NASA Satellites Find Upper Atmosphere Cooling and Contracting Due to Climate Change

TOPICS:Atmospheric ScienceClimate ChangeNASANASA Goddard Space Flight CenterNoctilucent Clouds

By LINA TRAN, NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER JULY 4, 2021

These AIM images span June 6-June 18, 2021, when the Northern Hemisphere noctilucent cloud season was well underway. The colors — from dark blue to light blue and bright white — indicate the clouds’ albedo, which refers to the amount of light that a surface reflects compared to the total sunlight that falls upon it. Things that have a high albedo are bright and reflect a lot of light. Things that don’t reflect much light have a low albedo, and they are dark. Credit: NASA/HU/VT/CU-LASP/AIM/Joy Ng

Since the mesosphere is much thinner than the part of the atmosphere we live in, the impacts of increasing greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, differ from the warming we experience at the surface. One researcher compared where we live, the troposphere, to a thick quilt.

“Down near Earth’s surface, the atmosphere is thick,” said James Russell, a study co-author and atmospheric scientist at Hampton University in Virginia. “Carbon dioxide traps heat just like a quilt traps your body heat and keeps you warm.” In the lower atmosphere, there are plenty of molecules in close proximity, and they easily trap and transfer Earth’s heat between each other, maintaining that quilt-like warmth.

That means little of Earth’s heat makes it to the higher, thinner mesosphere. There, molecules are few and far between. Since carbon dioxide also efficiently emits heat, any heat captured by carbon dioxide sooner escapes to space than it finds another molecule to absorb it. As a result, an increase in greenhouses gases like carbon dioxide means more heat is lost to space — and the upper atmosphere cools. When air cools, it contracts, the same way a balloon shrinks if you put it in the freezer.

This cooling and contracting didn’t come as a surprise. For years, “models have been showing this effect,” said Brentha Thurairajah, a Virginia Tech atmospheric scientist who contributed to the study. “It would have been weirder if our analysis of the data didn’t show this.”

While previous studies have observed this cooling, none have used a data record of this length or shown the upper atmosphere contracting. The researchers say these new results boost their confidence in our ability to model the upper atmosphere’s complicated changes.

The team analyzed how temperature and pressure changed over 29 years, using all three data sets, which covered the summer skies of the North and South Poles. They examined the stretch of sky 30 to 60 miles above the surface. At most altitudes, the mesosphere cooled as carbon dioxide increased. That effect meant the height of any given atmospheric pressure fell as the air cooled. In other words, the mesosphere was contracting.

Earth’s Middle Atmosphere

Though what happens in the mesosphere does not directly impact humans, the region is an important one. The upper boundary of the mesosphere, about 50 miles above Earth, is where the coolest atmospheric temperatures are found. It’s also where the neutral atmosphere begins transitioning to the tenuous, electrically charged gases of the ionosphere.

Even higher up, 150 miles above the surface, atmospheric gases cause satellite drag, the friction that tugs satellites out of orbit. Satellite drag also helps clear space junk. When the mesosphere contracts, the rest of the upper atmosphere above sinks with it. As the atmosphere contracts, satellite drag may wane — interfering less with operating satellites, but also leaving more space junk in low-Earth orbit.

This infographic outlines the layers of Earth’s atmosphere. Click to explore in full size. Credit: NASA

The mesosphere is also known for its brilliant blue ice clouds. They’re called noctilucent or polar mesospheric clouds, so named because they live in the mesosphere and tend to huddle around the North and South Poles. The clouds form in summer, when the mesosphere has all three ingredients to produce the clouds: water vapor, very cold temperatures, and dust from meteors that burn up in this part of the atmosphere. Noctilucent clouds were spotted over northern Canada on May 20, kicking off the start of the Northern Hemisphere’s noctilucent cloud season.

Because the clouds are sensitive to temperature and water vapor, they’re a useful signal of change in the mesosphere. “We understand the physics of these clouds,” Bailey said. In recent decades, the clouds have drawn scientists’ attention because they’re behaving oddly. They’re getting brighter, drifting farther from the poles, and appearing earlier than usual. And, there seem to be more of them than in years past.

“The only way you would expect them to change this way is if the temperature is getting colder and water vapor is increasing,” Russell said. Colder temperatures and abundant water vapor are both linked with climate change in the upper atmosphere.

Currently, Russell serves as principal investigator for AIM, short for Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, the newest satellite of the three that contributed data to the study. Russell has served as a leader on all three NASA missions: AIM, the instrument SABER on TIMED (Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics), and the instrument HALOE on the since-retired UARS (Upper Atmospherics Research Satellite).

TIMED and AIM launched in 2001 and 2007, respectively, and both are still operating. The UARS mission ran from 1991 to 2005. “I always had in my mind that we would be able to put them together in a long-term change study,” Russell said. The study, he said, demonstrates the importance of long-term, space-based observations across the globe.

In the future, the researchers expect more striking displays of noctilucent clouds that stray farther from the poles. Because this analysis focused on the poles at summertime, Bailey said he plans to examine these effects over longer periods of time and — following the clouds — study a wider stretch of the atmosphere.

