be fueling the algae boom that’s behind the sea snot.

Blankets of a goopy, camel-colored substance have been accumulating in the water off Turkey’s coast for months.

The goop, called marine mucilage or “sea snot,” is covering so much of the coastline along the Sea of Marmara that people can no longer fish there. The sea snot formations can get up to 100 feet (30 meters) deep, according to the Turkish news site Cumhuriyet.

The sea snot fills fishing nets and weighs them down – one fisherman told Cumhuriyet that nets have been bursting from the weight of the mucus. A fishery co-op leader said people were barely pulling in a fifth of the fish they hauled at this time last year.

Marine mucilage is a goopy discharge of protein, carbohydrates, and fat from microscopic algae called phytoplankton. The substance was documented in the Sea of Marmara for the first time in 2007, as researchers at Istanbul University reported in 2008.

marine mucilage sea snot underwater ocean

Normally, sea snot is not a problem, but when phytoplankton grow out of control, the goop can overpower marine ecosystems. This can wreak ecological havoc, since the substance can harbor bacteria like E Coli and ensnare or suffocate marine life. Eventually, the snot sinks to the sea floor, where it can blanket coral and suffocate them, too.

Since phytoplankton thrive in warm water, scientists suspect that climate change is fueling the new sea-snot crisis. Runoff from nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich fertilizer and sewage could also be causing an explosion in the phytoplankton population.

“We are experiencing the visible effects of climate change, and adaptation requires an overhaul of our habitual practices. We must initiate a full-scale effort to adapt,” Mustafa Sarı, dean of Bandırma Onyedi Eylül University’s maritime faculty, told The Guardian.

sea snot turkey coast harbor dock mucus marmara

This is the largest accumulation of sea snot yet, according to The Guardian. It began in deep waters during the winter then spread to the coastlines this year. Barış Özalp, a marine biologist at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, first noticed it in December but became alarmed once the snot carpets continued to grow through the spring.

“The gravity of the situation set in when I dived for measurements in March and discovered severe mortality in corals,” he told The Guardian.

Thousands of fish have been washing up dead in coastal towns as well, Sarı told The Guardian. The fish could be suffocating because sea snot clogs their gills, or because it depletes the water’s oxygen levels.

“Once the mucilage covers the coasts, it limits the interaction between water and the atmosphere,” Sarı said.

Turning Kenya’s plastic waste problem into a building solution

CBS News

Turning Kenya’s plastic waste problem into a building solution

CBSNews May 28, 2021

For the latest report in our “Eye on Earth” series, CBS News correspondent Debora Patta went to Kenya to learn about a creative approach to addressing the scourge of plastic pollution.

Nairobi — Floating in the middle of world’s largest ocean, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a man-made mess of plastic waste covering twice as much area as the state of Texas. Kenya is one of many countries contributing to the pollution.

Hundreds of tons of plastic waste are created every day in the capital, Nairobi, alone. On the outskirts of the sprawling city festers the Dandora dump — about 30 acres, or 22 football fields, of waste. Despite a pioneering ban on single-use plastics in 2017, Kenya is still drowning it.

A woman who works selling roasted corn for lunch to people who scavenge garbage for a living walks down a path between hills of garbage at the dump in Dandora, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, in a December 2018 file photo. / Credit: Ben Curtis/AP

But while most people look at Dandora and see an insurmountable plastic mountain, Patta met a young woman who’s finding innovative ways to tackle the problem, and to move that mountain.

There are days in Kenya when you can actually walk on water. Patta saw one river so choked with plastic that it has formed an unsinkable foundation. It’s a disturbing health hazard for everyone living there, but not for Nzambi Matee. “I get excited when I see waste,” the materials scientist told Patta, “because I know that’s life for us.”

The fact that plastic does not sink is precisely what intrigued Matee.

A river in Nairobi, Kenya, clogged with plastic and other garbage. / Credit: CBS/Debora Patta

“I came across this concept of using plastic to [make] building blocks,” she explained. Tons of plastic clogs drains, pollutes rivers and contaminates animal feed in the region, and some of it ends up at the Dandora landfill. The site reached its capacity and was supposed to have been shut down 20 years ago. But every day, waste pickers trudge through the rancid trash sifting for plastic. It wasn’t easy for Matee to figure out whether she really could turn the waste material into useable building bricks. When it finally worked, “that was the best day ever,” she told Patta. “It took us about nine months just to make one brick.” One brick wasn’t enough, but that was no problem for a woman who likes to get her hands dirty. Next, she built a machine to mass produce the plastic bricks.

