Wednesday, September 01, 2021

Biofuels offer a cost-effective way to lower shipping emissions

Marine shipping traffic has grown steadily over the past decade—and so have the associated greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon emissions from ships grew almost 10% between 2012 and 2018, and the industry is a large consumer of petroleum fuel.

Substituting biofuel could reduce the amount of greenhouse gases and other pollutants entering the air from ocean shipping, according to a study from researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Transportation. Compared with conventional heavy fuel oil, the study found, biomass-based fuel could reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 40 and 93%.

Without any changes to the status quo, greenhouse gas emissions from shipping in 2050 could be 40% higher than they are today, according to the United Nations' International Maritime Organization (IMO). The IMO has set a target to instead cut those emissions by at least half.

Shipping is also a key source of sulfur oxides and soot or particulate matter emissions, which worsen air quality and have been linked to human health problems. The IMO recently imposed new fuel standards aimed at reducing emissions of sulfur oxides, requiring lower concentrations of sulfur in shipping fuel.

"The push to cut pollutants from shipping is an emerging opportunity for biofuels, but the potential impact has gone relatively unexplored," said Troy Hawkins, a scientist at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory who co-led the study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. "Our analysis found biofuels can significantly reduce shipping emissions while remaining cost-effective."

The vast majority of cargo ships today run on heavy fuel oil, which is cheap and energy dense but very dirty to burn.

"These engines are multiple stories tall and so large you could climb inside them," Hawkins said. "They are just huge, and they are burning hundreds of millions of tons of thick, tar-like fuel to move freight internationally."

The study evaluated costs and emissions of biofuel alternatives including bio-oil and renewable diesel made from wood waste or fats such as used cooking oil. They also looked at mixtures of these biobased feedstocks with petroleum-based feedstocks including petroleum, natural gas and coal.

To conduct the emissions analysis, the researchers used Argonne's Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation model (GREET). GREET is an analytical tool used to calculate the energy and environmental impacts of different fuels across their full life cycle. Instead of just considering the energy use and emissions that result when a fuel is burned, a life-cycle analysis considers the bigger picture, including extracting the fuel, refining it, and transporting it to users.

The GREET model is a well-established tool for life cycle analysis of transportation and other technologies. For this study, Argonne researchers significantly expanded the fuel pathways considered for marine shipping. Their collaborators at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) analyzed costs of the various fuels compared. They found the 100% biofuel options offered emissions reductions up to 93% compared with heavy fuel oil and also the lowest cost among the alternative fuel pathways considered.

Across the board, the biofuels lowered emissions of greenhouse gases, sulfur oxides and particulate matter—and at costs that could be competitive with heavy fuel oil, after considering incentives such as California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Due to the low sulfur content of the biobased feedstocks, the biofuels analyzed reduced sulfur oxides emissions by 97% or more; particulate matter emissions came down between 84 and 90%.

The research, which was funded by the Department of Transportation Maritime Administration and DOE's Bioenergy Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, is part of a broader effort at DOE to study the feasibility of using biofuels to lower emissions from cargo ships. Recently, DOE also announced a partnership with the governments of the United States, Denmark and Norway to develop technologies for zero-emission shipping as part of Mission Innovation, a global initiative to accelerate affordable, accessible clean energy solutions.

The datasets developed in the recent study are publicly available and could also support the evaluation of fuels to meet California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which takes a similar life-cycle view of fuels to encourage options with the lowest carbon intensity. Co-authors with Hawkins are Eric Tan and Ling Tao at NREL; Uisung Lee and Michael Wang at Argonne; Pimphan Meyer at PNNL and Tom Thompson at the Maritime Administration.

"This study offers a foundation for fairly evaluating marine shipping fuels," Hawkins said. "With many options on the horizon for cleaner shipping, our goal is to support decision-making about which ones offer the best potential for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and are the most cost-effective to pursue."

Environmental concerns propel research into marine biofuels

More information: Eric C. D. Tan et al, Biofuel Options for Marine Applications: Technoeconomic and Life-Cycle Analyses, Environmental Science & Technology (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.0c06141

Journal information: Environmental Science & Technology

Provided by Argonne National Laboratory

Early COVID-19 shutdowns helped St. Louis area avoid thousands of deaths

by Washington University School of Medicine

In March 2020, not long after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported locally, health officials in the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County issued emergency public health orders intended to reduce interactions between people and slow the transmission of the novel respiratory virus. Such action likely saved thousands of lives in the region, according to new research led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

An analysis indicates that a delay of even two weeks in issuing local public health orders could have increased the number of deaths almost sevenfold in the city and county.

