Photos taken 1 year apart show potentially troubling sign in volcano

The Halema‘uma‘u crater on Kilauea, located in Hawaii, has been relatively quiet over the last year after a frenzy of activity in 2018, which all began with an explosive eruption of ash 30,000 feet into the air during May. But, since at least 2019, there has been a change that scientists believe could pose a potential danger to the Big Island. Water has started to collect in the caldera to form a lake.

A caldera is a large crater left behind in a volcano after an eruption. From 2010 until 2018, a lava lake had filled the caldera rather than water. That changed in May 2018 when the eruption caused the lava lake to drain, collapsing the caldera floor and causing a hole nearly as deep as the 1,776-foot One World Trade Center. The eruption also created a 459-foot cliff (140 meters) north of the crater.

About a year later, a helicopter pilot flying over the volcano noticed a mysterious green pool of water in the Halema‘uma‘u crater. A second report of the same findings from a helicopter passenger prompted USGS-Hawaiian Volcano Observatory researchers to survey the green pool of water.

It was then discovered that water had indeed started to pool into the lowest part of the Halema'uma'u crater, and ever since the water was discovered in 2019, the depth of the lake has been steadily growing.


© Provided by AccuWeather
The sequence of satellite images above shows Halema‘uma‘u crater before the lava lake drained (left), after the caldera floor had collapsed (middle) and after water pooled on the crater floor for nine months (right). (Joshua Stevens / Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey)

"We know that the crater floor dropped a little more than 70 meters below the water table in 2018. Any time that you punch a hole below the level of the water table, water is eventually going to come in and fill that hole," explained Don Swanson, a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.


© Provided by AccuWeather
The pool of water in the Halemaʻumaʻu Crater on Aug. 7, 2019. (USGS / D. Swanson)

Currently, the water has an area larger than five football fields combined and is approximately 100 feet (30 meters) deep, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The water has also changed color from the original chalky green to a rusty brown, due to chemical reactions happening in the water.


© Provided by AccuWeather
The pool of water in the Halemaʻumaʻu Crater on April 21, 2020. Since its discovery in 2019, the pool has slowly been growing. (USGS / M. Patrick)

As for how the water could affect a future eruption of the volcano, Swanson said it could contribute to an explosive eruption, since one of the main factors behind a big volcanic explosion is the amount of water and other gases that get caught up inside the magma.

"In one case, magma could rise quickly up the conduit and intersect with the lake," said Swanson. "In the second, the crater floor could collapse and drop all of the water down to a zone where it would be quickly heated into steam."

While an explosive eruption remains possible for Kilauea, Swanson said the next eruption could also happen slowly and all the water could evaporate.

"We do not want to be alarmist, but we also need to point out to the public that there is an increasing possibility of explosive eruptions at Kilauea," said Swanson.

Only time will tell what is in store for Kilauea, but for now, the volcano is being closely researched and monitored by geologists.

Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios.

Moon's mysterious disappearance 900 years ago finally gets an explanation
Brandon Specktor, Live Science

There's no use sugar coating it: According to one scribe in medieval England, A.D. 1110 was a "disastrous year." Torrential rainfall damaged crops, famine stalked the land — and, as if that wasn't bad enough, on one fateful night in May, the moon simply vanished from the sky.

© Jon Nazca The full moon rises between clouds above Ronda, southern Spain, on May 7, 2020.

"On the fifth night in the month of May appeared the moon shining bright in the evening, and afterwards by little and little its light diminished," the unnamed scribe wrote in the Anglo-Saxon manuscript known as the Peterborough Chronicle. "As soon as night came, it was so completely extinguished withal, that neither light, nor orb, nor anything at all of it was seen. And so it continued nearly until day, and then appeared shining full and bright."


Clouds weren't the problem; if they were, the scribe would not go on to describe how bright and twinkling the stars appeared while the moon faded from view. Nor was the moon being eclipsed by Earth's shadow — if it was, the skywatcher would have seen the orb become a coppery "blood moon," not an eerie blank spot in the sky.

Related: Amazing photo reveals a lunar eclipse like you've never seen before

So, what made the moon disappear in an already dismal year? According to a study published April 21 in the journal Scientific Reports, the explanation for both the moon's mysterious vanishing act and the rain-ravaged summer that followed may be one and the same — volcanoes.

"The spectacular atmospheric optical phenomena associated with high-altitude volcanic aerosols have caught the attention of chroniclers since ancient times," the study authors wrote. "Careful evaluation of ice core records points to the occurrence of several closely spaced volcanic eruptions," which may have occurred in Europe or Asia between A.D. 1108 and A.D. 1110.

Those volcanic events, which the researchers call a "forgotten cluster" of eruptions because they were sparsely documented by historians at the time, may have released towering clouds of ash that traveled far around the world for years on end. Not only could a high-altitude veil of volcanic aerosols blot out the moon while leaving many stars unobscured, as the Peterborough writer described, but a series of large eruptions could have also disrupted the global climate, the researcher wrote, causing or exacerbated the cold, wet weather that made life so miserable in A.D. 1110.

