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Trump’s Stance on the Paris Climate Agreement is Criticized by 375 Scientists

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Trump’s Stance on the Paris Climate Agreement is Criticized by 375 Scientists

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As I sit here typing this, I happen to be one of the millions Americans that is remarkably stressed about the results of tonight's presidential election between Our Lady Of Perpetual Pantsuits and The Yelling Tangerine Man. Thus, writing about the fact that 375 scientists felt compelled to address a letter to the latter of the two criticizing anything at all about him is almost therapeutic. Now then, as a quick refresher, I would like to remind whoever has taken time out of their day to read this (by the way, thanks!) that the Paris Climate Agreement is defined by the European Commission as an "...agreement sets out a global action plan to put the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C." Basically, it's a plan to ensure that climate change becomes less of a problem so that we can avoid a bunch of problems. Now, this entire ordeal can be tied to Mr. Trump because of the fact that he has stated quite clearly that if he were to be elected, he do everything that he could to pull the US out of it. Not only is that downright stupid in terms of how detrimental that could be for the fate of the world, but it is also certainly worth pointing out that the Paris Climate Agreement does not actually bind the United States to do anything at all; it's really just a formality. Nevertheless, Trump wants to put an end to it, and 375 scientists would definitely rather that he not. Hopefully, we'll never have to worry about what Trump would do in lieu of climate change. But if we should have to, then it would be important to note that since the US is a significant contributor to climate change, it would only make sense that we do our best to reduce it. After all, this is the only planet Earth we've got, so we had better take care of it.

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Yesterday, 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, posted an open letter reviewing the basics of established climate science, decrying claims of hoax and hype spouted by Republicans during the presidential campaign and warning against the United States pulling out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Although it did not name him, the letter was aimed squarely at Donald J. Trump. Trump has said he would "cancel" the climate deal if elected and starkly flip-flopped in his campaign from a past stance calling for such action.

Trump's call for pulling out of the agreement is pretty weird for such a supposed master of the deal, given that nothing in the pact legally binds the United States to take steps on emissions or climate aid. But of course that kind of detail doesn't matter in tribal politics.

Notably, at the United Nations this morning, 31 countries "deposited instruments" acceding to the agreement, bringing the total to 60 since its approval with a gavel stroke in Paris in December. United Nations officials tallied sufficient oral commitments today to bring the agreement into effect before the end of the year:

Latest #ParisAgreement tally. @UN officials say oral commitments today guarantee it goes into force this year.... https://t.co/VckDlCcvPA

- Andy Revkin (@Revkin) 21 Sep 16

The two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, China and the United States, joined officially on September 3 as President Obama and China's President Xi Jinping signed documents during Obama's most recent China visit.

As I've stressed before, this is both a remarkable achievement, gauged through the lens of diplomacy, and a largely inconsequential one, gauged from the standpoint of the atmosphere. There remains a huge " reality gap " between the wishful greenhouse-gas emissions projections used to determine whether the agreement can avoid dangerous warming and the global capacity to cut emissions even as human energy needs continue to surge in coming decades.

I'll be writing more on next steps under the Paris Agreement soon. In the meantime, read " The Paris Agreement and the inherent inconsistency of climate policymaking," an invaluable analysis by Oliver Geden for Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews - Climate Change. (The publisher is providing free access for a few weeks.) Geden heads a research division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

I encourage you to read the scientists' climate letter in full. (The authors stress it was not organized or endorsed by the National Academy.)

This isn't the first time there's been such an effort. Six years ago, after hundreds of climate researchers' email exchanges were posted online, fueling conservative lawmakers' attempts to challenge climate science, 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences signed a letter defending the integrity of research pointing to dangerous global warming.

But this is the first such letter in the heat of a presidential campaign. The drafting of the new letter was led by two climate researchers, Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two astrophysicists, George Field of Harvard and Ray Weymann, who is retired from the Carnegie Institution and devotes much of his time these days to climate change education.