Indonesia sets coal benchmark price at highest in a decade

Reuters
July 4, 2021

Coal barges are pictured as they queue to be pulled along Mahakam river in Samarinda, East Kalimantan province, Indonesia, August 31, 2019. Picture taken August 31, 2019. REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan

JAKARTA, July 5 (Reuters) - Indonesia set its coal benchmark price higher in July at $115.35 per tonne, an official document published by its energy and minerals ministry showed on Monday.

The price is 14.97% higher than June's benchmark price and the highest since the $117.6 per tonne in May 2011, Refinitiv data showed.

The document did not show what accounted for the price jump. An energy ministry spokesman told Reuters that a statement will be issued later on Monday.

Reporting by Bernadete Christina Munthe and Fathin Ungku; Editing by Martin Petty

 

Five Asian countries to face tremendous losses if insistent on coal plants: report

Research shows pouring money into coal energy financially, environmentally destructive

  

By Chris Chang, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

2021/07/04 

Cutting coal generation in Asian countries crucial to climate change (Taiwan News image)

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The latest report from Carbon Tracker reveals a future in which the investment in coal power plants is deemed economically and environmentally unviable, and five Asian countries are poised to suffer great economic losses with their plans to hang on to dirty energy.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the cheaper renewables might have contributed to a 4-percent decline in coal power generation in 2020, but energy-related carbon emissions are projected to rebound this year, mainly driven by coal consumption in Asia, according to the report.

Carbon Tracker, a financial think tank specializing in the analysis of the impact of energy transitions, predicted that the universal goal of countering temperature rise through cutting coal generation depends almost entirely on developments in China, India, and ASEAN countries, which account for around 75 percent of global coal capacity and 80 percent of new coal-related projects.

To offer a clear outlook on the risk of investing in coal energy, Carbon Tracker includes operating profits, debt financing obligations, and tax expenses while evaluating over 600 projects that are over 30 gigawatts (GW) across five Asian countries — China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, India. The projects are evaluated under the business-as-usual scenario (BAU) as well as the beyond two degrees scenario (B2DS), in which constraints exist when operating coal assets.

The research found 92 percent of projects would have a net present value (NPV), and new projects are at risk of providing value destruction of around US$150 billion under BAU. As in unregulated markets where market forces will drive the closure of unprofitable plants, 100 percent of coal projects in Japan and Vietnam, 89 percent in Indonesia, and 93 percent in India, risk creating an even higher negative NPV under the B2DS.

Data Source: Carbon Tracker

At the same time, the existing coal plants are losing economic ground as renewables become increasingly affordable, given that the price of solar panels has fallen from US$106 per watt in 1976 to US$0.38 in 2019. Based on current pollution regulations and climate policies, 77 percent of the running coal facilities are more expensive than renewables and will rise to 98% by 2026 and 99% by 2030, when the renewable capacity reaches 2,100 GW.

The think tank suggested that the public recognize that when facing the cost competitiveness of renewable energy, investment in coal is highly risky and financially unsustainable. On the other hand, governments should place more emphasis on their post-pandemic stimulus plans on establishing infrastructure so that renewables can compete fairly with traditional energy.

As for the trend in which countries are shifting from coal to liquified natural gas, the researchers argued it would drive up the electric prices and not help in the meeting of climate targets. Adopting renewables has been proven to be not only the cheapest but also the most commercially and environmentally-friendly choice.

What’s the carbon footprint of a wind turbine?

Compared to the pollution generated by fossil fuels, wind energy has the advantage.

by SARA PEACH

JUNE 30, 2021


Dear Sara,

Wind turbines are an absolute joke. Has anyone actually figured out the amount of carbon emissions emitted for the entire process from initial construction of the components and land development (construction machinery emissions)? — Mike M.

Hi Mike,

Thank you for this apparent attempt at a “gotcha” question, as it gives me the opportunity to reply with a resounding yes! People have studied, in detail, the amount of carbon pollution emitted during the life of a wind turbine.

In fact, this type of analysis constitutes an entire branch of research known as “life cycle assessment,” with its own handbooks, internationally agreed-upon standards, specialized software, and peer-reviewed journals.

To conduct a life cycle assessment of a wind turbine, or any other product, researchers begin by diagramming each stage of its existence, from manufacturing through end-of-life disposal. Next, they inventory the energy and raw materials consumed at each stage, such as the steel, fiberglass, and plastic needed during a wind turbine’s manufacturing, the diesel burned by ships and trucks in transporting turbine parts from factory to construction site, and the energy used during construction, operation, maintenance, and eventual deconstruction and recycling or disposal.

With this information in hand, researchers calculate the carbon pollution produced during a wind turbine’s life cycle — in other words, its carbon footprint.

