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While Obama was in office, he implemented a lot of hunting regulations, including the treatment of grizzly bears and wolves, and controlling them by the means of killing predators near their cubs or dens, baiting, live trapping, and aerial shooting. The house approved the bill sometime last month with a vote of 225-193, and now all that's left to do is to get President Trump's signature in order for it to be official and put into action. Some argue that this isn't a controversial matter because of the fact that animals are being mistreated, but rather, because an action like this takes away the power of the state, something that doesn't sit well with many people. However, some people, like myself, would argue and believe that this should be more focused on the mistreatment and how wrong and upsetting it is, rather than who possesses the power.

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A bill is headed to President Donald Trump's desk that would overturn Obama-era hunting restrictions protecting grizzly bears, wolves and other animals on national wildlife refuges in Alaska from hunting tactics such as aerial shooting, baiting and killing animals at their dens or with their cubs.

The Senate approved the bill to repeal the hunting restrictions on Alaska's 16 federal wildlife refuges on Tuesday, in a vote largely split on party lines that pitted the issue of "states' rights" and wildlife conservation. The bill was approved by a vote of 52-47.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had issued new hunting restrictions in August, which included bans on killing predators such as bears and wolves near their dens or with their cubs, aerial shooting, baiting and live trapping.

The FWS said at the time that the rule was intended to help maintain sustainable populations of predators such as bears, wolves and coyotes on the federal wildlife refuges.
Related: House Overturns Obama-Era Law to Protect Alaskan Bears and Wolves
The Senate's approval of the bill to overturn the hunting limits this week means the measure now only needs Trump's signature to become a law.

The bill was approved by the House last month by a vote of 225-193, again, mostly on party lines.

Alaska's Republican lawmakers have said the FWS's rule seized too much authority away from the state and was a case of federal overreach.

"We have to recognize this is not about the little polar bears, the little grizzly bears or wolves on television, this is about the state's right to manage - not allowing the federal government to do so," Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, who sponsored the bill, said last month. "We want to be able to take and manage our fish and game for the sustainable yield - so that our fish and game will be there forever."

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said according to the AP that the FWS's rule "undercuts meaningful public participation in refuge management decisions (and) utterly disregards the legal protections and rights given to the state in the Alaska Statehood Act."
Related: Rusty Patched Bumble Bee Is Put on Endangered Species List After Trump Administration Delay
But Democrats and wildlife advocates said overturning the restrictions would lead to inhumane treatment of animals.

"This isn't about states' rights," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., according to the Associated Press. "It's not about prohibiting hunting. ... It's about how we can manage these wildlife refuges to the degree that agencies believe are necessary for the preservation of these wildlife heritage areas."

Nora Apter, legislative advocate in government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in statement to NBC News that the new bill would lead to "unnecessary and unsustainable" hunting methods.

"Hunting grizzlies, wolves and other animals from airplanes is scientifically indefensible - and unsportsmanlike," Apter said. "And to be clear, this is not an issue of states' rights, as some in Alaska would have you believe. Rather, it's about ensuring that federal lands set aside for wildlife conservation stay that way. This bill would set a dangerous precedent for unnecessary and unsustainable hunting methods on national wildlife refuges.''

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Senate votes to overturn Obama-era hunting limits of Alaskan wildlife

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A bill is headed to President Donald Trump's desk that would overturn Obama-era hunting restrictions protecting grizzly bears, wolves and other animals on national wildlife refuges in Alaska from hunting tactics such as aerial shooting, baiting and killing animals at their dens or with their cubs.

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With pollution being an ever-present issue in the world today, is is encouraged that people try to find alternate methods of completing their everyday actions that could lower the pollution that then directly affects the planet after use. While we can't always prevent pollution, we can develop methods to cut down on existing pollution, and make it less of a factor and issue. Experts have developed "The Flame Refluxer" prototype. It's purpose is to burn off spilled oil quickly, while keeping the levels of air pollutant relatively low. It does this by accelerating the combustion of crude oil floating on water, and was developed by fire protection engineering researchers at WPI, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I believe this will be an effective solution to quick, unexpected, dangerous spills that can instantly damage the environment.

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Tests conducted last week of a novel technology that can greatly accelerate the combustion of crude oil floating on water demonstrated its potential to become an effective tool for minimizing the environmental impact of future oil spills. Called the Flame Refluxer, the technology, developed by fire protection engineering researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) with funding from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), could make it possible to burn off spilled oil quickly while producing relatively low levels of air pollutants.

