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From Rooftops to Algae Pools: Orlando’s Vision for Carbon-Free Energy

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From Rooftops to Algae Pools: Orlando’s Vision for Carbon-Free Energy

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Orlando, Florida is taking large steps to lead the way to a non-carbon powered energy city. They are installing more and more useful ways to utilize the energy that will allow the environment to thrive. There are a plethora of renewable resources that have been put in place in order to undo the effects of carbon powered energy and the exodus of the US from the Paris Climate Accord.

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Rubin York, an engineer with the Orlando Utilities Commission, examining data at a solar test site. Orlando wants to generate all of its energy from carbon-free sources. Credit Credit Edward Linsmier for The New York Times

ORLANDO, Fla. - This city has long been a leading tourist destination. Now, it is vying for another distinction: to be a pioneer in weaning itself from carbon-based energy.

You can see its aspirations in the thousands of ponds all over the city that collect the runoff from Central Florida's frequent downpours. Floating solar panels rise and fall in the water, sending power to the grid.

There is also evidence along city streets, where solar panels sit atop streetlights to power them instead of using the electric grid. About 18,000 of the 25,000 in the city already have been converted to high-efficiency light-emitting diodes.

Even algae pools may play a role. That's where officials are testing a system to trap the carbon that the city emits from power plants or transportation, rather than release it into the atmosphere.

Orlando, in short, is charting its own course to help curb the effects of climate change. In part, it is stepping in where the federal government has pulled back. It is among almost 300 American cities and counties that have reaffirmed the goals of the Paris climate accord since President Trump announced last year that he intended to withdraw the United States from the pact.

"Cities, we're having to take the lead," said Chris Castro, the city's director of sustainability. "You would have expected the federal government to be taking the lead, but the federal government seems to be backing away every day from the commitments they've made."

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"The biggest risk for us is not changing," said Clint Bullock, chief executive of the Orlando Utilities Commission, the municipally owned power company. Credit Edward Linsmier for The New York Times

Mayor Buddy Dyer acknowledges that the city's goals will require more than resolve. "As a community, we've been really good about creating visions," he said. "I think we all recognize that we need technology advancements to get to 100 percent."

Here in the center of the Sunshine State, significant potential rests with solar power.

By 2020, solar power is expected to make up 8 percent of the electricity generation of the city-owned utility, which powers much of the metropolitan area, including Universal Studios and SeaWorld, while investor-owned utilities serve some neighboring areas.

The municipal utility has installed equipment to generate 20 megawatts of community solar power - enough to power roughly 3,200 homes - on places like canopies over parking lots. The city's 280,000 residents contribute an additional 10 megawatts of solar power from equipment on their rooftops.

Thousands of ponds that collect rainwater all over Orlando have floating solar panels that rise and fall in the water, sending power to the grid. Credit Edward Linsmier for The New York Times

As an incentive to install solar panels, homeowners receive full retail value for electricity they send to the electric grid, an arrangement known as net metering. The utility also provides discount installation of home solar equipment and is looking at offering batteries.

And the city wants to float a large solar array on the pools of a water treatment plant, potentially offering a model for cities and utilities nationwide.

But solar power alone will not get Orlando to 100 percent clean energy, experts say.

For one thing, like other cities, Orlando struggles with its reliance on one of the dirtiest fuels for producing electricity - coal. Los Angeles, which also generates municipal power, has proposed to replace remaining coal plants with natural-gas facilities, which produce half as much carbon as coal units. In Orlando's case, about 47 percent of the energy mix comes from two coal units at the Curtis H. Stanton Energy Center, home also to two generators powered by natural gas.

The city is reviewing the future of the coal component. A transition from power plants burning coal and natural gas might force consumers to foot the bill for closing facilities by paying off their remaining debt early while also paying for the new technologies.

As Orlando tries to increase its use of intermittent sources like wind and solar power, battery storage will be important, but it remains costly.

And critics argue that focusing on power plants addresses only a portion of the greenhouse-gas problem. In 2017, a little more than a third of the nation's energy consumption came from the electric power industry, while transportation and the industrial sector made up about half, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Even the distance to the goal is open to question. "There's a fundamental disconnect on what 100 percent means," said Arshad Mansoor, senior vice president of research and development at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit group that does research for the nation's utilities.

Justin Kramer, a project manager with the Orlando Utilities Commission, said the commission was studying the effectiveness of various types of solar panels at its Gardenia Facility. Credit Edward Linsmier for The New York Times

In the electricity industry's calculus, 100 percent carbon-free may not mean 100 percent zero emissions. Sometimes, as Orlando talks of doing, it means buying credits produced from carbon-free power plants elsewhere - a benefit used to encourage development of clean power sources - to offset dirty emissions.

But Orlando aims to do all it can to achieve its goals in practice, not just on paper. And it is moving on many fronts.

Some measures, at this point, aim to curb rather than eliminate the use of carbon fuels. Natural gas powers the government-run bus system that serves the city and three neighboring counties, and garbage trucks have hybrid engines, reducing the use of gasoline. (The police force has gone a step farther, with electric motorcycles.)

At its vehicle maintenance shop, Orlando operates a natural gas station that blends the fuel and fills the fleet of trucks. The facility receives 60 percent of its power - and will soon receive all - from the 1,530 solar panels on the roof.

Other city buildings and operations have moved to energy-efficient systems under a mandate to show no consumption from the electric grid - a distinction called net-zero energy usage - by 2030. Part of the goal is to reduce emissions and electricity use rather than just shifting to power from carbon-free sources.

In some cases, Orlando is making common cause with other cities. It has joined Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles to harness their collective purchasing power in hopes of reducing the cost of carbon-free products - including electric vehicles and batteries for electricity storage - by buying in bulk.

"We're going to be looking for new business models," said Clint Bullock, the recently appointed general manager and chief executive of the city-owned power company, the Orlando Utilities Commission. "The biggest risk for us is not changing."

Under the direction of Mayor Buddy Dyer, Orlando has committed to reach 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2050. Credit Edward Linsmier for The New York Times

Conservationists are watching. "People in the communities that commit to 100 percent clean energy expect and deserve 100 percent clean energy, not a continued reliance on old coal plants or a build-out of dirty gas plants," said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. "That's why we are seeing leaders in communities across the country leverage these commitments to push utilities and politicians to walk the talk."

And the more progress that is made to reach the goal, the more effort it requires to close the gap.

"It gets more challenging as you get closer and closer to 100 percent," said Ed Smeloff, director of grid integration for Vote Solar, a nonprofit organization in Oakland, Calif., that promotes carbon-free energy. "The future to get to 100 percent is probably more diverse than we're seeing right now."

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From Rooftops to Algae Pools: Orlando's Vision for Carbon-Free Energy

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ORLANDO, Fla. - This city has long been a leading tourist destination. Now, it is vying for another distinction: to be a pioneer in weaning itself from carbon-based energy. You can see its aspirations in the thousands of ponds all over the city that collect the runoff from Central Florida's frequent downpours.

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2018 Arctic summertime sea ice minimum extent tied for sixth lowest on record. 

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2018 Arctic summertime sea ice minimum extent tied for sixth lowest on record. 

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https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2811/2018-arctic-summertime-sea-ice-minimum-extent-tied-for-sixth-lowest-on-record/
Global warming has been a growing problem for quite some time now. The sea ice in the polar region is at an all time low, and the numbers continue to decline. The arctic is a very important ecosystem to the world, and without many animals would lose their homes. Also the water sea levels would rise dramatically and cause damage and flooding to costal cities.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Arctic sea ice likely reached its 2018 lowest extent on Sept. 19 and again on Sept. 23, according to NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Analysis of satellite data by NSIDC and NASA showed that, at 1.77 million square miles (4.59 million square kilometers), 2018 effectively tied with 2008 and 2010 for the sixth lowest summertime minimum extent in the satellite record.

Arctic sea ice reached its annual minimum extent Sept. 19, and then again on Sept. 23, 2018. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Kathryn Mersmann

Arctic sea ice, the cap of frozen seawater blanketing most of the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas in wintertime, follows seasonal patterns of growth and decay. It thickens and spreads during the fall and winter and thins and shrinks during the spring and summer. But in the past decades, increasing temperatures have led to prominent decreases in the Arctic sea ice extents, with particularly rapid decreases in the minimum summertime extent. The shrinking of the Arctic sea ice cover can ultimately affect the planet's weather patterns and the circulation of the oceans.

"This year's minimum is relatively high compared to the record low extent we saw in 2012, but it is still low compared to what it used to be in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s," said Claire Parkinson, a climate change senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The yearly minimum Arctic sea ice extent has been decreasing at a rapid pace since the late 1970s due to warming temperatures. The twelve lowest extents in the satellite era have all occurred in the last twelve years. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder

Parkinson and her colleague Nick DiGirolamo calculated that, since the late 1970s, the Arctic sea ice extent has shrunk on average about 21,000 square miles (54,000 square kilometers) with each passing year. That is equivalent to losing a chunk of sea ice the size of Maryland and New Jersey combined every year for the past four decades.

This summer, the weather conditions across the Arctic have been a mixed bag, with some areas experiencing warmer than average temperatures and rapid melt and other regions remaining cooler than normal, which leads to persistent patches of sea ice. Still, the 2018 minimum sea ice extent is 629,000 square miles (1.63 million square kilometers) below the 1981-2010 average of yearly minimum extents.

One of the most unusual features of this year's melt season has been the reopening of a polynya-like hole in the icepack north of Greenland, where the oldest and thickest sea ice of the Arctic typically resides. In February of this year, a similar opening appeared in the same area, catching the attention of sea ice scientists everywhere. The first appearance of the hole raised concerns about the possibility that the region could became vulnerable if the original, thicker ice cover was replaced with thinner ice as the exposed seawater refroze. NASA's Operation IceBridge mission probed the area in March, finding that the ice was indeed thinner and thus more susceptible to be pushed around by the winds and ocean currents.

"This summer, the combination of thin ice and southerly warm winds helped break up and melt the sea ice in the region, reopening the hole," said Melinda Webster, a sea ice researcher with Goddard. "This opening matters for several reasons; for starters, the newly exposed water absorbs sunlight and warms up the ocean, which affects how quickly sea ice will grow in the following autumn. It also affects the local ecosystem; for example, it impacts seal and polar bear populations that rely on thicker, snow-covered sea ice for denning and hunting.

Measurements of sea ice thickness, an important additional factor in determining the mass and volume changes of the sea ice cover, have been far less complete than the measurements of ice extent and distribution in the past four decades. Now, with the successful launch of NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, on Sept. 15, scientists will be able to use the data from the spacecraft's advanced laser altimeter to create detailed maps of sea ice thickness in both the Arctic and the Antarctic.

Related link: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2018/09/arctic-sea-ice-extent-arrives-at-its-minimum/
Chart: Lowest sea ice minimum extents on record

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national aeronautics and space administration

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By Maria-José Viñas,
NASA's Earth Science News Team

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2018 Arctic summertime sea ice minimum extent tied for sixth lowest on record - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Arctic sea ice likely reached its 2018 lowest extent on Sept. 19 and again on Sept. 23, according to NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Floating Pipe set to start  massive ocean cleanup process

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Floating Pipe set to start  massive ocean cleanup process

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Over the years the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has been growing until it was double the size of Texas. But a company called the Ocean Cleanup foundation has created a pipe that will sit in the Pacific ocean to clean up the mess. If this mess isn't cleaned  up soon it could start to affect human health. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/15/tech/ocean-cleanup-project/index.html

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7.5 Billion and counting- how many humans can Earth support?

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7.5 Billion and counting- how many humans can Earth support?

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This article talks about population growth on Earth and how it is following an exponential growth trend. The doubling rate of the human population is becoming shorter, and is predicted to reach 10-12 billion before leveling off because of a lack of resources. As Americans we already consume around 6x the 1.9 hectares that the Earth has to sustain each person on Earth.

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Katy KellyTurtles Found Dead Off Mexicohttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/08/endangered-olive-ridley-sea-turtles-dead-mexico-news/ Published august 29, 2019Author: Jason BittelPart 1- Mexico's federal agency for environmental protection announced that more than 300 olive ridley sea turtles had died after becoming tangled in a fishing net. The animals were found floating together off the coast of the southern state of Oaxaca, their shells cracked from more than a week of drying in the sun. Bryan Wallace, a marine biologist says that it seems that the sea turtles in Oaxaca have fallen victim to a “ghost net.” Part II- A- Fishermen have been the source to this problem. It’s not just one country, it is a global problem, but especially mexico, who have caused this problem. nonprofit Conservation Science Partners, Inc. is the organization that are working together to try and help prevent this extinction. B- The article talks about the problem causing the deaths of these sea turtles which are called “ghost nets”. Marine scientists have decided to take control and create an organization to help donate and help physically prevent this problemC- This organization is an online organization and also it has started in countries where fishing with nets are popular. The negotiations take place in CPS world Headquarters in california.D- The organization started on August 10, 2018 and are continuing to expand the organization to make a difference.E- The events have become a huge impact to helping the turtles due to donations and volunteer work. This is a current crisis because sea turtles could go extinct. Groups have attended to help because sea turtles are amazing creatures and play a big role in the food web/chain. The cause of this problem are fishing nets.F- people have helped hugely in this organization by physical treatment and care for the animals. These events have taken place in volunteer work and online donations to this organization. The problems could be resolved by clean up of nets opr make net fishing illegal or more strict to do. Personal reaction- I personally think this non-profitable organization is a great work of solution. I think there could be a couple of solutions like either to make net fishing harder and more difficult to legally do it or make the rules about it strict. The other solution is to totally band net fishing and make it illegal. I can relate this article to my sophomore project because i based my project off of animal extinction and how harmful it really can be to the environment.   

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Katy KellyTurtles Found Dead Off Mexicohttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/08/endangered-olive-ridley-sea-turtles-dead-mexico-news/ Published august 29, 2019Author: Jason BittelPart 1- Mexico's federal agency for environmental protection announced that more than 300 olive ridley sea turtles had died after becoming tangled in a fishing net. The animals were found floating together off the coast of the southern state of Oaxaca, their shells cracked from more than a week of drying in the sun. Bryan Wallace, a marine biologist says that it seems that the sea turtles in Oaxaca have fallen victim to a “ghost net.” Part II- A- Fishermen have been the source to this problem. It’s not just one country, it is a global problem, but especially mexico, who have caused this problem. nonprofit Conservation Science Partners, Inc. is the organization that are working together to try and help prevent this extinction. B- The article talks about the problem causing the deaths of these sea turtles which are called “ghost nets”. Marine scientists have decided to take control and create an organization to help donate and help physically prevent this problemC- This organization is an online organization and also it has started in countries where fishing with nets are popular. The negotiations take place in CPS world Headquarters in california.D- The organization started on August 10, 2018 and are continuing to expand the organization to make a difference.E- The events have become a huge impact to helping the turtles due to donations and volunteer work. This is a current crisis because sea turtles could go extinct. Groups have attended to help because sea turtles are amazing creatures and play a big role in the food web/chain. The cause of this problem are fishing nets.F- people have helped hugely in this organization by physical treatment and care for the animals. These events have taken place in volunteer work and online donations to this organization. The problems could be resolved by clean up of nets opr make net fishing illegal or more strict to do. Personal reaction- I personally think this non-profitable organization is a great work of solution. I think there could be a couple of solutions like either to make net fishing harder and more difficult to legally do it or make the rules about it strict. The other solution is to totally band net fishing and make it illegal. I can relate this article to my sophomore project because i based my project off of animal extinction and how harmful it really can be to the environment.   

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New hybrid breed of pythons found in Everglades. The Burmese python was already a problem in the Everglades now they are more adaptable and more dangerous not just to humans but to the native species in the Everglades.

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New hybrid breed of pythons found in Everglades. The Burmese python was already a problem in the Everglades now they are more adaptable and more dangerous not just to humans but to the native species in the Everglades.

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https://padlet.com/jessica_thomason/apesoctober15

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Underestimating Combined Threats of Deforestation and Wildlife Trade will Push Southeast Asian Birds. 

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Underestimating Combined Threats of Deforestation and Wildlife Trade will Push Southeast Asian Birds. 

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A study conducted by University of Sheffield showed the public shocking news of endangered species, deforestation, and exploitation. Based in Sundaland, located in Southeast Asia, the group of scientists conducted many experiments and recorded observations that stated that by the year 2100, we are to of lost 50-90% of the forest dependent species, mainly birds. If the International Union for Conservation of Nature doesn't act quick to protect the land and pause the exploitation of these beautiful birds, we could lose over 300 species of birds within the next 100 years.

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The combined impact of deforestation and wildlife exploitation on bird numbers is severely underestimated and could lead to some species becoming extinct, a joint study by the University of Sheffield and National University of Singapore has found.

Scientists focused on Sundaland -- a hotspot of biodiversity in Southeast Asia, spanning Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Peninsular Malaysia -- where habitat loss, and hunting and wildlife trades are particularly intense.