Materials scientist Nzambi Matee holds one of the bricks she's made of plastic from waste gathered at a landfill in Nairobi, Kenya. / Credit: CBS/Debora Patta

First the waste is sorted to remove rubble and metal, and then the plastic is baked — just like “making cookies,” joked Matee — before the boiling mixture is molded into building blocks. Her setup can churn out as many as 2,000 per day, and they’re 35% cheaper than standard bricks, and up to seven-times stronger. Right now, Matee’s bricks are only being used for pathways in small households, but she wants to target big construction companies. Kenya’s fight against plastic pollution isn’t just a homegrown issue. It’s complicated by the fact that, two years ago, the U.S. exported more than one billion pounds of plastic waste to 96 nations, including Kenya. Now Washington wants to make the shipment of more plastic waste a condition of a proposed trade deal. Greenpeace activist Amos Wemanya believes Kenya can barely manage its own waste, let alone recycle America’s. “It would be importing more problems if we were to allow this U.S.-Kenya trade deal to be used as a way of dumping plastic waste on the African continent,” he told CBS News.

Matee agrees that countries should keep their waste in their own backyards, and she intends to make good on what she calls her triple threat: “The more we recycle the plastic, the more we produce affordable housing… the more we created more employment for the youth,” she said. Like many young Kenyans, Matee is passionate about saving the environment, but it’s not just words. She’s hoping that through her actions, the mountain in Dandora will become a mere hill.

Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians

Associated Press

Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians

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Australia Mice Plague

Mice scurry around stored grain on a farm near Tottenham, Australia on May 19, 2021. Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

BOGAN GATE, Australia (AP) — At night, the floors of sheds vanish beneath carpets of scampering mice. Ceilings come alive with the sounds of scratching. One family blamed mice chewing electrical wires for their house burning down.

Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork.

“We’re at a critical point now where if we don’t significantly reduce the number of mice that are in plague proportions by spring, we are facing an absolute economic and social crisis in rural and regional New South Wales,” Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said this month.

Bruce Barnes said he is taking a gamble by planting crops on his family farm near the central New South Wales town of Bogan Gate.

“We just sow and hope,” he said.

The risk is that the mice will maintain their numbers through the Southern Hemisphere winter and devour the wheat, barley and canola before it can be harvested.

NSW Farmers, the state’s top agricultural association, predicts the plague will wipe more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($775 million) from the value of the winter crop.

The state government has ordered 5,000 liters (1,320 gallons) of the banned poison Bromadiolone from India. The federal government regulator has yet to approve emergency applications to use the poison on the perimeters of crops. Critics fear the poison will kill not only mice but also animals that feed on them. including wedge-tail eagles and family pets.

“We’re having to go down this path because we need something that is super strength, the equivalent of napalm to just blast these mice into oblivion,” Marshall said.

The plague is a cruel blow to farmers in Australia’s most populous state who have been battered by fires, floods and pandemic disruptions in recent years, only to face the new scourge of the introduced house mouse, or Mus musculus.

The same government-commissioned advisers who have helped farmers cope with the drought, fire and floods are returning to help people deal with the stresses of mice.

The worst comes after dark, when millions of mice that had been hiding and dormant during the day become active.

By day, the crisis is less apparent. Patches of road are dotted with squashed mice from the previous night, but birds soon take the carcasses away. Haystacks are disintegrating due to ravenous rodents that have burrowed deep inside. Upending a sheet of scrap metal lying in a paddock will send a dozen mice scurrying. The sidewalks are strewn with dead mice that have eaten poisonous bait.

But a constant, both day and night, is the stench of mice urine and decaying flesh. The smell is people’s greatest gripe.

“You deal with it all day. You’re out baiting, trying your best to manage the situation, then come home and just the stench of dead mice,” said Jason Conn, a fifth generation farmer near Wellington in central New South Wales.

“They’re in the roof cavity of your house. If your house is not well sealed, they’re in bed with you. People are getting bitten in bed,” Conn said. “It doesn’t relent, that’s for sure.”

Colin Tink estimated he drowned 7,500 mice in a single night last week in a trap he set with a cattle feeding bowl full of water at his farm outside Dubbo.

“I thought I might get a couple of hundred. I didn’t think I’d get 7,500,” Tink said.

Barnes said mouse carcasses and excrement in roofs were polluting farmers’ water tanks.

“People are getting sick from the water,” he said.

The mice are already in Barnes’ hay bales. He’s battling them with zinc phosphide baits, the only legal chemical control for mice used in broad-scale agriculture in Australia. He’s hoping that winter frosts will help contain the numbers.