The tests of the Flame Refluxer were conducted between March 13 and March 17 by WPI and BSEE at the United States Coast Guard's Joint Maritime Test Facility on Little Sand Island, located in Mobile Bay. WPI is the first university to work on research at the facility since it reopened in 2015. The tests involved controlled burns of oil in a specially designed test tank on the island.

"In-situ burning has been used with great success, and it is our goal to support research that makes a good method even better," said Karen Stone, oil spill response engineer at BSEE. "This research, and the results of these tests, are particularly exciting. We saw hotter fires increase the amount of oil that was consumed, what appears to be cleaner emissions, and a significant reduction in burn residue after the burn. Initially we were hopeful that the technology could capture any remaining residue after the burn, but the fires burned so efficiently there was very little to collect."

When oil is spilled in open water, burning it in place (called in-situ burning) can be an effective method for removing the oil before it can settle into the water column and cause ecological harm. In fact, the current research project is based, in part, on the experience of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, during which more than 400 controlled burns removed between 220,000 and 310,000 barrels of oil from the ocean's surface.

While that experience demonstrated the potential for burns to become an effective clean-up tool, they also made clear the limitations of current techniques. For example, open-water oil fires can be difficult to sustain, they produce smoke, and they leave behind a tar-like residue that can harm marine life. The Flame Refluxer is designed to overcome each of those issues.

According to Scott Fields of the USCG Research and Development Center "in-situ burning is already a very successful process, but we want to improve the air quality for our first responders who are engaged in oil spill cleanup."

The Flame Refluxer consists of metal coils attached to a blanket made from copper wool sandwiched between two layers of copper mesh. The blanket is designed to be placed on top of floating oil that has been collected with a boom towed by boats. After the oil is ignited, the coils and blanket transmit heat from the flames to superheat the oil, which increases its burning rate and efficiency. As a result, the oil burns more completely. The more complete combustion produces fewer airborne emissions, and any solid residue is captured by the copper wool and kept out of the water column.

The technology was developed at WPI by a team led by Ali Rangwala, professor of fire protection engineering, as an outgrowth of research funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior aimed at assessing the feasibility of using in-situ burns to clean up oil spills in remote locations in the Arctic, where harsh weather can make it difficult to quickly mobilize clean-up equipment and crews. When laboratory tests identified the challenges of igniting and sustaining oil fires on ice and in cold water, Rangwala and his team began exploring methods for making the oil easier to burn by transmitting heat from the flames to the oil. The Flame Refluxer is the product of that exploration.

"The technology is so simple, it has no moving parts, it's inexpensive, and it significantly enhances the burning rate of oil. The tests we conducted at this unique facility will allow us to advance the technology closer to actual deployment" said Rangwala.

Prototypes of the technology were tested in the state-of-the-art Fire Protection Engineering Laboratory at WPI. The tests at the Joint Maritime Test Facility used a larger prototype, a circular blanket nearly 1.5 meters (four feet, eight inches) across with up to 48 metal coils attached. The blanket was immersed in a layer of crude oil floating on water. Oil was pumped to the test apparatus to maintain the oil layer at about one centimeter (0.4 inches) throughout each 10-20 minute test burn. (Previous research has shown that crude oil burns most effectively when the oil layer that is maintained between one and four centimeters.)

During test burns conducted with and without the Flame Refluxer, the researchers measured a number of parameters, including temperatures above the oil fire and the flow rate of oil delivered to the test apparatus, in order to determine how effectively the Flame Refluxer conveyed heat from the flames to the oil (a process known as heat flux) and how it changed the oil burning rate. An air sampling station collected emissions produced by the fire and continuously measured several combustion byproducts: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10). The copper blanket was weighed before and after each test to see how effectively it trapped residue from the oil fires.

While it will take time to analyze the large volume of data collected during the test burns and report official results, Rangwala said the research team made several observations that suggested that the Flame Refluxer technology performed as expected. "Where we observed thick black smoke during a baseline test, where we burned crude oil without the blanket and coils, when the Refluxer was in use, the smoke was thinner and grey, even though more oil was being combusted. In fact, our measurements show that between four and five times as much oil was burned per minute with the Flame Refluxer in place. Finally, we observed that virtually no residue was left over after our burns with the Refluxer, an indication that it promotes more complete combustion of the oil."

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petroleum; energy and resources; energy policy; oil spills; pollution; environmental issues; environmental policies; energy issues; stem education

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Experts successfully test a novel oil spill cleanup technology: Potential for the Flame Refluxer to efficiently burn oil spills while also minimizing water and air pollution

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Tests of a novel technology that can accelerate the combustion of crude oil floating on water demonstrated its potential to become an effective tool for minimizing the environmental impact of oil spills. The Flame Refluxer, developed by fire protection engineering researchers, could make it possible to burn off spilled oil quickly while producing relatively low levels of air pollutants.