Looking at 308 forest-dependent bird species, they found that when the loss of forest habitat and bird trapping in the area was examined together it resulted in a much higher average population loss than when accounted for separately.

The study calls for the threats to biodiversity to be considered in totality in order for effective measures to be implemented.

The research, which was conducted between October 2016 and July 2017, also suggests that about 50 to 90 of forest-dependent species in the region, such as the ruby-throated bulbul and white-crowned hornbill will be extinct by 2100.

Tropical forests are the most biodiverse ecosystem globally, however, extensive loss of tropical forests driven primarily by the expansion of agricultural land threatens the survival of forest species. Coupled with other anthropogenic disturbance such as logging, hunting and fires, the threat to biodiversity in these forests is amplified.

While the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been tracking the different forms of threats to wildlife, the assessments tend to look at each form of threat separately. These threats, are however, interconnected and the combined impact could be more severe than currently estimated.

The researchers focused their study on quantifying the combined threats of deforestation and wildlife exploitation in Sundaland.

"Recent extinctions like the passenger pigeon and the dodo present common traits like the simultaneous combination of habitat loss and active hunting," said Dr William Symes, from the National University of Singapore.

"This fatal combination of ingredients is present for dozens of unique bird species in Sundaland. At current rates, vanishing forests and enormous trapping pressures are likely to drive many of them to extinction in the near future."

Their evaluation revealed that 89 per cent of the 308 forest-dependent bird species studied had experienced an average habitat loss of 16 per cent due to deforestation, and they also estimated that wildlife exploitation had led to a 37 per cent decline in mean population on average.

Among the bird species studied, the researchers also identified 77 'commercially traded' species that are more commonly exploited. They found that the estimated average decline for these exploited species was 15.3 per cent from deforestation alone, but when combined with the effects of exploitation, the estimated average decline was drastically increased to 51.9 per cent.

In addition, the assessment of the combined impact of deforestation and exploitation in the study suggests that a total of 51 species should be listed as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable -- nearly doubling the number currently listed by IUCN.

Dr David Edwards, from the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield, said: "Our study highlights the importance of considering the impact of major conservation threats in combination.

"Recent habitat loss and exploitation combine to drive dramatic extinction risks to the forest specialist species of Sundaland. Without urgent policy intervention to curb deforestation and slow the quantities of birds entering the cage bird trade, many species are likely to be lost.

"Failing to account for these combined threats can lead to a major underestimation of threats in the IUCN Red List assessments."

The combined impacts of deforestation, forest fragmentation and commercial exploitation are not unique to Southeast Asia. Rampant land-use change and wildlife trade drive the decline in parrots from Latin America, Africa and Asia.

"Our technique of evaluating the combined threats can be applied to other tropical forests facing similar threats, to facilitate the development of effective conservation policies. Coordinated efforts to curb commercial exploitation and slow deforestation, for instance, can limit the extinction of bird species," Assistant Professor Roman Carrasco from the National University of Singapore added.

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extinction; ecology research; endangered animals; nature; new species; wild animals; endangered plants; birds

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Underestimating combined threats of deforestation and wildlife trade will push Southeast Asian birds

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The combined impact of deforestation and wildlife exploitation on bird numbers is severely underestimated and could lead to some species becoming extinct, a joint study by the University of Sheffield and National University of Singapore has found.

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This article is all about a new study that was found about how we may be able to feed 10 Billion people by 2050 using combined techniques. To achieve this you will learn about how we need more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustain-ably by 2050.
Bryce Stoklasa

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A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds. Adopting these options reduces the risk of crossing global environmental limits related to climate change, the use of agricultural land, the extraction of freshwater resources, and the pollution of ecosystems through overapplication of fertilizers, according to the researchers.

The study, published in the journal Nature, is the first to quantify how food production and consumption affects the planetary boundaries that describe a safe operating space for humanity beyond which Earth's vital systems could become unstable.

"No single solution is enough to avoid crossing planetary boundaries. But when the solutions are implemented together, our research indicates that it may be possible to feed the growing population sustainably," says Dr Marco Springmann of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food and the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, who led the study.

"Without concerted action, we found that the environmental impacts of the food system could increase by 50-90% by 2050 as a result of population growth and the rise of diets high in fats, sugars and meat. In that case, all planetary boundaries related to food production would be surpassed, some of them by more than twofold."

The study, funded by EAT as part of the EAT-Lancet Commission for Food, Planet and Health and by Wellcome's "Our Planet, Our Health" partnership on Livestock Environment and People, combined detailed environmental accounts with a model of the global food system that tracks the production and consumption of food across the world. With this model, the researchers analysed several options that could keep the food system within environmental limits. They found:

Climate change cannot be sufficiently mitigated without dietary changes towards more plant-based diets. Adopting more plant-based "flexitarian" diets globally could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than half, and also reduce other environmental impacts, such as fertilizer application and the use of cropland and freshwater, by a tenth to a quarter.

In addition to dietary changes, improving management practices and technologies in agriculture is required to limit pressures on agricultural land, freshwater extraction, and fertilizer use. Increasing agricultural yields from existing cropland, balancing application and recycling of fertilizers, and improving water management, could, along with other measures, reduce those impacts by around half.

Finally, halving food loss and waste is needed for keeping the food system within environmental limits. Halving food loss and waste could, if globally achieved, reduce environmental impacts by up to a sixth (16%).

"Many of the solutions we analysed are being implemented in some parts of the world, but it will need strong global co-ordination and rapid upscale to make their effects felt," says Springmann.

"Improving farming technologies and management practices will require increasing investment in research and public infrastructure, the right incentive schemes for farmers, including support mechanisms to adopt best available practices, and better regulation, for example of fertilizer use and water quality," says Line Gordon, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and an author on the report.

Fabrice de Clerck, director of science at EAT says, "Tackling food loss and waste will require measures across the entire food chain, from storage, and transport, over food packaging and labelling to changes in legislation and business behaviour that promote zero-waste supply chains."

"When it comes to diets, comprehensive policy and business approaches are essential to make dietary changes towards healthy and more plant-based diets possible and attractive for a large number of people. Important aspects include school and workplace programmes, economic incentives and labelling, and aligning national dietary guidelines with the current scientific evidence on healthy eating and the environmental impacts of our diet," adds Springmann.

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agriculture and food; food and agriculture; food; nature; environmental issues; environmental policy; ecology; environmental awareness

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Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable

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A new study quantifies how food production and consumption affects the planetary boundaries that describe a safe operating space for humanity beyond which Earth's vital systems could become unstable.

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Talking about overpopulation is still taboo. That has to change.

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Talking about overpopulation is still taboo. That has to change.

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As examined earlier in this course, the world's population is always increasing.  Some cities are
supposed to be 5x as large by the year 2050.  Yet, activist groups and politicians still try to fight this battle due to it affecting human rights.  If changes aren't made, the effects of overpopulation will be near impossible to reverse.

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Frances Kissling is the president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy. Jotham Musinguzi is director general of Uganda's National Population Council. Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

Fifty years ago, Paul Ehrlich's bestseller " The Population Bomb " predicted that the world's population would double in less than 35 years - a frightening speed. The book had a major impact but spurred a backlash that made almost any further discussion of population radioactive.

As it turns out, Ehrlich's predictions were extreme. At today's growth rate, the next population doubling will take nearly 60 years. That slowdown gives us time to find ethical ways of sustaining ourselves and the opportunity to collaborate with stakeholders with differing perspectives on how to do so.

Still, the taboo on talking about population remains.

This may be because of the controversial solutions to rapid population growth that "The Population Bomb" suggested. Ehrlich, a biologist, argued that if voluntary family planning didn't reduce population sufficiently to avoid famine and other natural disasters, then coercion and the withdrawal of food aid to some countries would be necessary and justifiable.

He had plenty of supporters, but feminists and progressives rejected such draconian solutions. When China initiated its one-child policy and reports of forced abortions emerged, feminists were in the forefront of efforts to end it. Foreign aid policies that set contraceptive targets in return for aid were condemned as violating human rights and disappeared. Feminists also contributed significantly to the taboo by urging a shift away from policies focused on population control to policies supportive of reproductive health and rights. Both feminists and population stabilization advocates now agree that providing reproductive health services to women is first and foremost a right in itself, as well as the best and most ethical way to slow population growth.

Still, the issue of rapid population increase has not gone away. Instead, it has become regionalized. Several European countries and Japan now have negative or zero natural population growth. But the U.N. Population Division estimates that 26 African countries will at least double their present populations by 2050. By 2100, Angola, Burundi, Niger, Somalia, Tanzania and Zambia are expected to have five times as many people as they do today. Nigeria already has an estimated population of 191 million, and women there give birth, on average, to more than five children. By 2050, Nigeria is projected to become the world's third-most populous country.

Many African family-planning advocates are concerned because society with rapid population growth means many dependent children for each adult. If fertility were reduced, there would be fewer children and more adults able to work. And if this potential workforce were adequately educated and had access to jobs, it could become the engine of economic growth, thus paying a demographic dividend to the society as a whole.

Prospects of African prosperity are also threatened by climate change. In regions that are already hot and arid, higher temperatures will make prolonged outdoor physical labor almost impossible and will also increase evaporation, further reducing already strained water resources.

Yet population remains an unmentionable topic in international policy circles. None of the 17 Goals or 169 targets of the U.N. Sustainable Development Agenda dares to suggest that it might be desirable to slow the increase in human population, nor does this issue get much attention in World Bank documents. Researchers say they are discouraged from writing about the links between population and climate change or the survival of marine environments.

That should not be the case. The increasing recognition of reproductive health as a human right means there is less likelihood that poor countries will introduce or be coerced into draconian programs of population control. Today we should be able to safely broach the potential problems of population growth and ethical ways to respond to it.

Melinda Gates has shown one way of doing this, by focusing on making contraceptives more readily available to the 214 million women who do not want to become pregnant over the next two years but do not have effective preventive methods. Equally important is providing women with access to emergency contraception following unprotected sex and making safe abortion available to women who need it. The voters of Ireland have clearly indicated that they believe it is unethical to limit reproductive rights for all because of the religious beliefs held by some, and we agree.

Finally, a central part of every discussion about population must be educating girls and women and ensuring opportunities for their participation in work and political life. Women need more options to take control of their fertility and lead fulfilling and rewarding lives.

We have learned a lot in the 50 years since "The Population Bomb" was published. We should not shy away from discussing what actions are ethically permissible to facilitate a stable level of population growth, nor should we leave this discussion in the hands of the affluent. The conversation about ethics, population and reproduction needs to shift from the perspective of white donor countries to the places and people most affected by poverty, climate change and environmental degradation.

Read more:

John Podesta and Timothy E. Wirth: Women's rights issues are climate change issues

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Trump escalates the war on women

Janet Harris: Stop calling abortion a 'difficult decision'

Catherine Rampell: Want to fight poverty? Expand access to contraception.

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Opinion | Talking about overpopulation is still taboo. That has to change.

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Frances Kissling is the president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy. Jotham Musinguzi is director general of Uganda's National Population Council. Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

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Hurricanes Like Michael Show Why We Can’t Ignore Climate Change

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Hurricanes Like Michael Show Why We Can’t Ignore Climate Change

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/14/hurricanes-like-michael-show-why-we-cant-ignore-climate-change/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e5487f80e753

A group of international scientists developed a long IPCC report describing the recent elevations of climate change threats, and within days of this report, Hurricane Michael tore up the southeastern side of the united states. This natural disaster, and similar ones before it, only reminded the united states that the increasing threat of man-made climate change is posing as the driving source for these natural disasters. We must now address the look into more solutions to counter the effects of climate change and find ways to protect and account for all Americans and their homes and lifestyles.
Emma Butler

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Why "Green" Germany Remains Addicted to Coal

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Why "Green" Germany Remains Addicted to Coal

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This article is about how Germany, mainly Eastern Germany, has social and economic problems with the move away from coal. Chancellor Merkel’s plans of reducing carbon emissions are ambitious and there are many opposing conflicts in mining-based regions. According to the International Energy Agency, Germany is the world leader in the mining and burning of lignite which is known as “brown coal”. There is an opposition party Ms. Merkel faces called the Alternative for Germany (AfD) which has questioned Germany on the role humans play in contributing to climate change. The change to renewable resources is hard because regions of Germany have their industry based on lignite and many of jobs will be lost and protests will be formed.

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A mine in eastern Germany. The move away from coal poses economic and social challenges, particularly in the east. Credit Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

COTTBUS, Germany - On a Sunday in September, at the moment when part of the nearby coal-fired power station went dark for good, 600 people lifted white miner's helmets from their heads and placed them on folding chairs in the main square in Cottbus, an industrial town in eastern Germany.

It was a silent protest to mark the number of jobs lost.

"You have to think that every one of those places represents a job, an income that an entire family depends on," said Mathias Felsch, a 26-year-old whose father and grandfather both worked in the coal mines. "When you see it like that, it really is a whole lot."

Even so, for Germany, it is not nearly enough.

If the country is to meet its commitment to the Paris Climate Accord - to reduce carbon emissions by 80 to 95 percent by 2050 - it must also address the economic and social impact on the roughly 22,500 people whose jobs depend on coal.

Increasingly, for Chancellor Angela Merkel it is a question of wavering political will in the face of mounting challenges, including from the far right, in eastern regions where a bulk of those jobs would be lost.

More than 15 years ago, Germany embarked on an ambitious plan to shift to renewable energy sources. Promoting that energy transformation, known as the Energiewende, helped earn Ms. Merkel international admiration and the moniker of "the climate chancellor."

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A protest last month in Cottbus against the shutdown of part of a coal-fired power plant. Credit Alexander Becher/EPA, via Shutterstock

Yet even as Ms. Merkel was a leader in setting ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decided in the wake of the Fukushima disaster to shutter the country's nuclear plants by 2022, successive governments under her leadership have failed to take the necessary, painful political decisions to quit coal.

"In the past Chancellor Merkel has been seen as the 'climate chancellor,' riding on the wave of renewable energy successes," said Jennifer Morgan, a director of Greenpeace International. "But unless she turns her full attention to reducing emissions in Germany, particularly from coal, with clear support for a phaseout of coal by 2030, her legacy will not be green. It will be dirty brown."

Today, nearly a quarter of all electricity produced in Germany still comes from burning lignite, often called brown coal, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels, making Germany the world's leader in the mining and burning of lignite, according to the International Energy Agency.

That record runs contrary to a United Nations report released Monday, which found that time is running out for action as global temperatures are rising much faster than previously understood. The dire report, compiled by 91 scientists from 40 countries, recommended "phasing out coal in the energy sector."

For Ms. Merkel, the news could not have come at a worse time. Already, in August, the environment ministry said the country will fail to meet its ambitious targets to cut carbon emissions to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020.

The pressure to save her country's international reputation comes as Ms. Merkel faces an unexpectedly strong challenge from the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the leading opposition party, which has questioned Germany's national consensus on the role humans play in contributing to climate change.

Environmental activists squatted in tree houses and tents to protest plans to expand the Hambach coal mine. Credit Lena Mucha for The New York Times

An estimated 7,800 jobs are dependent on the mines in Lusatia, a region abutting Poland, where Cottbus is situated and memories of the 2.5 million people put out of work after the fall of the Berlin Wall remain acute. Some 1,900 jobs are at stake in another nearby mining region in eastern Germany.

In addition, 8,900 people work in the country's other main mining region, in the heavily industrial state of North Rhine-Westphalia, a critical testing ground for Ms. Merkel's Christian Democratic Party.

In June, Ms. Merkel's government convened a 31-member commission to "work together with affected regions" to recommend the best ways to quit coal. Members are to arrive in Lusatia on Thursday.

Police officers evacuating protesters last month from the forest near the Hambach mine. Credit Michael Gottschalk/Getty Images

The Hambach mine. "Hambach has become a symbol for the fight against coal," one activist said. Credit Federico Gambarini/DPA, via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Hanna Buchmann and Nora Gundermann, both 18, started traineeships there in August and believe the company can offer them a future.

"LEAG offered the best opportunities and the best pay. They are really the only company here in the region," said Ms. Buchmann, who took part in the demonstration in Cottbus.

Tensions are playing out in western Germany as well. Last month, a dispute over the power company RWE's plan to clear half of a 500-acre forest to expand the Hambach lignite mine exploded into a clash between the police and protesters who had been squatting in tree houses and tents.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Germany Remains Addicted to Coal 15 Years After Pledge to Dial Back. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Why 'Green' Germany Remains Addicted to Coal

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COTTBUS, Germany - On a Sunday in September, at the moment when part of the nearby coal-fired power station went dark for good, 600 people lifted white miner's helmets from their heads and placed them on folding chairs in the main square in Cottbus, an industrial town in eastern Germany.

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Hurricanes Like Michael Show Why We Can't Ignore Climate Change

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Hurricanes Like Michael Show Why We Can't Ignore Climate Change

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Natural disasters are occurring more frequent and becoming more catastrophic every year due to the lack of action in preventing climate change. Not only are we becoming more susceptible to catastrophes such as Hurricane Florence, but the economically lower class are being singled out in damages due to lack of insurance and evacuation availability. Climate scientists estimate that the problems we face such as rising water levels, growing temperatures, and natural disasters are only going to worsen unless we plug the issue from the source.