Search online for the keywords “life cycle assessment” and “wind turbine” and you’ll retrieve dozens of published papers on this topic. Here’s a non-comprehensive chart of such papers from the past five years:

The carbon footprint of wind turbines

Study year Location Configuration Rated power (megawatts) grams of CO2-eq per kWh

2019 Texas, USA onshore 2 4.9
2018 United Kingdom onshore 1.5 11.8
2018 China offshore 3.6 25.5
2018 China onshore 1.5, 0.75 8.7
2016 Europe onshore 2.3 6
2016 Europe onshore 3.2 5
2016 Europe offshore 4 10.9
2016 Europe offshore 6 7.8
2013 global onshore 2 8
2012 – – 2 9.7
2012 – – 1.8 8.8

This chart shows how much carbon dioxide, per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, can be attributed to a wind turbine during its life from cradle to grave. If you’re wondering about those awkward-sounding “grams of carbon dioxide-equivalent,” or “CO2-eq,” that’s simply a unit that includes both carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, such as methane.

You can see that the results vary by country, size of turbine, and onshore versus offshore configuration, but all fall within a range of about five to 26 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour.

To put those numbers in context, consider the two major fossil-fuel sources of electricity in the United States: natural gas and coal. Power plants that burn natural gas are responsible for 437 to 758 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour — far more than even the most carbon-intensive wind turbine listed above. Coal-fired power plants fare even more poorly in comparison to wind, with estimates ranging from 675 to 1,689 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, depending on the exact technology in question.

There’s another crucial difference between fossil fuels and wind turbines. A coal or natural gas plant burns fuel — and releases carbon dioxide — every moment that it runs. By contrast, most of the carbon pollution generated during a wind turbine’s life occurs during manufacturing. Once it’s up and spinning, the turbine generates close to zero pollution.

What’s more, wind turbines often displace older, dirtier sources that supply power to the electricity grid. For example, after a new wind farm connects to the grid, the grid operator may be able to meet electricity demand without firing up a decades-old, highly polluting coal plant. The result? A cleaner, more climate-friendly electricity grid.

In fact, it’s possible to calculate a carbon “payback” time for a wind turbine: the length of time it takes a turbine to produce enough clean electricity to make up for the carbon pollution generated during manufacture. One study put that payback time at seven months — not bad considering the typical 20- to 25-year lifespan of a wind turbine. Bottom line: Wind turbines are far from a joke. For the climate, they’re a deal too good to pass up.

— Sara

Added July 1, 2021: Reader Bill R. writes, “One thing you didn’t mention, and it is probably significant, is that as the energy mix tilts in favor of renewable energy over time, the energy mix used to manufacture wind turbines (and PV cells & panels) will also see a reduction in carbon intensity, resulting in an even smaller carbon footprint. There will be exceptions — making steel will probably continue to require carbon emissions for a long time — but everything else in the manufacturing pipeline should see reductions.”

Got a question about climate change? Send it to sara@yaleclimateconnections.org. Questions may be edited for length and clarity.

Tom Toro is a cartoonist and writer who has published over 200 cartoons in The New Yorker since 2010.TAGGED:Sara Peach


SARA PEACH is the Senior Editor of Yale Climate Connections. She is an environmental journalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, Environmental Health News, Grist, and... More by Sara Peach

The Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to Greenwash

BY RISHIKA PARDIKAR
JACOBIN
07.01.2021

The fossil fuel industry is trying to rebrand, using terms like “unabated coal” and “responsibly sourced gas” in an attempt to greenwash their commitment to continue burning fossil fuels.
The rise of terms like “unabated coal” and “responsibly sourced gas” suggest companies and politicians are still more interested in adopting a green facade than making the major changes necessary to address the mounting climate crisis.(Gerry Machen / Flickr)


On June 12, the United States and other leaders of the intergovernmental political forum the Group of Seven (G7) committed “to an end to new direct government support for unabated international thermal coal power generation by the end of this year.” The pledge is part of climate change actions aimed at accelerating the global transition away from coal generation.

While the announcement might sound encouraging, the problem lies in how the pledge was phrased — including but not limited to the term “unabated coal.” The term refers to coal-fired power generation that does not employ technologies like carbon capture and storage. That means these nations can still support other types of coal power generation as long as they involve technologies like carbon capture and storage — processes that have been heavily criticized for being stalling tactics that have yet to deliver on their promises.

The G7 announcement is “about as effective as sprinkling a few drops of water on a raging forest fire,” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, a nonprofit media lab working to end fossil fuels. “First, the G7 failed to set a clear deadline for ending coal use; second, by saying they’re only ending ‘direct’ government support, they leave room for all sorts of loopholes that could funnel money towards new coal plants; and third, the term ‘unabated’ means they’re leaving room for plants that say they’ll use carbon capture and sequestration technology, something that has proven thus far to be a colossal failure.”

The idea for “unabated coal” is not a new one. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has tried greenwashing its polluting operations by adopting misleading terms like “clean coal” and “natural gas.”


Along with “unabated coal,” another new example of fossil fuel duplicity is the emergence of the term “responsibly sourced gas.” Many major gas companies are moving to brand their products as having low greenhouse gas emissions as a way to take advantage of climate change–oriented investment trends — even though so far, there is little scientific consensus as to what “responsibly sourced gas” actually means and how much the approach will benefit the environment.