The researchers analyzed an epidemiological model to examine what was likely to have happened if the epidemic trajectory in St. Louis early in March had continued without the enactment of behavior-focused public health policies for another one, two and four weeks.

The research, published Sept. 1 in JAMA Network Open, demonstrates the importance of early and coordinated implementation of local public health policies in reducing deaths from the pandemic, particularly during a critical window at the onset of a new epidemic.

"We heard a lot about the dire situations in cities such as New York and Boston in the early part of the pandemic, where thousands of people died and hospitals were completely overwhelmed, but whether a similar situation would have happened in St. Louis is not obvious," said lead author Elvin H. Geng, MD, a professor of medicine. "Some may argue that because the same thing didn't happen here, it could never have happened here and that, therefore, early social-distancing policies were an overreaction. But our data suggest that a large number of deaths due to the pandemic was indeed possible in St. Louis, and therefore, the early implementation of public health orders helped prevent the number of deaths that cities such as New York and other places experienced."

The first known case of COVID-19 in St. Louis County was reported March 7, 2020. By March 13, the city and county had banned large gatherings. Four days later, they closed bars and restaurants, and the next day, March 18, they ordered all public schools to close their doors. On March 23, the city and county issued shelter-in-place orders. With these public health measures, area hospitals experienced a total of 2,246 COVID-19 hospitalizations and 482 deaths attributed to COVID-19 by June 15, 2020.

Had the orders been delayed two weeks, the researchers' modeling indicates that the city and county likely would have seen 3,292 deaths by June 15—a nearly sevenfold increase over what was actually recorded in the first three months of the pandemic. In the two-week delay scenario, the model predicts an increase in cumulative total hospitalizations by June 15 from the actual number of 2,246 to an estimated 19,600—a nearly ninefold increase.

"Because the virus spreads exponentially, the difference between a hospital at 25% capacity and over capacity is actually just a hair's breadth—a matter of one or two doubling intervals, which in an unmitigated epidemic with COVID-19 is probably a little longer than a week," Geng said. "In addition, it takes time for changes in behavior to translate into reductions in hospitalizations. As a rule of thumb, we estimate the St. Louis region has about 2,000 available hospital beds total. If the hospitals reach half capacity and only then are stay-at-home policies implemented, it's going to be too late."

Even a one-week delay in public health measures would have considerably increased hospitalizations and deaths, with an estimated 8,000 hospitalizations and 1,300 deaths by June 15, under that modeling scenario.

The researchers also estimated how these delays might have played out if the general public had voluntarily changed its behavior. In the absence of public health orders, even if the public had changed its behavior enough to cut viral transmission by half—an optimistic scenario—a two-week delay still would have resulted in an estimated 8,090 hospitalizations and about 1,400 deaths.

As cases rose in other regions of the country, data from cell phones in the St. Louis area showed the public made no changes in mobility before the city and county orders.

"At the moment when a pandemic is arriving, spontaneous collective behavior change—without any public health actions—that is drastic enough to significantly slow the epidemic is probably not realistic," Geng said. "If behavior changes after the hospitals fill up and the impact of the pandemic is obvious, it's already too late to avoid a high number of deaths. A pandemic is like a big ship; it takes time to change course. But as the virus ramped up, early social distancing policies in St. Louis mitigated it just before it really exploded."

The researchers estimated that before March 15, each person in the city or county with COVID-19 infected almost four other people, on average. For a pandemic to be curbed, each person must infect fewer than one other person, on average. For St. Louis and St. Louis County, the model estimated that the average number of people each person with COVID-19 infected dropped from almost four to 0.93 after the stay-at-home policies went into effect.

"These data do not speak to the overall societal costs, which were formidable and painful," Geng added. "The best long-term strategies to mitigate a respiratory epidemic in the absence of a vaccine is a difficult question. Social distancing is only part of the solution. But if such strategies are to be used, implementing them early, during the initial arrival of the virus, might be the best time to deploy such actions."

Geng performed this analysis with colleagues at Washington University, BJC HealthCare, Saint Louis University, Mercy Health and elsewhere, including senior author Maya Peterson, MD, Ph.D., of the University of California at Berkeley, and lead programmer and co-author Joshua Schwab, of the University of California at San Francisco. The program—called Local Epidemic Modeling for Management & Action—is publicly available and open source, and the researchers hope that other public health officials across the country will be able to use it to inform pandemic responses in their communities. The most recent version of the program also can incorporate the dynamics of local vaccination rates.