Farmers like Barnes endured four lean years of drought before 2020 brought a good season as well as the worst flooding that some parts of New South Wales have seen in at least 50 years. But the pandemic brought a labor drought. Fruit was left to rot on trees because foreign backpackers who provide the seasonal workforce were absent.

Plagues seemingly appear from nowhere and often vanish just as fast.

Disease and a shortage of food are thought to trigger a dramatic population crash as mice feed on themselves, devouring the sick, weak and their own offspring.

Government researcher Steve Henry, whose agency is developing strategies to reduce the impact of mice on agriculture, said it is too early to predict what damage will occur by spring.

He travels across the state holding community meetings, sometimes twice a day, to discuss the mice problem.

“People are fatigued from dealing with the mice,” Henry said.

Ryan Sutter Shares He Has Lyme Disease After Year-Long Health Battle

E! News

Ryan Sutter Shares He Has Lyme Disease After Year-Long Health Battle

Elyse Dupre May 25, 2021

After months of uncertainty, Trista and Ryan Sutter finally have some answers about his health.

During the May 25 episode of her podcast Better Etc., the former Bachelorette and her husband shared he has been diagnosed with Lyme disease.

“It’s been hard,” Trista said while looking back at their path to Ryan’s diagnosis. “It’s a really difficult thing to see the person that you love most in this world struggling. And he’s a big strong guy, and to see him get emotional and feel helpless in a way in that all I could do was really advocate for him. So, that’s what I did.”

While Trista informed her followers of Ryan’s medical journey in November, her spouse of 17 years said he actually started experiencing symptoms in early 2020.

“My body would just itch for no reason. I’d get some pretty severe headaches…swollen lymph nodes, nausea, night sweats, fevers, really really deep bone aches and muscle aches and joint aches, periods of extreme fatigue—almost paralyzing fatigue…. All things that I just had never really experienced before in my life,” he recalled. “I mean, I’ve done a lot of things that have made me tired, but this was beyond tired.”

After speaking with a number of doctors and undergoing a series of tests, Ryan still didn’t have clarity. It wasn’t until about a year into the investigative process that he received a diagnosis.

Ryan later learned he has a genetic predisposition that makes him more susceptible to toxins, which he said he’s exposed to as a firefighter. He also said he was dealing with mold in his body.

“On top of being exposed to mold, I was also dealing with these long days, exhaustion, dehydration, all these other things that weaken your immune system, products of combustion,” he explained. “So, my immune system was weakened, making it difficult to fight off infections, or what it seems like, allowing prior infections that my immune system had been able to sort of suppress and keep down to resurface. One of those infections was indeed Lyme disease.”

Ryan tested positive for Lyme disease. “I now essentially have Lyme disease,” he said. “It seems like that’s something that I will always have. It’s just that, now, I know and I can start to try to build back my immune system so I can fight it off. Again, Epstein-Barr I had shown that virus. This weakened immune system may have allowed that to kind of come back in. On top of that, COVID. So, I had the COVID virus, EBV virus and Lyme disease all were able to show back up. I don’t know which ones necessarily did and which ones didn’t other than Lyme disease.”

Now, “the major things” Ryan is addressing are Lyme disease and mold toxicity. For Lyme disease, he said he’s “responded well” to supplements and dietary changes. He also noted he has a “good team” supporting him.

“I truly believe that we’re on the right path now,” he continued. “I’m very thankful for where we are and for everyone who’s helped us get there, whether that’s doctors, our family support or even all the people that have written in on social media or in other avenues.”

Trista and Ryan also hope to use their platform to help other people in their health journeys. “For anyone out there who is struggling, keep up hope and keep advocating for yourself,” Trista said. “Never stop, never settle for an answer that you don’t believe to be true. Keep advocating, keep looking for answers. It’s your right. It’s your right to find answers and consult with different doctors.”

Climate Change Is Pushing Wildfires to New Heights

Daily Beast

Climate Change Is Pushing Wildfires to New Heights

The Conversation May 26, 2021

By Mojtaba Sadegh, John Abatzoglou, and Mohammad Reza Alizadeh

The western U.S. appears headed for another dangerous fire season, and a new study shows that even high mountain areas once considered too wet to burn are at increasing risk as the climate warms.

Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. West is in severe to exceptional drought right now, including large parts of the Rocky Mountains, Cascades and Sierra Nevada. The situation is so severe that the Colorado River basin is on the verge of its first official water shortage declaration, and forecasts suggest another hot, dry summer is on the way.

Warm and dry conditions like these are a recipe for wildfire disaster.

In a new study published May 24, 2021, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our team of fire and climate scientists and engineers found that forest fires are now reaching higher, normally wetter elevations. And they are burning there at rates unprecedented in recent fire history.