One such eruption, which occurred in Japan in A.D. 1108, could be to blame, the team said.
Hunting for the 'forgotten'

For evidence of these "forgotten" eruptions, the researchers looked at ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica — long tubes of ancient ice that can reveal what the global climate looked like at the time, as well as what sorts of particles were floating around in the atmosphere. The team saw an increase in sulfate aerosols (a component of volcanic ash) in both cores between A.D. 1108 and A.D. 1110, suggesting that the stratosphere was sprinkled with fumes from a recent eruption.

The team found further evidence of volcanic activity in tree rings dating from the same period. The rings, which change thickness in response to climate patterns, revealed that 1109 was an unusually cold, wet year in Western Europe — a climatic "anomaly" comparable to the effects of several other major volcanic eruptions from history, the researchers said. The team also tracked down 13 narrative accounts of adverse weather, crop failure and famine from that time period, further supporting the theory that a series of eruptions had slammed Europe's climate.

"The sources of these eruptions remain unknown," the team wrote, "yet one eruption with a historical date in this period is that of Mount Asama in Japan."

According to a diary the team examined, written by a Japanese statesman between 1062 and 1141, the eruption of Mount Asama in central Japan began in late August 1108 and lasted until October of that year.

This eruption, which the statesman described as throwing fire into the sky and rendering nearby fields unfit for cultivation, could have plausibly contributed to the sulfate spike in the Greenland ice core and polluted the sky with enough aerosols to induce the eclipse two years later, the team wrote. (Another unknown eruption, located somewhere in the southern hemisphere and also dating to 1108, likely contributed to the sulfates in the Antarctic ice core, the researchers added.)

While this explanation relies on a lot of "indirect" evidence, the researchers said, it still provides the best solution yet for the case of the disappearing moon.

Photos: Fiery Lava from Kilauea Volcano Erupts on Hawaii's Big Island

In Photos: Aftermath of Iceland Volcano Floods

Wow! Wild Volcanoes in Pictures

Originally published on Live Science.

Ominous trend in American West could signal a looming "megadrought"

CBSNews

Come spring, the American West's vast water reservoirs are supposed to fill with melting snow. However, this year, as in recent years, the large reservoirs of Lake Mead and Lake Powell in the Colorado River basin area have seen declining water levels — an ominous trend that a new study warns could signal a looming megadrought.


"The persistence of the drought conditions, in the Colorado River basin especially, is essentially unprecedented in human history," John Fleck, author of "Water is for Fighting Over," told CBS News' John Blackstone.

Fleck has spent years studying the Colorado River, a crucial source of water for much of the region around it. He said that Lake Mead and Lake Powell's reservoirs have what he described as "big bathtub rings" around them, left behind as the water declines.

"There is less water in the system now than there was 20 and 30 years ago," he said.

Fleck explained that a "wet year" every few years may seem like the drought is ending, but those years are still comparatively lower than decades before.

"When we do get a snowpack in the mountains over winter, we are seeing less water make it into the rivers, and downstream to the farms and cities and the fish and the ecosystems that depend on the water," he said. 

© Provided by CBS News Lake Powell is shown from an airplane window on March 30, 2015, in Page, Arizona.

A team of scientists is researching megadroughts that have lasted as long as 40 years, using tree ring evidence going back 1,200 years.

"If they go back in time 500 years or so, there were these phenomenal droughts — in terms of both severity and in terms of length," Park Williams, the scientist leading the research, said. "And until recently, those droughts have always been spoken about with almost a mythical-type character."

Williams said the drought of the last two decades "developed the same way that the megadroughts did."

However, the key difference now is climate change's effect on weather conditions in the area, which largely depends on melting snowpacks to fill reservoirs.

"Without human-caused climate change, we would still have a drought," Williams said. "But it wouldn't be a serious as the one we've actually seen."

NASA-run project SnowEx has researchers in the mountains of Idaho developing remote sensing equipment to get accurate snowpack measurements from space in order to determine how much water they will produce.

"It's becoming more challenging for us to not only predict how much water is going to enter our reservoirs, but also the ability to store that water all the way through the end of the summer for agriculture and water resource purposes," said Hans Peter Marshall, a scientist working on the project.

The shifting patterns and increased difficulty are some of the main reasons researchers are seeking to develop a space-borne approach to monitor the region's water.

"We're really needing an approach that maps the amount of water that's stored within the snowpack," he said.

It’s already getting too hot and humid in some places for humans to survive

A combination of heat and humidity so extreme that it’s unendurable isn’t just a problem for the future — those conditions are already here, a new study finds. Off-the-chart readings that were previously thought to be nearly nonexistent on the planet today have popped up around the globe, and unyielding temperatures are becoming more common

© Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Extreme conditions reaching roughly 115 degrees Fahrenheit on the heat-index scale — a measurement of both heat and humidity that’s often referred to as what the temperature “feels like” — doubled between 1979 and 2017, the study found. Humidity and heat are a particularly deadly combination, since humidity messes with the body’s ability to cool itself off by sweating. The findings imply that harsh conditions that scientists foresaw as an impending result of climate change are becoming reality sooner than expected.