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This past week was a grim one in climate history, by any measure.

First, an international group of scientists released a long-anticipated report detailing in excruciating detail the extra damages we can expect unless we slam our foot on the fossil fuel brakes right now. Then, just a few days later, record-breaking Hurricane Michael came barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico with a late-breaking intensification that transformed the Florida Panhandle into a landscape straight out of a horror movie.

The fact that both events occurred within a few days of each other is pure coincidence, of course. But it does leave the feeling that Nature just put one or more planetary-scale exclamation marks on the main takeaway from the IPCC report: Act now to reduce emissions, or suffer the consequences!

The real exclamation point from Michael, though, is the same one that came with its close relatives Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Maria and Florence - all supercharged by man-made climate change to some degree: We are exceptionally ill-prepared for the climate threats that are unfolding today, let alone those of the next decades. Rising seas caused by warming and rising oceans and melting ice are already bringing low-lying coastlines under threat from so-called " blue sky flooding." And studies now show that there are plenty of reasons to think that hurricanes will get stronger, and wetter, under continued climate change, as the ocean and the overlying atmosphere warm.

As hurricane after hurricane illustrates in a deafening drumbeat of destruction, the most vulnerable populations pay the highest costs during these disasters - sometimes with their lives. Residents of poor neighborhoods, often members of ethnic and racial minorities, frequently cannot afford flood insurance, even if they live in low-lying, flood-prone areas. Evacuation requires transportation and lodging expenses, while recovery requires access to savings to pay upfront costs. Taxpayers are on the hook for rebuilding in flood-prone areas, even as private insurance companies continually increase premiums for many coastal properties in recognition of the shifting statistics of risk.
[We already knew how to reduce damage from floods. We just didn't do it.]
Unfortunately, as the climate report indicates, we need to be preparing for things to get worse. The full costs of relying on outdated estimates of coastal flooding risk can already be measured in the currency of lost lives, ruined local economies and deep, multigenerational scars gouged into our country's social fabric. Scientists can provide decision-makers with estimates of the rates of sea-level rise over the next decades, including some worst-case scenarios. But a more complete understanding of the physical risks of coastal flooding is only the first step. We'll also need to consider how the natural and built environments may compound or mitigate flood risks to communities. And policymakers must decide how to allocate finite public resources to protecting lives and property across communities marked by huge disparities in economic capacity and inherent resilience.

There is no doubt that we will be playing catch-up with our new climate reality for decades to come, even as it shifts under our feet, in a vicious and unforgiving game of cat and mouse. The new climate report outlines a path for an aggressive drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that would avoid some of the worst damages associated with climate change, and we must get started in earnest on a host of no-regrets actions toward this end. We have some promising success stories from many American cities and states, but federal action is long overdue. Hurricane Michael pointedly reminds us that reducing emissions is only part of the climate change solution.

The real lesson from the recent spate of record-breaking heat waves, hurricanes and wildfires is that the highly polarizing political debates around emissions reductions have sidelined important conversations about protecting American lives, property and livelihoods from natural disasters fueled by climate change. Here's hoping we can find common purpose in uniting to protect our front-line communities, including the vulnerable urban and rural poor, from the ravages of ongoing climate change.

Evidence-based policy is a critical ingredient for designing community-based climate solutions, as are healthy, rich partnerships between policymakers, community leaders, scientists, engineers, educators, businesses and artists. That is the future I want for my four children and all of America's children. That is the future we can reach for, together, beginning today.
Read more: It's time to move away from the coasts Hurricanes reveal our vulnerabilities. They also show our strengths. Why do people stay put during hurricanes?

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Perspective | Hurricanes like Michael show why we can't ignore climate change

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This past week was a grim one in climate history, by any measure. First, an international group of scientists released a long-anticipated report detailing in excruciating detail the extra damages we can expect unless we slam our foot on the fossil fuel brakes right now.

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Bringing Extinct species back from the Dead?

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Bringing Extinct species back from the Dead?

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This article shows that the de-extinction of animals could become a possibility within our new future. A facility in Australia is using the common rock pigeon that carry the cas9 gene, which is essential to the Crispr gene-editing tool, to bring back certain distinct animals. It also shows us how editing genes could benefit our society, the Crispr tool has been used before to create mutations of human diseases (Autism, Alzheimer's, etc.) to find a cure for them. The problem with gene-editing and the de-extinction of species is that a lot individuals believe that it is unethical or that it goes against their religion. Hopefully in the future, our earth can find social acceptance on this topic because it not only could bring back extinct species, but it could help improve the health and well-being of humans.
- this current event is about biodiversity and native species

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Meet the Scientists Bringing Extinct Species Back From the Dead

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New gene-editing technology could revive everything from the passenger pigeon to the woolly mammoth. But should scientists be playing God?

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Pairing Wind + Solar for Cheaper, 24-Hour Renewable Energy

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Pairing Wind + Solar for Cheaper, 24-Hour Renewable Energy

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This article shows how beneficial it is to run wind farms and solar farms right next to each other. It also emphasizes that wind energy and solar energy peak at different times of the day. With these two forms of renewable energy being run at the same time, we could finally make renewable energy worth the time it takes to build these solar and wind farms.

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Along a country road east of Lima, Ohio, a company is preparing to build one of the world's largest renewable energy projects that pairs wind and solar to create a hybrid power source. It's a rare combination now, but one that's expected to become more common because of its potential to cut costs while providing a more consistent flow of clean energy.

Invenergy is starting with a 175 megawatt wind farm. Within the wind farm, it plans to build a 150 megawatt solar farm. Together, they would produce enough electricity for about 75,000 homes.

The wind and solar energy complement each other. They hit their peaks at different times of day and night, allowing them to provide a steadier output together than if each was alone. And they save money because they can share equipment, power lines and workers.

The consistency is increasingly important as renewable energy replaces coal-fired plants, which can provide 24-7 power but that also create pollution and contribute to climate change.

Most renewable energy development so far has targeted either the sunniest or the windiest areas, without considering locations that could be good for both solar and wind.

That's changing as wind and solar costs decrease and the technology advances. Today, there are many parts of the U.S. where both wind and solar can be profitable, said Vahan Gevorgian, a chief engineer at the government's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. "It will create economic opportunities for wind in parts of the U.S. where wind [farms are] not present," he said.

In the Midwest, where wind farms are more common than solar, it's the other way around, with opportunities to put solar panels alongside wind turbines. One example is the Grand Ridge Energy Center in northern Illinois, also operated by Invenergy, which has 210 megawatts of wind, 20 megawatts of solar and 33 megawatts of energy storage.

Wind-Solar Hybrids Keep Power Flowing

The benefits of wind-solar hybrids start with a simple idea: Solar power is strongest when the sun is brightest, often in the middle of the day. Wind power is stronger at night in many areas of the U.S. By combining the two, a hybrid project has the potential to produce power around the clock.

This is important because one of the challenges of managing a power grid is dealing with the intermittent nature of renewable energy.

Power grids have to provide the right amount of electricity to match customers' power demand moment-to-moment, so natural gas power plants are often kept at the ready to power up when needed. That could include being used on a cloudy day when a region's solar power output is down.

The ability of a gas plant to quickly ramp up and down helps keep the grid reliable, but it's harmful in terms of emissions, said Joshua Rhodes, an energy research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. The plants emit more pollutants per megawatt-hour when increasing or decreasing their output than they do when running at a steady rate.

If wind and solar plants built together can provide a more consistent power supply, other power plants could run on a more predictable schedule, with lower emissions and lower costs.

In addition, operators of solar-wind hybrids can save money by sharing assets. With the Ohio project, wind and solar will be located right next to each other and feed power into the same equipment that connects to the grid, with a single substation. They likely also will share a maintenance building and other operations.

The Australian government estimated in a 2016 report that integrating solar and wind energy would cut costs by 3 to 13 percent.

Other countries have embraced wind-solar hybrids, too. In India, the government released a draft policy in May that encourages their construction. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which tracks energy developments, also lists small wind-solar hybrid projects in Wales and Chile, among other locations.

Renewable Energy Grows in Ohio

In Ohio, the first wind turbines of the new project are scheduled to be built next year, followed by construction of the solar farm soon after.

Gabe Klooster, a project analyst for Invenergy, said his Chicago-based company was attracted to the Hardin County site because it is right next to a transmission line that can transport power to the grid, and land in the area is some of the most affordable to develop within the PJM Interconnection grid region, a territory that stretches from Chicago to the Atlantic Coast.

The community has also been welcoming, he said, which is not always the case when companies want to build energy infrastructure. "We have great relationships there," he said.

There is no comprehensive international list of hybrid wind-solar projects, but Klooster believes the Invenergy project would be the largest in the world to have such a level of integration and both sides with at least 150 megawatts.

Invenergy's 150 megawatts of solar would also be one of the largest solar arrays in Ohio, adding to a statewide total that was 182 megawatts as of June, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Even though state lawmakers in Ohio have pushed back on renewable energy targets in recent years, it's clear that utilities are still moving ahead. AEP also announced plans last week for an even larger solar-only farm in Appalachian Ohio.

Local residents stand to benefit. Invenergy is leasing the land and will provide royalties to the landowners and taxes to local governments. The county got its first wind farm in December when another developer finished a 66 megawatt project a few miles to the north of the Invenergy project.

Next Step: More Solar + Wind + Storage?

Invenergy is looking at options for selling the electricity from the project, a key step toward securing all the financing for construction.

The company says its typical model is to own and operate its projects, but that it will consider selling projects and remaining as the operator. It had explored the possibility of selling the wind farm portion of the Ohio project to a subsidiary of American Electric Power, but that was rejected by West Virginia regulators.

Asked about the status of finding buyers for the power, Invenergy spokeswoman Beth Conley said the project continues to move forward.

The likely next step for wind-solar hybrids in the broader market is that developers will begin to consider adding wind or solar to existing renewable energy sites, Rhodes said.

Energy storage is also likely to become a key part of the mix as renewable energy projects increasingly operate like traditional power plants.

Wind-solar hybrids "should be a part of the conversation for every project that comes up," Rhodes said. "It's not going to make sense everywhere, but at some price point it will make sense."
Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the total number of homes expected to be served by the new project to 75,000.

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Pairing Wind + Solar for Cheaper, 24-Hour Renewable Energy

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Along a country road east of Lima, Ohio, a company is preparing to build one of the world's largest renewable energy projects that pairs wind and solar to create a hybrid power source. It's a rare combination now, but one that's expected to become more common because of its potential to cut costs while providing a more consistent flow of clean energy.

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Florence gone but its flooding a crisis in parts of North Carolina

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Florence gone but its flooding a crisis in parts of North Carolina

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Along with all the physical damage brought to South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, there is also a large amount of environmental impacts due to Hurricane Florence. The communities that were affected and all the volunteers have been able to come together and work with each other in the recovery process. Florence caused between 17 and 22 Billion dollars in damage, ranking it among the top 10 costliest hurricanes to hit the US.

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florence gone but its flooding a crisis in parts of north carolina -- live updates

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Florence gone but its flooding a crisis in parts of North Carolina -- live updates

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Officials set handouts of supplies in nearly cut off Wilmington as swollen rivers approach record levels in many parts of state

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Noise: The other pollution hurting our health 

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Noise: The other pollution hurting our health 

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Environmental noise is one of the top environmental health risks for many people. Experts in Europe are trying to reduce the amount of traffic noise, allowing different lower amounts of that sound in the day than at night. By reducing a lot of the environmental noises, it would reduce the amount of health risks as well.

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Is climate change making hurricanes worse?: Hurricane season is here, and long-term trends paint a worrying picture

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Is climate change making hurricanes worse?: Hurricane season is here, and long-term trends paint a worrying picture

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Rising temperatures in the ocean are causing an increase is hurricanes and other major storms all around the world. Hurricane severity has been above average in the past 15 years. These storms have been intensifying rapidly, some hurricanes have been seen going from a category 1 to a 4 within 24 hours.

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Is climate change making hurricanes worse?

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The 2018 Atlantic hurricane season was expected to be 'below normal' but long-term trends paint a worrying picture

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Human Overpopulation: Still an Issue of Concern?

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Human Overpopulation: Still an Issue of Concern?

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Today our world population estimates around 7 billion people. With better healthcare and medical advances, life expectancy is rising. However, the fertility rate of developing countries is the silent killer. Fertility rates in Africa are the highest in the world which could lead to overpopulation if fertility rates don’t drop. By 2100, the world population is said to be as high as 15.8 billion people on a planet that has a carrying capacity of 10 billion people.

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Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that human overpopulation isn't such a big issue anymore, as numbers are expected to start declining in a few decades?-Melinda Mason, Boone, Iowa

Ever since Thomas Malthus published "An Essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798, positing incorrectly that humans' proclivity for procreation would exhaust the global food supply within a matter of decades, population growth has been a hot button issue among those contemplating humankind's future. Indeed our very success going forth and multiplying, paired with our ability to extend our life expectancy, has meant that we are perpetually pushing the limits of the resource base that supports us.

When Malthus was worrying about the planet's "carrying capacity," there were only about a billion of us on the planet. Today our population tops seven billion. While better health care and medicine along with advances in food production and access to freshwater and sanitation have allowed us to feed ourselves and stave off many health ills, some so-called Neo-Malthusians believe we may still be heading for some kind of population crash, perhaps triggered or exacerbated by environmental factors related to climate change.

But others are less concerned given projections that world population will likely start to decline once the world's less developed nations urbanize and start lowering their birth rates, as has already happened in Europe, the U.S., Australia and parts of Asia. For example, Europe's "fertility rate" between 2005 and 2010 was just 1.53 live births per woman (the standard replacement rate to maintain a stable population is 2.1). Without immigration, Europe's population would already be shrinking.

Of course, the immigration that continues to fuel population numbers in developed countries is coming from somewhere. Indeed, population numbers are still growing in many of the world's developing countries, including the world's most populous nation, China, and its close rival, India. Also fertility rates in Africa continue to be among the highest in the world, as many countries there are growing fast, too. Poverty and health problems due to poor sanitation, lack of access to food and water, the low social status of women and other ills continue to cripple these regions. Overpopulation could plague us indefinitely if fertility rates don't drop in these areas, especially as they ramp up their Western-style development.

Globally, the United Nations estimates that the number of humans populating the planet in 2100 will range from as few as 6.2 billion-almost a billion less than today-to as many as 15.8 billion on the high end. Meanwhile, other researchers confirm the likelihood of world population levels flattening out and starting to decline by 2100 according to the lower UN estimate. To wit, the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) recently unveiled research showing that if the world stabilizes at a fertility rate comparable to that of many European nations today (roughly 1.5), the global human population will be only half of what it is today by the year 2200, and only one-seventh by 2300.

It is difficult to say which way the global population pendulum will swing in centuries to come, given ever-changing cultural, economic and political attitudes and the development demographics they affect. As such the jury is still out as to whether human overpopulation will become a footnote in history or the dominant ill that stands in the way of all other efforts to achieve sustainability and a kinder, gentler world.

CONTACTS: Thomas Malthus, www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf; United Nations, www.un.org/esa/population/‎; IIASA, http:// webarchive.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/IR-08-022.pdf.

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine www.emagazine.com. Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

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Human Overpopulation: Still an Issue of Concern?

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Dear EarthTalk : Is it true that human overpopulation isn't such a big issue anymore, as numbers are expected to start declining in a few decades?

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Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

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Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

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During the IPCC session from October the first to the fifth has led to a startling report of the dire consequences of climate change unless we drastically changed the world economy. The authors of the IPCC has estimated the cost of the damages of being up to 54 trillions dollars.

~Aaron Zheng

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Air Pollution may be linked to heightened dementia risk

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Air Pollution may be linked to heightened dementia risk

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Science news: http://www.sciencedailynews.com/releases2018/09/18195347.htm
This article was written on September 18th 2018 and was about how air pollution may be linked to a heightened risk of developing dementia and is now an established risk factor for heart disease/stroke and respiratory diseases. Patient health records from the clinical practice research data link has been collecting data from participating general practices across the UK since 1987. In this article, the scientist talk about how air pollution can be a factor in dementia and other respiratory diseases. The scientist did a study research on some health patients and their health was tracked for about 7 years, these diseases can take many years to develop. The monitoring period of the research began in 2004. There are many factors that may be involved in the development of dementia and other diseases, there are many possible pathways for air pollutants to enter the brain. The scientist suggest that even if the impact of the air pollution were related to these diseases the public health gains would be significant if it emerged that curbing exposure to it might delay the progression of dementia. This article was very interesting to me because many people just blame diseases on smoking or not eating right. In addition not many people focus on pollution as affecting our health along with the environment. Too much air pollution can be harmful to everyone and everything. It can also play a big role in why a lot more people keep getting cancer, heart diseases and strokes.