The rise of terms like “unabated coal” and “responsibly sourced gas” suggest companies and politicians are still more interested in adopting a green facade than making the major changes necessary to address the mounting climate crisis. If such phrases become the norm, they risk misleading and distracting the public from the vital work that needs to be done to limit global warming to within 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. Beyond this threshold, scientists agree that many natural and human ecosystems may not survive.
A History of Duplicity

Fossil gas is predominantly composed of methane, a greenhouse gas with a much higher warming potential than the carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning coal. But the fossil fuel industry has worked to blunt resistance to fossil gas’s global warming impacts by branding it as “natural gas” or “liquid natural gas.”

The efforts have worked. A December 2020 study found that the term “natural gas” evokes much more positive feelings than “methane” or “methane gas.”

“The fossil fuel industry is constantly trying to rebrand its products as good for the environment even as they’re destroying the planet,” said Henn at Fossil Free Media. “That’s why our Clean Creatives campaign is going after the PR and ad agencies that work for the fossil fuel industry.” The campaign calls on public relations and advertising agencies to stop working with fossil fuel companies.

During the Trump administration, the Department of Energy (DOE) tried its hand at fossil fuel duplicity by referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of freedom” and fossil gas as “freedom gas.” Canadian oil companies, meanwhile, attempted to rebrand their product as “ethical oil.”

“We need to stop the industry’s ability to pollute our public discourse if we’re going to stop them from polluting the atmosphere,” noted Henn.

Nonthreatening terms like “natural gas” have allowed the Biden administration to enthusiastically support the gas industry with minimal public pushback, despite that fact that Joe Biden made campaign promises to pursue “aggressive methane pollution limits for new and existing oil and gas operations” and signed an executive order on his first day in office calling for consideration of new methane regulations in the oil and gas sector.

In March, Biden told union leaders he’s “all for natural gas,” adding he supports both the gas industry and carbon capture and storage technologies.

And in June, Andrew Light, Biden’s nominee to lead international energy issues as the DOE’s assistant secretary for international affairs, told lawmakers at his confirmation hearing:


My job in this role is to make sure US gas is competitive around the world . . . More and more countries are looking for cleaner sources of gas. Russia has the dirtiest source of gas right now. We’ve got to make sure ours is cleaner and that ours fill those markets around the world. That’s what I intend to do.

According to Light’s testimony, US liquid natural gas exports reached a record 10.2 billion cubic meters in March, and the industry expects a 50 percent increase in total exports this year compared to 2020.

The Biden administration’s support of fossil gas goes squarely against what the Paris Agreement demands from wealthy nations, which have historically been the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. The United States, for example, has emitted a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions since the mid-eighteenth century. Countries like the United States, therefore, are expected to bear more responsibility for combating climate change, both by reducing its own emissions and helping less-developed countries transition to low-carbon economies.

“There’s no room for gas in a safe climate future,” said Henn. “The science is clear: Gas production results in massive methane emissions and slows the transition to clean energy. There’s simply no way to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement if we keep building new gas infrastructure.”
Fossil Fuel Science Fiction

The Biden administration’s pledge at the G7 meeting to end “new direct government support” for “unabated coal” suggests the White House is using misleading terminology and embracing unproven technologies as a way to still fund coal projects.

In April, for example, the DOE announced up to $35 million for programs focused on developing technologies to reduce methane emissions in the oil, gas, and coal industries. What’s more, Biden’s proposed infrastructure legislation bill has earmarked billions for the fossil fuel industry in terms of subsidies and support for carbon capture and storage.

Such incentives, while positioned as environmentally friendly, are likely to encourage additional fossil fuel production.

A report by forty-one scientists last December called the reliance on such technologies “overly optimistic” because “they are expensive, energy intensive, risky, and their deployment at scale is unproven.”

The upshot, say experts, is that by throwing around terms like “unabated coal” and putting their faith in questionable technology, developed nations will likely end up underwriting projects that shouldn’t be funded at all.

“This means the G7 will continue financing abated coal, which the world cannot afford,” said Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD). “Policies with exceptions like these only further delay [the implementation] of solutions which we need. We are losing time.”
The “Responsibly Sourced Gas” Mystery

Early this year, a new term emerged in the public discourse around fossil fuels: “responsibly sourced gas” (RSG).

In January, EQT Corporation, the largest natural gas producer in the United States, announced it was launching a pilot program with Project Canary, a Denver, Colorado–based climate-tech company, with the goal of certifying several of its wells as producing “responsibly sourced natural gas.”

In April, Chesapeake Energy — an oil and gas company and a fracking pioneer that emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year with about $3 billion in new financing, a $7 billion reduction in debt, and $1.7 billion cut from its gas processing and pipeline costs — announced that it, too, was partnering with Project Canary to produce responsibly sourced gas.

These efforts are a direct response to the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment movement, an increasingly influential form of investing that takes into account a company’s overall impact, rather than just financial factors.