“We may be closer to a real tipping point on this than we think”

“We may be closer to a real tipping point on this than we think,” Radley Horton, co-author of the new study published today in the journal Science Advances, said in a statement. His previous research had projected that the world wouldn’t experience heat and humidity beyond human tolerance for decades.

More intense and frequent heat events are one of the symptoms of climate change, a lot of research has shown. But most of those studies were based on readings that looked at averages over a wide area over a long period of time. Instead, Horton and his co-authors looked closely at hourly data from 7,877 weather stations around the world. They used the “wet bulb” centigrade scale, which measures other factors such as wind speed and solar radiation on top of heat and humidity.

That’s how they found more than a thousand readings of severe heat and humidity, reaching wet bulb readings of 31 degrees Celsius, that were previously thought to be very rare. Along the Persian Gulf, they saw more than a dozen readings above what’s thought to be the human tolerance limit of 35 degrees Celsius on the wet bulb scale. That’s the highest wet bulb reading that scientific literature has ever documented. In 2015, the city of Bandar Mahshahr in Iran experienced a wet bulb reading just under 35 degrees Celsius. At more than 160 degrees Fahrenheit on the heat-index scale, that’s about 30 degrees higher than where the National Weather Service’s heat-index range ends — and it’s a scenario that climate models hadn’t forecast to happen until the middle of the century.

Spells of extreme humid heat were also witnessed across Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, and North America and were generally clustered along the coasts. The US Gulf Coast was particularly hard-hit. The region saw dozens of instances of conditions reaching levels not expected to take place for decades. Severe conditions only lasted hours and were often only in small areas, but these bouts are becoming more frequent and more intense, the researchers say.

They make the case that future studies ought to take a similarly localized look to get a better understanding of how climate change is playing out in communities that will feel the crunch ahead of the rest of the world. A Pulitzer prize-winning series by The Washington Post took this sort of approach in a series about places where average temperatures have already risen 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold at which the Paris climate accord aims to keep the globe from surpassing.

“At the smallest scale, it’s more intense.”

“If you zoom in you see things that you don’t see at a larger scale,” says Colin Raymond, lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “At the smallest scale, it’s more intense.” One of the limitations to their study, according to Raymond, is that there are places across the globe that simply lack weather stations. So what they were able to document could be happening at an even wider scale, there just aren’t tools in place yet to make those measurements everywhere.

Extreme heat already kills more people in the US than any other weather-related event.

In 50 years, between 1 to 3 billion people could find themselves living in temperatures so hot that they’re outside the range in which humans have been able to thrive, found another study published this week. Just how many billions will face that future depends on what action is taken now to stop the planet from dangerously overheating.


Potentially lethal heat waves are happening more often

QUARTZ

Last July, a deadly extreme heat wave ripped across the United States. Triple-digit temperatures caused widespread power outages and at least half a dozen deaths. In many places, the temperatures were made even more excruciating by high humidity, which limits the cooling effect of evaporating sweat. In Baltimore, the heat index—a measure used by meteorologists to account for heat and humidity—hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

But that kind of extreme is just the tip of the iceberg, according to research published today in the journal Science Advances. Combing global weather records at an unusually fine level of detail, climatologists at Columbia University found that globally, combined extreme heat and humidity events are occurring more frequently, even more so than scientists previously thought. The tally includes a small but growing number of instances where heat and humidity conditions reached levels that would be deadly to most people.

The study focused on a metric called wet bulb temperature, which is similar to heat index and also combines heat and humidity. Because of how they are calculated, wet bulb temperatures are typically lower than the ambient air temperature, even though humidity makes heat feel more intense. A typical summer day in New York City has a wet bulb temperature in the low 70s F (low 20s C); Baltimore’s 2019 heat wave maxed out at around 30°C (86°F) wet bulb temperature.


Between 1979 and 2017, the frequency of instances of wet bulb temperatures at or above 27°C (81°F) has more than doubled, the study found, mostly in coastal areas. Instances over 29°C more than tripled. Locations in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Gulf of California have even hit 35°C (95°F)—the highest level documented on Earth, and what physiologists see as the limit of human survival—an increasing number of times. 

Altogether, the study unearthed 1.7 million instances of a wet bulb temperature at or above 27°C. Many of these were brief, spanning just hours. For that reason, they are easily lost in most global weather analyses, which aggregate hourly data from thousands of weather stations to understand long-term trends.

Climate change models have projected an increase in these kinds of extreme heat and humidity later in the century; a 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that in a mid-range warming scenario, 1-in-20-year temperature extremes could happen once every other year. But these findings suggest that extreme highs are already happening regularly now.

“There’s nothing wrong with those models,” said Colin Raymond, the study’s lead author, who began the research as a climatology doctoral student at Columbia and is now a postdoc studying climate at NASA. “But they didn’t really capture the baseline of what’s happened in last 40 years because they were using data that was too smoothed out to represent brief localized extremes.”