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A dead zone is defined as a low oxygen area, that as a result, tends to completely obliterate marine life. A new study has shown that coral reefs are becoming increasingly susceptible to this problem, with dozens already having been affected. It's shocking to many that dead zones have been increasingly more of an issue, as opposed to ocean warming or acidification, which is the reduction of the pH in an ocean over time. Fortunately for us, studies have shown that dead zones can be reduced by controlling both agricultural runoff into the ocean and sewage. For quite some time now, coral reefs have been demonstrating behaviors of severe stress, and hopefully we have successfully located the issue, and can now work toward solving it and preventing it from occurring in the future.

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Dead zones affect dozens of coral reefs around the world and threaten hundreds more according to a new study by Smithsonian scientists published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Watching a massive coral reef die-off on the Caribbean coast of Panama, they suspected it was caused by a dead zone -- a low-oxygen area that snuffs out marine life -- rather than by ocean warming or acidification.

"Ocean warming and acidification are recognized global threats to reefs and require large-scale solutions, whereas the newly recognized threats to coral reefs caused by dead zones are more localized, said Andrew Altieri, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and first author of the study. Fortunately dead zones can be reduced by controlling sewage and agricultural runoff into the ocean."

In September, 2010, coral reefs in Almirante Bay, Bocas del Toro Province, showed severe signs of stress. In addition to corals turning white and dying, which is typical during coral bleaching associated with warming events, there were other clues suggesting that more was involved than high temperatures. Many unusual observations pointed to something else as the culprit. There were thick mats of bacterial slime, and the dead bodies of crabs, sea urchins and sponges lay scattered on the ocean floor. Even more odd, there was a clear depth line above which the reefs looked OK, and below which, something had gone terribly wrong. Even single colonies of corals that straddled the line were fine above and dying below.

Scientists went to work, measuring several aspects of water quality. One set of measurements came back as a shock. Extremely low oxygen levels in deeper waters contrasted with high oxygen levels in shallow waters where corals were still healthy. This is the hallmark of a dead zone.

The team thinks that such dead zones may be common in the tropics but have gone largely unreported, simply because scientists never looked. "The number of dead zones currently on our map of the world is 10 times higher in temperate areas than it is in the tropics, but many marine biologists work out of universities in Europe and North America and are more likely to find dead zones close to home," Altieri said.

"We were lucky that there was already a reef monitoring program in place at STRI's Bocas del Toro Research Station as part of the Smithsonian's Marine Global Earth Observatory Network," said Rachel Collin, station director.

"Based on our analyses, we think dead zones may be underreported by an order of magnitude." said Nancy Knowlton, coauthor and Sant Chair for Marine Science at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. "For every one dead zone in the tropics, there are probably 10 -- nine of which have yet to be identified."

The researchers found 20 instances when dead zones were implicated in the mass mortality of coral reefs worldwide. "Hypoxia (low oxygen) isn't even mentioned in several of the most important academic reviews of threats to coral reefs and is rarely discussed at scientific meetings," Altieri said, "Even worse, many coral-reef monitoring efforts do not include measurement of oxygen levels, making it nearly impossible to identify low oxygen as the cause of mass coral mortality after the fact." For example, the cause of a 2016 mass mortality at the Flower Garden Reefs in the Gulf of Mexico remains unclear, but some of the photographs look strikingly similar to what was observed in Panama.

The authors argue that building capacity to monitor oxygen on reefs will help people to improve coral reef health and understand how dead zones might interact with other forces such as global warming in a one-two punch, which put reefs in even greater danger.

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marine biology; extinction; sea life; fish; coral reefs; oceanography; ecology; geography

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Dead zones may threaten coral reefs worldwide

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Dead zones affect dozens of coral reefs around the world and threaten hundreds more according to a new study. Watching a massive coral reef die-off on the Caribbean coast of Panama, they suspected it was caused by a dead zone -- a low-oxygen area that snuffs out marine life -- rather than by ocean warming or acidification.

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This article seemed to me to be very similar to one that I chose to write about in a prior marking period, what with the struggles that environmental activists are constantly going through. However, this one showed that this is a problem that is occurring all over the world and not just in America. Jose Trinidad Baldenegro says, "I'm in shock....in despair." He has good reason to feel this way, with Latin America being the most dangerous place in the world for environmental activists. It's shocking to me that organized crime has become an attacking force against environmentalists because I see no reason for the aggression when the environmentalists are only trying to protect and conserve the land. There were 63 documented attacks in 2015 and 2016, but there were likely many more that were undocumented. The scary thing is that Baldenegro is now dead, a victim to the malicious killing, just because of his actions of standing up and speaking out about what he believed in.