While some people focus on historical fire suppression and other forest management practices as reasons for the West’s worsening fire problem, these high-elevation forests have had little human intervention. The results provide a clear indication that climate change is enabling these normally wet forests to burn.

As wildfires creep higher up mountains, another tenth of the West’s forest area is now at risk, according to our study. That creates new hazards for mountain communities, with impacts on downstream water supplies and the plants and wildlife that call these forests home.

In the new study, we analyzed records of all fires larger than 1,000 acres (405 hectares) in the mountainous regions of the contiguous western U.S. between 1984 and 2017.

The amount of land that burned increased across all elevations during that period, but the largest increase occurred above 8,200 feet (2,500 meters). To put that elevation into perspective, Denver—the mile-high city—sits at 5,280 feet, and Aspen, Colorado, is at 8,000 feet. These high-elevation areas are largely remote mountains and forests with some small communities and ski areas.

The area burning above 8,200 feet more than tripled in 2001-2017 compared with 1984-2000.

<div class="inline-image__caption"><p>Forest fires advanced to higher elevations as the climate dried from 1984 to 2017. Every 200 meters equals 656 feet.</p></div> <div class="inline-image__credit">Mojtaba Sadegh, CC BY-ND</div> — Forest fires advanced to higher elevations as the climate dried from 1984 to 2017. Every 200 meters equals 656 feet.

Mojtaba Sadegh, CC BY-ND

Our results show that climate warming has diminished the high-elevation flammability barrier—the point where forests historically were too wet to burn regularly because the snow normally lingered well into summer and started falling again early in the fall. Fires advanced about 826 feet (252 meters) uphill in the western mountains over those three decades.

The Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado in 2020 was the state’s largest fire in its history, burning over 208,000 acres (84,200 hectares) and is a prime example of a high-elevation forest fire. The fire burned in forests extending to 12,000 feet (3,650 meters) and reached the upper tree line of the Rocky Mountains.

We found that rising temperatures in the past 34 years have helped to extend the fire territory in the West to an additional 31,470 square miles (81,500 square kilometers) of high-elevation forests. That means a staggering 11% of all western U.S. forests – an area similar in size to South Carolina – are susceptible to fire now that weren’t three decades ago.

In lower-elevation forests, several factors contribute to fire activity, including the presence of more people in wildland areas and a history of fire suppression.

In the early 1900s, Congress commissioned the U.S. Forest Service to manage forest fires, which resulted in a focus on suppressing fires—a policy that continued through the 1970s. This caused flammable underbrush that would normally be cleared out by occasional natural blazes to accumulate. The increase in biomass in many lower elevation forests across the West has been associated with increases in high-severity fires and megafires. At the same time, climate warming has dried out forests in the western U.S., making them more prone to large fires.

By focusing on high-elevation fires, in areas with little history of fire suppression, we can more clearly see the influence of climate change.

Most high-elevation forests haven’t been subjected to much fire suppression, logging or other human activities, and because trees at these high elevations are in wetter forests, they historically have long return intervals between fires, typically a century or more. Yet they experienced the highest rate of increase in fire activity in the past 34 years. We found that the increase is strongly correlated with the observed warming.

A Wildfire Destroyed His House. This Climate Denier Blames Environmentalists.

High-elevation fires have implications for natural and human systems.

High mountains are natural water towers that normally provide a sustained source of water to millions of people in dry summer months in the western U.S. The scars that wildfires leave behind—known as burn scars—affect how much snow can accumulate at high elevations. This can influence the timing, quality and quantity of water that reaches reservoirs and rivers downstream.

High-elevation fires also remove standing trees that act as anchor points that normally stabilize the snowpack, raising the risk of avalanches.

The loss of tree canopy also exposes mountain streams to the sun, increasing water temperatures in the cold headwater streams. Increasing stream temperatures can harm fish and the larger wildlife and predators that rely on them.

Climate change is increasing fire risk in many regions across the globe, and studies show that this trend will continue as the planet warms. The increase in fires in the high mountains is another warning to the U.S. West and elsewhere of the risks ahead as the climate changes.

Mojtaba Sadegh is an assistant professor of civil engineering at Boise State University; John Abatzoglou is an associate professor of engineering at University of California, Merced; Mohammad Reza Alizadeh is a Ph.D. student in engineering at McGill University.

Climate: World at risk of hitting temperature limit soon

BBC News

Climate: World at risk of hitting temperature limit soon

David Shukman – Science editor May 26, 2021

Nantou in Taiwan during a drought this year

It’s becoming more likely that a key global temperature limit will be reached in one of the next five years.

A major study says by 2025 there’s a 40% chance of at least one year being 1.5C hotter than the pre-industrial level.