The places at highest risk for extreme heat and humidity, the study found, were coastal desert areas at mid-latitudes, near gulfs and other relatively warm bodies of water. There, unlike at the equator, heat and humidity are able to build up without triggering tropical storms that release humidity from the air in the form of precipitation. The worst conditions were found in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Compared to other weather events like droughts and hurricanes, extreme heat is one of the best-understood impacts of climate change; scientists are highly confident that instances of extreme heat will rise in tandem with average global temperatures. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record have happened since 2010; 2020 is on track to be in the top five, said Kristy Dahl, a climatologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

That could be a serious problem during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially because the elderly and others most vulnerable to the disease are the same people most susceptible to heat stress. Despite a claim in April by Department of Homeland Security researchers that sunlight and humidity can be detrimental to the virus, an analysis by the National Academies of Science found there’s little reason to expect a significant summer slowdown in transmission.

“It wouldn’t be surprising if we have intense heat waves this summer,” Dahl said. “But all the places cities will often open to keep people cool—cooling centers, libraries, museums, shopping malls, movie theaters—all of those are off-limits right now.”

Raymond said a step for future research will be to add more variables, including breeze and sunshine, on top of heat and humidity, for a more complete picture of what these conditions really feel like, as well as including more data from sub-Saharan Africa and other regions that aren’t covered as well by weather stations.

As for researching the feeling of a 35°C wet bulb temperature first hand, Raymond said he’ll pass.

“It’s beyond what anyone who hasn’t experienced it can really imagine,” he said. “The heat and humidity of the American south pales in comparison to the steam-room atmosphere that we’re seeing around the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.”

The science of gossip (and why everyone does it)

© Shutterstock Research has found that the average person spends 52 minutes a day talking about someone who isn't present.

People feed off gossip. It's one reason why, in the 1960s, the National Enquirer swapped the gory, gruesome headlines they were known for with celebrity scoops and scandal. The switch gave the tabloid access to supermarket checkout lines and the "enquiring minds" in them.

But it's not just tabloid readers who love to dish. Social scientists have found that everyone is hardwired to pay attention to gossip, and to participate in it. In fact, it's an evolutionary adaptation -- it's become human nature to spill the tea.

"We're the descendants of people who were good at this," said Frank McAndrew, a psychology professor at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. "In prehistoric times, people who were fascinated by the lives of other people were more successful."

McAndrew, an expert on human social behavior and gossip, explains that to thrive in the time of cavemen, we had to know what was happening with the people around us.

"Who is sleeping with whom? Who has power? Who has access to resources? And if you weren't good at that, you weren't very successful," he said.

Gossip generally has a negative connotation, especially when you think about hurtful rumors, or tabloids and a person's right to privacy.

But in everyday life, researchers say, our chatter about other people tends to be relatively boring and neutral and serves its own unique purpose.

52 minutes of gossip a day

Most researchers define gossip as talking about someone who isn't present and sharing information that isn't widely known.

And according to an analysis by researchers at the University of California Riverside, the average person spends 52 minutes every day doing exactly that.

Yet the majority of our gossip is harmless. About 15% of our gabbing involves negative judgment -- or what researchers call "evaluative" -- but outside of that, the average person is just documenting facts, such as "she's stuck late at work," or "he had to go to the hospital." This kind of neutral chitchat actually helps us build friendships, community or learn information that's vital for having a social life, said Megan Robbins, a UC Riverside psychology professor.

"You can establish a relationship by talking about other people and finding out something about others in the group," she said. "Even for those types of gossip that are evaluative, you're saying, 'I'm trusting you with this information.'"

Although gossiping is often stereotyped as a feminine, low-class or uneducated pastime, Robbins said that everyone does it.

"Our data debunked all of the stereotypes," Robbins said. "As a social species, we have to talk about people. We don't live in isolation, and we talk about people who inevitably sometimes are not present."

Everyone gossips -- and it's not all bad

The practice becomes purely harmful when it doesn't provide any opportunity for social learning, scientists say, such as with rude comments about someone's appearance or health and comments that are blatantly untrue.

Where judgmental or negative gossip can be useful is when it provides cultural learning and compels people to behave better.

Robbins said there is compelling research that gossip might serve as a check on people's moral behavior, deterring potential cheaters or slackers in a group setting because we care about our reputations and the risk of others gossiping about our bad decisions.

It can also be a way to figure out unwritten rules. For example, when we start a new job, the water cooler talk helps us find out what is acceptable office attire, who we might want to avoid working with on a team project, and whether it's acceptable to take a monthlong vacation.

"Sharing gossip with someone is a bonding mechanism," McAndrew said. "It does kind of increase morale."

This human habit isn't limited to a certain age group. Sociology professor Stacy Torres studied this habit among elderly people living alone in New York city. Her research revealed that older adults engaged in gossip at local restaurants and shops as a way to connect with others, maintain social ties and combat loneliness.

"This is something that we see across different cultures and different ages, although it may sort of take a different flavor," said Torres. "A lot of them would say, 'Oh I don't want to partake,' or 'I need to watch what I say,' but then would show up every day and participate."

Torres, who is now based at the University of California San Francisco, added that gossip gives us the opportunity to vent about people while allowing us to still maintain positive social ties with them overall. Even when the elders' gossip seemed to be negative or rude, it usually came from a place of thoughtfulness.