Here's their prime point about the Paris agreement:

[I]t is of great concern that the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord. A "Parexit" would send a clear signal to the rest of the world: "The United States does not care about the global problem of human-caused climate change. You are on your own." Such a decision would make it far more difficult to develop effective global strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change. The consequences of opting out of the global community would be severe and long-lasting - for our planet's climate and for the international credibility of the United States.

The United States can and must be a major player in developing innovative solutions to the problem of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Nations that find innovative ways of decarbonizing energy systems and sequestering CO2 will be the economic leaders of the 21st century. Walking away from Paris makes it less likely that the U.S. will have a global leadership role, politically, economically, or morally. We cannot afford to cross that tipping point.

Will it make a difference to voters who are so disengaged that they have not already locked in on a candidate?

I doubt it. But it never hurts to try. And, as I've written before, scientists have every right to express their views as citizens.

Is there any chance Trump might shape shift to some stance on climate science and policy remotely connected to reality?

Searching for hints, I clicked to the welcome effort by the organization Science Debate to engage the four presidential candidates' campaign teams on 20 science questions, if not an actual science debate. The questions, on everything from climate and nuclear energy to vaccines and science education, are great and answers range from vexing to exciting.

Here's the Science Debate climate question:

The Earth's climate is changing and political discussion has become divided over both the science and the best response. What are your views on climate change, and how would your administration act on those views?

Think of Trump's stump rhetoric, full of definitive superlatives, as you read this bizarrely wishy-washy response:

There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of "climate change." Perhaps the best use of our limited financial resources should be in dealing with making sure that every person in the world has clean water. Perhaps we should focus on eliminating lingering diseases around the world like malaria. Perhaps we should focus on efforts to increase food production to keep pace with an ever-growing world population. Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels. We must decide on how best to proceed so that we can make lives better, safer and more prosperous.

So is there a chance he'd shift?

Perhaps.

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united nations framework convention on climate change

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Trump's Stance on the Paris Climate Agreement is Criticized by 375 Scientists

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Yesterday, 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, posted an open letter reviewing the basics of established climate science, decrying claims of hoax and hype spouted by Republicans during the presidential campaign and warning against the United States pulling out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

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If for some reason you have chose to completely disregard logic, scientific evidence, and a myriad of experts and not believe in climate change, then you're definitely not going to like this next one. Here's the honest truth: climate change is a real problem, and it's about to get a whole lot bigger. According to Scott Waldman of the Scientific American, if Earth were to get warmer by even 2 degrees Celsius, then the global sea levels will rise faster than humans have ever seen. As someone who lives in New Jersey, this would have a particularly large impact on me, because the predictions from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has stated that the Atlantic coast of North America is going to really see firsthand just how drastic this change will be. Now, you may be wondering why the distribution isn't going to be uniform across the planet, and the answer to that is twofold. For one thing, gravity plays a major role. But it's mostly just the movement of the ocean that really has a say in how the water is currently and will soon be distributed across this planet. Now, as far as just how soon this will happen, the answer is really that it all depends on what we do to stop or, at the very least, decrease the rate at which Earth's climate is changing. If people either refuse to acknowledge climate change or just decide to do nothing about it, then we could be seeing a dramatic rise as soon as 2040. Scientists also predict that depending upon how we act, by the year 2100, sea levels could rise anywhere from 11 inches to 38 inches. As is per usual, the real message here is that we absolutely have to do something about the state of our world if we wish to continue to comfortably inhabit it

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Sea levels across the globe will rise faster than at any time throughout human history if the Earth's warming continues beyond 2 degrees Celsius.

The Atlantic coast of North America will be one of the worst-hit areas as melting glaciers cause the sea level to rise over the next century, a new study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds.

However, that rise is not expected to be uniform, as gravity and the movement of the ocean will play a role in how the water is distributed, and some areas will be hit worse than others. New York and other cities along the East Coast could see seas rise by more than 3 feet by the end of the century if the Earth warms by 4 or 5 degrees beyond preindustrial levels.