Indeed, the power of socially conscious investment strategies is on the upswing, and fossil fuel companies in particular are feeling the heat. As one oil and gas executive admitted in a recently released Dallas Fed Energy Survey, “We have relationships with approximately 400 institutional investors and close relationships with 100. Approximately one is willing to give new capital to oil and gas investment. The story is the same for public companies and international exploration.”

Facing the threat of institutional investors citing ESG concerns to pull capital out of fossil fuel projects, oil and gas companies are trying to flip the script: they are aiming to use the concept of RSG to position their projects as ESG investment opportunities, especially since the two acronyms bear a striking similarity.

Never mind that gas drilling seems to go against the very idea of ESG investing. As EQT CEO Toby Rice noted in a press release about the company’s pilot project, “This partnership aligns with our commitment to ESG leadership and to meeting the evolving needs and expectations of our stakeholders.”

Experts say, however, that so far there is very little information on the specifics of responsibly sourced gas, or the criteria being used to certify these gas operations as ESG-appropriate or less harmful for the environment. Moreover, RSG certification appears to gloss over the fact that far less pollution comes from the extraction of gas than is generated by its inevitable combustion — and no matter how fossil gas is sourced, it still releases the same amount of harmful emissions when it is burned.

“None of the certifying organizations I’ve looked into have clear instructions on what responsibly sourced gas means. It’s a very open question as of now,” said Sharon Kelly, an attorney and freelance writer based in Philadelphia.

“It’s the Wild West, and there are no industry-wide standards,” Kelly added. She explained that there are a lot of different standards for certification of responsibly sourced gas that are competing for credibility among investors like banks and oil and gas analysts. Many of these standards rely on metrics like methane emissions, wastewater handling, and air pollution. But the standards often face scrutiny and skepticism by environmental groups, said Kelly, because most were developed with the help of fossil fuel interests, which have a history of prioritizing their bottom line above all other concerns.

Greenwashing efforts like embracing “responsibly sourced gas” and misleading the public with terms like “unabated coal” could prove to be the fossil fuel industry trying to squeeze the last bits of profit from infrastructure investments in the face of climate change–driven public demands and a rising renewable energy sector. And while the Biden administration appears to be aiding the efforts, experts aren’t fooled. No matter what people choose to call them, they say, gas, oil, and coal projects have no place in the climate change era.

“Any ESG fund or serious government plan needs to exclude gas in all of its forms,” said Henn. “Renewable energy is cheap, reliable, and widely available. We need to stop financing and building oil, gas, and coal projects across the board.”

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Daily Poster, here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rishika Pardikar is a climate change and wildlife reporter based in India.

‘We thought it wouldn’t affect us’: heatwave forces climate reckoning in Pacific north-west

A man rests in the cooling center at Fisher Pavilion in the Seattle Center this week after experiencing symptoms of heat exhaustion. Photograph: Bettina Hansen/AP


Left-leaning states had focused on how global heating would affect others. Then the ‘heat dome’ arrived


Levi Pulkkinen in Seattle

THE GUARDIAN
Sat 3 Jul 2021 

The record heatwave in the Pacific north-west is forcing a reckoning on the climate crisis, as many living in the typically mild region consider what rising temperatures mean for the future.

A “heat dome” without parallel trapped hot air over much of the states of Oregon and Washington in the United States, and southern British Columbia in Canada, in past days, shattering weather records in the usually temperate region.

Temperatures in tiny Lytton, British Columbia, hit 49.6C (121.3F) and set a Canadian all-time record, days before a wildfire tore through the town. Roads buckled under the heat in Washington and Oregon. Heat and heavy air conditioner use knocked out power for tens of thousands. The dead, thought to number in the hundreds, are not yet counted.

In Washington and Oregon, largely liberal, climate-conscious states, efforts to combat global heating have long been popular. The Washington governor, Jay Inslee, put himself forward as the “climate candidate” during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. He argued residents of the region would, in the absence of federal leadership, “do our part to address a global problem”.


‘Lytton is gone’: wildfire tears through village after record-breaking heat

Climate conversations have generally centered on what north-westerners could do to protect the planet or other people in places at greater risk of extreme heat. But after three days of temperatures near or above 100F (38C) in Seattle – a city where residents often describe the sixth month as “June-uary”, as temperatures rarely reach 80F (27C) – they’re increasingly concerned about themselves.
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“It felt like we’d set our Earth on fire,” said Summer Stinson, a 49-year-old Seattle non-profit executive.

“There was a naivety that this wouldn’t affect us in the north-west,” Stinson continued.

Having lived in Las Vegas, Stinson knew how to deal with the heat. She covered south-facing windows in her craftsman-style home with aluminum foil, kept the appliances off, and hunkered down with her teenage son and black labrador retriever, Rico. It was oppressive, evocative of the wildfire smoke that’s kept west coast residents trapped inside during recent summers. Stinson binged the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and worried for her city.

While city workers turned on some water fountains and spray parks, many wading pools remained closed because of a national chlorine shortage. Like most prosperous American cities, Seattle has hundreds of people living in tents and shanties in public parks and vacant spaces; in Stinson’s view, city leaders should have opened more cooling centers and ensured that they stayed open through the hot nights.