Geng said that models are not crystal balls, but they do project forward what could happen under a set of behavioral and structural conditions.

"While we can never be sure about what would have happened, it's also not true that we know nothing about the behavior of epidemics," Geng said. "The model uses real data about the epidemic early on—what actually happened on the ground in St. Louis—to project epidemic course over time under a 'what if' scenario. These COVID-19 projections suggest that the city and county dodged a bullet with early social distancing measures."

In related research, Geng—along with first author Ingrid Eshun-Wilson, MBChB, an instructor in medicine, and colleagues at the university's Brown School, including Virginia McKay, Ph.D., a research assistant professor, and Vetta Thompson, Ph.D., the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity—also gauged public opinion on stay-at-home policies by surveying a random sample of Missouri residents. They found that the general public was broadly accepting of such public health policies, including the prohibition of large gatherings and closing social and lifestyle venues, such as bars, restaurants, gyms and hair salons. An analysis of the survey was published July 8 in JAMA Network Open

Los Angeles hopes new mask mandate will reverse virus spike

More information: Geng EH et al. Outcomes associated with social distancing policies in St. Louis, Missouri, during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. JAMA Network Open. Sept. 1, 2021.

Eshun-Wilson I, et al. Public preferences for social distancing policy measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in Missouri. JAMA Network Open. July 8, 2021.

Journal information: JAMA Network Open

Provided by Washington University School of Medicine

Prehistoric climate change repeatedly channelled human migrations across Arabia

by Max Planck Society

Recent research in Arabia—a collaboration between scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and many other Saudi and international researchers—has begun to document the incredibly rich prehistory of Saudi Arabia, the largest country in Southwest Asia. Previous research in the region has focused on the coastal and woodland margins, while human prehistory in the vast interior areas remained poorly understood.

The new findings, including the oldest dated evidence for humans in Arabia at 400,000 years ago, are described as a breakthrough in Arabian archaeology by Dr. Huw Groucutt, lead author of the study and head of the "Extreme Events' Max Planck Society Research Group in Jena, Germany, based at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.

The discovery of thousands of stone tools reveals multiple waves of human occupation and shows changing human culture over time. At the site of Khall Amayshan 4 (KAM 4), nestled in a hollow between large dunes, researchers found evidence for six phases of lake formation, five of them associated with stone tools made by early humans at around 400,000, 300,000, 200,000, 100,000, and 55,000 years ago. Each phase of human occupation is characterized by a different kind of material culture, documenting the transition from the Lower Paleolithic Acheulean 'handaxe' culture to different kinds of stone flake-based Middle Paleolithic technologies. Excavations at the Jubbah Oasis, 150 km to the east, also recovered stone tools, dating to 200,000 and 75,000 years ago.

Green Arabia

The dating of the archaeological sites—achieved primarily through a technique called luminescence dating, which records the length of time since tiny grains of sediment were last exposed to sunlight—shows that each occupation dates to a time when rainfall is known to have increased in the region. In addition, all of the stone tool assemblages are associated with the distinctive sediments produced by freshwater lakes. The findings therefore show that, within a dominant pattern of aridity, occasional short phases of increased rainfall led to the formation of thousands of lakes, wetlands, and rivers that crossed most of Arabia, forming key migration routes for humans and animals such as hippos.

While today the Nefud desert is a very arid region, deep hollows between the large sand dunes created places for small lakes to form during occasional increases in rainfall. As a result, the Nefud region was periodically transformed from one of the most uninhabitable parts of Southwest Asia into a lush grassland that provided opportunities for repeated population movements.

Wider implications

Unlike bones and other organic materials, stone tools preserve very easily, and their character is largely influenced by learned cultural behaviors. As a result, they illuminate the background of their makers and show how cultures developed along their own unique trajectories in different areas. The Khall Amayshan 4 and Jubbah Oasis findings reflect short-lived pulses of occupation that represent the initial phases of migration waves.

Each phase of human occupation in northern Arabia shows a distinct kind of material culture, suggesting that populations arrived in the area from multiple directions and source areas. This diversity sheds unique light on the extent of cultural differences in Southwest Asia during this timeframe, and indicates strongly sub-divided populations. In some cases the differences in material culture are so great as to indicate the contemporary presence of different hominin species in the region, suggesting that Arabia may also have been an interface zone for different hominin groups originating in Africa and Eurasia. Animal fossils indicate a similar pattern: although the north Arabian fossil record shows a prominent African character, some species came from the north, while others represent long-time residents of Arabia.