"They had nicknames for each other, some that were disparaging, but it was obvious they were thinking about each other," Torres said. For example, they'd call each other names but then tack on a comment about reaching out to them: 'Has anyone heard from old so-and-so?'"

"There was an element of concern," Torres said, "and they were checking on (each other)."


Why do we care about celebrities?

Humans are hardwired to care about the lives of people who are friends, foes or family. Researchers call those people "socially important." But why do we care about famous people we've never actually met?

"What's going on is that our caveman brains are unprepared to deal with (modern communication). In those days, if you knew a lot about someone, by definition they were socially important to you," McAndrew said.

This is especially true today thanks to the internet and social media, which means we know a lot about people we don't actually know. Being privy to that information tricks our brains into thinking celebrities are socially important to our lives. One of McAndrew's studies showed that we even gravitate toward celebrity tabloid stories about people of the same gender and age group.

"They're our cohort -- they might be our rivals or allies," McAndrew explained. "Consciously, you know they don't matter and you're not going to meet them, but they press the same buttons in our brains as people who do matter to us."

Celebrity gossip also gives us common ground with others. Pop culture knowledge gives us something to talk about during those awkward small talk encounters or at parties where we don't know many people.

"You might even think about keeping up with celebrities as a social skill," McAndrew said. "It makes you know about things that other people care about."

If you're worried that your gossip is excessive or otherwise harmful, start by examining the reasons why you think you have an issue, McAndrew said, as it may be that you're not using the skill appropriately.

"Bad gossipers are either people who indiscriminately blab everything they have heard to anyone who will listen, or they are individuals with a clearly selfish agenda in which gossip is designed to damage the reputations of their rivals," he said. Those who do it well "know things but are trusted to be discreet. They have the well-being of others on their radar."

If you notice that "your gossip is hurting your relationships or taking time away from other things you need to be doing," McAndrew said, it may be time to cut back. He suggested you try avoiding the situations or people that bring out the worst in you.

Glaciers Will Tell the Story of COVID-19 for Centuries to Come



© The Washington Post - Getty Images Scientists from the Ohio State University say that Earth’s crust will carry evidence of COVID-19 (coronavirus) likely for the rest of Earth’s long timeline.

Climate researchers who study historical climate events say there are links to today.
Scientists study history by pulling enormous cores of ice out of deep holes.
The ice "records" events like drought and disease, but must be studied with historical records.

Scientists from the Ohio State University say that Earth’s crust will carry evidence of COVID-19 (coronavirus) likely for the rest of Earth’s long timeline. That’s because of both environmental signs of a global pandemic and the way pathogens like viruses and bacteria are effectively “flash frozen” in snow and ice.


The scientists, from OSU’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, have tested ice cores in some of the world's most remote areas for viruses. These cores are most useful as a way to corroborate the human historical record.

“[If] all you have are the ice core records, and you don’t have the human history, you might miss the connection,” said Byrd Center geography researcher Ellen Mosley-Thompson in a statement. One example is of a high amount of dust in cores dating back to the 1300s, which scientists can’t place or contextualize without some written record, such as contemporary notes about a drought or even a volcanic eruption.

The same is true in reverse: It’s impractical for scientists to search entire ice cores for evidence of a viral pathogen at some point in the past. Instead of that needle in a haystack, they need bookends on a smaller time frame, and that guidance comes from the historical record. “[I]f you are looking for evidence of old viruses, then you have to know precisely where to look in the cores,” Mosley-Thompson said in the OSU statement.

In the case of the dusty core from the 1300s, the cause was a “major drought” that lasted for more than four decades. Combined with that, the human population was impacted and reduced by the plague. And, the statement says, “On some glaciers the ice that formed during the years of the Plague contains less lead than ice that formed during preceding years, likely because mining and smelting activities sharply dropped off during that time.”

Video player from: YouTube (Privacy Policy, Terms)

The multifaceted impact of a global pandemic had similar hallmarks even in the 1300s. The human cost of illness affected everything, from culture to industry to Earth itself. And a drought and illness event that lasted for decades was enough to pull down some of the world’s great contemporary civilizations, including “the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia, societies around the Indus River and the Yangtze River in Asia, and the Old Kingdom in Egypt,” the statement says.

COVID-19 is already affecting Earth's atmosphere, the scientists say. From the statement:
As people stayed home and drove less, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide levels dropped over China and throughout much of the United States. Both are potent pollutants that primarily form by burning gas and oil – the fossil fuels that power most of our vehicles. That decrease in nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide levels will be evident in the nitrate and sulfate levels in ice cores retrieved by future glaciologists.

So the scientists believe there are parallels between events like the ones in the 1300s and the global pandemic happening today. One interesting difference, of course, is that the world is now totally interconnected. In the 1300s, entire civilizations could thrive and perish without ever meaningfully contacting each other. Today, any group that suffers affects everyone—and can ask everyone for help.

“I suspect there are some lessons here that would be useful today,” Mosley-Thompson concluded. Indeed, humankind has faced pandemics and catastrophes for all of history. What we can change is how we respond.