In the emergency department of Seattle’s Harborview medical center, the region’s premier trauma hospital, Dr Jeremy Hess found the scene he expected on Sunday night – dozens of people with heat-related ailments. By Monday evening, as the temperatures peaked, the scene was unusually intense.

A motorist travels on the Trans-Canada Highway as a wildfire burns on the side of a mountain in Lytton, British Columbia, on Thursday. Photograph: Canadian Press/REX/Shutterstock

Ambulance teams were run ragged, transporting critically ill patients who’d been intubated in the field. One area hospital was low on ventilators, while equipment at others was breaking in the heat. Hospitals were nearly overwhelmed.
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“We really hadn’t had activity like that since the beginning of the Covid outbreak here,” said Hess, who also directs the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington. “We were on the edge.”

Having contributed to UN climate work, Hess knew both the dangers posed both by extreme heat and the lack of preparation in most communities, including his own.

There had been a sense, Hess said, that the north-west would be spared the worst harms presented by a warming world. There’s truth to the sentiment inasmuch as the region, with its affluence, abundant resources and usually mellow weather, is better positioned than much of the world for a hotter, more erratic climate. The deadly heatwave came as a surprise.

“People have recognized that this might happen in theory, but I don’t think they expected it to happen,” he said. “They certainly didn’t expect it to happen now, and they didn’t expect it to be this bad.”


Nowhere is safe, say scientists as extreme heat causes chaos in US and Canada

As of Thursday, officials in Washington had attributed 20 deaths to the heatwave, 13 of them in King county, which includes Seattle. Oregon had recorded 79 deaths attributable to the heat, the state’s medical examiner said, and officials in British Columbia said they had recorded hundreds more “sudden and unexpected” deaths, though they cautioned it was too soon to determine how many were heat-related. All of those numbers are expected to rise in coming days.

Directly to blame for the tragedy was a towering ridge of high-pressure air that cut off the flow of cool, wet wind from the Pacific Ocean, the Washington state climatologist, Nick Bond, said. The ridge – dubbed a “heat dome” – also warmed the air by compressing it and funneled hot, dry air east from the arid side of the Cascade Mountains.
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Bond described the phenomenon as “unprecedented”. Crucially from a health perspective, it held nighttime temperatures up, prolonging heat-related stress on residents.

A man sleeps at a cooling shelter set up in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday. Photograph: Maranie Staab/Reuters

Was climate breakdown to blame? Bond was equivocal. Normal daytime temperatures in the region have risen about 2C degrees, while normal nighttime temps are up about 3C degrees. It stood to reason, Bond said, that the heatwave would have been less severe if the climate were generally cooler.

More instructive, in Bond’s view, is the fragility revealed by the extreme heat.

“There’s no question the climate is warming and this shows what can happen,” he said. “We didn’t like it, so let’s do something about it.”

When Michaela Eaves and her colleagues heard the extreme heat was on the way they was put up tents – big ones with air conditioning – and filled them with animals.

Eaves is a volunteer with Washington State Animal Response Team. She and other volunteers spent the scorching weekend cooling dogs, cats and other pets housed inside military surplus tents set up south-east of Seattle.

Dogs stayed in their own tent, while cats, kept company by a flock of chickens and a rabbit, stayed in a darkened enclosure. The shelter hit its maximum capacity of 40 animals each day, before it closed on Tuesday.

Dodging the heat wasn’t an option for Cody Spencer, 32, or his wife. Together, they run a pair of video game stores in Seattle – Pink Gorilla Games – catering to tech workers interested in spending some of their disposable income on vintage Nintendo systems. While one of the couple’s stores has air conditioning, the other, located in Seattle’s historic International District, does not.
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“It’s a really old building, super, super old. And so is the landlord, and he wasn’t helping at all,” Spencer said.

Customers kept coming, so Spencer sweated out the hottest days in Seattle’s history. Home was no better. Though he lives in a “kinda spend-y” apartment, Spencer, like most Seattleites, doesn’t have air conditioning.

Of course, air conditioning is a poor response to a warming world. Washington state lawmakers have taken more substantial action on climate change, and recently created a cap-and-trade system similar to California’s as well as new rules meant to constrain transportation pollution.

On Thursday, the Washington state senator Rebecca Saldaña, whose support proved crucial to passage of the cap-and-trade plan earlier in the year, said the heatwave demonstrated the need for climate action, particularly for people already living with pollution. Saldaña believes a new racially aware anti-pollution effort in Washington may prove consequential.

“There is a way forward,” said Saldaña, a progressive Democrat representing a racially and economically diverse Seattle district. “I don’t think the will is there yet, but I am hopeful that these moments of crisis, these moments where our communities are being tested, will light a fire to do something.”