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Pablo Aneli/AP

"I'm in shock," says José Trinidad Baldenegro. "In despair."

On the phone from the city of Chihuahua in Mexico's arid north, he's telling me about his older brother, Isidro Baldenegro López, an activist and leader of the indigenous Tarahumara people. For years, Baldenegro had endured numerous threats as a result of his work protecting the country's ancient forests from illegal logging. But one stormy afternoon in January, standing by a goat pen outside his uncle's house in the village of Coloradas de la Virgen, Baldenegro was shot six times in the chest, stomach and legs. He died a few hours later.

His killing fits a deadly pattern across the region: Latin America is now the most dangerous place in the world for environmental activists, according to a 2016 report by Article 19, a British human rights group. More than 122 activists were killed in the region in 2015, one of the deadliest years on record, according to the most recent study from Global Witness, another nongovernmental organization.

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Mexico has emerged as one of the most perilous countries in the region. Organized crime, state-sanctioned intimidation and near-total impunity have proved to be a hazardous and often deadly combination for the many activists trying to protect the country's natural resources. In January, Mexico's Center for Environmental Rights (CEMDA) released a report that documented 63 attacks against environmental activists in 2015 and 2016. However, this only included cases reported on by the media or other NGOs, so the number could be much higher.

The high rate of human rights abuses in Mexico has drawn increasing international attention: Baldenegro was killed while U.N. Special Rapporteur Michel Frost was in Mexico investigating attacks against activists. Still, the renewed global focus on the activists' plight doesn't mean the violence has waned. Baldenegro had been awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2005 for his campaign to protect Mexico's ancient forests from illegal logging-the same work that led to his father's murder 30 years ago. His death came less than a year after the shooting death of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, who received the Goldman prize in 2015. "It used to be that when you got to that level of awareness about your work, it gave you some measure of protection," says Article 19's David Banisar. "Now even that seems to be undermined. It's a good indication that things are getting worse."

The Mexican government has promised a full investigation of Baldenegro's killing. On March 8, authorities arrested Romeo Rubio Martínez, 21, the husband of one of Baldenegro's distant cousins, who claims he killed Baldenegro because of an old family quarrel. But Isela González, director of Alianza Sierra Madre, an organization that works with the Tarahumara to defend their land right, is skeptical. "We are urging authorities not to abandon the investigation into his environmental work which has resulted in so much violence, not just against Isidro but against many environmental activists," she says.
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Giovanna Garrido Márquez, a subdirector of attention to appeal resources with Mexico's secretary of governance, says that the killing has "raised a huge red flag" and that her department will be holding a special meeting to discuss how to increase protections for environmental activists so that "Chihuahua can be a model for the rest of the country."

But for many, these measures have come too late. Two weeks after Baldenegro was killed, Juan Ontiveros Ramos, another Tarahumara leader, was found dead in the same region. Armed men had kidnapped him the day before, brutally beating members of his family during the attack. "It's incredibly painful," says González, who has received death threats herself and had known Ramos for 20 years. "He was very quiet and reserved. But he was an admired and distinguished person given a fundamental task: protecting his people."

Ramos was in charge of security for the Choréachi community and regularly took the 15-hour trip to the state capital so he could meet with authorities and discuss the challenges this indigenous group face, particularly organized crime. Known as "the Golden Triangle" for the intersection of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua states, the region is a major heroin and marijuana production area for the Sinaloa cartel. The expansion of powerful cartels has brought traffickers into more close contact with local indigenous groups, and all too often the result is violence. According to González, Ramos had just returned from a meeting with state and federal authorities to discuss security and other matters before he was killed. "There's a dangerous cocktail of powerful landowners, sicarios [cartel hit men] and loggers," she says. "It's created a climate of terror."

The deaths of Ramos and Baldenegro came as a shock to many environmentalists in Mexico, particularly indigenous leaders facing their own battles. "It's a deadly message to all defenders of environmental rights," says Mario Luna, a leader of the Yaqui tribe in the northern state of Sonora. Luna has been fighting the state government for years over control of the Yaqui River, which has sustained his tribe for centuries. In 2010, authorities began building an aqueduct to divert millions of liters of water from the river to the state capital of Hermosillo. According to Luna, he and his tribe were not even consulted-a common problem, analysts say, for indigenous groups. "Mexico is proud of its indigenous people in museums," says Astrid Puentes, co-executive director of the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA). "But they don't care at all about their real, living indigenous communities."