Trump administration to restore partial funding to World Health Organization - Fox News

May 15 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is set to restore partial funding to the World Health Organization, Fox News reported late on Friday, citing a draft letter.

The Trump administration will "agree to pay up to what China pays in assessed contributions" to the WHO, Fox News reported, quoting from the letter.

Trump suspended U.S. contributions to the WHO on April 14, accusing it of promoting China's "disinformation" about the coronavirus outbreak and saying his administration would launch a review of the organization. WHO officials denied the claims and China has insisted it was transparent and open.

The United States was the WHO's biggest donor. If the U.S. matches China's contribution, as the Fox report adds, its new funding level will be about one-tenth of its previous funding amount of about $400 million per year.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

Another casualty of the coronavirus: scientific research


Ecologists have been unable to gather water samples vital to understanding the impact of climate change on state forests. Marine biologists who regularly collect data about conditions in the Gulf of Maine have been stuck on land, while others who do aerial surveys critical to monitoring endangered whales have been grounded.\

© Serdar Sakinan Carin Ashjian, a WHOI biologist, has been studying zooplankton aboard a German icebreaker attached to an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. Now, she's experiencing an additional two months on the ship, as another team of scientists go through a period of quarantining before she can be replaced.

With much of the world still shut down, the coronavirus has hampered the painstaking work of many scientists whose findings rely on regularly collected data and seasonal experiments.


The loss of that work — much of which can’t be replicated or done at another time — could have a long-lasting impact on scientists’ understanding of everything from the warming of our oceans to the demise of certain species.Opinion: The parallels between the coronavirus and the climate crisis

“Long-term environmental data sets have never been impacted to the extent we’re experiencing now,” said Doug Levey, director of the division of environmental biology at the National Science Foundation, which subsidizes nearly a quarter of all basic research at US universities.

From the tundra to the tropics, much of the work of the agency’s grantees has been halted, including long-term studies at remote outposts in Alaska and field sites in Puerto Rico, he said.

That has meant decades of research will now have gaping holes in their data — gaps that are especially significant now, given what could be learned from a time when people are having less of an effect on the environment because of the global shutdown.

“Because humans have such a direct impact on ecosystems, it is likely that many ecosystems will respond in ways we have never previously witnessed,” Levey said. “Without scientists in place to record the details, however, many of those unexpected phenomena will go unexplained.”

At Harvard Forest in Petersham, David Foster worries about losing data that have informed three decades of research about local woodlands.

Among the losses since March has been the collection of vital water samples that can’t be stored in university labs. “This thwarts studies of hemlock loss, climate change, and connections between forests and oceans,” said Foster, director of Harvard Forest, one of the nation’s oldest managed forests.

At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the pride of its fleet of research vessels — the new, 240-foot Neil Armstrong — has been tied up at the pier since it returned from its last voyage in March. Its crew remains onboard, quarantined, waiting for clearance to head back to sea with a new team of scientists.

The Armstrong had been scheduled to take Canadian scientists to collect data about plankton, toxic algae, and temperature in the waters off the Maritimes in Atlantic Canada, part of a series of studies that has been underway since 1998.

That mission was canceled, as was another by the institution’s other large ship, the Atlantis, which was supposed to take part in a multinational effort to better understand how the smallest parts of the ecosystem circulate through different depths of the oceans.

“These are significant blows to the science and will have a large impact,” said Rob Munier, the institution’s vice president of marine facilities and operations.

It’s unclear when they will be allowed back on the water.

“The uncertainty has been the hardest part,” said Munier, noting that WHOI has trips planned in Greenland and Iceland this summer. "Scientists prepare for these trips for years, and graduate students rely on the data to complete their dissertations.”

A different challenge for some scientists has been getting stuck in remote locations when the pandemic hit.

Since February, Carin Ashjian, a biologist, has been studying zooplankton aboard a German icebreaker attached to an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. She’s now experiencing an additional two months on the ship, as another team of scientists go through a period of quarantining before she can be replaced.

Unlike colleagues back home, Ashjian has been able to conduct her research without much interruption.

“As I sit in my lab, photographing copepods,” she wrote to colleagues at Woods Hole, “I reflect on how what I thought would be surreal (working on a ship frozen into the ice in the middle of the Arctic Ocean) is now normal, and the world that I left behind is the one that is surreal. I cannot imagine what it is like at home.”

One of her replacements, Stephen Archer, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, has been quarantined at a hotel in Germany, awaiting confirmation that he’s not infected with the virus before he can be sent to the ship.

Both worry that the project could be more profoundly affected by COVID-19.

“Developing a plan for how to keep the experiment going in the face of the pandemic has been a huge effort,” Archer wrote from his hotel in Germany. “It would be extremely sad and a major loss to science (and society) if we were not able to achieve the full year of measurements as planned.”

At the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, scientists who monitor the health of the remaining 400 endangered North Atlantic right whales couldn’t fly over Cape Cod Bay when more than half of their population usually congregate there in early spring.

Other research they do on humpback whales also stopped.

“When we and others can’t fly, we lose a lot of knowledge,” said Charles “Stormy” Mayo, director of the center’s right whale ecology program. “We lose information on injuries, which is critical to their management.”