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The Hurricanes, and Climate-Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes, They’re Linked.

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The Hurricanes, and Climate-Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes, They’re Linked.

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As the climate of the globe increases because of global warming so do the detrimental effects of Hurricanes. The hurricanes are getting stronger, wetter, and have worse storm surges because of the effects humans have had on both the ocean and the air.

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A storm chaser returned to collect his things after debris collapsed on his car Wednesday in Panama City, Fla. Credit Credit Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

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Scientists are increasingly confident of the links between global warming and hurricanes.

In a warming world, they say, hurricanes will be stronger, for a simple reason: Warmer water provides more energy that feeds them.

Hurricanes and other extreme storms will also be wetter, for a simple reason: Warmer air holds more moisture.

And, storm surges from hurricanes will be worse, for a simple reason that has nothing to do with the storms themselves: Sea levels are rising.

Researchers cannot say, however, that global warming is to blame for the specifics of the latest storm, Hurricane Michael, which grew to Category 4 with sustained winds of 155 miles an hour, as it hit the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday. Such attribution may come later, when scientists compare the real-world storm to a fantasy-world computer simulation in which humans did not pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

There are already tantalizing suggestions, however, that the warming caused by all those greenhouse-gas emissions has had an impact on Michael. A 2013 study showed that sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Gulf of Mexico have warmed over the past century by more than what would be expected from natural variability. These are the waters that the hurricane churned across as it headed toward the Panhandle and its maximum wind speeds more than doubled.

"That general region has been one where there has been long-term climate warming," said Thomas R. Knutson, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author of the study. "We have reason to believe humans have made the water warmer."

Read more about STORMS And climate change

While there is debate over whether global warming will lead to more frequent hurricanes - many models suggest there may actually be fewer in the future, although with a greater proportion of major ones - scientists are generally agreed about the effects of warming on intensity, as measured by wind speeds.

"We have a very clear theory on how tropical cyclones intensify," said Suzana J. Camargo, an ocean and climate physicist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.

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Panama City, Fla., on Wednesday. The storm has sustained winds of 155 miles an hour. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The theory, largely the work of Kerry Emanuel, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, holds that the temperature difference between ocean and upper atmosphere determines how much a storm intensifies. A bigger temperature difference leads to the release of more energy into the storm.

"The warmer you have the ocean, the bigger the difference," Dr. Camargo said.

The theory has been reinforced by computer simulations that produce more intense storms with rising ocean temperatures. "We understand the theory behind it, and we have seen it in the models," Dr. Camargo said.

As for storms producing more precipitation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that human-caused warming has affected the amount of water vapor in the air, and that extreme precipitation events have already increased in many parts of the world. The group's latest report, issued this week, found that such extreme precipitation will likely further increase if the world cannot limit overall warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Dr. Knutson cautioned that while this increase in rain and snow amounts has been seen in extreme events in general, of which hurricanes are a subset, "we haven't actually seen this in the data for hurricanes yet." But if a given amount of air flowing into a hurricane carries more water vapor, he said, "that enhances the water supply to the storm so it can create higher rain rates."

As Hurricane Michael approached land on Wednesday, forecasters warned that the worst damage could come from a storm surge of as much as 13 feet. Florida, both along the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, is exceptionally vulnerable to storm surge, with strings of low-lying communities on the coasts and along waterways that are connected to the sea.

Storm surge occurs when winds pile water up as it approaches land, and many factors - including the contours of the seafloor, topography of bays and inlets and the stage of the tide when the surge hits - can affect it. But rising sea levels can have an impact, too.

"What's not emphasized enough is the sea level-rise connection," Dr. Camargo said. "Even if there weren't changes in the hurricane itself, just because you have sea-level rise you end up having more flooding."

Seas are rising for two main reasons: water expands slightly as it warms, and glaciers and ice sheets add more water as they melt. But the rise can vary because of local factors like uplift or subsidence of the land.

In the past four decades, global average sea levels have risen by about four inches. That may not seem like much, and in a 15-foot storm surge it may not add much to the destruction.

"But we're not talking about a few inches anymore by the end of the century," Dr. Camargo said. "We're talking about a foot or so. Then, it makes a difference."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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The Hurricanes, and Climate-Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes, They're Linked.

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. Scientists are increasingly confident of the links between global warming and hurricanes. In a warming world, they say, hurricanes will be stronger, for a simple reason: Warmer water provides more energy that feeds them.

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Humans Are Destroying Animals' Ancestral Knowledge 

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Humans Are Destroying Animals' Ancestral Knowledge 

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Bighorn sheep are becoming endangered because of hunters rifles and a disease spreading across the world throughout other sheep. YellowStone National Park, Wyoming has taken these creatures in to protect them from extinction, but studies show that that might not have been the best answer.

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"The translocated animals were literally let out of a livestock trailer and started looking around at their new environment," says Matthew Kauffman from the University of Wyoming. "And they almost entirely failed to migrate."

Kauffman knows this because the translocated sheep were often fitted with radio collars, allowing him and his colleagues to compare their movements to those of bighorns that lived in the same place for centuries. Within those longstanding herds, between 65 and 100 percent of the sheep migrated. But in the translocated herds, fewer than 9 percent migrated-only the sheep that had been moved into established populations that already knew the land.

The team also used satellite images to measure how closely the sheep were tracking the waves of emerging greenery. Then, they compared the animals' performance to two kinds of simulated sheep-naive ones that moved around at random, and omniscient ones that had perfect knowledge of the local plants. "Some of the recently translocated herds tracked the green wave no better than the ones that wandered randomly," says Brett Jesmer, who led the work. The older herds did far better-"not as well as the omniscient ones, but closer," he says.

"This changes how we think about wildlife habitats," Kauffman adds. "Wildlife researchers have always focused on the physical landscape. How much grass is there? How many conifers? Then you can ask how good that habitat is for a sage grouse or a grizzly bear. But our work suggests that the true measure of habitat quality for mobile animals is both the physical attributes of the landscape and the knowledge that animals have of how to make a living there. Put naive animals into awesome habitats and they may perform really poorly, while animals that know how to exploit landscapes that have been degraded could do really well."

Scientists have long wondered how migrating animals know where to go. In some cases, that knowledge is innate. Sea-turtle hatchlings read the Earth's magnetic field to head off in specific directions, while hybrid songbirds will travel along routes that are halfway between those of their parents. In other cases, learning clearly matters. Whooping cranes get better at migration with age, and groups that include at least one elder are much better at staying on course.
A once-captive dolphin has introduced her friends to a silly trend.
Ecologists have long speculated that ungulates-hooved animals such as deer, bison, and sheep-also learn to migrate, since many species seem to adopt the movement patterns of their mothers and peers. By studying the translocated bighorns, using data gleaned from their collars, Kauffman's team has finally confirmed this long-standing assumption.

To an extent, ungulates can find emerging greenery through local smells and sights. "But they also possess excellent spatial memory," Jesmer says. "They can remember when a path greened up and time their movements to go to that area the next spring." Their mental maps are the foundation of migration. They're the difference between an animal that's just going after nearby shoots, and one that's moving long distances across the terrain in anticipation of greenery that it knows will arrive.

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Humans Are Destroying Animals' Ancestral Knowledge

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"The translocated animals were literally let out of a livestock trailer and started looking around at their new environment," says Matthew Kauffman from the University of Wyoming. "And they almost entirely failed to migrate."

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Hurricane Florence Has Gone, but Challenges for the Carolina's Have Just Begun

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Hurricane Florence Has Gone, but Challenges for the Carolina's Have Just Begun

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Hurricane Florence at just category 1 hurricane left waste in the Carolina's. Extensive damage from wind and water displaced thousands and cost the state over 700 million dollars. This put many in years of re-building their town and homes. With coal ash going into the rivers and hog and chicken waste through out rivers have caused waste water treatment plants to shut down and numerous legal fights with coal facilities. With the help of technology, people could see what areas were prone to flooding. The long recovery has just begun and many political people to prove their help in the natural disaster.

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Hurricane Florence Has Gone, but Challenges for the Carolinas Have Just Begun (Published 2018)

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Already the emergency and recovery response is staggering in scope, and the threats have not abated.

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How Drought and Other Extremes Impact Water Pollution

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How Drought and Other Extremes Impact Water Pollution

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With the rising temperatures snow is melting faster than usual, about a month faster. With the snow melting so fast the streams down the mountain are delivering nutrients to plants who are not ready to absorb them so the sediment stays in the water creating pollution that lowers the water quality.

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One in 10 Americans depends on the Colorado River for bathing and drinking. Last fall's record-high temperatures reduced Colorado snowpack in winter 2018 to 66 percent of normal, sparking concern over water shortages downstream and leaving water managers fearful of a repeat. Berkeley Lab hydrological science expert Bhavna Arora explains how unseasonably warm weather and drought can affect water quality.

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One in 10 Americans depends on the Colorado River for bathing and drinking. Last fall's record-high temperatures reduced Colorado snowpack in winter 2018 to 66 percent of normal, sparking concern over water shortages downstream and leaving water managers fearful of a repeat.

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A Wedding Ring With a Dirty Little Secret 

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A Wedding Ring With a Dirty Little Secret 

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After visiting Beijing and getting tired of the thick air pollution, Daan Roosegaarde created a Smog Free Tower that sucks in polluted air, cleans it, and returns it back into the enviorment. Not knowing what to do with the left over buckets of smog particles, he did some research and decided to create jewlery out of it. people all around the world are getting engaged with these inexpensive and eco friendly rings. The profit goes to funding more Smog Free towers and cleaning more air around the world.

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Deepak Panjwani proposed to his then-girlfriend, Chloe Stein, two years ago with a "smog free" ring at the Drottningholm Palace in Sweden. Credit Credit Caroline Amira El Sineity

Chloe Stein, an executive chef and caterer, remembers fondly her fairy tale engagement in early September 2016.

She and her then-boyfriend, Deepak Panjwani, a data analyst at Bloomberg, were vacationing in Sweden. They took a day trip to Drottningholm Palace, the private residence of the Swedish royal family, and toured the vast 16th-century gardens.

At a scenic overlook, Mr. Panjwani surprised Ms. Stein by proposing marriage. But instead of presenting a traditional diamond solitaire, he held out a "smog free ring," a piece of designer jewelry that has come to symbolize the fight against urban pollution.

The ring is made of hundreds of thousands of gallons of pollution sucked from the air and compressed into a tiny box and covered by a shiny, protective case. (It's essentially a black mass inside a clear cube.) The particles in the ring are considered so dangerous that if breathed in, they can shorten an adult's life expectancy by six to eight years, according to the ring's designer and creator, Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch artist and technologist.

Some might question the romantic appeal of a smog free ring, but Ms. Stein, 27, a staunch environmentalist, remains delighted. "The normal paradigm is for you to start your marriage by buying something that causes harm to the environment and the people who are working to get out the diamond," she said. "By not buying into the system, we started our marriage not only with a clean slate, but an environmentally positive state."

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Ms. Stein, a staunch environmentalist, was delighted with her smog free ring, which has come to symbolize the fight against urban pollution. Credit Caroline Amira El Sineity

The couple married Sept. 3, 2017 in Frenchtown, N.J., and are now in the process of relocating from Princeton, N.J., to San Diego, where Ms. Stein recently took a job with a wellness retreat.

Many brides today care deeply about the rings they put on their fingers and are opting for pieces of jewelry that considered both sustainable and ethical.

The smog free ring takes this trend a step further by giving brides the opportunity to wear a ring that isn't just conflict-free and neutral; it actually helps remove negative debris from the world. (There is also a cuff link version, which Prince Charles owns.)

"In the beginning we were joking, who is going to wear pollution?" Mr. Roosegaarde said. "It's a new meaning of beauty. It's not beauty like Louis Vuitton or Ferrari or Rolex, but it's clean air. That's beautiful."

Couples around the world are incorporating the ring into their weddings. Studio Roosegaard e, which is based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, declined to provide sales figures, but it said that it has had "requests from several couples across the world."

The smog ring was created as an after thought.

Four years ago, Mr. Roosegaarde was visiting Beijing for work. Tired of the thick pollution there, when he returned home he designed "the world's largest smog vacuum cleaner." Every hour a smog free tower draws in 30,000 cubic meters (or nearly eight million gallons) of polluted air. It cleans the air, and returns it to the environment.

The cubed rings contain black smog captured from so-called smog free towers. Each tower draws in nearly eight million gallons of polluted air, which it cleans and returns to the environment. Credit Derrick Wang

After making a prototype, he couldn't figure out what to do with the buckets of smog particles left over from the process. He studied the material under a microscope and was shocked to find that half of it was carbon.

"When you put carbon under high pressure, you get diamonds," he said. "That's when we said, 'Let's make jewelry out of it, let's make something personal that people can share.'"

Proceeds from the sale of each ring, which costs 250 euros, or around $290, are allocated to building more smog free towers. The first one was in Beijing; they are now located in public parks around the world in cities including Rotterdam; Kraków, Poland; and Tianjin, China. Mexico City is slated to have one this fall. India and Colombia are also in negotiations with Studio Roosegaarde to get some for their countries.

Because the pollution is different in each city (cars might be the biggest offender in one place, while another has a problem with factories) clients can choose which city's pollution they want in their ring. "If we have a tower there, we can do it," said Mr. Roosegaarde.

In November 2015, Chris Ketchledge, 35, proposed to his then-girlfriend, Vanessa Hertz, 37, in Museum Park, across the from their home in downtown Miami, with a smog free ring. (Actually, it was with a picture of one placed inside a ring box. The smog free ring he had ordered had not yet arrived.)

Mr. Ketchledge saw the ring online and agreed with the concept. "Instead of that carbon representing someone else's marketing or some other country's natural resources, but 1,000 cubic meters of clean air to the people of Beijing is brilliant," he said. "The idea of using something toxic or broken and turning it into something beautiful is so inspiring."

Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch artist and technologist, is the ring's designer and creator. Credit Derrick Wang

Ms. Hertz loved it immediately because it was so different than traditional engagement rings. "It looks like it's floating on my hand," she said. "I smile every time I look at it."

Frank van der Linden, a 54-year-old chief executive of a health care organization in Groningen, Netherlands, selected the ring because he knew it would impress his girlfriend, an architect who loves anything modern and fresh. He wrapped it up in a box and put it under the tree for Christmas Day.

"She cried, said yes immediately," he said. "I don't know anyone else who has the ring. For me it was very special to give such an innovative, green, beautiful design to my then future wife."

Many couples also like the fact that the smog free ring is more affordable than a diamond or other precious gem. "Chloe isn't very materialistic, neither of us are," Mr. Panjwani said. "So we thought this was a cool ring to get. It was the fraction of the cost of a traditional engagement ring."

Its contemporary design and unusual makeup isn't for everyone, however.

"There were a few people who I could see in their eyes were like, 'What?'" Ms. Stein said. "Like my mom is probably a bit more traditional. She wanted me to have a family ring."

As for Mr. Roosegaarde, he can't imagine a better use for the smog free ring. One day he also hopes to use it as an engagement ring. "I'm not married, I'm single, but I always carry a smog free ring with me," he said, laughing. "Right now it's a proposal for a new world, not a person, but you never know when I will meet someone."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page ST14 of the New York edition with the headline: The Wedding Ring With a Dirty Little Secret. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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A Wedding Ring With a Dirty Little Secret

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Chloe Stein, an executive chef and caterer, remembers fondly her fairy tale engagement in early September 2016. She and her then-boyfriend, Deepak Panjwani, a data analyst at Bloomberg, were vacationing in Sweden. They took a day trip to Drottningholm Palace, the private residence of the Swedish royal family, and toured the vast 16th-century gardens.

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Judge Restores Grizzly Bears' Protections As Endangered Species

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Judge Restores Grizzly Bears' Protections As Endangered Species

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This September 24th, the U.S. District Court Judge, Dana Christensen, restored grizzly bears to the endangered list. In his ruling, he stated that the federal government did not use the best logistics in removing the species from the list last year. Furthermore, Christensen said that these bears are living in isolated pockets and the federal regulators should not delist the species until they start connecting together.

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A federal judge has restored Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears living around Yellowstone National Park.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen said the federal government didn't use the best available science when it removed the bears from the threatened-species list last year.

Monday's ruling puts a stop to proposed grizzly hunts in Wyoming and Idaho, which were on hold while Christensen mulled his decision.

"I'm feeling relieved," said Matthew Bishop, an environmental attorney representing WildEarth Guardians.

He helped represent tribes and conservation groups in a lawsuit filed after the grizzly bears were delisted in 2017. Bishop argued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service couldn't delist the animals in one isolated spot without considering the impact on threatened grizzly bears living in other places in the Lower 48 states.

"When you commit to recovering a species in the Lower 48 you should do that," Bishop said.

Christensen agreed. In his decision, he said grizzly bears don't roam everywhere in the West like they used to. Instead they live in isolated pockets, and the federal regulators can't delist those isolated pockets until the grizzly populations start connecting together.

"The Service cannot abuse its power to delist an already-protected species by 'balkanization," Christensen wrote."