Luna and his fellow Yaquis sued the state government, but despite a Supreme Court decision in their favor in 2013, the aqueduct continued pumping water to Hermosillo. Luna and other members of the tribe organized protests, but in September 2014 he was arrested and taken to prison. "Like some kind of super-terrorist," says Luna.

A year later, the charges were thrown out and Luna was released, but by then the damage was done: The time and energy it took to free him hampered efforts to protect the river, and the aqueduct is still operating. The impact on the tribe, says Luna, has been devastating. After years of water exploitation, many of the tributaries that sustained Yaqui communities are drying up. He says up to 12,000 acres of agricultural land are now unusable. The effect on the tribe's spiritual practices, which revolve around the river, has been equally destructive. "They've killed the Yaqui River," Luna says. "Now they're killing Yaqui culture."

Luna is now under the protection of the Mechanism to Protect Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, created by President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2012. Everywhere he goes, Luna now carries a panic button, a GPS-enabled device to alert authorities in case of trouble, and he also has security cameras installed in his house. "But in the end," he says, "it gives you the feeling that they're watching you and not the bad guys."

For activists like Luna and others, the real problem lies in the government's failure to properly investigate crimes against environmentalists and bring those responsible to justice. "There is no political will," says AIDA's Puentes. "Here, it's a complete and murderous silence."

Ildefonso Zamora, a leader of the indigenous Tlahuica community, has been fighting to protect the lush forests that surround his home in San Juan Atzingo, 50 miles southwest of Mexico City, since 1998. After six years campaigning to stop illegal logging in the region, Mexico's federal attorney for environmental protection began investigating the issue. That's when the death threats started. "The loggers told me they were going to hit me where it most hurts," Zamora says.

On May 15, 2007, while Zamora's sons Aldo and Misael were surveying the forest looking for illegal loggers, they were surprised by armed men who fired at them several times. Aldo, 21, was killed-Misael, just 16 at the time, was badly hurt but survived. "It was an ambush," Misael says. "Everything was planned."

The killing drew national attention, and a few weeks later, Zamora was given the Ecological Merit Award by then-President Felipe Calderón, who promised that those responsible for his son's death would be brought to justice. Still, it took three years for two of the four suspects to be arrested. "The others are still unpunished," says Zamora.

Analysts say this kind of impunity is all too common. According to the Global Impunity Index, just 4.46 percent of crimes that get reported in Mexico result in convictions. "There's a dangerous cycle of impunity and corruption," says Márquez. "All too often, sentences aren't even carried out."

Even worse, activists say, is the government's complicity in acts of intimidation. According to CEMDA's report, 43 percent of the attacks carried out against environmentalists came from the authorities themselves. Márquez admits that this too is a serious issue. "Criminalizing human rights defenders does enormous damage," she says. "We need to recognize the work that they do as contributors to our democracy." She says her team is working on a publicity campaign on social and traditional media in support of activists, as well as holding meetings with state governors to investigate the problem and try to "restore confidence in authorities."

For Zamora, however, that confidence is long gone. Eight years after his son was killed, he was arrested by state police on charges of breaking and entering and theft. He was sent to the prison in Tenancingo, a place he calls "a rat's nest." It took nine months and a sustained campaign from both Amnesty International and Greenpeace to secure his release last year: A federal judge ruled that "his human right to a presumption of innocence was violated; there is no evidence against him."

Zamora says his arrest was part of a campaign to silence him and his campaign. "Behind all of this is the government," he says. "That's who we need to be afraid of." Those efforts have worked to a degree: After so many attacks, Zamora says, he's afraid to campaign as he used to. Still, he's resolved to continue the struggle. "The forest is a legacy given to us by our ancestors," he says. "It inspires me to keep fighting."

But back in Chihuahua, the future for communities like the Tarahumara and the forests they are trying to protect is more uncertain after so many years of violence and intimidation. For José Trinidad Baldenegro, his brother's killing remains an ominous warning. "Out here," he says, "no one is safe."

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Why Mexico's environmental activists fear for their lives

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Pablo Aneli/AP "I'm in shock," says José Trinidad Baldenegro. "In despair." On the phone from the city of Chihuahua in Mexico's arid north, he's telling me about his older brother, Isidro Baldenegro López, an activist and leader of the indigenous Tarahumara people.

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With a new president in office, President Trump, there will be and already have been massive changes in the way that the country is run, and the way that our country's money is invested. In this case, Trump has proposed budget cuts in terms of environmental and scientific agencies, which could prove be a bigger issue than expected. While Obama was in office, the EPA was sued many times for the regulations that they had imposed.  It is believed that the rising carbon emissions are a big part of the current world-wide problem that is global warming. Trump's goal is to somehow come up with $54 billion dollars to put toward the Department of Defense, and unfortunately, that money is coming out of environmental efforts.