The findings highlight the importance of filling in the gaps in the hominin map. "Arabia has long been seen as empty place throughout the past," says Dr. Groucutt. "Our work shows that we still know so little about human evolution in vast areas of the world and highlights the fact that many surprises are still out there."

"It's remarkable; every time it was wet, people were there," says project leader Prof. Michael Petraglia, from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. "This work puts Arabia on the global map for human prehistory," he adds.

The study is reported in Nature.

Stone tools linked to ancient human ancestors in Arabia have surprisingly recent date

More information: Multiple hominin dispersals into Southwest Asia over the past 400,000 years, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03863-y , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03863-y

Journal information: Nature

Provided by Max Planck Society

Dogs distinguish between intentional and unintentional action

by Max Planck Society

Dogs tell the difference between intentional and unintentional action — Dogs and experimenter sat on opposite sides of the partition. Dogs were fed through

Over their long shared history, dogs have developed a range of skills for bonding with human beings. Their ability to make sense of human actions, demonstrated by every "sit," "lay down," and "roll over," is just one such skill. But whether dogs understand human intentions, or merely respond to outcomes, remains unclear. The ability to recognize another's intentions—or at least conceive of them—is a basic component of theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, long regarded as uniquely human. Do dogs have this basic component of theory of mind, the ability to tell the difference between something done on purpose and something done by accident?

To answer this question, a team of researchers in Germany conducted an experiment that examined how dogs reacted when food rewards were withheld, both intentionally and unintentionally. They found that dogs respond differently depending on whether the actions of the experimenter were intentional or unintentional. This, the researchers say, shows that dogs can distinguish between actions that were done on purpose or accidentally.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers conducted an experiment using the "unable vs. unwilling" paradigm. This works by examining whether test subjects react differently toward a human experimenter who either intentionally (the unwilling condition) or unintentionally (the unable condition) withholds rewards from them. Despite being an established paradigm in studies of human and animal cognition, the unable vs. unwilling paradigm had never been previously used to investigate dogs.

The experiment was conducted with 51 dogs, each of which was tested under three conditions. In each condition, the dog was separated from the human tester by a transparent barrier. The basic situation was that the experimenter fed the dog pieces of dog food through a gap in the barrier. In the "unwilling" condition, the experimenter suddenly withdrew the reward through the gap in the barrier and placed it in front of herself. In the "unable-clumsy" condition, the experimenter brought the reward to the gap in the barrier and "tried" to pass it through the gap but then "accidentally" dropped it. In the "unable-blocked" condition, the experimenter again tried to give the dog a reward, but was unable to because the gap in the barrier was blocked. In all conditions, the reward remained on the tester's side of the barrier.

"If dogs are indeed able to ascribe intention in action to humans," says Dr. Juliane Bräuer, "we would expect them to show different reactions in the unwilling condition compared to the two unable conditions. As it turns out, this is exactly what we observed."

The primary behavior measured by the researchers was the time dogs waited before approaching the reward they were denied. The researchers predicted that, if dogs are able to identify human intentions, they would wait longer before approaching the reward in the unwilling condition, where they were not supposed to have the reward, than in the two unable conditions in which the reward was, in fact, meant for them.

Not only did the dogs wait longer in the unwilling condition than in the unable conditions, they were also more likely to sit or lie down—actions often interpreted as appeasing behaviors—and stop wagging their tails.

"The dogs in our study clearly behaved differently depending on whether the actions of a human experimenter were intentional or unintentional," says Britta Schünemann, the first author of the study. "This suggests that dogs may indeed be able to identify humans' intention-in-action," adds Hannes Rakoczy from the University of Göttingen.

The team acknowledges that their findings may be met with skepticism and that further study is needed to address alternative explanations, such as behavioral cues on the part of experimenters or knowledge transfer from prior dog training.

"Nevertheless," the paper concludes, "the findings present important initial evidence that dogs may have at least one aspect of theory of mind: The capacity to recognize intention-in-action."

The study is published in Scientific Reports.

Dogs may not return their owners' good deeds

More information: Britta Schünemann et al, Dogs distinguish human intentional and unintentional action, Scientific Reports (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-94374-3

Journal information: Scientific Reports

Provided by Max Planck Society

Raining microbes? New study finds rain-borne bacteria colonize plants

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN PHYTOPATHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

When it rains, plants are not only showered with water, but also microbes. These rain-borne microbes have the opportunity to become part of a plant’s aboveground microbial community – known as the phyllosphere. Phyllosphere microbes can protect plants from disease and other stressors and understanding where they come from may help us improve plant health. While plant microbiome research has historically focused on soil and seeds as sources of plant-associated microbes, new findings by scientists at Virginia Tech University suggest that rain may also be an important reservoir.