If the rate of carbon emissions continues unabated, the authors said, the globe would warm by 2 degrees and cause significant sea-level rise by 2040. It would be worse along the East Coast of North America and Norway, which are expected to experience a sea-level rise of about a foot. The relative speed of the sea's rise means many areas won't have time to adapt, researchers found. And from there, warming would accelerate even faster.

"The coastal communities of rapidly expanding cities in the developing world and vulnerable tropical coastal ecosystems will have a very limited time to adapt to sea-level rises after the '2 degrees Celsius' threshold is likely to be reached," said Svetlana Jevrejeva, a researcher at the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool, England, and lead author of the study.

The sea-level rise comes as the Earth's record-breaking warmth is expected to become the "new normal," according to another study published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. While 2015 was the hottest year on record, it could be the average within the next decade if carbon emissions continue to rise at their current rate, it found. And even if countries take action to limit carbon dioxide, humanity may have already locked in the increased warmth by 2040.

But limiting emissions now will mean some of the regions of the globe are not locked in for the new levels of warmth, and that they can still have significant variability.

"It gives us hope to know that if we act quickly to reduce greenhouse gases, seasonal extremes might never enter a new normal state in the 21st century at regional levels for the Southern Hemisphere summer and Northern Hemisphere winter," said Sophie Lewis, a researcher at the Australian National University.

Millions of urban dwellers at risk

Nations that signed the Paris Agreement limiting warming to a maximum of 2 degrees are meeting this week in Morocco to put the accord into motion. Meanwhile, the United Nations has already cautioned that the emission targets countries voluntarily set may not be strict enough to meet the 2-degree goal.

Two degrees of warming is expected to cause an average global sea-level rise of 8 inches, but virtually all coastal areas will see more of a rise, Jevrejeva found. If warming exceeds 2 degrees by 2100, as some climate scientists worry it might, about 80 percent of the global coastline could experience a rise in sea levels of 6 feet. Such a rapid rise in sea levels is unprecedented since the dawn of the Bronze Age about 5,000 years ago, according to the study.

The research takes further the potential for sea-level rise posed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which argued that sea-level rise of 11 to 38 inches is possible by 2100. Many climate scientists have since claimed that estimate is too conservative.

Absent a concerted effort to limit warming, cities and island nations across the globe are at risk, researchers found.

"Coastal communities, notably rapidly expanding cities in the developing world; small island states; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Cultural World Heritage sites; and vulnerable tropical coastal ecosystems will have a very limited time after midcentury to adapt to these rises," they wrote.

The rise for New York is predicated on a warming of 5 degrees by 2100, which some researchers have contested may be too high. But at the upper scale of that level of warming, tens of millions of people around the world would be displaced. That includes "2.5 million living in low-lying areas of Miami; 2.1 million in Guangzhou [in China]; 1.8 million in Mumbai; and more than 1 million each in Osaka [in Japan], Tokyo, New Orleans, New York, and [Vietnam's] Ho Chi Minh City," researchers contended.

The study is part of a growing body of research that looks for possible scenarios that involve the potential for catastrophic sea-level rise, but more attention should be paid to the loss of land ice, as well, said Tad Pfeffer, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. While researchers typically focus on the loss of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland, the loss of land ice in other spots across the globe is now contributing to sea-level rise at almost the same rate as the Arctic's melting ice, he said. It's the full scope of the current glacial loss that concerns political leaders and policymakers because it has already presented a pressing need to be addressed, he said.

"This near-term time scale is the time of greatest concern to decisionmakers," he said. "Research that reaches out to 2100 and beyond is scientifically exciting, but really of secondary importance to the people who are trying to make sense of the science for decisionmaking."
Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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Sea levels across the globe will rise faster than at any time throughout human history if the Earth's warming continues beyond 2 degrees Celsius. The Atlantic coast of North America will be one of the worst-hit areas as melting glaciers cause the sea level to rise over the next century, a new study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds.