That’s the lower of two temperature limits set by the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The conclusion comes in a report published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The analysis is based on modelling by the UK Met Office and climate researchers in 10 countries including the US and China.

In the last decade, it was estimated that the chance of any one year reaching the 1.5C threshold was only 20%.

This new assessment puts that risk at 40%.

Leon Hermanson, a senior Met Office scientist, told BBC News that comparing projected temperatures with those of 1980-1900 shows a clear rise.

“What it means is that we’re approaching 1.5C – we’re not there yet but we’re getting close,” he said.

“Time is running out for the strong action which we need now.”

The researchers point out that even if one of the next five years is 1.5C above the pre-industrial level, it’ll be a temporary situation.

Natural variability will mean the following few years may be slightly cooler and it could be another decade or two or more before the 1.5C limit is crossed permanently.

The Paris Agreement established the goal of keeping the increase in the global average temperature to no more than 2C and to try not to surpass 1.5C – and that’s understood to mean over a long period rather than a single year.

According to Dr Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, “the 1.5C in the Met Office announcement should not be confused with the 1.5C limit in the Paris Agreement”.

“The Paris targets refer to global warming – that is, the temperature increase of our planet once we smooth out year-to-year variations,” he explained.

“A single year hitting 1.5C therefore doesn’t mean the Paris limits are breached, but is nevertheless very bad news.

“It tells us once again that climate action to date is wholly insufficient and emissions need to be reduced urgently to zero to halt global warming.”

Wildfire consumes house in St Helena, California — A house is consumed by flames during the Glass wildfire in California last year

A landmark report by the UN climate panel in 2018 highlighted how the impacts of climate change are far more severe when the increase is greater than 1.5C.

At the moment, projections suggest that even with recent pledges to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, the world is on course to heat up by up to 3C.

The WMO’s secretary-general, Prof Petteri Taalas, said the results of the new research were “more than mere statistics”.

“This study shows – with a high level of scientific skill – that we are getting measurably and inexorably closer to the lower target of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change,” he explained.

“It is yet another wake up call that the world needs to fast-track commitments to slash greenhouse gas emissions and achieve carbon neutrality.”

Prof Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, told me that if the new forecast is proved right “it does not mean that we have exceeded the Paris Agreement limit”.

He points out that two individual months in 2016 saw a rise of 1.5C.

“As the climate warms, we’ll get more months above 1.5C, then a sequence of them, then a whole year on average above 1.5 and then two or three years and then virtually every year,” Prof Hawkins said.

He also stresses that 1.5C is “not a magic number that we’ve got to avoid”.

“It’s not a sudden cliff edge, it’s more like a slope that we’re already on and, as the climate warms, the effects get worse and worse.

“We have to set a line in the sand to try to limit the temperature rise but we clearly need to recognize that we’re seeing the effects of climate change already in the UK and around the world and those effects will continue to become more severe.”

The report comes in the approach to the COP26 summit on climate change, due to be held in Glasgow in November.

The summit aims to raise ambition among world leaders on tackling the climate crisis.

New Mexico Stuck With $8 billion in Cleanup for Oil Wells, Highlighting Dangers From Fossil Fuel Dependence

DeSmog

New Mexico Stuck With $8 billion in Cleanup for Oil Wells, Highlighting Dangers From Fossil Fuel Dependence

The oil industry boasts that it fills state coffers with revenues from drilling, but a new study finds a serious gap in funding available to tackle the environmental legacy of abandoned wells.

Nick Cunningham May 26, 2021

New Mexico is facing more than $8 billion in cleanup costs for oil and gas wells, an enormous liability that taxpayers could be left to pick up if drillers go out of business or walk away from their obligations.

Cleaning up old wells at the end of their operating lives can be expensive, and typically states require drillers to cover part of the cleanup cost at the outset, known as financial assurance requirements. The money is tapped later on when the well or pipeline must be dismantled and cleaned up.

But a study commissioned by the New Mexico State Land Office published on April 30 found that “financial assurance requirements do not exist for much of the oil and gas infrastructure explored in this study, and in some cases where such requirements are imposed, operators may have multiple ways of minimizing or avoiding those requirements.” The study was conducted by the Center for Applied Research, an independent analytical firm.

Inadequate bonding requirements means there is a serious gap in available funding to properly clean up after the fossil fuel industry. According to the report, it could cost as much as $8.38 billion to clean up the state’s tens of thousands of wells and associated pipeline infrastructure. Alarmingly, however, New Mexico only has $201 million tucked away for cleanup, leaving a hole of $8.1 billion.

