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At the top of a 50 foot cliff in the Bahamas lies a common tourist spot -- two extremely large boulders. For decades, scientists have wrestled with the question of how they got there, but the solution may have just been found. After running data, is believed that these rocks may have landed there during a period of time around 100,000 years ago, when global temperatures were high, sea levels were too, and storms were violent enough to throw boulders from the sea as large as these. This idea is scary to a world with a rapidly heating climate, and it acts as a warning to avoid the Earth to going back to that state.

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Atop a jagged, 50-foot-high cliff on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera sit two enormous boulders known as "The Cow and the Bull." Each is several times taller than a person; the squatter and wider of the two, the "Bull," weighs around a thousand tons. The boulders are a tourist attraction, but in recent years, they've become much more than that - a scientific mystery that has been scrutinized because of the lessons it could hold about climate change.

Scientists don't know for sure how these boulders got to their exceptional location - they couldn't have rolled uphill to the top of the cliff; there's no higher cliff from which they could have fallen - but they suspect it has something to do with the Atlantic Ocean far below them.

One possible explanation has frightening implications for the present. Two years ago, climate scientist James Hansen, drawing on the work of the geologist Paul Hearty, a retired research associate professor at the University of North Carolina, suggested they had been put in placeby catastrophic superstorms more than 100,000 years ago at a time of higher seas and dangerous weather dynamics. These conditions, Hansen fears, could return again if polar ice sheets melt rapidly, upending ocean circulation and potentially causing a host of other difficult-to-predict scenarios.

A new scientific study, however, counters that while the boulders were indeed probably put in place by violent waves long ago, it wouldn't have required superstorms to get them there. The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents work by Alessio Rovere of the University of Bremen and the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research and his colleagues. It suggests that even storms of today's strength could have moved the boulders - at least back when seas were 20 to 30 feet higher, as they were during part of the Eemian warm period, circa 125,000 years ago.

The new study, though, could hardly be called good news for those who will live with the consequences of climate change. It uses the boulders to underscore the lesson that as seas rise once again in our future, they will be able to unleash even more of the ocean's destructive power upon present-day human structures. Storms won't even need to have stronger winds - the oceans will do much of the work.

"As soon as you start rising sea level, you have higher energies on that cliff," said Rovere, who conducted the new research with nine other scientists at institutions in Germany, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands.

The controversy over Eleuthera's boulders underscores just how little we know about how the oceans will react to climate change. The seas are rising, but only relatively slowly so far - we don't know how much this could speed up. And as they warm up they may also foster more intense hurricanes or perhaps even other kinds of large storm systems.

Early reaction to Monday's paper, however, suggests the ongoing debate over the mysterious boulders of Eleuthera is unlikely to end soon.

Hearty and Hansen believe that during a period of dynamic climate transition over 100,000 years ago, enormous storm waves swept the boulders upward from a lower and older cliff face. Other boulders on the island of Eleuthera, Hearty suggests, were carried even farther afield.

Hearty believes this is part of a "trilogy" of evidence of disastrous change on Eleuthera at the time. He also argues that the fossil remnants of small bubbles from vast waves were left as high as 80 feet above sea level on the island, and that long and pointed rock walls farther inland, which Hearty calls "chevrons," represent ancient sand dumps from these waves. (Hearty summarized all the evidence in a recent paper that can be read here.)

Rovere and his colleagues traveled to Eleuthera in 2016 hoping to investigate Hearty's hypothesis, and to add some mathematics and computing power to the endeavor. So they used photographic tools and samples to estimate the weight of the rocks (the Cow, they found, weighs 383 tons; the Bull they estimated at 925), and boat measurements to determine the shape of the seafloor offshore, which drops off quickly into very deep waters - a phenomenon that helps the ocean funnel its energy at the cliff.

Then, the researchers ran simulations of a variety of storms hitting the cliff with different sea levels superimposed. And they found that with Eemian sea levels, the smaller rock, the Cow, could be moved by waves moving around 20 mph or more - while at around 25 mph and higher, the same applies to the Bull. (The study assumed the boulders had stood on the edge of the cliff and were moved inland to their current position, which is contrary to Hearty's idea that they were moved from a considerably lower position.)

Depending on varying sea levels, the study found that Hurricane Andrew of 1992 and Superstorm Sandy of 2012 produced waves powerful and fast moving enough to move the boulders. (In fact, with present-day sea level, the study suggests that smaller boulders on Eleuthera were indeed moved by Hurricane Andrew.)

However, three experts on the geology of the Bahamas - including Hearty - contested aspects of the new work, while praising some others.

Hearty said the new work "contains important technical observations that shed some light on the physical characteristics and mechanisms of transport of the megaboulders," and noted that it "supports wave transport of the boulders by storms, as we have maintained since 1998, despite many challenges."