Prior to the ruling, wildlife agencies in Wyoming and Idaho planned to let hunters kill up to 23 grizzlies during its first hunting season for the bears in three decades. It was set to begin on September 1 before Christensen granted a temporary restraining order on August 30.

Many ranchers near the nation's oldest national park lauded the hunt.

"There are people that encounter grizzly bears as part of their daily lives," attorney Cody Wisniewski said at an earlier hearing.

He represented Wyoming ranchers and farmers in the case and said his clients liked having the states in charge.

"Their goal is just to have local management. To be able to go to their local representatives, their elected officials, the people that live in and beside them in their state in order to resolve any disputes," he said.

According to Montana Public Radio, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson Jennifer Strickland said the federal government will "work with the state and tribes to ensure that this transition proceeds in accordance with the court's order."

Bishop, who represents WildEarth Guardians, noted the federal government could appeal the decision, which could also impact the proposed delisting of grizzly bears living in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem near Montana's Glacier National Park.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, Yellowstone Public Radio in Montana, KUER in Salt Lake City and KRCC and KUNC in Colorado.

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Judge Restores Grizzly Bears' Protections As Endangered Species

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A federal judge has restored Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears living around Yellowstone National Park. In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen said the federal government didn't use the best available science when it removed the bears from the threatened-species list last year.

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Today’s global climate is where it is today due to human activity, and we are causing this change at a rate that is unprecendented. Earth’s average temperature has raised about 1.62 degrees fahrenheit ever since the 19th century, influenced by human made emissions like carbon dioxide that are released into our atmosphere. Greenland alone has lost 281 billion tons of ice per year between 1963 to 2016, and Antarctica’s ice loss has tripled in that time period. If humans do not start making rapid changes, the global temperature can raise to a crucial temperature of 2.7 degrees fahrenheit as early as 2030.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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The rate of change since the mid-20th century is unprecedented over millennia.

Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 800,000 years, there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, with the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era - and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth's orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Luthi, D., et al.. 2008; Etheridge, D.M., et al. 2010; Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.) Find out more about ice cores (external site).

The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun's energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

Do scientists agree on climate change?

Yes, the vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists - 97 percent - agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change.

detailed answer

Earth-orbiting satellites and new technologies have helped scientists see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate all over the world. These data, collected over many years, reveal the signs and patterns of a changing climate.

Scientists demonstrated the heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases in the mid-19th century. Many of the science instruments NASA uses to study our climate focus on how these gases affect the movement of infrared radiation through the atmosphere. From the measured impacts of increases in these gases, there is no question that increased greenhouse gas levels warm Earth in response.

"Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that Earth's climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of warming after an ice age. Carbon dioxide from human activities is increasing about 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last Ice Age.

References

References
Header image shows clouds imitating mountains as the sun sets after midnight as seen from Denali's backcountry Unit 13 on June 14, 2019. Credit: NPS/Emily Mesner

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Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. How do we know it's happening? Here's the evidence.

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Hurricane Michael flattened towns where survivors remain in disbelief

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Hurricane Michael flattened towns where survivors remain in disbelief

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The most recent natural disaster to hit Florida, Hurricane Michael made landfall as a category four leaving much destruction and families with no homes. In Lynn Haven, Florida, 70-90% of homes were destroyed and in Mexico Beach, 95% of homes were destroyed. FEMA prepared diligently for the hurricane and continues to respond to each citizens needs preparing meals and such for families without homes and people currently living in shelters. Search and rescue parties continue to go out and look for remaining survivors among the debris and destruction.

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LYNN HAVEN, Fla. - For a grueling 55 minutes, Mayor Margo Anderson didn't know if they were going to survive Hurricane Michael.

She rode out the storm in the police headquarters building here with about 40 other people, including police officers, their families and their pets.

The group went room to room, dodging falling debris until the eye came through. Then, silence.

"I looked over at my husband and I took his hand and I said we're not going to make it," said Anderson. "We are not going to make it."

Fortunately, all 40 people sheltered inside survived. Once the storm passed, they crawled through blown out windows to get out of the demolished building. The first time she went back inside the building, it was almost too much to bear.

"I have normally a very low, calm voice and I can feel myself just talking about it and I'm short of breath," she said.

What Anderson lived through in Lynn Haven echoes the destruction seen by those throughout the area. The death toll from Hurricane Michael rose to 19 Sunday as searchers continued to make their way through the devastated parts of the Florida Panhandle. Residents have been left in disbelief, unsure of what's next.

Four miles south of Lynn Haven is Panama City, Florida. Along the main road through town, every business has either some damage or is completely destroyed.

A local auto shop owner in Panama City was so worried about looting that he spent the night in his destroyed building armed with a shotgun.

Meanwhile, Mexico Beach, just 24 miles away from Panama City, is considered ground zero for hurricane damage - every home there was leveled by the wind and rain. Search and rescue teams from Tennessee, Indiana and Florida are on the ground searching for 250 people who chose to stay behind and are currently unaccounted for.

"We continue to go through that list to assure that we account for everyone," said Michael Pruitt, PIO for FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Incident Support Team.

Those without any insurance are in dire straits. Kelly Mitchell said her grandparent's beach house is beyond repair. It was a place where generations of family members came together to enjoy the peacefulness of a small town coastal community of just about 1,000 people.

"I know it's just a big house but it has a lot of memories for us," said Mitchell. "There's a five foot of storm surge inside and it's totally mud and sand and everything in the house is just destroyed. "

Mitchell and her daughter Abby Golden made their way from Blountstown to Mexico Beach for one thing.

"We came down here mainly to get pictures that my grandmother who would have been 100 years old had painted in the house," said Mitchell. "We wanted to salvage that and we were able to pick those up."

In Lynn Haven, Anderson is working hard to check on her community, riding around otherwise impassible roads in a golf cart.

"We are all together. We have a hashtag. Lynn Haven Together And Strong. And that's what we are," said Anderson. "We have hope for the future and we're going to get through it. People here are devastated. Our town has been catastrophically affected."

Anderson organized the first distribution center in her city where residents can get a hot meal, water and ice. Volunteers have been working around the clock serving homemade casseroles, hot dogs, burgers, and even cupcakes. Everything has been donated from neighboring cities where people have power, can cook or can reach open grocery stores miles away.

"There's a lot of good people here," said Mara Harrison. "They just want to help."

Harrison has lived in the Florida Panhandle all her life and she's never seen devastation like this.

Across the street from the volunteer distribution center, her husband's dentist office barely stands. But Harrison is more concerned about her neighbors who can't leave their pummeled homes.

"There's a lot of people who don't have the means to leave and those are the people we need to help," she said.

Anderson said 80 to 90 percent of the homes in Lynn Haven are destroyed. The Mexico Beach city manager said 95 percent of the homes in Mexico beach are uninhabitable.

Residents in Lynn Haven aren't waiting for help. Although FEMA arrived Sunday to begin the process of providing transitional sheltering assistance to residents, volunteers continued to serve hot meals.

"Who's going to help? People just don't know they need to," Harrison said as she prepared hot dogs and hamburgers for a long line of hungry neighbors. "They have no idea it's like this."

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Hurricane survivors band together after entire Florida towns flattened

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LYNN HAVEN, Fla. - For a grueling 55 minutes, Mayor Margo Anderson didn't know if they were going to survive Hurricane Michael. She rode out the storm in the police headquarters building here with about 40 other people, including police officers, their families and their pets.

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Climate Change Is Becoming a Top Threat to Biodiversity

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Climate Change Is Becoming a Top Threat to Biodiversity

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Climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation are all being worsened by human actions on the natural environment. Climate change is causing the destruction of habitats and consequently whole ecosystems, which leaves species without enough land to maintain their populations. This is causing the biodiversity in ecosystems to decrease substantially across the planet.

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Climate Change Is Becoming a Top Threat to Biodiversity

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Warming rivals habitat loss and land degradation as a threat to global wildlife

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How plant microbes could feed the world and save endangered species 

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How plant microbes could feed the world and save endangered species 

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Plants hosts millions of various microbes called endophytes which assist the plant with growth and photosynthesis by producing chlorophyll. Some microbes even help the plant survive through a drought and protect plants from diseases. But the lack of microbes leave plants endangered including the Cacao crop. With the constant threat from fungi, the Cacao pod rots. Scientists studied the rotting of the Cacao pod in depth resulting in advanced microbial treatment for plants. Farmers invest in millions of dollars for these microbial treatment for their crops to supply the countries high demands. An agricultural revolution is highly needed with these new technological microbes due to the humans population estimation to be 10 billion in 2050. Also our plant based food and animal fed is expected to double as well. Microbes will help the world meet these crucial demands and save plants from becoming endangered.

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How plant microbes could feed the world and save endangered species

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Scientists have only scratched the surface of the plant microbiome, but they already believe it might increase crop yield and save species from extinction.

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As global temperatures continue to rise so dose the amount of glaciers melting. This increase could cause extreme global changes such as ocean levels rising causing global flooding destroying many freshwater aquifers and changing are global climates.

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"If we don't have it, we don't need it," pronounces Daniel Fagre as we throw on our backpacks. We're armed with crampons, ice axes, rope, GPS receivers, and bear spray to ward off grizzlies, and we're trudging toward Sperry Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana. I fall in step with Fagre and two other research scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey Global Change Research Program. They're doing what they've been doing for more than a decade: measuring how the park's storied glaciers are melting.

So far, the results have been positively chilling. When President Taft created Glacier National Park in 1910, it was home to an estimated 150 glaciers. Since then the number has decreased to fewer than 30, and most of those remaining have shrunk in area by two-thirds. Fagre predicts that within 30 years most if not all of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear.

"Things that normally happen in geologic time are happening during the span of a human lifetime," says Fagre. "It's like watching the Statue of Liberty melt."

Scientists who assess the planet's health see indisputable evidence that Earth has been getting warmer, in some cases rapidly. Most believe that human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, have influenced this warming trend. In the past decade scientists have documented record-high average annual surface temperatures and have been observing other signs of change all over the planet: in the distribution of ice, and in the salinity, levels, and temperatures of the oceans.

"This glacier used to be closer," Fagre declares as we crest a steep section, his glasses fogged from exertion. He's only half joking. A trailside sign notes that since 1901, Sperry Glacier has shrunk from more than 800 acres (320 hectares) to 300 acres (120 hectares). "That's out of date," Fagre says, stopping to catch his breath. "It's now less than 250 acres (100 hectares)."

Everywhere on Earth ice is changing. The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80 percent since 1912. Glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya in India are retreating so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035. Arctic sea ice has thinned significantly over the past half century, and its extent has declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years. NASA's repeated laser altimeter readings show the edges of Greenland's ice sheet shrinking. Spring freshwater ice breakup in the Northern Hemisphere now occurs nine days earlier than it did 150 years ago, and autumn freeze-up ten days later. Thawing permafrost has caused the ground to subside more than 15 feet (4.6 meters) in parts of Alaska. From the Arctic to Peru, from Switzerland to the equatorial glaciers of Man Jaya in Indonesia, massive ice fields, monstrous glaciers, and sea ice are disappearing, fast.

When temperatures rise and ice melts, more water flows to the seas from glaciers and ice caps, and ocean water warms and expands in volume. This combination of effects has played the major role in raising average global sea level between four and eight inches (10 and 20 centimeters) in the past hundred years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Scientists point out that sea levels have risen and fallen substantially over Earth's 4.6-billion-year history. But the recent rate of global sea level rise has departed from the average rate of the past two to three thousand years and is rising more rapidly-about one-tenth of an inch a year. A continuation or acceleration of that trend has the potential to cause striking changes in the world's coastlines.

Driving around Louisiana's Gulf Coast, Windell Curole can see the future, and it looks pretty wet. In southern Louisiana coasts are literally sinking by about three feet (a meter) a century, a process called subsidence. A sinking coastline and a rising ocean combine to yield powerful effects. It's like taking the global sea-level-rise problem and moving it along at fast-forward.

The seventh-generation Cajun and manager of the South Lafourche Levee District navigates his truck down an unpaved mound of dirt that separates civilization from inundation, dry land from a swampy horizon. With his French-tinged lilt, Curole points to places where these bayous, swamps, and fishing villages portend a warmer world: his high school girlfriend's house partly submerged, a cemetery with water lapping against the white tombs, his grandfather's former hunting camp now afloat in a stand of skeleton oak snags. "We live in a place of almost land, almost water," says the 52-year-old Curole.

Rising sea level, sinking land, eroding coasts, and temperamental storms are a fact of life for Curole. Even relatively small storm surges in the past two decades have overwhelmed the system of dikes, levees, and pump stations that he manages, upgraded in the 1990s to forestall the Gulf of Mexico's relentless creep. "I've probably ordered more evacuations than any other person in the country," Curole says.

The current trend is consequential not only in coastal Louisiana but around the world. Never before have so many humans lived so close to the coasts: More than a hundred million people worldwide live within three feet (a meter) of mean sea level. Vulnerable to sea-level rise, Tuvalu, a small country in the South Pacific, has already begun formulating evacuation plans. Megacities where human populations have concentrated near coastal plains or river deltas-Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, Tokyo, and New York-are at risk. The projected economic and humanitarian impacts on low-lying, densely populated, and desperately poor countries like Bangladesh are potentially catastrophic. The scenarios are disturbing even in wealthy countries like the Netherlands, with nearly half its landmass already at or below sea level.

Rising sea level produces a cascade of effects. Bruce Douglas, a coastal researcher at Florida International University, calculates that every inch (2.5 centimeters) of sea-level rise could result in eight feet (2.4 meters) of horizontal retreat of sandy beach shorelines due to erosion. Furthermore, when salt water intrudes into freshwater aquifers, it threatens sources of drinking water and makes raising crops problematic. In the Nile Delta, where many of Egypt's crops are cultivated, widespread erosion and saltwater intrusion would be disastrous since the country contains little other arable land.

In some places marvels of human engineering worsen effects from rising seas in a warming world. The system of channels and levees along the Mississippi effectively stopped the millennia-old natural process of rebuilding the river delta with rich sediment deposits. In the 1930s oil and gas companies began to dredge shipping and exploratory canals, tearing up the marshland buffers that helped dissipate tidal surges. Energy drilling removed vast quantities of subsurface liquid, which studies suggest increased the rate at which the land is sinking. Now Louisiana is losing approximately 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of wetlands every year, and the state is lobbying for federal money to help replace the upstream sediments that are the delta's lifeblood.

Local projects like that might not do much good in the very long run, though, depending on the course of change elsewhere on the planet. Part of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf broke apart in early 2002. Although floating ice does not change sea level when it melts (any more than a glass of water will overflow when the ice cubes in it melt), scientists became concerned that the collapse could foreshadow the breakup of other ice shelves in Antarctica and allow increased glacial discharge into the sea from ice sheets on the continent. If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to break up, which scientists consider very unlikely this century, it alone contains enough ice to raise sea level by nearly 20 feet (6 meters).

Even without such a major event, the IPCC projected in its 2001 report that sea level will rise anywhere between 4 and 35 inches (10 and 89 centimeters) by the end of the century. The high end of that projection-nearly three feet (a meter)-would be "an unmitigated disaster," according to Douglas.

Down on the bayou, all of those predictions make Windell Curole shudder. "We're the guinea pigs," he says, surveying his aqueous world from the relatively lofty vantage point of a 12-foot-high (3.7-meter) earthen berm. "I don't think anybody down here looks at the sea-level-rise problem and puts their heads in the sand." That's because soon there may not be much sand left.

Rising sea level is not the only change Earth's oceans are undergoing. The ten-year-long World Ocean Circulation Experiment, launched in 1990, has helped researchers to better understand what is now called the ocean conveyor belt.

Oceans, in effect, mimic some functions of the human circulatory system. Just as arteries carry oxygenated blood from the heart to the extremities, and veins return blood to be replenished with oxygen, oceans provide life-sustaining circulation to the planet. Propelled mainly by prevailing winds and differences in water density, which changes with the temperature and salinity of the seawater, ocean currents are critical in cooling, warming, and watering the planet's terrestrial surfaces-and in transferring heat from the Equator to the Poles.

The engine running the conveyor belt is the density-driven thermohaline circulation ("thermo" for heat and "haline" for salt). Warm, salty water flows from the tropical Atlantic north toward the Pole in surface currents like the Gulf Stream. This saline water loses heat to the air as it is carried to the far reaches of the North Atlantic. The coldness and high salinity together make the water more dense, and it sinks deep into the ocean. Surface water moves in to replace it. The deep, cold water flows into the South Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, eventually mixing again with warm water and rising back to the surface.

Changes in water temperature and salinity, depending on how drastic they are, might have considerable effects on the ocean conveyor belt. Ocean temperatures are rising in all ocean basins and at much deeper depths than previously thought, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Arguably, the largest oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments is in the declining salinity of the subpolar seas bordering the North Atlantic.