“That’s $8.1 billion that we don’t have,” New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard said in a statement. “Enormous sums of taxpayer money and money meant for public schools, along with the long-term health of our lands, are on the line.”

The industry likes to boast that oil and gas revenues contribute roughly a third of the state’s general fund — a fact that the New Mexico Oil & Gas Association (NMOGA) triumphantly advertised in a recent report and regularly highlights on social media.

Indeed, drilling accounts for a large source of state revenues. In April 2021, for example, the state took in $109 million in royalties, a record high. Those funds will be funneled into public services, including schools and hospitals.

As the report exposed, however, the massive liability put onto the public in cleanup costs somewhat undercuts the notion that the oil and gas industry is a financial godsend.

The industry has helped fill state coffers in recent years, with oil production booming to roughly 1 million barrels per day, more than double production levels from five years ago. According to the report, last year the oil and gas industry produced nearly 370 million barrels of oil and 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from roughly 60,000 wells, which was transported on 35,000 miles of pipelines.

But as the State Land Office study highlights, the industry is leaving behind enormous costs for the state and the general public to deal with at a later date, a liability that is mostly obscured from public discussion.

The average cost to plug an old well and reclaim the surface is over $182,000 per well, but the state only has the finances to cover a little over $3,200 per well. The funding gap is even more staggering for pipelines. Decommissioning and reclamation costs are roughly $211,000 per mile of pipeline, but available financial assurance only totals about $51 per mile.

A pump jack in Roswell, New Mexico. Credit: BLM. (CC BY 2.0)

The risk to the public from inadequate bonding requirements is compounded by the fact that oil and gas drillers can go out of business long before wells are cleaned up, which can be years or even decades later. The U.S. shale industry has burned through hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, and there have been more than 250 bankruptcies of North American oil and gas companies since 2015. And as the clean energy transition accelerates, the financial challenges to the industry are likely to only grow more severe.

The state has long suffered from the roller coaster cycles of extractive industry, according to James Jimenez, executive director of New Mexico Voices for Children, a health, education, and economic advocacy organization. “We’ve made policy choices in boom times that have really exacerbated our over-dependence on oil and natural gas revenues,” Jimenez told DeSmog.

“Because of the really volatile nature of the oil and gas industries, we haven’t had sustainability in the programs,” he said. A dependence on a boom-and-bust industry has forced the state to make cuts to school systems during downturns in the past.

“We need to reduce this over reliance we have on oil and natural gas to fund really basic important programs like our K-12 education and higher education systems,” Jimenez said. He added that the state should diversify its revenue base, such as through progressive taxation on the wealthy and supporting non-extractive business sectors.

Even as money flows to the state from drilling today, the unfunded liabilities of cleanup that are dumped onto the public also highlight the downside to such high levels of drilling. “The $8 billion that it would take to do the cleanup would have to come from somewhere,” Jimenez said. Dollars spent on cleaning up the waste from the oil and gas industry, are dollars not spent on other important needs, such as rural broadband or road infrastructure, he added.

“The answers are simple and urgent — raise royalty rates and taxes on the industry, stash away the revenues in our Permanent Fund to stabilize cash flows, and spend current budget dollars on investments to diversify our economy,” Thomas Singer, senior policy advisor at the Western Environmental Law Center, told DeSmog via email.

NMOGA did not respond to a request for comment.

Well pad near Roswell, NM. Credit: BLM. (CC BY 2.0)

On top of the financial risks from abandoned wells, the fossil fuel industry brings numerous environmental and public health hazards as well. Oil and gas operations have contributed to a deterioration in air quality in the state. And in northwestern New Mexico, there have been more than 300 accidents since 2019, including oil spills, fires, blowouts, and gas releases, and much of it has occurred on Navajo land, as reported by Capital & Main.

A recently published peer-reviewed study found that shut-in conventional oil wells in the Permian basin could be leaking a substantial amount of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that exacerbates climate change.

“New Mexicans must recognize that while industrialization of our landscape to produce oil and gas brings revenue today, if not properly cleaned up, it also jeopardizes our economy of the future,” Singer said. Allowing drillers “to defer this obligation indefinitely puts the state and taxpayers at great risk that they will have pick up the tab or leave these areas as polluted sacrifice zones.”

Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist covering the oil and gas industry, climate change and international politics. He has been featured in Oilprice.com, The Fuse, YaleE360 and NACLA.

Turn off the gas: is America ready to embrace electric vehicles?

The Guardian

Turn off the gas: is America ready to embrace electric vehicles?