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In a sharp break with scientific consensus, the new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that carbon dioxide's role in the Earth's changing climate remains unclear.

In his previous role as Oklahoma's attorney general, Pruitt repeatedly sued the EPA over its regulations, notably the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan. Now a leading U.S. environmental official, his backpedaling claims follow reports this week of the new presidency's eagerness to deemphasize environmental regulation in its first budget-with possible big impacts. Here's a look at what that could mean for the planet and public health.

U.S. and international scientists have repeatedly connected rising carbon emissions to the Earth's changing climate. A 2014 review by the National Academy of Sciences, the United States' preeminent scientific advisory body, observed that the Earth's warming since the 1970s "is mainly a result of the increased concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases."

Yet in an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on March 9, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt muddied the waters. "I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact," he said. "So no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see."

Deep Cuts for EPA'S Budget

Pruitt's controversial comments come on the heels of reports of budget cuts to U.S. science and environmental agencies, as the Trump administration seeks to carve out $54 billion in additional annual funding for the Department of Defense.

The leaked documents are "passbacks," preliminary budget guidance from the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). They are not final budget proposals, and any final say rests with Congress, which has already expressed concern. But if the rumored cuts were to be passed, they would slash agencies' enforcement capacity, as well as cut a battery of programs, many of which directly impact public health and safety.

"Here, they're not even trying to hide anything," says Becker in a phone interview. "It's a triple whammy: cutting EPA, cutting very effective programs, and cutting substantially the state and local governmental programs."

The passback reportedly details the elimination of at least 38 different programs that Becker describes as "generally bipartisan, widely effective, [and] non-controversial"-including support for Alaskan villages threatened by climate change, water-quality tests for beaches, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces the country's most comprehensive reports on climate change's impacts on the U.S.

Most troubling, says Becker, are the more than $600 million in state grants that the EPA could lose under the proposal-at a time that Pruitt has promised will bring greater state primacy over environmental regulation.

If enacted, the cuts would come at a time of already tightened belts for the EPA. In 2016, the agency had 15,376 employees, its smallest staff since 1989, and after adjusting for inflation, today's EPA spends roughly what it did in 1987.

At 2016 levels, the cuts would fund the U.S. Department of Defense for just over 30 hours.

Targeting Climate and Weather Data

The U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a major U.S. weather and climate-science agency, is also said to face possible major cuts, to the tune of $990 million, reports the Washington Post. At 2016 levels, that 17-percent reduction would run the U.S. Department of Defense for just under 15 hours-and could hamper U.S. weather forecasting and monitoring of natural disasters, not to mention studies of climate change, say weather and climate experts.

"It's like giving a 15-year-old kid a whole bunch of coffee, and then giving them a machete and asking them to do surgery," says David Titley, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and Penn State University meteorology professor. "There's a lot of a hacking and slashing."

The passback reportedly nixes a planned $83-million NOAA ship that would have been used for widespread ocean surveys, as well as cuts the agency's $400-million Polar Follow-On program, a pair of polar-orbiting weather satellites scheduled to launch in 2024 and 2026. Another $100 million in unspecified cuts to the agency's satellite service could come at the expense of the agency's climate data centers.

"It does not mean that satellites will fall out of the sky... [but] they're really attacking NOAA's future capability, frankly, without a plan to replace it," says Titley, who served as NOAA's chief operating officer starting in 2012. "It's take-the-money-and-run."

What's more, the passback proposes a dizzying array of cuts to programs that maintain and protect the country's waterways, such as the National Ocean Service, which continually recharts the nation's ever-shifting coastlines, and a 26-percent cut to NOAA's research budget. It also proposes eliminating Sea Grant, a popular $73-million program that supports pragmatic research on the nation's bodies of water.

"We're hopeful that the administration learns more about the benefits of Sea Grant and the kinds of things it does," says Jeffrey Reutter, an Ohio State University professor who for years served as the head of Ohio's Sea Grant program. "The program does true, meaningful science that is almost immediately usable by people."

For Reutter, who has studied Lake Erie since the early 1970s, fights over the agencies' budgets are no mere abstraction. He says that if enacted, the proposed cuts to EPA and NOAA would directly harm efforts to clean up Lake Erie, which provides drinking water to some 11 million people.

The proposed EPA budget, for instance, includes a 97-percent reduction in spending to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which funds and coordinates research of lakes' ecosystems and supports efforts to restore coastal habitats. At 2016 levels, the $290-million cut would fund the U.S. Department of Defense for less than five hours.