But he noted that the boulders are only one part of the evidence that he has adduced to support the superstorm hypothesis. And he posed this question: If storms of the present are powerful enough to move rocks this big, "then why aren't there many Holocene [the current geologic era] and historical boulders at lower elevations as large as the megaboulders?"

John Mylroie, a geologist at Mississippi State University who has also studied the rocks, added that during the Eemian period long ago, the cliff face was different than at present - jutting farther out into the sea, and with higher cliffs - which he believes poses a problem for the calculations.

"The authors have accounted for the +6 m sea level position 120,000 years ago, but not for how the coastline was configured at that time," said Mylroie by email. This means, he said, that "more energy would have been needed than they calculated."

Pascal Kindler, a field geologist at the University of Geneva who has studied the rocks, also questioned the analysis. On the one hand, he noted that the Bull is actually made up of three separate boulders on top of one another, which might have been easier to move than the study supposes. But at the same time, he argued (like Hearty does) that the rocks come from an older and lower cliff face, rather than the cliff edge - making them even harder to move.

"It means that the flow velocity required to lift these boulders must be greater than that calculated by Rovere et al.," Kindler said.

(Not that Mylroie or Kindler agree with the superstorm hypothesis: Mylroie has suggested that the rocks could have been created by erosion and weathering, and Kindler thinks that a large collapse of the seafloor offshore could have created a mini-tsunami that did the work of lifting the boulders.)

Asked about what it would mean if the rocks indeed came from farther below, Rovere answered that "we would probably need higher flows."

But he added that "based on what we observe basically everywhere in the Caribbean, there is no other evidence that a boulder has been taken from the base of even a small cliff and brought up, surpassing an entire cliff."

Clearly, the origin of the boulders remains debated. Nobody, though, seems to be contesting the main punchline of the current study - as seas rise, so do our risks from damaging ocean waves hurled by storms.

"If you raise sea level, you will have more energy on cliff and coastal barriers," said Rovere. "That's the real problem we will have to deal with if sea level keeps rising."
Read more at Energy & Environment: New science suggests the ocean could rise more - and faster - than we thought That's heavy: Climate-change warnings include rising seas and wild weather shifts. But giant flying boulders? We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet's future For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.

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Ancient storms could have hurled huge boulders, scientists say - raising new fears of rising seas

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Atop a jagged, 50-foot-high cliff on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera sit two enormous boulders known as "The Cow and the Bull." Each is several times taller than a person; the squatter and wider of the two, the "Bull," weighs around a thousand tons.

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This video from the Wall Street Journal highlights why Hurricane Harvey was as devastating as it was to Houston. The video begins by stating that most storms quickly move off the coast at which they first hit, but Harvey was different and stayed inland for a very long period of time. Houston also lies very low in altitude, which does not help at all with drainage. To further worsen drainage issues, Houston has not been careful with preserving its swamp-land, and has allowed for a lot of laying down of asphalt. This means that the only place that the water has left to go is the residential streets. All of these factors contributed to the making of "the 800 year flood".

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The Science of Why Harvey Was So Devastating for Texas

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Tropical Storm Harvey dumped record rainfall along the Texas coast, and Houston was among the hardest hit areas. Here's the science of why Harvey had such a catastrophic impact. Photo: NASA

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According to a recent study published in the Lancet Scientific journal, pollution kills about 9 million people worldwide each year.  These deaths are the result of dirty air in China and India, tainted water in sub-Saharan Africa, toxic mining conditions in South America, as well as many other things. These 9 million deaths related to pollution are more per year than deaths caused by HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis combined. These numbers are quite astounding, and according to environmental expert Gina McCarthy,  these numbers are not only astounding, but very reliable. She is known to claim that these are the best epidemiological numbers that we have.

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Dirty air in India and China. Tainted water in sub-Saharan Africa. Toxic mining and smelter operations in South America. Pollution around the globe now contributes to an estimated 9 million deaths annually - or roughly one in six - according to an in-depth new study published Thursday in the Lancet. If accurate, that means pollution kills three times more people each year than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, with most of those deaths in poor and developing countries.

"Going into this, my colleagues and I knew that pollution killed a lot of people. But we certainly did not have any idea of the total magnitude of the problem," said Philip Landrigan, dean of global health at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-chair of the commission behind the report. "I think all of us were really surprised when we saw this."

The two-year project, which relied on data from researchers in more than 130 countries documenting the causes of disease and premature deaths in recent decades, found that poor air quality was the most significant pollution-related killer. That includes both outdoor pollution tainted by mercury, arsenic and other harmful particulates, and household air dirtied by the burning of wood, dung and other organic materials. The result: An estimated 6.5 million deaths in 2015 from heart disease, strokes, lung cancer and other respiratory problems.

Water pollution, which includes everything from unsafe sanitation to contaminated drinking water, accounted for an additional 1.8 million annual deaths from gastrointestinal diseases and other infections, researchers found.