Tom Perkins May 23, 2021

Joe Biden inside the new Lightning last week. ‘This sucker’s quick,’ he declared. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Ford unveiled its new F-150 Lightning pickup this week – but the success of EVs in this car-loving nation is far from certain

In Detroit, auto plants have for decades churned out trucks built with Motor City steel and fueled by gasoline. But this week’s rollout of the Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck offered a vision of the future in America’s automotive heartland: aluminum-clad pickups running off of electric powertrains with lithium batteries.

An electric model of the nation’s best-selling vehicle at an accessible $40,000 has the potential to shift the auto industry’s course, and do more to advance the transportation sector’s electrification than any recent development, analysts say.

“Offering a well-known vehicle at a competitive price could really help push the EV agenda in the US,” said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds.com.

Meanwhile, Ford characterized the Lightning’s introduction as a “watershed moment”, but it also represents a major gamble. The F-150 embodies American ruggedness, and it raises the question: is the truck market’s meat-and-potatoes base ready to embrace environmentally friendly electric vehicles (EVs)?

It’s uncharted territory, said Michelle Krebs, Autotrader executive analyst. The success of the Lightning or any EV hinges on a major infrastructure build-out that’s far from certain.

“There’s no EV pickup market at the moment, so we just don’t know how big it could be, or what consumer acceptance will be,” she said.

Truck consumers are generally unwilling to switch to cars just to go electric, Krebs said. So pitching them on the Lightning not only opens a new market for Ford, but is a critical step in the nation’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, of which the transportation sector accounts for 29%. The EV transition is a key component of Joe Biden’s climate plan, which calls for the nation to cut emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, and net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050.

Though EVs only make up less than 2% of new-vehicle sales in the US, there’s perhaps no better line to push the needle on those figures than the F-Series. Last year, Ford generated about $42bn in the sale of over 800,000 F-Series trucks, according to data from the company and Edmunds.com. Sales of the F-150, the line’s light-duty truck, exceeded 556,000.

The Lightning feature that seems to be catching the most attention isn’t under the hood or in the cab, but on the price tag. With EV tax incentives, the truck’s base model could cost about $32,000 – less than a $37,000 gas-powered F-150 with a crew cab. By contrast, the GMC Hummer EV and Rivian R1T, are priced at $80,000 and $70,000 though they are slightly flashier.

The Lightning also marks one of the first attempts to electrify a well-known, everyday vehicle that appeals to a mass market. Previously, EVs were mostly small, unconventionally designed cars that appealed to environmentally minded people who made a personality statement with their vehicle, Caldwell said. The “pendulum has swung” in terms of design, she added.

The Lightning’s range is also notable. One charge will take a base model Lightning 230 miles, or, for an additional $20,000, the extended range trim will travel 300 miles. It can haul up to 2,000lb of payload and tow up to 10,000lb. However, Ford doesn’t offer any data on range with a heavy payload or tow, and Car And Drive estimated it at as little as 100 miles.

That’s the type of detail that could keep consumers away from not just the Lightning, but all electric pickups. On a 150kw DC fast charger, the extended-range trim targets up to 54 miles of range in 10 minutes, or just under an hour for a full charge.

It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which someone who may be buying a truck to tow a camper a long distance once or twice per year opting for a gas-powered F-150 instead being inconvenienced with an hour-long stop to recharge every 100 miles or so, Caldwell said.

But several once-in-a-while Lightning features are generating a buzz, like a drain hole in case the cab needs to be hosed out. Its dual battery system can power tools in the field, or a house for three days during an outage. The F-150 Hybrid was utilized as a mobile generator in the recent deadly Texas blackouts.

Ford’s chief executive engineer Linda Zhang unveils the Ford F-150 Lightning in Dearborn on Wednesday. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP

The Lightning’s power is another selling point – it can go 0-60mph in just over four seconds, offers 775lb-ft of torque, and the extended range model targets 563 horsepower.

That was enough to impress the president, who test drove a Lightning during a Michigan stop last week. “This sucker’s quick,” he declared.

Among those who will need to harness the truck’s full power and hauling capacity are contractors. It’s worth consideration, said Dave Alder, an electrician in Detroit, especially if it could save on gas money. But he worried about where he would charge it, and said it’s a bit of a “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” situation with his gas-powered Chevy Silverado.

The Lightning has the support of the United Auto Workers union, which at times has been skeptical of electrification. The truck will be built at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, which sits just outside of Detroit and next to the Dearborn Truck Plant that produces gas-powered and hybrid F-150s. Lightning production is slated to start next spring, with the trucks hitting the lot in mid-2022.

Critical to its success is an infrastructure build out, and Biden’s $2tn infrastructure plan includes $174bn to support the EV transition.

Biden has framed his pitch by repeatedly claiming the US is in an electrification race with China.