Cuts to NOAA wouldn't help matters. Reutter says that he relies on NOAA's weather satellites for vital lakewide data, and Sea Grant, he adds, plays an important role in rehabilitating coastal habitats. In the 1980s, Sea Grant support led to the creation of artificial reefs along the city's Lake Erie coastline, recycling rubble from a demolished football stadium. The reefs have provided habitat to local fish-and have created lucrative fishing spots. As of 1992, the reefs yielded annual benefits nearly three times greater than the cost of their construction.

Rick Hobrla, an official with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality's Great Lakes Management Unit, concurs. He says that Sea Grant support is vital to educating Michigan's public about agricultural runoff, an issue of paramount importance to the Great Lakes' health.

Since the 1990s, phosphorus inputs to Lake Erie have spiked as a result of agriculture, spurring an outburst of toxic algal blooms not seen since the 1970s. The resulting threats to drinking water are real: In August 2014, the city of Toledo, Ohio, was forced to order its residents not to drink or boil the city's drinking water, after an algal bloom on Lake Erie contaminated it with the toxin microcystin.

When asked if the Trump administration's proposed cuts would increase the likelihood of Toledo-like incidents, Reutter did not mince words. "I think that's absolutely true," he says. "We can't manage, protect, and restore Lake Erie without EPA, NOAA, and Sea Grant. We just can't do it."

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What You Need to Know About Trump's Proposed Climate Cuts

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In a sharp break with scientific consensus, the new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that carbon dioxide's role in the Earth's changing climate remains unclear. In his previous role as Oklahoma's attorney general, Pruitt repeatedly sued the EPA over its regulations, notably the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan.

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While it is completely natural, normal, and expected that the Earth's magnetic field becomes weaker in the brief periods in which it switches, it has been brought to our attention that it is now growing exponentially smaller at alarming rates. At this point, considering the most recent pole reversal was some 780,000 thousand years ago, we cannot blame this on that specific event. Scientists have partially blamed this occurrence on the phenomenon called the South Atlantic Anomaly.  The South Atlantic Anomaly is defined as "an area where the Earth's inner Van Allen radiation belt comes closest to the Earth's surface, dipping down to an altitude of 200 kilometers." In order to fix this, there is hope to reverse this, and it has been shown that there may be places at the core-mantle boundaries that promote such "behavior" and reversals.

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NASA/Gary Glazmaier

This article originally was published on The Conversation.

The Earth is blanketed by a magnetic field. It's what makes compasses point north, and protects our atmosphere from continual bombardment from space by charged particles such as protons. Without a magnetic field, our atmosphere would slowly be stripped away by harmful radiation, and life would almost certainly not exist as it does today.

You might imagine the magnetic field is a timeless, constant aspect of life on Earth, and to some extent you would be right. But Earth's magnetic field actually does change. Every so often - on the order of several hundred thousand years or so - the magnetic field has flipped. North has pointed south, and vice versa. And when the field flips it also tends to become very weak.

What currently has geophysicists like us abuzz is the realization that the strength of Earth's magnetic field has been decreasing for the last 160 years at an alarming rate. This collapse is centered in a huge expanse of the Southern Hemisphere, extending from Zimbabwe to Chile, known as the South Atlantic Anomaly. The magnetic field strength is so weak there that it's a hazard for satellites that orbit above the region - the field no longer protects them from radiation which interferes with satellite electronics.

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And the field is continuing to grow weaker, potentially portending even more dramatic events, including a global reversal of the magnetic poles. Such a major change would affect our navigation systems, as well as the transmission of electricity. The spectacle of the northern lights might appear at different latitudes. And because more radiation would reach Earth's surface under very low field strengths during a global reversal, it also might affect rates of cancer. We still don't fully understand what the extent of these effects would be, adding urgency to our investigation. We're turning to some perhaps unexpected data sources, including 700-year-old African archaeological records, to puzzle it out.

Genesis of the geomagnetic field

Earth's magnetic field is created by convecting iron in our planet's liquid outer core. From the wealth of observatory and satellite data that document the magnetic field of recent times, we can model what the field would look like if we had a compass immediately above the Earth's swirling liquid iron core.
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These analyses reveal an astounding feature: There's a patch of reversed polarity beneath southern Africa at the core-mantle boundary where the liquid iron outer core meets the slightly stiffer part of the Earth's interior. In this area, the polarity of the field is opposite to the average global magnetic field. If we were able to use a compass deep under southern Africa, we would see that in this unusual patch north actually points south.