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Antarctica's Ice Sheets Are Melting Faster — And From Beneath

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Antarctica's Ice Sheets Are Melting Faster — And From Beneath

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A certain man by the name of Donald Trump may not believe what I'm about to say, but that definitely doesn't mean that it isn't true: climate change is very real, and it's causing some serious problems, especially in particular areas of the world. For the purpose of this assignment, I'm going to focus on Antarctica. Now, in case you've lived under a rock for your entire life, allow me to quickly point out that Antarctica is ridiculously cold and covered in ice. To be clear, when I say covered, I don't just mean a little layer on top or just on the top or something - I mean that this continent is surrounded by a layer of ice that can be as deep as 1 mile. The thing is pretty much ice-olated (insert optional rimshot here if you're a fellow connoisseur of particularly terrible puns. If not, then I am so, so sorry).Anyways, the big thing here is that as you might have already known, climate change means rising temperatures, and rising temperatures means than ice will melt. What's unexpected about the whole ordeal is that currently, it seems that the ice in Antarctica is going for a personal best in terms of how quickly it can melt. Now, I take it you have lived through the sad polar bear ads too many times for it to be an okay thing for me to bring up, but since there's plenty of other problems to discuss, that's just fine. For one thing, the more ice melts, the more ice is then in turn exposed to warm water. To recap, warm means melting, and the cycle essentially repeats itself at a quicker rate. In addition to that, there appears to be no rewind button for this, and things are only predicted to get much, much worse form here. As a matter of fact, there is a very real and incredibly justified fear among scientists that eventually, Antarctica's ice shelves will just say "forget this" and collapse, causing massive glaciers to flow into the earth's oceans. At this point in time, scientists aren't entirely sure what sorts of consequences an event like this would bring, which is perhaps what makes it so terrifying a thing to think about. In short, we need to do something about the state of our planet's climate so that we never have to actually find out.

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Antarctica's ice has been melting, most likely because of a warming climate. Now, newly published research shows the rate of melting appears to be accelerating.

Antarctica is bigger than the U.S. and Mexico combined, and it's covered in deep ice - more than a mile deep in some places. Most of the ice sits on bedrock, but it slowly flows off the continent's edges. Along the western edge, giant glaciers creep down toward the sea. Where they meet the ocean, they form ice shelves.

The shelves are the specialty of Ala Khazendar, a geophysicist and polar expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"You have this floating plate of ice being fed by the glaciers flowing from the interior of the continent," he says, "while having ocean water underneath it." He calls the shelves "the gates of Antarctica."

Although the shelves float, they're still connected to the mainland. The point at which the ice shelf is no longer supported by bedrock is called the "grounding line."

A team from JPL has been studying that grounding line in several places along the edge of the West Antarctic ice sheet. They used radar to look beneath the ice. In particular, overflights have targeted ice shelves along the West Antarctic ice sheet known as the Amundsen Sea Embayment.

They've found that the ice is melting faster than they've ever seen. The researchers believe the cause is warm water circulating beneath the ice shelf. The melting was most pronounced from 2002 to 2009. (The influx of warmer water to the region stalled recently, and the rate of melting seems to have slowed somewhat.)

Khazendar says the more the bottom of the shelves melt, the more ice is exposed to warm water. "It becomes a runaway process," he explains, "which makes it unstable."

Where's the warmer water coming from? The team, whose findings appear in the journal Nature Communications, points to global warming that's heating up the oceans. There's been a spate of research lately showing that Antarctic ice is melting faster than previously thought - and raising global sea levels.

Khazendar says the melting process appears to be irreversible. Polar scientists fear that at some point, the shelves will collapse and Antarctica's glaciers will flow into the sea. As to whether and when that might happen?

"The simple answer is we don't know. And that's the scary part," Khazendar says.