Pollution in the workplace also took a heavy toll on some of the world's poorest workers. From bladder cancer in dye workers to the lung disease pneumoconiosis in coal miners, researchers found that occupational exposure to various carcinogens and toxins was linked to about 800,000 deaths annually.

In 2015, the largest number of deaths attributable to pollution occurred in India and China, with an estimated 2.5 million and 1.8 million deaths respectively. Other severely affected countries include Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kenya.

Beyond the massive human toll, the authors of Thursday's report also focused on the financial toll caused by pollution-related health problems.

"Until now, people haven't recognized what an incredible hit pollution makes on the economy of a country," Landrigan said. "Pollution control can stimulate the economy because it reduces death and disease."

They estimated the hit to national budgets at about 1.3 percent of gross domestic product in low-income countries, compared to about 0.5 percent in developed, high-income countries. In addition, nations facing crippling pollution tend to spend much more on health care to treat diseases related to the problem.

"When you're looking at developing countries, you really have to address this challenge if you want to move people out of poverty and into the middle class," said Gina McCarthy, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was not involved in the study but had studied its conclusions. "It is holding people back."

And the warming of the Earth's climate is likely to fuel more deaths in the absence of international action, she said.

"Climate change is going to exacerbate the very problems that are identified in this article. There will be more contagious and infectious diseases. There will be more lives lost, more injuries, if we don't identify a path that gets us out of the hole that we're in," McCarthy said. "What people don't realize is the instability that results from poverty, the instability that results from migration as a result of climate change."

The startling conclusion that pollution accounts for 16 percent of deaths worldwide is, of course, an estimate. But the findings build on previous studies, including a 2016 report from the World Health Organization, detailing the extent to which pollution represents a public health crisis. "If countries do not take actions to make environments where people live and work healthy, millions will continue to become ill and die too young," then-WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said last year.

McCarthy said the Lancet study also is built on the most complete epidemiological data available.

"These are the best numbers that we have available to us. And even if they're off by a factor of 10, you're still talking about huge, huge impacts. But they're not off by a factor of 10," she said. "It's very clear if you go to other countries and it's clear if you go to some of our own communities that they are being held back because of the impact of pollution on their kids and their elderly. And we have to stop thinking that because we can't see the pollution and it's not as visible that it's not there."

Landrigan said there is "an old wive's tale" that developing countries inevitably suffer through troublesome pollution and disease on their way to becoming more prosperous.

Rather, he and the study's other authors insisted that countries must do much to reduce pollution and improve the health of their citizens - and that they will reap economic benefits for doing so. In addition, he said developed nations can play a meaningful role in helping poorer countries slash pollution, and major nonprofit foundations that have largely steered clear of the problem must be convinced that it is a global priority.

"It doesn't have to [get worse]. It's not an inevitable outcome," Landrigan said of the annual death toll. "Pollution control is a winnable battle."
Read more: Exposure to pollution kills millions of children, WHO reports find Global cancer hotspots: Burden of disease is shifting to developing world You're more likely to die from air pollution in India than China, study says

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Pollution kills 9 million people each year, new study finds

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Dirty air in India and China. Tainted water in sub-Saharan Africa. Toxic mining and smelter operations in South America. Pollution around the globe now contributes to an estimated 9 million deaths annually - or roughly one in six - according to an in-depth new study published Thursday in the Lancet.

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Yesterday, the U.S. released a report worked on by 13 of their agencies, that states that "humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization," entirely contradicting the views of the Trump Administration in the process.   This release is very timely, as next week the United Nations convenes in Germany for its annual conference regarding climate change.  The U.S. is expected to be heavily criticized for the fact that Trump's peers now have scientific proof that his views on climate change are incorrect, and that he seemingly will still remain out of the Paris climate accord agreement.

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WASHINGTON - Directly contradicting much of the Trump administration's position on climate change, 13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report on Friday that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization.

Over the past 115 years global average temperatures have increased 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to record-breaking weather events and temperature extremes, the report says. The global, long-term warming trend is "unambiguous," it says, and there is "no convincing alternative explanation" that anything other than humans - the cars we drive, the power plants we operate, the forests we destroy - are to blame.

The report was approved for release by the White House, but the findings come as the Trump administration is defending its climate change policies. The United Nations convenes its annual climate change conference next week in Bonn, Germany, and the American delegation is expected to face harsh criticism over President Trump's decision to walk away from the 195-nation Paris climate accord and top administration officials' stated doubts about the causes and impacts of a warming planet.

"This report has some very powerful, hard-hitting statements that are totally at odds with senior administration folks and at odds with their policies," said Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center. "It begs the question, where are members of the administration getting their information from? They're obviously not getting it from their own scientists."