‘A scourge of the Earth’: grasshopper swarms overwhelm US west

The drought has created ideal conditions for grasshopper eggs to hatch and for the insatiable eaters to survive into adulthood

Oregon and Montana have been the hardest hit by the grasshopper swarms, particularly in the arid eastern flank of both states. Photograph: AP

Lee van der Voo in Portland

Sun 4 Jul 2021 

They’re arriving in swarms so dense it can appear the earth is moving. They’re covering roads and fields, pelting ATV riders, and steadily devouring grains and grass to the bedevilment of farmers and ranchers.

A massive population of grasshoppers is proliferating in the sweltering American west, where a deep drought has made for ideal conditions for grasshopper eggs to hatch and survive into adulthood.

“I can only describe grasshoppers in expletives,” said Richard Nicholson, a cattle rancher in Fort Klamath, a small community in southern Oregon, who once recalled seeing grasshopper bands eat 1,000 acres a day and cover the ground like snow. The insects cause innumerable headaches for farmers and ranchers, competing with cattle for tough-to-find wild forage and costing tens of thousands of dollars in lost crops and associated costs. “They are a scourge of the Earth … They just destroy the land, destroy the crops. They are just a bad, bad predator.”

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Prolific though they are, the grasshoppers are not interlopers. Native to the western lands, they have been there for millions of years, their populations typically in check. They hatch as tiny versions of adults, so small about 50 can fit on a coin the size of a quarter. In average years, most die off before becoming the winged grownups that now buzz the rural skies. They and their eggs are susceptible to pathogens, brutal winters and starvation while young. But grasshopper populations began ballooning in spring 2020, thanks to warmer and drier winters that favored survival, along with a lucky few rains that spur grass that feeds young grasshopper populations.

Oregon and Montana have been the hardest hit by the insatiable eaters, particularly in the arid eastern flank of both states. Thirteen other states are also facing grasshopper damage, according to hazard maps assembled by the animal and plant health inspection service at the US Department of Agriculture. The program helps contain grasshoppers on rangeland and also targets a close cousin, the Mormon cricket. The 17 states under the purview of this pest patrol have a combined agricultural value of $8.7bn, according to the most recent estimates. Last year the program spent more than $5m on suppression efforts and is presently steeped in more.

Grasshoppers in the Swan Lake area. Photograph: Courtesy of Helmuth Rogg

“The biggest biomass consumer in the country are not cattle, are not bison. They are grasshoppers,” said Helmuth Rogg, an entomologist and agricultural scientist who works for the Oregon department of agriculture. “They eat and eat from the day they get born until the day they die. That’s all they do.”

“They basically ate all the forage,” said John O’Keeffe, a cattle rancher whose eastern Oregon ranch was besieged by grasshoppers a year ago. The ranch was recently treated with insecticide to avoid being menaced again. O’Keeffe estimates grasshoppers cost him $50,000 in lost forage, plus the price of hay to feed cattle once rangeland forage was gone.

According to Rogg, agricultural losses due to grasshoppers are often reported to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition to grazing down rangeland forage, which also wipes out feed for wild antelope, grasshoppers eat the leaves off of fruit trees and bed down in the dry areas ringing crops, where they decimate grain by eating slowly inward. Capable of flying for miles, they can travel in bands to consume one area, then move on to the next.

They eat and eat from the day they get born until the day they die. That’s all they do

Helmuth Rogg

But controlling grasshoppers can be challenging. Because they molt like snakes, shedding skins as they grow, they are susceptible to the most targeted insecticide, dimilin, only when young and between molts. That window is small in places like Oregon, where grasshoppers tend to hatch early and mature fast, in part because the climate crisis is hastening the timing of their hatch. The adults, once spotted, are too old to suppress, except with chemicals that harm other insects. That means ranchers and farmers that spot infestations are often out of luck until the next year. That’s already the case in Oregon, where the grasshoppers are entering adult days. Not so in Montana, where officials have made the most requests for insecticide.

Based on initial data, the suppression campaign will be, like the grasshopper population, the first or second largest in 35 years. Left alone, the grasshopper populace would eventually shrink. Their population bursts tend to be cyclical, controlled after predator populations catch up to tamp them down. In addition to the pathogens that claim them, parasites and fungi also attack grasshoppers, while and they and their eggs are the mealtime fare of beetles, moths, lizards and birds. Their popularity as a prey base makes them key to ecological equilibrium most of the time. That is until population density turns them to pests.

“They’re kind of a neat bug, kind of like a pack, but when they go through a field, they will just completely wipe out everything that’s there,” said Tylor Lorenz, a sixth generation rancher near Oregon’s border with California. “The damage that they do when they come into crops is just absolutely horrific.”

 

How green mining could pave the way to net zero and a sustainable future

by University of Oxford

White Island volcano, New Zealand. This is one of many volcanoes worldwide that discharge hot, metal-rich fluids to the atmosphere. In the case of White island, the discharge amounts to some 100 tonnes per year of copper and 4.5 kg per year of gold. Not all of the metals in the volcanic fluids reach the surface, in fact most is retained at depth. The challenge for green mining is to harness the metal-rich fluids that get trapped underground and the associated geothermal power. Credit: Professor Richard Arculus, Australian National University

Scientists at the University of Oxford demonstrate how it is possible to directly extract valuable metals from hot salty fluids ('brines') trapped in porous rocks at depths of around 2km below dormant volcanoes. They propose this radical green-mining approach to provide essential metals for a net zero future—copper, gold, zinc, silver and lithium—in a sustainable way.