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Antarctica's Ice Sheets Are Melting Faster - And From Beneath

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Antarctica's ice has been melting, most likely because of a warming climate. Now, newly published research shows the rate of melting appears to be accelerating. Antarctica is bigger than the U.S. and Mexico combined, and it's covered in deep ice - more than a mile deep in some places.

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Early 20th Century Earthquakes May Have Been Caused By Calif. Oil Boom

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Early 20th Century Earthquakes May Have Been Caused By Calif. Oil Boom

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Ah yes, everyone's favorite terrifying natural disaster, the earthquake. While typically viewed as unpredictable, unavoidable, and altogether a somewhat random occurrence, Susan E. Hough and Morgan Page have gathered some research  that would completely negate that idea when it comes to several larger earthquakes that took place in  California in the early 20th century. Both members of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), these women found that out of the 22 most widely felt earthquakes at the time, at least 13 could more than likely be largely attributed to the drilling for oil deep within the earth during the oil boom going on in the 1920s and 1930s. The takeaway from this is ultimately that even though some things cannot be controlled by humans, we have a bigger, and sometimes much more dangerous, role in what happens in and to the world than we would think. Therefore, it is our responsibility as beings who inhabit this precious earth to do right by it, to protect it, to help it in any way that we can, and to cause as little damage as possible. After all, not every planet can put up with us!

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A new study suggests some Los Angeles-area earthquakes in the 1920s and 1930s could have been caused by the oil boom at the time.

The paper, scheduled to be published online Tuesday in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, presents evidence that drilling around Los Angeles between 1915 and 1932 could have been associated with damaging earthquakes in the area, including the magnitude 6.4 Long Beach quake in 1933 that killed 120 people.

Although the modern practice of hydraulic fracturing has been tied to small man-made earthquakes, right off the bat, the study authors - Susan E. Hough and Morgan Page of the U.S. Geological Survey - make clear this is not a study to draw lessons from today. The authors write in the opening paragraph:

"Our results suggest that significant earthquakes in Southern California during the early twentieth century might have been associated with industry practices that are no longer employed (i.e., production without water reinjection), and do not necessarily imply a high likelihood of induced earthquakes at the present time."

As the Los Angeles Times points out, "Nowadays, water is carefully used to replace the pumped-out oil, which prevents land from sinking and also helps extract more oil," something that was not being done in the '20s and '30s in the oil fields of the Los Angeles basin.

Rather than a model for the present, the new paper is a lens through which to view the seismic past of Southern California, using scientific history.

The authors note that earthquake-sensing technology was neither as sensitive nor as widespread in the early 20th century as it is today. Most earthquakes in the Los Angeles basin in the first third of the century "caused light shaking reported by at most a few witnesses," they write.

A few witnesses are not the most reliable source of data, so Hough and Page limited themselves only to the 22 biggest, most widely felt earthquakes of the period, and compared those quakes to oil industry records from the time.

Of those earthquakes, they found 13 possibly or likely were associated with "oil production activities," including the drilling of deeper and deeper oil wells near hidden faults that are known to cause earthquakes. The authors based their findings on the best information available about when and where the earthquakes and drilling occurred and the kind of drilling being conducted.

Last year, Hough and Page published evidence that midcentury earthquakes in Oklahoma were triggered by the injection of wastewater during oil production in that part of the country. That historical finding was more relevant to today's oil production activities than the California data. The USGS announced earlier this year that pumping wastewater underground during oil production has caused parts of Oklahoma to be as seismically active as parts of California.

Hough and Page used a similar historical record analysis for the Oklahoma and California papers, but Thomas Heaton, director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, told NPR he thought the Oklahoma research was more convincing than the new California findings.

"There is a long history of earthquakes being triggered by increased fluid pressure," he wrote in an email after reviewing the new paper. "Although we don't understand [the association] very well, it's as close as our community gets to consensus that fluid induction triggers earthquakes."

"The tricky part of the equation in California is that earthquakes occur regularly without fluid injection," he wrote.