This patch is the main culprit creating the South Atlantic Anomaly. In numerical simulations, unusual patches similar to the one beneath southern Africa appear immediately prior to geomagnetic reversals.

The poles have reversed frequently over the history of the planet, but the last reversal is in the distant past, some 780,000 years ago. The rapid decay of the recent magnetic field, and its pattern of decay, naturally raises the question of what was happening prior to the last 160 years.

Archaeomagnetism takes us further back in time

In archaeomagnetic studies, geophysicists team with archaeologists to learn about the past magnetic field. For example, clay used to make pottery contains small amounts of magnetic minerals, such as magnetite. When the clay is heated to make a pot, its magnetic minerals lose any magnetism they may have held. Upon cooling, the magnetic minerals record the direction and intensity of the magnetic field at that time. If one can determine the age of the pot, or the archaeological site from which it came (using radiocarbon dating, for instance), then an archaeomagnetic history can be recovered.

Using this kind of data, we have a partial history of archaeomagnetism for the Northern Hemisphere. In contrast, the Southern Hemisphere archaeomagnetic record is scant. In particular, there have been virtually no data from southern Africa - and that's the region, along with South America, that might provide the most insight into the history of the reversed core patch creating today's South Atlantic Anomaly.

But the ancestors of today's southern Africans, Bantu-speaking metallurgists and farmers who began to migrate into the region between 2,000 and 1,500 years ago, unintentionally left us some clues. These Iron Age people lived in huts built of clay, and stored their grain in hardened clay bins. As the first agriculturists of the Iron Age of southern Africa, they relied heavily on rainfall.

The communities often responded to times of drought with rituals of cleansing that involved burning mud granaries. This somewhat tragic series of events for these people was ultimately a boon many hundreds of years later for archaeomagnetism. Just as in the case of the firing and cooling of a pot, the clay in these structures recorded Earth's magnetic field as they cooled. Because the floors of these ancient huts and grain bins can sometimes be found intact, we can sample them to obtain a record of both the direction and strength of their contemporary magnetic field. Each floor is a small magnetic observatory, with its compass frozen in time immediately after burning.

With our colleagues, we've focused our sampling on Iron Age village sites that dot the Limpopo River Valley, bordered today by Zimbabwe to the north, Botswana to the west and South Africa to the south.

Magnetic field in flux

Sampling at Limpopo River Valley locations has yielded the first archaeomagnetic history for southern Africa between A.D. 1000 and 1600. What we found reveals a period in the past, near A.D. 1300, when the field in that area was decreasing as rapidly as it is today. Then the intensity increased, albeit at a much slower rate.

The occurrence of two intervals of rapid field decay - one 700 years ago and one today - suggests a recurrent phenomenon. Could the reversed flux patch presently under South Africa have happened regularly, further back in time than our records have shown? If so, why would it occur again in this location?

Over the last decade, researchers have accumulated images from the analyses of earthquakes' seismic waves. As seismic shear waves move through the Earth's layers, the speed with which they travel is an indication of the density of the layer. Now we know that a large area of slow seismic shear waves characterizes the core mantle boundary beneath southern Africa.

This particular region underneath southern Africa has the somewhat wordy title of the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province. While many wince at the descriptive but jargon-rich name, it is a profound feature that must be tens of millions of years old. While thousands of kilometers across, its boundaries are sharp. Interestingly, the reversed core flux patch is nearly coincident with its eastern edge.

The fact that the present-day reversed core patch and the edge of the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province are physically so close got us thinking. We've come up with a model linking the two phenomena. We suggest that the unusual African mantle changes the flow of iron in the core underneath, which in turn changes the way the magnetic field behaves at the edge of the seismic province, and leads to the reversed flux patches.

We speculate that these reversed core patches grow rapidly and then wane more slowly. Occasionally one patch may grow large enough to dominate the magnetic field of the Southern Hemisphere - and the poles reverse.

The conventional idea of reversals is that they can start anywhere in the core. Our conceptual model suggests there may be special places at the core-mantle boundary that promote reversals. We do not yet know if the current field is going to reverse in the next few thousand years, or simply continue to weaken over the next couple of centuries.

But the clues provided by the ancestors of modern-day southern Africans will undoubtedly help us to further develop our proposed mechanism for reversals. If correct, pole reversals may be "Out of Africa."

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Here's how scientists are tracking the dangerous weakening of Earth's magnetic field

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This article originally was published on The Conversation. The Earth is blanketed by a magnetic field. It's what makes compasses point north, and protects our atmosphere from continual bombardment from space by charged particles such as protons. Without a magnetic field, our atmosphere would slowly be stripped away by harmful radiation, and life would almost certainly not exist as it does today.