Magma beneath volcanoes releases gasses that rise towards the surface. These gasses are rich in metals. As the pressure drops, the gasses separate into steam and brine. Most metals dissolved in the original magmatic gas become concentrated in the dense brine, which in turn gets trapped in porous rock. The less dense, and metal-depleted steam continues up to the surface, where it can form fumaroles, such as those seen at many active volcanoes.

In a new paper, published today in Open Science, Oxford scientists, based at the Department of Earth Sciences, reveal how this trapped, subterranean brine is a potential 'liquid ore' containing a slew of valuable metals, including gold, copper and lithium, that could be exploited by extracting the fluids to the surface via deep wells.

Their models show that the brines potentially contain several million tons of copper. Copper is a key metal for making the transition to net zero, due to its importance in electricity generation and transmission, and electric vehicles.

Professor Jon Blundy, based at the Department of Earth Sciences and lead author, says that "Getting to net zero will place unprecedented demand on natural metal resources, demand that recycling alone cannot meet. We need to be thinking of low-energy, sustainable ways to extract metals from the ground. Volcanoes are an obvious and ubiquitous target."

The paper also shows how geothermal power will be a significant by-product of a green-mining approach, meaning that operations at the well-head will be carbon-neutral.

Conventional mining extracts metals, such as copper, from deep pits or underground mines in the form of solid ores that then need to be crushed and processed. In the case of copper over 99% of the crushed rock is waste. Such mines are environmentally impactful, very expensive to construct and decommission, produce huge tailings piles of waste rock, and are very energy-demanding and CO2-producing.

The prospect of extracting metals in solution form from wells reduces the cost of mining and ore processing, plus exploits geothermal power to drive operations. This vastly reduces environmental impact of metal production.

Professor Blundy, says that "active volcanoes around the world discharge to the atmosphere prodigious quantities of valuable metals. Some of this metal endowment does not reach the surface, but becomes trapped as fluids in hot rocks at around 2 km depth. Green mining represents a novel way to extract both the metal-bearing fluids and geothermal power, in a way that dramatically reduces the environmental impact of conventional mining."

The research is part of an international effort (between the UK and Russia) that uses volcanology, hydrodynamic modeling, geochemistry, geophysics and high temperature experiments.

The team has worked on drill core from a number of deep geothermal systems (in Japan, Italy, Montserrat, Indonesia, Mexico) to confirm their predictions of metal-rich brines.

Professor Blundy, who is now funded by a research professorship from the Royal Society to work on volcanoes and green mining, says that "green mining is a scientific and engineering challenge which we hope that scientists and governments alike will embrace in the drive to net zero."

The scientists say that geophysical surveys of volcanoes show that almost every active and dormant volcano hosts a potentially exploitable 'lens' of metal-rich brine. This means that metal exploration may not be limited to relatively few countries as it is currently (Chile, U.S., Peru, China, DRC etc), owing to the ubiquity of volcanoes around the world.

The principal risks are technological. The process involves drilling into rock at 2 km depth and at temperatures of more than 450 °C. The extracted fluids are corrosive, which places limits on the types of drilling materials. The extracted fluids tend to dump their metal load in the well-bore, a problem known as 'scaling' (a bit like limescale in a kettle). Preventing scale formation will require complex thinking about the dynamics of fluid flow and pressure-temperature control in the well-bore. Preventing well-bore corrosion will require developments in materials science to create resistive coatings.

According to the Oxford team, many of these challenges are already being addressed through deep, hot geothermal drilling projects. In some cases these projects have reached temperatures over 500 °C; occasionally they have tapped into small pockets of molten rock, for example in Iceland and Hawaii.

Ensuring the fluids continue to flow into the well once drilled is a complex problem and the permeability and porosity of hot, ductile rock is a challenging field. The Oxford team has already patented an idea for fluid extraction.

They say that the risk of triggering volcanic eruptions is very small, but must be assessed. They are not planning to drill into magma itself, but into the hot rocks above the magma chamber, which greatly reduces the risk of encountering magma

The scientists have spent the last five years 'de-risking' the concept, and are now ready to drill an exploratory well at a dormant volcano. This will clarify many of the risks and challenges described, and will herald a new advance in our understanding of volcanoes and their immense bounty of energy and metals.

Professor Blundy, says that "continuing the de-risking work, which we are pursuing on many fronts through an international collaboration, is important. Likewise, we need to identify the best test-case volcano to drill an exploration well."

They say a working 'brine mine' could be five to 15 years away, depending on how well the challenges can be addressed.

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Explore further

Understanding the copper heart of volcanoes

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More information: Jon Blundy et al, The economic potential of metalliferous sub-volcanic brines, Royal Society Open Science (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.202192

Journal information: Royal Society Open Science