He did not go so far as to call into question the associations suggested by the paper - he thought it's certainly possible that oil drilling played a part in some or all of the earthquakes Hough and Page identified. But it's hard to be sure about the reason for any one quake.

"It would be no surprise to discover that some of our California earthquakes were triggered by oil production," Heaton wrote. "What would be surprising would be to discover that a team of scientists was able to present a compelling case that it had occurred in any particular example (e.g. 1933 Long Beach)."

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Early 20th Century Earthquakes May Have Been Caused By Calif. Oil Boom

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A new study suggests some Los Angeles-area earthquakes in the 1920s and 1930s could have been caused by the oil boom at the time. The paper, scheduled to be published online Tuesday in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, presents evidence that drilling around Los Angeles between 1915 and 1932 could have been associated with damaging earthquakes in the area, including the magnitude 6.4 Long Beach quake in 1933 that killed 120 people.

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300 Million Children Are Breathing 'Extremely Toxic' Air, UNICEF Says

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300 Million Children Are Breathing 'Extremely Toxic' Air, UNICEF Says

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The phrase "Think of the children!" seems more often than not to be used in an almost mocking sort of tone when you need a little extra oomph to fully emphasize how dramatic a particular individual or situation is. But when it comes to dealing with real problems that affect millions of people worldwide, it is really quite imperative that we consider the children. In a general sense, they are our future. The kid who's sucking on their thumb today will someday be where I am, and where you are as well, dear reader. That is, if they can make it that far. Obviously, anything that negatively concerns the health of children is something that people would probably rather not think about, but the fact of the matter is this: UNICEF has stated that around the world, approximately 300 million children are breathing what they have classified as highly toxic air. Other than the obvious negative effects this can have on developing respiratory and cardiovascular systems, this also affects other things, such as how often a child can attend school, or later in life, how often they are able to go to work and support themselves. You see, some children may be set up for not even being able to attend school, something that I definitely take for granted, because of complications that may arise from health conditions brought on by extreme air pollution. But that is far from close to the worst part of this. UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake has come forth and stated that "Air pollution is a major contributing factor in the deaths of around 600,000 children under five every year..." That means that these kids will not even get the chance to think about an education, or much of a life at all, before they are taken away from the world because of deplorable air conditions. The takeaway from this is grim and glaring: something must be done about the state of air conditions around the world, and it must be done soon

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Some 300 million children around the world are breathing highly toxic air, according to a new report from UNICEF.

The report, which uses satellite imagery to determine the impacted areas, says these children live in places "where outdoor air pollution exceeds international guidelines by at least six times." Altogether, it states, some 2 billion children are breathing air that has been deemed a "long term hazard," exceeding minimum standards set by the World Health Organization.

"Air pollution is a major contributing factor in the deaths of around 600,000 children under five every year - and it threatens the lives and futures of millions more every day," UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in a statement. "Pollutants don't only harm children's developing lungs - they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains - and, thus, their futures. No society can afford to ignore air pollution."

The report says poor air quality can have an outsize impact on children: Their lungs are still developing; their respiratory airways are more prone to blockages; they "breathe twice as fast, taking in more air per unit of body weight, compared to adults."

The impact of living in a place with poor air quality extends far beyond childhood. As the report states, "studies have shown that the lung capacity of children living in polluted environments can be reduced by 20 per cent - similar to the effect of growing up in a home with secondhand cigarette smoke."

Here's more from the report on the impact:

"The combination of respiratory, cardiovascular, cognitive, morbidity and reproductive health effects of air pollution have biological as well as social and economic effects that last a lifetime. These include health conditions, school attendance, school performance, health costs and productivity, which affect income, poverty and inequalities. Air pollution, through its massive and cumulative impact on the overall health and well-being of children and parents, can perpetuate intergenerational cycles of inequality."

Both outdoor air pollution (such as pollution from a factory) and indoor air pollution (such as smoke from solid fuels used in cooking) are causing damage to children's health, the report finds. Outdoor air pollution is worse in "lower-income, urban communities," while indoor air pollution is more prolific in "lower-income, rural areas." At the same time, the report states that it can be difficult to tease out the impact of each, because individuals are constantly moving between the two environments.