Robert Gagosian, president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, believes that oceans hold the key to potential dramatic shifts in the Earth's climate. He warns that too much change in ocean temperature and salinity could disrupt the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation enough to slow down or possibly halt the conveyor belt-causing drastic climate changes in time spans as short as a decade.

The future breakdown of the thermohaline circulation remains a disturbing, if remote, possibility. But the link between changing atmospheric chemistry and the changing oceans is indisputable, says Nicholas Bates, a principal investigator for the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study station, which monitors the temperature, chemical composition, and salinity of deep-ocean water in the Sargasso Sea southeast of the Bermuda Triangle.

Oceans are important sinks, or absorption centers, for carbon dioxide, and take up about a third of human-generated CO2. Data from the Bermuda monitoring programs show that CO2 levels at the ocean surface are rising at about the same rate as atmospheric CO2. But it is in the deeper levels where Bates has observed even greater change. In the waters between 820 and 1,476 feet (250 and 450 meters) deep, CO2 levels are rising at nearly twice the rate as in the surface waters. "It's not a belief system; it's an observable scientific fact," Bates says. "And it shouldn't be doing that unless something fundamental has changed in this part of the ocean."

While scientists like Bates monitor changes in the oceans, others evaluate CO2 levels in the atmosphere. In Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland, a lighthouse attendant opens a large silver suitcase that looks like something out of a James Bond movie, telescopes out an attached 15-foot (4.5-meter) rod, and flips a switch, activating a computer that controls several motors, valves, and stopcocks. Two two-and-a-half liter (about 26 quarts) flasks in the suitcase fill with ambient air. In North Africa, an Algerian monk at Assekrem does the same. Around the world, collectors like these are monitoring the cocoon of gases that compose our atmosphere and permit life as we know it to persist.

When the weekly collection is done, all the flasks are sent to Boulder, Colorado. There, Pieter Tans, a Dutch-born atmospheric scientist with NOAA's Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory, oversees a slew of sensitive instruments that test the air in the flasks for its chemical composition. In this way Tans helps assess the state of the world's atmosphere.

By all accounts it has changed significantly in the past 150 years.

Walking through the various labs filled with cylinders of standardized gas mixtures, absolute manometers, and gas chromatographs, Tans offers up a short history of atmospheric monitoring. In the late 1950s a researcher named Charles Keeling began measuring CO2 in the atmosphere above Hawaii's 13,679-foot (4,169-meter) Mauna Loa. The first thing that caught Keeling's eye was how CO2 level rose and fell seasonally. That made sense since, during spring and summer, plants take in CO2 during photosynthesis and produce oxygen in the atmosphere. In the fall and winter, when plants decay, they release greater quantities of CO2 through respiration and decay. Keeling's vacillating seasonal curve became famous as a visual representation of the Earth "breathing."

Something else about the way the Earth was breathing attracted Keeling's attention. He watched as CO2 level not only fluctuated seasonally, but also rose year after year. Carbon dioxide level has climbed from about 315 parts per million (ppm) from Keeling's first readings in 1958 to more than 375 ppm today. A primary source for this rise is indisputable: humans' prodigious burning of carbon-laden fossil fuels for their factories, homes, and cars.

Tans shows me a graph depicting levels of three key greenhouse gases-CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide-from the year 1000 to the present. The three gases together help keep Earth, which would otherwise be an inhospitably cold orbiting rock, temperate by orchestrating an intricate dance between the radiation of heat from Earth back to space (cooling the planet) and the absorption of radiation in the atmosphere (trapping it near the surface and thus warming the planet).

Tans and most other scientists believe that greenhouse gases are at the root of our changing climate. "These gases are a climate-change driver," says Tans, poking his graph definitively with his index finger. The three lines on the graph follow almost identical patterns: basically flat until the mid-1800s, then all three move upward in a trend that turns even more sharply upward after 1950. "This is what we did," says Tans, pointing to the parallel spikes. "We have very significantly changed the atmospheric concentration of these gases. We know their radiative properties," he says. "It is inconceivable to me that the increase would not have a significant effect on climate."

Exactly how large that effect might be on the planet's health and respiratory system will continue to be a subject of great scientific and political debate-especially if the lines on the graph continue their upward trajectory.

Eugene Brower, an Inupiat Eskimo and president of the Barrow Whaling Captains' Association, doesn't need fancy parts-per-million measurements of CO2 concentrations or long-term sea-level gauges to tell him that his world is changing.

"It's happening as we speak," the 56-year-old Brower says as we drive around his home in Barrow, Alaska-the United States' northernmost city-on a late August day. In his fire chief's truck, Brower takes me to his family's traditional ice cellars, painstakingly dug into the permafrost, and points out how his stores of muktuk-whale skin and blubber recently began spoiling in the fall because melting water drips down to his food stores. Our next stop is the old Bureau of Indian Affairs school building. The once impenetrable permafrost that kept the foundation solid has bucked and heaved so much that walking through the school is almost like walking down the halls of an amusement park fun house. We head to the eroding beach and gaze out over open water. "Normally by now the ice would be coming in," Brower says, scrunching up his eyes and scanning the blue horizon.

We continue our tour. Barrow looks like a coastal community under siege. The ramshackle conglomeration of weather-beaten houses along the seaside gravel road stands protected from fall storm surges by miles-long berms of gravel and mud that block views of migrating gray whales. Yellow bulldozers and graders patrol the coast like sentries.

The Inupiat language has words that describe many kinds of ice. Piqaluyak is salt-free multiyear sea ice. Ivuniq is a pressure ridge. Sarri is the word for pack ice, tuvaqtaq is bottom-fast ice, and shore-fast ice is tuvaq. For Brower, these words are the currency of hunters who must know and follow ice patterns to track bearded seals, walruses, and bowhead whales.

There are no words, though, to describe how much, and how fast, the ice is changing. Researchers long ago predicted that the most visible impacts from a globally warmer world would occur first at high latitudes: rising air and sea temperatures, earlier snowmelt, later ice freeze-up, reductions in sea ice, thawing permafrost, more erosion, increases in storm intensity. Now all those impacts have been documented in Alaska. "The changes observed here provide an early warning system for the rest of the planet," says Amanda Lynch, an Australian researcher who is the principal investigator on a project that works with Barrow's residents to help them incorporate scientific data into management decisions for the city's threatened infrastructure.

Before leaving the Arctic, I drive to Point Barrow alone. There, at the tip of Alaska, roughshod hunting shacks dot the spit of land that marks the dividing line between the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Next to one shack someone has planted three eight-foot (2.4-meter) sticks of white driftwood in the sand, then crisscrossed their tops with whale baleen, a horny substance that whales of the same name use to filter life-sustaining plankton out of seawater. The baleen, curiously, looks like palm fronds.

So there, on the North Slope of Alaska, stand three makeshift palm trees. Perhaps they are no more than an elaborate Inupiat joke, but these Arctic palms seem an enigmatic metaphor for the Earth's future.

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"If we don't have it, we don't need it," pronounces Daniel Fagre as we throw on our backpacks. We're armed with crampons, ice axes, rope, GPS receivers, and bear spray to ward off grizzlies, and we're trudging toward Sperry Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana.

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Michael's death toll jumps as crews search for survivors - live updates

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Michael's death toll jumps as crews search for survivors - live updates

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In the past week Hurricane Micheal a giant storm tore through Panama, Florida,Georgia, and other Cities along the United States East coast causing death and destruction to anything in its path. It left Millions without power, and so many without a place to call home. According to a recent count that was done the death toll is up to 16 as of Friday. The US government is coordinating with FEMA to get relief efforts going.

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Michael’s death toll jumps as crews search for survivors - live updates

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At least 13 deaths being blamed on historic storm; it’s out to sea but still being felt in parts of Southeast

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While the warming of the Earth would, in theory, give way to an increase in plant growth- soil quality alteration, extreme temperature change, and decrease in water supply would outweigh the projection with negative consequences. Not only is the fate of many plants and entire forests at stake, these producers are vital in the ecosystems that they support. Researching the growth process on a molecular level gives way to the plants’ sensitive responses to climate change.

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Global warming affects more than just plant biodiversity-it even alters the way plants grow. A team of researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) joined forces with the Leibniz Institute for Plant Biochemistry ...

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Dedicated biologist scour Colorado River to help endangered species survive

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Dedicated biologist scour Colorado River to help endangered species survive

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A group of biologists ventured the Colorado river in electrified rafts with the goal to catch non-native species of fish. As the fish approached the raft, they were stunned and pulled out by the biologists with nets. They were specifically looking for smallmouth bass, which feed on the four endangered species of fish in the river

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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. - The temperature is hovering around 90 degrees as Dale Ryden and I float down the Colorado River near Grand Junction. The turbid water looks inviting, a blessed reprieve from the heat, but if either of us jumped in, we'd be electrocuted.

"It can actually probably be lethal to people if you get in there," said Ryden, a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Ryden's co-workers cruise by in gray and blue inflatable rafts, their bows fitted with a rig that suspends metal spheres the size of disco balls from electric cables. When the balls are lowered into the river, a generator at the back of each raft sends current through the balls into the water. What lies beneath the surface - Ryden likened it to Ovaltine - is a mystery the biologists intend to explore.

"To get at the animal we're studying, we have to actually find ways to capture them and take them out of their natural habitat," Ryden said. "And so, one of the ways we can do that is electrofishing."

Fish that venture near the electrified rafts are momentarily stunned and pulled from the water with nets. Today's mission is to remove non-native fish - such as smallmouth bass that feed on the fry of the four endangered species found in the river. The bass will be collected, measured, weighed, stored in bags and eventually sent to a landfill.

Any of the four endangered species - bonytail, razorback sucker, Colorado pikeminnow and humpback chub - we encounter will be treated with care and released back into the river.

Ryden has a tough, and some would say impossible, job. Every day, he tries to find ways to help fish that evolved to live only in this river system - one of the most engineered ecosystems in the world - survive.
Ancient species
Fish in the Colorado River are a product of harsh conditions.

Over millions of years, the rushing, sediment-laden water sculpted their bodies with characteristic ridges and bumps, making them well-equipped to handle its highs and lows. But human interference in the rivers they call home has pushed a few to the edge of extinction.

"They've survived three explosions of the Yellowstone supervolcano," Ryden said. "They were here when mastodons and woolly mammoths went extinct."

However, the era of big dam building in the West fundamentally altered their river home over the past 100 years or so, Ryden said. Dams and diversions have made life close to impossible for these fish. Then people started adding toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and a range of invasive fish for sportsmen to catch.

"Call it the death by a thousand cuts," Ryden said. "So they could survive any one of those problems probably fairly well. When you start throwing them all on top of them, then it becomes a lot more problematic."

About an hour into our trip, there's a flurry of activity on one of the rafts. Technician Andrew Disch dips his net and pulls out the river's historic top predator - the Colorado pikeminnow. It has been listed as endangered for more than 50 years.

The fish is impressive, measuring about 3 feet long. But it pales compared to the pikeminnows that once hunted the river, Ryden said.

"Back in the day, these guys used to get 6 feet long and a hundred pounds."

The pikeminnow gulps down prey with a mouth so huge you could put your whole hand inside without touching the sides - something Ryden has tested personally. The torpedo-bodied fish is pale green on top with a white belly and pinkish tail.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Travis Francis scanned a microchip biologists inserted in the pikeminnow years ago.

"We haven't we haven't seen this fish since 2004," he said, adding that biologists make dozens of passes over this section of river each summer. They've documented some pikeminnow migrating several hundred river miles from the San Juan River, down through Lake Powell and up to Grand Junction. Early settlers nicknamed the pikeminnow "the white salmon" for such behavior.

Ryden estimated 400 pikeminnow exist in the upper reaches of the Colorado River, and close to 800 in stretches of the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado. He likens the pikeminnow to a lioness on the Serengeti: Each is at the apex of its food chain. Now imagine you built a series of concrete walls around the lion, boxing her in, making it difficult to hunt. That's what dams on the Colorado River have done to the pikeminnow, Ryden said.

After the fish was measured and scanned, Ryden gently picked it up and walked into the river.

"Come here, baby," he whispered.

With both hands he lowers the minnow into the water. It disappears into the murk.

During this day on the river, Ryden repeatedly referred to the endangered species as "our fish." He takes ownership of their protection. They're something different and more special than the non-native fish that surround them.

"I've earned a lot of respect for them," he said. "I think if you put that many issues in front of people that we had to adapt to in a very short amount of time, I think as a species we would have a very hard time existing in some of the world-changing conditions that these fish have."
Defining success in recovery
Since 1988, recovery programs for endangered Colorado River fish have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, funded by a mix of hydropower revenues and money from agencies within the Department of the Interior. Ryden said the effort is beginning to pay off.

Two species - the humpback chub and the razorback sucker - are on their way to being downgraded from endangered to threatened.

But deciding whether an endangered species is "recovered" is a subject for debate. Some environmental groups have questioned the Fish and Wildlife Service's decision to downlist the two species. In the case of the razorback sucker, they contend, most of its population growth is the result of an intense breeding and stocking program, not reproduction in the wild. Going forward, it's unclear how much government intervention will be necessary to keep the sucker from going extinct.

In its proposal to downlist the razorback, the Upper Colorado Endangered Fish Recovery Program recommends that Fish and Wildlife revise the program's goals, and that its current goals for "recovery," written in 2002, are inadequate and dated.

The program, a partnership of local, state and federal agencies, water and power interests, and environmental groups, is set to expire in 2023. Director Tom Chart said the partners are rethinking what recovery of means, and how best to achieve it. Current goals for the program don't fully address the need for more coordinated management of flows from the Colorado River system's reservoirs, removal of non-native fish and stocking of endangered species past 2023, he said.

"The Colorado River is one of the most altered ecosystems in the world," Chart said in an email. "The (Fish and Wildlife) Service should revise recovery goals for this species in these contexts and based on the experiences and information gathered."
'Some people even kiss them'
Although the Endangered Species Act of 1973 requires the government to save these fish, it can be tough convincing the public that they're valuable and the effort isn't in vain. A razorback sucker, Ryden noted, doesn't have the charisma of other wildlife.

"Basically we've made the judgment through the Endangered Species Act that it (the endangered animal) is there for a reason and it has a right to exist," he said. "And it doesn't have to be a polar bear or an eagle."

In our last few miles on the river, the biologists net a razorback sucker - the second of the day - and head toward the river bank to scan it. The grayish-green fish is notable for its pronounced hump, which looks like the keel of an overturned boat.

That's when the Morton family from Houston - mom Kate and kids Simon and Claire - floated by on a raft. Ryden, seeing an opportunity to educate the public on the value of the razorback sucker, called them over. He pulled the sucker from the livewell of the raft and presented it to the Mortons.

"Go ahead, give it a pet," Ryden suggested.

Simon gently rubbed his fingers along the fish's scales. Claire tentatively placed an index finger on the razorback's head.

"Isn't that special?" her mother asked. "Wow, that is an awesome fish."

When Ryden first started working on the Colorado River, razorbacks nearly had been wiped out. He didn't see one during his first four years on the job. One day, a crew brought one into the hatchery for breeding. He remembers the biologists crowding around it, marveling at the novelty of seeing a wild razorback.

"Some people even kiss them if you're really brave," Ryden told Simon. "Just right on the cheek."

Ryden leaned in, nearly touching his lips to the fish, and made a kiss sound.

Now, after years of stocking tens of thousands into some reaches of the river, Ryden says razorback suckers are plentiful enough that you can find one on any summer day and give it a kiss.

This story is part of a project covering the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported through a Walton Family Foundation grant. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial content.
This story is part of Elemental: Covering Sustainability, a multimedia collaboration between Cronkite News, Arizona PBS, KJZZ, KPCC, Rocky Mountain PBS and PBS SoCal.

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Biologists scour rivers to help endangered species survive | Cronkite News

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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. - The temperature is hovering around 90 degrees as Dale Ryden and I float down the Colorado River near Grand Junction. The turbid water looks inviting, a blessed reprieve from the heat, but if either of us jumped in, we'd be electrocuted.

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What Tiny Bhutan Can Teach the World about Being Carbon Negative

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What Tiny Bhutan Can Teach the World about Being Carbon Negative

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Bhutan is a country in southern Asia that takes in more carbon than emitted per year; making them “carbon negative”. The small, Buddhist nation is the only one of its kind, and although developed countries might believe that there is nothing to be learned from them, it is possible to take their ideologies and goals and to slowly implement them into our daily lives to solve the carbon emissions crisis.

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What tiny Bhutan can teach the world about being carbon negative | CNN

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While many countries are struggling to reduce their carbon emissions, the Kingdom of Bhutan is already carbon negative: it takes more greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere than it emits.

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Congress is Quietly Eroding the Endangered Species act

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Congress is Quietly Eroding the Endangered Species act

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Over the past 20 years, Republicans have put forth over 378 bills to weaken the ESA. Most of these bills were never signed to come to a vote. Last week, the committee passed five bills to vote on that could end endangered species. With these bills coming into play, the ESA could be in serious danger.