Across the bay in Plymouth, long-term studies of birds at the conservation group Manomet have suffered.

Trevor Lloyd-Evans, director of the group’s landbird conservation program, said the shutdown has hampered a 54-year banding operation at their observatory. Another blow to their research came when colleagues had to cancel what he described a “crucial season” of surveys of shorebirds that breed in the Arctic.

He described the past two months as a “lost spring” of research.

“What if keystone species are vanishing from large areas, and we do not have the basic data to recognize this?” he said. “Our predictions are only as good as the data we enter into our analyses.”

27 million Americans may lose health insurance coverage: Report

DEAR JOE AND WALL ST DEMOCRATS
NO ONE LIKES NOR WANTS THEIR EXPENSIVE INSUFFICIENT WORKPLACE HEALTHCARE EXCEPT THE INSURANCE COMPANIES

Soaring unemployment numbers could translate into nearly 27 million people losing their health insurance, according to a new report.

© Kathy Willens/AP Edgar Chun, left, who was laid off from his job as a mover in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, appeals to Pastor Juan Carlos Ruiz for emergency food aid in front of Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, in the Brooklyn, New York, May 12, 2020.

"Between March 1st and May 2nd, 2020, more than 31 million people had filed for unemployment insurance," notes the Kaiser Family Foundation report, which was released Wednesday.

"Actual loss of jobs and income are likely even higher, as some people may be only marginally employed or may not have filed for benefits."

Along with losing their jobs, Americans who previously had health insurance coverage through their employers will lose that, too.

Eight states including California, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, Georgia, Florida, Michigan and Ohio will account for roughly half of the people who lost health insurance they previously had through their job, the report estimated.

Those individuals may be eligible for subsidized coverage under the Affordable Care Act, for Medicaid, or may continue their employer insurance through COBRA.

But COBRA insurance is often expensive, since former employees generally pay the entire premium themselves. On average, annual COBRA insurance premiums are $7,188 for a single person and $20,576 for a family, according to KFF.

The losses not only come in the middle of a global pandemic but also when many Americans, even those with health insurance, are struggling to pay for medical care. Before the pandemic, 1 in 3 Americans said that they wouldn't be able to pay a $400 medical bill without selling their belongings or borrowing money.MORE: Middle-class Americans getting crushed by rising health insurance costs

Government programs like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are crucial safety nets for the newly unemployed as the economic downturn continues. Yet the Trump administration continues to challenge the health care law, arguing that the Supreme Court should overturn it.

"Given the health risks facing all Americans right now, access to health coverage after loss of employment provides important protection against catastrophic health costs and facilitates access to needed care," KFF notes.

In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.


Brad Plumer
2 days ago

















The Kintigh Generating Station in Somerset, N.Y., the state’s last coal-burning plant, just before it was shut down in March.4 SLIDES © Libby March for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The United States is on track to produce more electricity this year from renewable power than from coal for the first time on record, new government projections show, a transformation partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic, with profound implications in the fight against climate change.

It is a milestone that seemed all but unthinkable a decade ago, when coal was so dominant that it provided nearly half the nation’s electricity. And it comes despite the Trump administration’s three-year push to try to revive the ailing industry by weakening pollution rules on coal-burning power plants.

Those efforts, however, failed to halt the powerful economic forces that have led electric utilities to retire hundreds of aging coal plants since 2010 and run their remaining plants less frequently. The cost of building large wind farms has declined more than 40 percent in that time, while solar costs have dropped more than 80 percent. And the price of natural gas, a cleaner-burning alternative to coal, has fallen to historic lows as a result of the fracking boom.

Now the coronavirus outbreak is pushing coal producers into their deepest crisis yet.

As factories, retailers, restaurants and office buildings have shut down nationwide to slow the spread of the coronavirus, demand for electricity has fallen sharply. And, because coal plants often cost more to operate than gas plants or renewables, many utilities are cutting back on coal power first in response.

“The outbreak has put all the pressures facing the coal industry on steroids,” said Jim Thompson, a coal analyst at IHS Markit.

In just the first four and a half months of this year, America’s fleet of wind turbines, solar panels and hydroelectric dams have produced more electricity than coal on 90 separate days — shattering last year’s record of 38 days for the entire year. On May 1 in Texas, wind power alone supplied nearly three times as much electricity as coal did.

The latest report from the Energy Information Administration estimates that America’s total coal consumption will fall by nearly one-quarter this year, and coal plants are expected to provide just 19 percent of the nation’s electricity, dropping for the first time below both nuclear power and renewable power, a category that includes wind, solar, hydroelectric dams, geothermal and biomass.

Natural gas plants, which supply 38 percent of the nation’s power, are expected to hold their output steady thanks to low fuel prices.

The decline of coal has major consequences for climate change.

Coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, and its decline has already helped drive down United States carbon dioxide emissions 15 percent since 2005. This year, the agency expects America’s emissions to fall by another 11 percent, the largest drop in at least 70 years. While the pandemic has made these projections uncertain, the decline is expected to come partly because Americans aren’t driving as much, but mainly because coal plants are running less often.