The problem is getting worse because of industrialization, based on current projections. "Unless action is taken to control outdoor air pollution, studies show that outdoor air pollution will become the leading cause of environment-related child death by 2050," the report states.

"South Asia has the largest number of children living in these areas, at 620 million, with Africa following at 520 million children," according to UNICEF. "The East Asia and Pacific region has 450 million children living in areas that exceed guideline limits."

A recent World Health Organization report said 92 percent of the world's population breathes air containing dangerous levels of pollutants.

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300 Million Children Are Breathing 'Extremely Toxic' Air, UNICEF Says

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Some 300 million children around the world are breathing highly toxic air, according to a new report from UNICEF. The report, which uses satellite imagery to determine the impacted areas, says these children live in places "where outdoor air pollution exceeds international guidelines by at least six times."

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Giant Snowballs Wash Up On Siberian Beach

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Giant Snowballs Wash Up On Siberian Beach

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If you're someone who, thus far, has had as mild an autumn as I have, then the very idea of snow seems just obscene at this point. Over in Siberia, that is clearly not the case. In fact, snow is just straight up washing up on Siberian shores, and according to BBC and NPR, this has been happening for a good two weeks as I sit here typing this. Reportedly,  these snowballs that are surely the dream of anybody looking to dominate on the next snow day started off as nothing more than a teeny-tiny piece of ice. After being rolled again and again by wind and water, they become the magnificent things that have captured the attention of many. And what's perhaps even crazier is that this is far from the first time that something like this has happened. In fact, giant snowballs have been known to occasionally wash up on the shores of Lake Michigan, too! Basically, snow has been brought up to the shore as opposed to falling down from above, and people are just really excited.

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There were snowy, icy balls everywhere.

Videos and photos from western Siberia, on the Gulf of Ob, showed an entire beach covered in snowballs that had apparently washed ashore. In one image published online by the Siberian Times, a woman sat on the frozen balls. In another, a dog ran near the balls, which had also formed what looked like a vertical mass of balls mashed together into an icy ball-wall.

The BBC reports that the balls started washing up about two weeks ago. They're strung along some 11 miles of coast and are said to range from about the size of a tennis ball up to almost 3 feet across.

Here's a video of the beach shot by someone named Valery Togo, who told the Russian news site Vesti Yamal that he lives in the nearby town of Nyda, which is on the Yamal Peninsula just above the Arctic Circle.

The BBC reports the chilled orbs that washed ashore "result from a rare environmental process where small pieces of ice form, are rolled by wind and water, and end up as giant snowballs." It adds:

"Russian TV quoted an explanation from Sergei Lisenkov, press secretary of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute:

" 'As a rule, first there is a primary natural phenomenon - sludge ice, slob ice. Then comes a combination of the effects of the wind, the lay of the coastline, and the temperature and wind conditions.'

" 'It can be such an original combination that it results in the formation of balls like these.' "

The Collins English Dictionary defines "slob ice" as "sludgy masses of floating ice" in Canadian English.

Rare and original as the ball-forming process might be, this is not the first time humans have witnessed these globular creations. In 2010, a Chicago Tribune video showed snowballs that washed up along Lake Michigan.

In 2015, a man waded into the water - again in Lake Michigan - to heft a couple of frozen balls himself, and videotaped it. He and other witnesses to the snowball phenomenon have noted that the main body of water is not frozen even though the balls are.

That same year, waves of icy spheres turned a Maine lake into an undulating ball-mass, captured on video by a Facebook user called Stone Point Studio.

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Giant Snowballs Wash Up On Siberian Beach

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There were snowy, icy balls everywhere. Videos and photos from western Siberia, on the Gulf of Ob, showed an entire beach covered in snowballs that had apparently washed ashore. In one image published online by the Siberian Times, a woman sat on the frozen balls.