“The future of the auto industry is electric. There’s no turning back,” he said during the Lightning’s unveiling. “The question is whether we will lead or we will fall behind in the race to the future.”

Buy-in from the auto industry could help Biden push his proposal with Congress, though it’s uniformly opposed by the GOP. Republican leadership has pointed to the lack of infrastructure as a chief reason for opposing spending on the EV transition, but at the same time opposes funding an infrastructure build-out.

American consumers have said they won’t buy an EV without the infrastructure in place, Krebs said, which leaves the industry facing a “chicken and egg” situation.

“That’s key – they have got to have the charging infrastructure in place or this will all go kaput,” she said.

Trucks of fresh water used to feed Taiwan’s semiconductors as crops left to die in punishing drought

The Telegraph

Trucks of fresh water used to feed Taiwan’s semiconductors as crops left to die in punishing drought

Nicola Smith May 22, 2021

The dried lakebed of Sun Moon Lake in Nantou county in central Taiwan - AP — The dried lakebed of Sun Moon Lake in Nantou county in central Taiwan – AP

The world’s largest microchip maker is buying tanker trucks full of water to keep its plant going as farmers struggle to make ends meet during the worst drought in the history of Taiwan.

The Taiwanese government this week said it would tighten water rationing from June 1 in the semiconductor making hubs of Hsinchu and Taichung if there is no significant rainfall by then. This would require companies to cut water consumption by 17 per cent.

Chip manufacturing requires a significant amount of water, and the shortfall in Taiwan, the rainswept island that hasn’t seen a typhoon in the last last year, has sounded alarm bells across the world.

The global economy is suffering from a major shortage of semiconductors that are key to almost all consumer appliances and vehicles.

A cut in supply from factories shut by Covid first hit the market last year, but a surge in spending on electrical items during lockdown has savaged the industry.

The automotive sector is by far the hardest hit, with Ford, Volkswagen and Jaguar Land Rover shutting down factories and laying off workers.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC), the world’s largest chipmaker, told the Telegraph it had a contingency plan for the punishing drought compounding global supply issues further.

“We have initiated some measures including cutting back water usage and ordering water by tanker trucks for some of our facilities. So far there’s no impact on production and we are closely monitoring the water supply situation,” said a spokesperson.

People fish at the Sun Moon Lake with low water levels during an island wide drought - ANNABELLE CHIH /REUTERS — People fish at the Sun Moon Lake with low water levels during an island wide drought – ANNABELLE CHIH /REUTERS

But the 18-month drought, which has seen reservoirs in the island’s central and southern region plunge below 5 per cent of capacity, not only threatens Taiwan’s technological dominance, it has damaged farmers’ livelihoods and revived calls for long term action over climate change.

In parts of central Taiwan, taps are now turned off two days a week.

“With climate change accelerating, it is a sign that we have to think about how to transform,” said farmer Liu Cheng-yu, 37, who is facing significant losses from his rice paddy fields due to irrigation restrictions.

“That means our previous investment and effort will go to waste completely, and we won’t be able to earn any income,” he said. “We are desperately looking for other water resources to prevent the irrigation from halting.”

Mr Liu said he saw the crisis as an opportunity, but other farmers believe they have been shortchanged to save the chip industry.

“We had no choice but to stop planting for this season,” said Ho Wan-chin, 57, who was forced to lease his 100 hectares of land in Hsinchu county fallow.

“The government’s policy has always prioritized water supply to industries like the Hsinchu Science Park,” he said. “We are frustrated by the drought, and with climate change, drought will only happen again in the future.”

The island’s Greenpeace chapter agrees, concluding that Taiwan will face a more intense drought by 2030 if nothing is done to reduce carbon emissions.

People visit dried up Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan's Nantou County — People visit dried up Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan’s Nantou County

“Because of semiconductors and the regulation of domestic water use, the public awareness of climate change has indeed increased. However, climate change is never the focus of the discussion,” said June Liu, climate and energy campaigner.

“A long-term and climate-orientated water management policy is lacking and must be built up as soon as possible. Crossing fingers is not how we deal with risks.”

Dr Hsu Huang-hsiung, a climate change expert at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, said that although this year’s drought was likely more attributable to bad luck rather than proven to be global warming, that it served as a wake-up call for the island.

“This has been a good lesson for the Taiwanese people and government to learn,” he said. “Although this particular event was not necessarily caused by global warming, similar phenomena occurred so that we know that our water resources policy is not well planned.”

The island needed to address leakage in water pipes, hike consumption prices, and explore other water resources like retention pools, he said.

“I think the government will start to come up with better plans for long term policies for water resources for the future.”