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In the past two decades, Republicans in Congress have offered up more than 378 bills-45 in 2018 alone-to seriously weaken the Endangered Species Act. Most of those plans died before they got past the House Committee on Natural Resources, which needs to sign off before the bills come to a vote. But last week, while front pages and Twitter feeds spilled over with news of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the committee voted along party lines and passed five bills that could devastate protections for endangered species.

The committee head, Utah Republican Rob Bishop, has said in no uncertain terms that he'd love nothing more than to completely invalidate the ESA. But serious attacks on the law have historically been defeated by both Republicans and Democrats because the act is overwhelmingly popular. About 74 percent of American conservatives and 90 percent of liberals support it. None of the five bills will get a vote before elections in November, and it's worth remembering there's a chance Congress will look a lot different after that. But with the committee's stamp, the ESA is in more danger than it has ever been.

What Would the Bills Do?

The House committee called the bills bipartisan, but only one is sponsored by a Democrat. That came from Montana's Collin Peterson, whose bill would delist gray wolves in Wyoming and the western Great Lakes region. Protections for wolves there have gone back and forth in federal courts for years, and Peterson's bill would essentially override any judgment and open hunting on the animals for good.

Another bill deals with breeding permits for non-native endangered species and moving these animals over state lines. But it's the last three that could have the most wide-ranging, long-lasting impacts. One would make the government factor in the economic cost of protecting plants or animals before listing them; another would make it harder for people to suewhen they feel the ESA has been abused; and the last would give reports submitted by local and state governments the same weight as those offered by federal studies, which may seem harmless, except that these reports can contain little or no science.

All three bills are framed as important modernizations to the 45-year-old act, but opponents like Arizona Representative Raúl Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the committee, has said that together they make a "wish list" for the mining and oil industry.Taken together, they would generally make it more difficult for the government to list a species, give states more power to stop any listing, and seriously hamper conservationists' rights to hold the government accountable.

What's the Conflict Over the ESA?

To hear some Republicans talk about the ESA, you'd think it was massive failure, and they have their own arithmetic to prove it. Since President Nixon signed the act in 1973, it has protected more than 1,600 species. The bald eagle, the California condor, the grizzly bear, the humpback whale, and many insects and plants wouldn't be around without it. But in all that time, only 51 species have recovered enough to delist.

"We cannot allow the fear of challenging the status quo to prevent us from taking a hard look at the ineffective policies put in place decades ago that have failed to meet the goals of the underlying statute," said Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson, who sponsored one of the new bills.

The ESA certainly has its flaws. But the other end of this logic is that 1,600 species are still around that otherwise might not be. So, in regard to keeping animals like the symbol of our country around, conservationists argue that it's done pretty well.

What Is Trump's Bigger Plan for the ESA?

Trump's America First energy plan relies on auctioning off tens of millions of acres to oil and gas companies. In some cases, like with the American burying beetle, the Trump administration and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke are pushing to remove protections from animals on desirable land. But that sort of legal wrangling can take a while. So another tact they've taken is to change how agencies interpret the act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have typically extended ESA protections to "any species which is likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future"-essentially, species considered threatened. But in July, both agencies proposed to reinterpret "foreseeable future" in terms that make it much tougher to get these protections and offer them only on a case-by-case basis.

That, combined with the bills passed by the natural resources committee, could ensure that hundreds of species never get the protections of the ESA. And of course it would make it much easier for oil and gas companies to drill on land that might have been considered critical habitat.

Will the Bills Pass?

Probably not on their own. Republicans still hedge at crippling what is widely seen as one of the most important conservation laws in the world. They'll more likely try to bury it in a bill that people are more inclined to support.

Bishop stunned many people earlier this summer when he teamed up with Grijalva to sponsor a bill that could save the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It garnered wide praise and raised a few eyebrows from those who view Bishop as a public-lands enemy. But here's the thing: as legislation moves through the House, it gains fat, with representatives tacking on all sorts of stuff that has nothing to do with the original bill. Republicans tried to do that earlier this year when they added language to a spending bill that would have made it illegal to list the sage grouse for the next ten years. So one likely scenario is that Bishop and his allies play quid pro quo with the LWCF bill and add on some, or all, of the ESA changes.

"Chairman Bishop knows these ESA bills wouldn't become law as standalone measures," Adam Sarvana, Grijalva's communications director, told Outside. "He seems to think a large end-of-year deal-which would have to include genuinely popular measures like LWCF reauthorization-is his best chance at moving his more controversial ideas forward."

Of the hundreds of bills conservatives have proposed to weaken the ESA, few have ever made it through the committee, let alone Congress, because, overall, voters support the goals of the act. But what Bishop is banking on-aided by all the flashy chaos that has become the norm for this administration-is that, this time, you won't be paying attention.

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Congress Is Quietly Eroding the Endangered Species Act

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In the past two decades, Republicans in Congress have offered up more than 378 bills-45 in 2018 alone-to seriously weaken the Endangered Species Act. Most of those plans died before they got past the House Committee on Natural Resources, which needs to sign off before the bills come to a vote.

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Genetic study provides new information about endangered whales

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Genetic study provides new information about endangered whales

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Recent studies have shown that the endangered species of gray whales along the Pacific Coast have been able to stay thriving through interbreeding with other populations of whales in the east. Despite their near-extinction from popular whaling in the 1950's, these western whales have kept their genetic diversity with the help of the eastern populations. Due to this, scientists such as Andrew DeWoody believe that this could lead to the forming of one singular gene pool, or two completely different species; the continued observations of these populations and their genetics could help continue the lifespan of other endangered species in the future.

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October 11, 2018 by Brian Wallheimer, Purdue University

An eastern gray whale, pictured off the coast of Mexico, and its cousins to the west have similar levels of genetic diversity, though they have genetically diverged into two distinct subgroups, according to a Purdue University study. A genetic analysis of the whales suggests there are enough genetic resources between the populations to offer hope for the critically endangered populations to the west. Credit: Anna Brüniche-Olsen

Hope for an alarmingly low number of gray whales in the western Pacific Ocean might rest with their cousins to the east, according to a Purdue University study of the animals' genetic resources.

Andrew DeWoody, professor in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Department of Biological Sciences, and Anna Brüniche-Olsen, a postdoctoral researcher in DeWoody's lab, wanted to understand how the booming population of gray whales in the east-numbering about 27,000 along the coasts of California and Mexico-is connected to approximately 200 western gray whales along the Russian coast.

"At any one time, there is a huge disparity in the number of whales in each location. Some think that intense Russian and Japanese commercial whaling in the 1950s might have wiped out the entire population in the west," DeWoody said. "It's possible then that a few survived and have been increasing in population. Or some might have dispersed from the east to make up today's western population. It might also be a combination of the two."

DeWoody and Brüniche-Olsen compared the genotypes of 77 western and 135 eastern gray whales and found that the two populations have diverged genetically. The genotypes show distinct alleles-variations in genes-in each group. The separation is similar to levels sometimes seen between distinct subspecies.

The analysis also shows, however, that there is some genetic admixture. Whales have been observed traversing the Pacific Ocean, and genetic data show that there seems to be at least some interbreeding among the populations.

"That's good news. If you have a tiny population, a critically endangered population as we see in the west, you want to maintain gene flow and make sure they don't lose genetic diversity," Brüniche-Olsen said. "There seems to be gene flow between the two. It might be that even though it's different population, they're not completely separated."

The findings, reported in the journal Biology Letters, reveal that both populations of whales have significant amounts genetic diversity, which is especially important for the endangered western gray whales. The authors will monitor the subgroups to see whether they continue to diverge or if the intermingling will lead to a loss of the distinct groups.

"Maybe they'll become one single gene pool in the future," DeWoody said. "Or they could be quite different and at some point won't mate with one another any longer."

The findings may also inform new standards for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which maintains the Red List, a comprehensive list of endangered animals around the world. DeWoody is involved with a group in the IUCN that is developing guidelines for using genetics to determine the threat level for animals such as the gray whale.

"As we've seen with gray whales, it's a lot more complicated than the number of animals in the west and the east," DeWoody said. "Using genetics is going to prove to be a better method for understanding the population structures of endangered species and how those might be affected by human pressures or by natural processes such as ocean currents."

More information: Anna Brüniche-Olsen et al. Genetic data reveal mixed-stock aggregations of gray whales in the North Pacific Ocean, Biology Letters (2018). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2018.0399

Provided by: Purdue University

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Genetic study provides new information about endangered whales

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October 11, 2018 by Brian Wallheimer, Purdue University Hope for an alarmingly low number of gray whales in the western Pacific Ocean might rest with their cousins to the east, according to a Purdue University study of the animals' genetic resources.

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Asian elephants are now being killed for their skin 

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Asian elephants are now being killed for their skin 

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Elephants are one of the most endangered species today. For decades the males were poached for their ivory tusks, now they are also being killed for their skin. Before it was just the males with tusks that were killed, but now female and calves are being killed as well causing their extinction ate to increase rapidly.

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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Global Waste Generation could increase by 70% by 2050

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Global Waste Generation could increase by 70% by 2050

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There is an extreme juxtaposition in the waste management field dealing with developed countries and underdeveloped countries. Waste management that goes unnoticed in larger Nations is about 2% while it is 93% in less successful nations. The World Bank has conducted multiple statistics to observe these issues along with giving loans to assist countries actively working to improve. Overall, if we keep up ignorant tendencies the Earth will keep becoming polluted at the immense rate its at currently.

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An article from

A new in-depth report highlights the mounting inequities of waste management around the world, along with the financial and climate opportunities that could come from truly addressing it.

Andrea Westmoreland

Annual global waste production will increase by 70% if current conditions persist, according to “What a Waste 2.0,” a newly published report from the World Bank that was multiple years in the making.

Currently, about 2.01 billion metric tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) are produced annually worldwide. The World Bank estimates overall waste generation will increase to 3.40 billion metric tons by 2050. An estimated 13.5% of today's waste is recycled and 5.5% is composted. The report estimates that between one-third and 40% of waste generated worldwide is not managed properly and instead dumped or openly burned.

Building on a previous report in 2012, this latest edition sourced information from 217 countries and 367 cities. All of that information was standardized as much as possible, given different measurement methods. The 200-plus page document includes a wealth of data, case studies and analysis and is accompanied by multimedia elements online.

Global problems

Rich countries (such as the United States, Canada and members of the European Union) represent just 16% of global population, but produce 34% of the world’s waste. An estimated 93% of waste in low-income countries is mismanaged, as compared to 2% in high-income countries.

Daily per capita waste generation is estimated to be 4.87 pounds in North America, as compared to 1.01 pounds in Sub-Saharan Africa. Though the World Bank expects waste to triple in Sub-Saharan Africa and to double in South Asia, accounting for a full 35% of global output by 2050.

Collection is more common in urban areas for these low-income countries than in rural areas, but is still far less prevalent than in developed nations. The World Bank found that the amount of collection in low-income countries increased from about 22% to 39% since 2012 — though noted data may not be directly comparable.

Climate issues

Global waste production accounted for about 5% of global emissions in 2016, with an output of 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent. That number is expected to grow to 2.6 billion billion metric tons by 2050.

Food waste accounted for 47% of those emissions — showing both a monumental problem and an opportunity for gases released by food waste to be harnessed for energy. Silpa Kaza, the report's lead author, told Waste Dive these emissions "are mostly driven by open dumping of waste and then landfilling of waste without landfill gas systems."

Underdeveloped waste management infrastructure may also become a growing sign of global inequity as climate change advances. The open dumpsites in poorer countries can pose multiple hazards in the form of deadly landslides — which may be exacerbated by weather events — or pollution in waterways. Because of this, Kaza said a case can be made for addressing waste as part of broader climate resiliency strategies.

The role of WTE

Incineration of waste for conversion to energy is more widespread in wealthier nations, where about 22% of waste is handled at waste to energy (WTE) facilities.

The World Bank found the use of WTE in upper-middle-income countries had increased from 0.1% to 10% since 2012 — though made clear that the two reports aren't directly comparable. This increase is largely attributed to the recent boom of WTE construction in China. ​

Kaza said a lot of countries that are clients of the World Bank inquire about WTE. It’s especially common in wealthier countries that have land restraints — such as Japan. Though she added, "W hat we’re also seeing is that countries are trying to move away from [WTE] because they’re trying to increase their recycling."

Investment opportunities

The World Bank already has a record of investing in waste management infrastructure across the globe. It has moved more than $4.7 billion to more than 340 solid waste management programs since 2000. ​Kaza said there’s “a big opportunity” for national governments and the private sector to invest in better waste management infrastructures and systems going forward.

A recent study referenced in the report, which focused on Southeast Asia, found that each metric ton of improperly managed or disposed waste had an economic cost of about $375. However, it cost only between $50-$100 to properly manage a metric ton of waste in that same region. Moving funds that are currently used for mitigation into programs that prevent waste from leaving a sanitary infrastructure could be an economic boost to poorer regions. Waste management still accounts for up to 20% of local budgets in these countries.

Between 2008 and 2012, the population of Azerbaijan that was served by a proper waste management system increased from 53% to 74% after loans supported by the World Bank. Those loans also helped create a 25% recycling rate, demonstrating that money put into a waste system can have concrete and measurable outcomes.

Loans and investments could also help formalize the work of more than 15 million waste pickers and recyclers around the world, which could help bolster local economies and make informal waste pickers safer and healthier.

The World Bank's research points to a strong need for industrializing and developing countries to invest in modern waste management infrastructure. It also calls for reducing plastic consumption to stem the generation of marine litter and points to a need for further food waste reduction.

These recommendations, and multiple others, present opportunities for countries of all types to focus on developing more circular economies to capture value from their material rather than let it become an environmental burden.

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World Bank: Global waste generation could increase 70% by 2050

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A new in-depth report highlights the mounting inequities of waste management around the world, along with the financial and climate opportunities that could come from truly addressing it.

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A forestry boom is turning Ireland into an ecological dead zone

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A forestry boom is turning Ireland into an ecological dead zone

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In an attempt to increase its amount of tree coverage, Ireland's woodland areas are now turning into dead zones, or places that can barely support life. The new hectares of Sitka spruce "forests" are forcing out birds and other various animals that can very soon become endangered. All of this is because the land that was there before wasn't exactly profitable.

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A forestry boom is turning Ireland into an ecological dead zone | Mary Colwell

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Susbsidised spruce plantations cover vast tracts of the Irish countryside. They are driving bird species to extinction, says author Mary Colwell

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Tropical Frogs Found to Coexist with Deadly Fungus	Frogs in El Cope, Panama have been infected with a deadly fungus called Batrachochytrium Dendrobatidis. The university of maryland has been researching the effect of this deadly fungus on the frogs in Panama. They realized that the frogs that had been infected with the deadly fungus were surviving at the same rate as the frogs that had not been infected. Direnzo and her colleagues in Maryland had been studying the same field for the past 4 years examining the frogs and how they have been affected by the fungus. Each time the researchers went back to the field in Panama they recorded the results from the frogs progress. Direnzo researched that “98% of the frog population had already been infected by the fungus at low levels.” They believe that some of the frogs have built up a tolerance to the viruses affects and have learned to prosper with the changes to the frogs ecosystem. The article states “The frogs of El Cope are not doing great,but they are hanging in.” which states that they have learned to adapt to the deadly fungus entering their ecosystem. They have learned to coexist with the fungus and not let them terrorize the frogs. Although the frogs are learning to exist with the fungus some of the frogs species have died off. The University of Maryland has studied the adaptations the frogs have made to stay alive and they state “We know how all these species responded to the initial invasion. Now we know how the survivors are responding to the continuing infection.” Also the article states that the organisms called “Typhoid Mary” species began to die off slowing the rate of infection spreading. The university of Maryland states that the frogs offspring will hopefully inherit the tolerance and build a stronger generation. Although the frogs are building tolerances to the fungus Direnzo states that “Some of the species are now gone. So the entire ecosystem is totally different. It’s almost not comparable to what there was before.” So in the end the deadly fungus has brought a major impact upon El Cope’s environment causing the frog population to decrease by some extent. 	My initial thought on this article was pretty fascinated and impressed because of how well the frog species dealt with the deadly fungus entering into their ecosystem. I was really shocked on the research by the University of Maryland when it showed that most of the frogs not only survived but began to build a tolerance to the fungus. Also when the article stated that the organisms helping to spread the infection were dying off i was surprised because the organisms that help with the spreading of the disease are usually the organisms that prosper. In the end when the article stated that the frog population has depleted from the deadly fungus i was very surprised since the frogs were showing that they were building a tolerance to the infection.Overall this current event was very interesting and was very surprising with the impacts one fungus can have on an entire ecosystem of frogs.	