Even if coal does manage to beat expectations and rebound later this year, experts say that the dramatic shift in the nation’s electricity system is unlikely to be just a blip.

Utilities and large technology companies, major consumers of electricity, are increasingly turning to wind and solar farms for their power, both because renewables keep getting cheaper as technology improves but also because of concerns over air pollution and climate change. Large power companies, including Duke Energy in the Southeast and Xcel Energy in the Midwest, are currently planning to retire at least four dozen large coal plants by 2025, and no utility is currently planning to build a new coal facility.

“The grid is changing so much faster than anyone expected,” said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. “A decade ago, I was teaching my students that coal was the ‘baseload’ source that runs all the time, and solar was something you might sprinkle in if you want to pay more. Now coal’s been pushed to the margins and it’s wind and solar that are the cheapest options.”

At the same time, electric companies used to worry that using more than just a tiny fraction of wind and solar would make it difficult to keep the nation’s lights on, since the sun isn’t always shining and the wind isn’t always blowing. But since then, utilities have discovered ways to tackle this problem by using technologies like natural-gas plants that can be quickly turned on to meet spikes in demand, better weather forecasting and, increasingly, vast battery storage projects such as those planned in Nevada and California.

The Energy Information Administration expects wind and solar generation to increase this year, although the Covid-19 outbreak is likely to put many projects on hold as supply chains are disrupted. For instance, Pacificorp, a major utility in the Northwest, said it was facing challenges in completing a large 503-megawatt wind farm under construction in Wyoming, though a spokesman said the company was trying to find “creative solutions” in order to meet a November deadline.

Last week, the Internal Revenue Service signaled that it would provide some flexibility for wind and solar developers at risk of missing deadlines for finishing projects this year in order to qualify for a key federal tax subsidy.

The decline of coal power has created turmoil across the industry. Mining companies have laid off hundreds of workers in states like Wyoming and Montana. In April, Longview Power, which operates one of the nation’s youngest and most advanced coal power plants, in West Virginia, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing the pandemic as a factor.

Analysts said that coal power could see a moderate rebound next year if natural gas prices rise from their current lows. Still, even under that scenario, the E.I.A. does not currently see coal overtaking renewable energy.

For now, it is often cheaper for many utilities to generate electricity from natural gas than coal because of a nationwide gas glut, thanks in part to a warm winter that reduced demand for gas heating, combined with the boom in hydraulic fracturing. In places like Texas, natural gas is frequently an abundant side product produced by drillers that use fracking to extract crude oil.

More recently, however, the coronavirus has caused oil prices to crash worldwide. Many oil drillers are now being forced to shut down their wells, which could mean less natural gas next year and potentially higher gas prices, helping coal recover.

There is a wild card, however: If the financial pain caused by the pandemic leads utilities to speed up their decisions to retire more coal plants, the industry would have a much harder time bouncing back in the years ahead. Once a coal-burning plant is closed, it is difficult to restart.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we do see some companies accelerate their plans to retire more coal plants,” said Manan Ajuha, a power industry analyst at S&P Global Platts.

One danger sign for many coal plants is that they are running less frequently. Back in 2010, the average U.S. coal plant ran at about 67 percent of its capacity. Last year, that fraction dipped below one-half for the first time in decades and is slipping further this year.

“The less you use these plants, the more expensive they are to keep around,” said Seth Feaster, a data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. His group recently estimated that, by 2025, coal could make up 10 percent or less of the electricity generated in the United States.

The latest example: This month Great River Energy, a cooperative based in Minnesota, said it planned to close its giant Coal Creek Station, a 1.1 gigawatt coal plant in North Dakota, by 2022. While a utility official attributed the decision to long-term economic trends, not the pandemic, the closure is notable for what will replace it: The utility plans to add 1.1 gigawatts of new wind capacity, a small amount of gas, as well as a first-of-its-kind battery that can store wind power for long periods.

The coal industry, for its part, says that many of these retirements may prove shortsighted. Michelle Bloodworth, the chief executive of America’s Power, an industry trade group, argued that coal plants remained a critical pillar of the nation’s electricity mix and a valuable hedge in case natural gas prices rise, as they have done in the past during particularly severe winter storms when demand for gas heating can spike.

“The coal fleet is not dead,” Ms. Bloodworth said. “There is still a significant amount of coal that’s going to be needed in the future to make sure we don’t risk and threaten the reliability of the grid.”

While President Trump came into office vowing to save the coal industry and revive mining jobs, he has so far been unable to do so. His push to relax costly air pollution rules on coal plants have not stopped the plant closures. And several plans by the administration to indirectly subsidize coal plants, on the grounds that they can improve grid reliability, have gone nowhere.

The United States is not yet at the point reached in Britain, which now goes for weeks at a time without using any coal power at all. But some parts of the United States are now getting an early preview of life where coal is on the decline and renewables are soaring.

“In some parts of the country, we’re now seeing renewable penetration hit 60 or 70 percent on some days,” said Nat Kreamer, chief executive of Advanced Energy Economy, a clean-energy business group, “and no one’s screaming that they can’t do that.”