While there were pockets of resistance to the report in the Trump administration, according to climate scientists involved in drafting the report, there was little appetite for a knockdown fight over climate change among Mr. Trump's top advisers, who are intensely focused on passing a tax reform bill - an effort they think could determine the fate of his presidency.

The climate science report is part of a congressionally mandated review conducted every four years known as the National Climate Assessment. The product of hundreds of experts within the government and academia and peer-reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, it is considered the United States' most definitive statement on climate change science.

The White House put out a statement Friday that seemed to undercut the high level of confidence of the report's findings.

"The climate has changed and is always changing," Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said in the statement. "As the Climate Science Special Report states, the magnitude of future climate change depends significantly on 'remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth's climate'" to greenhouse gas emissions, he added.

Despite the scientific consensus presented in the report, the Environmental Protection Agency has scrubbed references to climate change from its website and barred its scientists from presenting scientific reports on the subject.

Their agencies referred questions to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversaw the research.

The report has provoked consternation in scientific circles for months. Though the study has been in the works since 2015, several scientists said the election of Mr. Trump, who has labeled climate change a " canard" and appointed cabinet members who disputed the scientific consensus, caused them to worry the report would be blocked or buried.

That did not happen. Scientists who worked on the report said none of the 13 agencies that reviewed it tried to undermine its findings or change its wording.

"I'm quite confident to say there has been no political interference on the message," said David Fahey, a NOAA scientist and a lead author of the report. "Whatever fears we had weren't realized."

Responsibility for approving the report fell to Gary D. Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, who generally believes in the validity of climate science and thought the issue would have been a distraction from the tax push, according to an administration official with knowledge of the situation.

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Phoenix experienced record highs in June. The report says there are "no convincing alternative explanations" other than human activity to account for rising global temperatures. Credit Ralph Freso/Getty Images

One of Mr. Cohn's top policy deputies, Michael Catanzaro, had the authority to block, delay or change the report. But Mr. Catanzaro, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush and former Speaker John A. Boehner, chose instead to follow the lead of the Obama administration by referring the report back to more than a dozen federal agencies for feedback.

That review, according to two people familiar with the process, went relatively smoothly, surprising some scientists who worked on the report who had expected more resistance.

The only significant turbulence, according to one person familiar with the process, came from a midlevel political appointee at the Department of Energy who grilled the report's authors on changes that had been made to temperature and other climate data over the years. The authors responded by adding a more detailed explanation of their methodology and all of the agencies then gave their approval, the person said.

Mr. Trump was barely aware of the report's existence, several White House officials said.

Some critics of climate change science attacked the report as the product of holdovers from the Obama administration and chastised the Trump administration for allowing it to be published.

"I'm saddened that they have decided they will let the permanent government, the civil servants, continue down this road without supervision," said Myron Ebell, director of global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group.

Scientists said the report's findings were clear.

"This new report simply confirms what we already knew. Human-caused climate change isn't just a theory, it's reality," said Michael E. Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. "Whether we're talking about unprecedented heat waves, increasingly destructive hurricanes, epic drought and inundation of our coastal cities, the impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. They are upon us. That's the consensus of our best scientists, as laid bare by this latest report."

The report says the Earth has set temperature highs for three years running, and 16 of the last 17 years are the warmest years on record for the globe. Weather catastrophes from floods to hurricanes to heat waves have cost the United States $1.1 trillion since 1980, and the report warns that such phenomena may become common.

"The frequency and intensity of extreme high temperature events are virtually certain to increase in the future as global temperature increases," the report notes. "Extreme precipitation events will very likely continue to increase in frequency and intensity throughout most of the world."

In the United States, the report finds that every part of the country has been touched by warming, from droughts in the Southeast to flooding in the Midwest to a worrying rise in air and ground temperatures in Alaska, and conditions will continue to worsen.

"This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century," the report states. "For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence."

The findings, other researchers said, create an unusual situation in which the government's policies are in direct opposition to the science it is producing.

"This profoundly affects our ability to be leaders in developing new technologies and understanding how to build successful communities and businesses in the 21st century," said Christopher Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "Choosing to be dumb about our relationship with the natural world is choosing to be behind the eight ball."

Correction:

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Report By U.S. Agencies Counters Trump. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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U.S. Report Says Humans Cause Climate Change, Contradicting Top Trump Officials

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WASHINGTON - Directly contradicting much of the Trump administration's position on climate change, 13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report on Friday that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization.

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The United Nations just announced that Carbon Dioxide levels grew at a record rate in 2016. This rate was 50% faster than the average of the last decade, taking the ppm from 400 to 403.3. The last time that the world has ever seen levels of Carbon Dioxide this high was 3 to 5 million years ago in the mid-Pliocene era. Scientists believe that this growth in Carbon Dioxide levels has contributed to the sea levels rising about 20 meters and the global average temperature also rising 3 degrees.