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Tropical Frogs Found to Coexist with Deadly Fungus	Frogs in El Cope, Panama have been infected with a deadly fungus called Batrachochytrium Dendrobatidis. The university of maryland has been researching the effect of this deadly fungus on the frogs in Panama. They realized that the frogs that had been infected with the deadly fungus were surviving at the same rate as the frogs that had not been infected. Direnzo and her colleagues in Maryland had been studying the same field for the past 4 years examining the frogs and how they have been affected by the fungus. Each time the researchers went back to the field in Panama they recorded the results from the frogs progress. Direnzo researched that “98% of the frog population had already been infected by the fungus at low levels.” They believe that some of the frogs have built up a tolerance to the viruses affects and have learned to prosper with the changes to the frogs ecosystem. The article states “The frogs of El Cope are not doing great,but they are hanging in.” which states that they have learned to adapt to the deadly fungus entering their ecosystem. They have learned to coexist with the fungus and not let them terrorize the frogs. Although the frogs are learning to exist with the fungus some of the frogs species have died off. The University of Maryland has studied the adaptations the frogs have made to stay alive and they state “We know how all these species responded to the initial invasion. Now we know how the survivors are responding to the continuing infection.” Also the article states that the organisms called “Typhoid Mary” species began to die off slowing the rate of infection spreading. The university of Maryland states that the frogs offspring will hopefully inherit the tolerance and build a stronger generation. Although the frogs are building tolerances to the fungus Direnzo states that “Some of the species are now gone. So the entire ecosystem is totally different. It’s almost not comparable to what there was before.” So in the end the deadly fungus has brought a major impact upon El Cope’s environment causing the frog population to decrease by some extent. 	My initial thought on this article was pretty fascinated and impressed because of how well the frog species dealt with the deadly fungus entering into their ecosystem. I was really shocked on the research by the University of Maryland when it showed that most of the frogs not only survived but began to build a tolerance to the fungus. Also when the article stated that the organisms helping to spread the infection were dying off i was surprised because the organisms that help with the spreading of the disease are usually the organisms that prosper. In the end when the article stated that the frog population has depleted from the deadly fungus i was very surprised since the frogs were showing that they were building a tolerance to the infection.Overall this current event was very interesting and was very surprising with the impacts one fungus can have on an entire ecosystem of frogs.	

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Pollution May Dim Thinking Skills, Study in China Suggests

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Pollution May Dim Thinking Skills, Study in China Suggests

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A study in China suggests that there is a link between air pollution and adverse effects on peoples math and language skills. Pollution is also linked to many respiratory illnesses such as asthma, bronchitis, and lung cancer which could possibly affect the cardiovascular system as well. The study suggests that air pollution caused a cognitive impact in older men. The World Health Organization claimed that 92 percent of people on Earth breathe in unhealthy outdoor air causing 4.2 million premature deaths. Accumulative exposure caused a decline in verbal test scores in China among older less educated men. China's carbon dioxide emissions also cause an outrage among the public due to smog and respiratory illness. Eastern China and mega cities are most affected by the rising levels of air pollutants.

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A hazy day in Beijing in February. Credit Credit Thomas Peter/Reuters

HONG KONG - A large study in China suggests a link between air pollution and negative effects on people's language and math skills.

The link between pollution and respiratory diseases is well known, and most experts now believe that small particulates may also raise the risk for strokes and heart attacks. Whether this form of air pollution impairs cognition is not yet certain, but several studies have hinted at a connection.

The latest study, by researchers based in China and the United States, analyzed how long-term exposure to air pollution affected performance on nationwide math and word-recognition tests by more than 25,000 people across 162 Chinese counties. It was published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors based their findings on models they built that combined weather and pollution data from specific locations in China where people had taken nationwide tests in 2010 and 2014, as well as the test scores themselves. Their analysis tried to document how short- and long-term pollution exposure might have affected the scores - and, by extension, the test-takers' brains.

The authors found that the cognitive impact of cumulative exposure among the test takers was especially pronounced among older men, and that the results were troubling in part because cognitive decline and impairment are risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

The study "further amplifies the need to tackle air pollution now to protect the health of particularly the young and elderly populations," Heather Adair-Rohani, a technical officer for public health and environment at the World Health Organization in Geneva, which was not involved in the study, said in an email.

Atmospheric pollution has long been recognized as a significant threat to global public health.

In 2016, the W.H.O. reported that 92 percent of people worldwide breathe what it classified as unhealthy air. It defined that air as having concentrations of fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, above 10 micrograms per cubic meter, or 35.3 cubic feet.

The agency said in May that outdoor air pollution caused approximately 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2016, more than a million of them in China, and that short- and long-term exposure increased the risk of stroke, heart disease, lung cancer and chronic and acute respiratory diseases.

This month a study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters calculated that air pollution was reducing average life expectancies; the exact risk depended on location - around nine months in Russia, for example, or 1.9 years in Egypt.

But few epidemiological studies have analyzed associations between air pollution and cognition in older adults, a team of researchers from France and Britain wrote in a 2014 study in the journal Epidemiology. Their study found that traffic-related pollution in greater London was associated with declining cognitive functions over time among study participants, who had an average age of 66.

In China, which already has the world's largest population of people with dementia, the number is expected to rise to 75.6 million by 2030, up from about 44.4 million in 2013, according to a report that year by Alzheimer's Disease International, a nonprofit based in Chicago.

The new study's findings "imply that the indirect effect on social welfare could be much larger than previously thought," the authors wrote. "A narrow focus on the negative effect on health may underestimate the total cost of air pollution."

The study used test scores from the 2010 and 2014 editions of China Family Panel Studies, an interview-based exam given nationwide, as well as air-quality data from readings of three types of pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter that is smaller than 10 micrometers in diameter, called PM10.

"Essentially, we compare the same person in two time periods," said Zhang Xin, the study's lead author and a pollution expert at Bejing Normal University, referring to the study's methodology. "The major variation stems from exposure to local air pollution at the date of interview, which is largely random."

The study found that "accumulative exposure" had a pronounced impact on verbal test scores - especially for older, less-educated men - and that cutting the local concentration of PM10 to levels that meet United States Environmental Protection Agency air quality standards would move people up from the median, or 50th percentile, to the 58th percentile on math test scores and the 63rd percentile on verbal scores.

He Guojun, an economist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who studies pollution in China, said that he hoped the new study would be the first of many to examine apparent links between pollution and cognition in China. "The paper is quite solid, both in terms of data and methodology and results," said Dr. He, who was not involved in the study.

The research tried to minimize the impact of other variables besides pollution. For example, it excluded test takers who migrated across counties between 2010 and 2014, and others who worked in mining, smelting, wood processing and other "polluted occupations."

However, Dr. He said, measuring long-term effects of pollution exposure can be difficult, in part because individual exposure depends on so many factors - including, for example, whether a person uses air filters at home.

In another critique, Rajasekhar Balasubramanian, an air quality expert at the National University of Singapore, noted that while the study's authors speculate that continued exposure to pollution can alter brain chemistry, they offered no clinical proof. (The authors agreed, writing that the hypothesis should be explored further.)

But Dr. Balasubramanian said the study was useful in part because, while the effects of pollution on children's cognition had been documented by epidemiologists, this was the first to focus on such risks to China's older people. He said similar research was now needed in other countries.

"The outcome of such studies would provide a sound scientific basis for tightening air quality standards to curtail air pollution and protect public health in both developing and developed countries," Dr. Balasubramanian, who was not involved in the study, said in an emailed statement.

As public outrage has grown in China over smog andrespiratory illnesses related to it, officials have in recent years closed hundreds of coal-fired power plants, imposed limits on driving and residential coal burning, and sent teams of police officers to inspect factories.

But China's carbon dioxide emissions increased last year, and even though the country is on its way to meeting its major climate change goals, many of its cities still have dangerously high levels of outdoor air pollution.

In one sign of the problems, a study published in April found that about 142 million people, or just over half the population surveyed in 155 Chinese cities, were exposed in 2014 to average annual "multicontaminant concentrations" that were above the World Health Organization's limits. The study said that eastern China and megacities were worst affected.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized a type of pollutant analyzed in a study on air pollution and cognitive performance in China. The pollutant, known as PM10, was defined in the study as particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometers in diameter, not between 2.5 and 10 micrometers.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Pollution May Be Diminishing Thinking Skills, Study in China Suggests. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Pollution May Dim Thinking Skills, Study in China Suggests

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HONG KONG - A large study in China suggests a link between air pollution and negative effects on people's language and math skills. The link between pollution and respiratory diseases is well known, and most experts now believe that small particulates may also raise the risk for strokes and heart attacks.

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Australia's Endangered Quolls Get Genetic Boost From  Scientist

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Australia's Endangered Quolls Get Genetic Boost From  Scientist

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Quolls are nocturnal marsupials around the size of squirrels. They typically eat any animal smaller than themselves. However, this lead to a diet of Cane Toads, who are invasive and poisonous. In Australia, the quolls eating the toads were completely wiped out causing the animal to be considered endangered since 2005. Scientist noticed that some quolls did not have a taste for these deadly toads so they were surviving. They had a gene to make them averse to eating toads. In 2016, ecologist started breeding these quolls with others that lacked toad aversion. All of these offspring survived. Now scientist are breeding and releasing more of these offspring into the wild. However habitat loss and climate change still endanger these species today. To me this is a very sad thing, quolls are these cute little animals and they have no idea what eating these toads would do to them. But i am glad that scientist found a way to help them. However the anthropoginic effects like pollution and deforestation still upset me because the quolls and other endangered species still aren't safe.

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A northern quoll bred at a wildlife park in 2016. Scientists hope breeding programs can help quolls inherit life-saving genes. Credit Credit Ella Kelly

SYDNEY, Australia - Australia's northern quolls are small animals with big appetites - and they are eating themselves to death.

Nocturnal marsupials, about the size of squirrels, quolls once roamed all of Northern Australia. But a disposition to eat just about any animals smaller than themselves led to a steady diet of cane toads, an invasive and poisonous species.

Since the 1900s, quoll populations have plummeted. In parts of Cape York Peninsula in northeastern Australia, toad-eating quolls were completely wiped out, and the animal has been considered endangered nationwide since 2005.

But in one area of Queensland, scientists noticed, quolls did not have a taste for the deadly toad and local populations were thriving. The secret to their success: a gene that made them averse to eating toads.

In 2016, University of Melbourne ecologists began breeding the Queensland quolls with others that lacked the toad-aversion gene. They soon discovered that all of the hybrid offspring inherited the survival gene.

Now, scientists believe they can help restore diminishing populations across the country using a technique known as "targeted gene flow." By selectively breeding quolls, they can fast-track evolution, and introduce toad-averse quolls into areas where the amphibians have yet to invade. Experts hope that the same science of identifying favorable genes and introducing them naturally through breeding could help other endangered species, including the corals of the Great Barrier Reef.

"What we're doing is nothing unnatural," said Professor Ben Phillips, who conducted the research on the quolls and wrote a study published last month in Conservation Biology. "It's just matchmaking."

Taking what they learned in the lab, Professor Phillips and his team released 54 mixed-gene quolls last year onto Indian Island, off the northern coast of Australia, which is home to a large toad population. In April, the scientists retrieved and tested the surviving quolls and found that offspring produced on the island all inherited the aversion gene.

The surviving quolls were later rereleased onto Indian Island to be left until next April, when scientists will discern whether the population has remained stable or, better yet, thrived. Quolls are prolific breeders, producing litters on average of five to eight babies once a year.

But cane toads are not the only threat quolls face.

Habitat loss, climate change and nonnative predators like foxes and feral cats have contributed to the quolls' rapid decline.

"The problem for the quolls doesn't have everything to do with pest management," said Alberto Vale, the president of the Australian Quoll Conservancy. "We need to monitor the species, manage them and be conscious of them."

The quoll experiment is promising, experts said, because it proves targeting genes to protect animals can be done safely and naturally.

"It provides an important message of hope that by using scientific tools we might be able to address some of these substantially important threats facing biodiversity," said Euan Ritchie, a senior lecturer in ecology at Deakin University in Melbourne, "and that's obviously particularly important in Australia, which has one of the worst conservation records in the world."

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misidentified the location of Indian Island. It is off the northern coast of Australia, not the eastern coast.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a scientific journal. It is Conservation Biology, not Conservation Weekly.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: You Are What You Eat: Saving Australia's Quolls . Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Australia's Endangered Quolls Get Genetic Boost From Scientists

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SYDNEY, Australia - Australia's northern quolls are small animals with big appetites - and they are eating themselves to death. Nocturnal marsupials, about the size of squirrels, quolls once roamed all of Northern Australia. But a disposition to eat just about any animals smaller than themselves led to a steady diet of cane toads, an invasive and poisonous species.

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Global warming has an influence on hurricanes and their effects.

Sea temperatures rising allows the water to be evaporated easier and will cause hurricanes to thrive. Sea levels rising causes flooding to be much more severe. There are also many other effects of global warming on hurricanes and storms.

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A storm chaser returned to collect his things after debris collapsed on his car Wednesday in Panama City, Fla. Credit Credit Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

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Scientists are increasingly confident of the links between global warming and hurricanes.

In a warming world, they say, hurricanes will be stronger, for a simple reason: Warmer water provides more energy that feeds them.

Hurricanes and other extreme storms will also be wetter, for a simple reason: Warmer air holds more moisture.

And, storm surges from hurricanes will be worse, for a simple reason that has nothing to do with the storms themselves: Sea levels are rising.

Researchers cannot say, however, that global warming is to blame for the specifics of the latest storm, Hurricane Michael, which grew to Category 4 with sustained winds of 155 miles an hour, as it hit the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday. Such attribution may come later, when scientists compare the real-world storm to a fantasy-world computer simulation in which humans did not pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

There are already tantalizing suggestions, however, that the warming caused by all those greenhouse-gas emissions has had an impact on Michael. A 2013 study showed that sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Gulf of Mexico have warmed over the past century by more than what would be expected from natural variability. These are the waters that the hurricane churned across as it headed toward the Panhandle and its maximum wind speeds more than doubled.

"That general region has been one where there has been long-term climate warming," said Thomas R. Knutson, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author of the study. "We have reason to believe humans have made the water warmer."

Read more about STORMS And climate change

While there is debate over whether global warming will lead to more frequent hurricanes - many models suggest there may actually be fewer in the future, although with a greater proportion of major ones - scientists are generally agreed about the effects of warming on intensity, as measured by wind speeds.

"We have a very clear theory on how tropical cyclones intensify," said Suzana J. Camargo, an ocean and climate physicist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.

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Panama City, Fla., on Wednesday. The storm has sustained winds of 155 miles an hour. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The theory, largely the work of Kerry Emanuel, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, holds that the temperature difference between ocean and upper atmosphere determines how much a storm intensifies. A bigger temperature difference leads to the release of more energy into the storm.

"The warmer you have the ocean, the bigger the difference," Dr. Camargo said.

The theory has been reinforced by computer simulations that produce more intense storms with rising ocean temperatures. "We understand the theory behind it, and we have seen it in the models," Dr. Camargo said.

As for storms producing more precipitation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that human-caused warming has affected the amount of water vapor in the air, and that extreme precipitation events have already increased in many parts of the world. The group's latest report, issued this week, found that such extreme precipitation will likely further increase if the world cannot limit overall warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Dr. Knutson cautioned that while this increase in rain and snow amounts has been seen in extreme events in general, of which hurricanes are a subset, "we haven't actually seen this in the data for hurricanes yet." But if a given amount of air flowing into a hurricane carries more water vapor, he said, "that enhances the water supply to the storm so it can create higher rain rates."

As Hurricane Michael approached land on Wednesday, forecasters warned that the worst damage could come from a storm surge of as much as 13 feet. Florida, both along the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, is exceptionally vulnerable to storm surge, with strings of low-lying communities on the coasts and along waterways that are connected to the sea.

Storm surge occurs when winds pile water up as it approaches land, and many factors - including the contours of the seafloor, topography of bays and inlets and the stage of the tide when the surge hits - can affect it. But rising sea levels can have an impact, too.

"What's not emphasized enough is the sea level-rise connection," Dr. Camargo said. "Even if there weren't changes in the hurricane itself, just because you have sea-level rise you end up having more flooding."

Seas are rising for two main reasons: water expands slightly as it warms, and glaciers and ice sheets add more water as they melt. But the rise can vary because of local factors like uplift or subsidence of the land.

In the past four decades, global average sea levels have risen by about four inches. That may not seem like much, and in a 15-foot storm surge it may not add much to the destruction.

"But we're not talking about a few inches anymore by the end of the century," Dr. Camargo said. "We're talking about a foot or so. Then, it makes a difference."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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The Hurricanes, and Climate-Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes, They're Linked.

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. Scientists are increasingly confident of the links between global warming and hurricanes. In a warming world, they say, hurricanes will be stronger, for a simple reason: Warmer water provides more energy that feeds them.

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The rise in carbon dioxide levels, related to climate change has caused a severe decline in the bee population as well as a change to protein content in pollen. Because of the increase in the carbon dioxide content, the protein in the pollen is diluted and the bees are unhealthy, due to the fact that there is not enough protein in the available pollen as well as there is not as many pollen giving plants because there are less bees to pollinate those plants. This poses a massive threat to society because bees are a significant contributor to pollination and the growth of new plants.