A study recently published in Phytobiomes Journal led by Marco Mechan-Llontop and Boris Vinatzer examined rain as a reservoir of phyllosphere bacteria. After finding greater densities of microbes on the leaves of rain-exposed tomato plants compared to those grown in the lab, they set out to experimentally test whether rain-borne microbes could successfully colonize the phyllosphere of tomato plants. “Although this is a simple question, it is actually really hard to answer since plants outside are exposed to many bacteria that come from the soil, rain, and the air,” noted Vinatzer.

Additionally, while rain may contain important microbes, their quantities may be small–a milliliter of rain might only contain a few microbial cells. To control for other external sources of microbes and inoculate plants with measurable doses of rain-borne microbes, Vinatzer and colleagues performed a laboratory experiment with rain they collected. They filtered the rainwater to obtain sterilized water and membranes containing the bacterial microbiota. These membranes were incubated to obtain a highly concentrated inoculum of rain-borne bacteria. They sprayed plants with this inoculum or with sterilized rainwater and distilled water (as negative controls) and incubated the plants for one week before characterizing their bacterial communities via DNA analyses.

Their analysis showed that inoculating plants with the rainwater microbial communities increased the abundance of over 100 bacterial taxa, indicating that microbes in rain can successfully colonize and grow on the surface of plants. This suggests rain is a potentially important reservoir for phyllosphere bacteria. The authors hope this research will pave the way for more research into the origins of plant-associated microorganisms and microbes that are efficiently distributed by rain. “The more we know about these bacteria, the better we can use them to our advantage to improve plant health,” says Vinatzer. For example, bacteria that suppress plant pathogens could be sprayed onto leaves to reduce or prevent disease. The authors plan to continue their research examining the importance of rain in phyllosphere assembly and hope to identify beneficial bacteria from rain.

Read more about this research in “Experimental Evidence Pointing to Rain as a Reservoir of Tomato Phyllosphere Microbiota” by Marco Mechan-Llontop, Long Tian, Parul Sharma, Logan Heflin, Vivian Bernal-Galeano, David Haak, Christopher Clarke, and Boris Vinatzer.

Lead author Marco E. Mechan-Llontop is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Shade Lab at Michigan State University. Senior author Boris Vinatzer is a professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech.

Author information: Eric Wang is a student at Millburn High School and is interested in how plant-microbial interactions vary among different kinds of plants. Mia Howard (@mia_how) is an assistant feature editor for Phytobiomes Journal and a postdoctoral researcher in the Lau Lab at Indiana University. She is fascinated by how plants—often with help from microbes—protect themselves from herbivores with toxic chemicals.

JOURNAL

Phytobiomes Journal

DOI

10.1094/PBIOMES-04-21-0025-R

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Experimental Evidence Pointing to Rain as a Reservoir of Tomato Phyllosphere Microbiota

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Jun-2021

Extreme sea levels to become much more common worldwide as Earth warms

Critical coastal events, happening once a century in recent times, to occur every year on average

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DOE/PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY

COLLEGE PARK, Md.—The news has been packed in recent months with severe climate and weather events—record-high temperatures from the Pacific Northwest to Sicily, flooding in Germany and the eastern United States, wildfires from Sacramento to Siberia to Greece. Events that seemed rare just a few decades ago are now commonplace.

A new study, appearing in the journal Nature Climate Change August 30, looks specifically at extreme sea levels—the occurrence of exceptionally high seas due to the combination of tide, waves and storm surge. The study predicts that because of rising temperatures, extreme sea levels along coastlines the world over will become 100 times more frequent by the end of the century in about half of the 7,283 locations studied. That means, because of rising temperatures, an extreme sea level event that would have been expected to occur once every 100 years currently is expected to occur, on average, every year by the end of this century.

While the researchers say there is uncertainty—as always—about future climate, the most likely path is that these increased instances of sea level rise will occur even with a global temperature increase of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial temperatures. Scientists consider these temperatures the lower end of possible global warming. And the changes are likely to come sooner than the end of the century, with many locations experiencing a 100-fold increase in extreme sea level events by 2070.

Mapping effects, location by location

Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, led an international team of researchers in the analysis. She brought together scientists who have led previous large studies of extreme sea levels and the effects of temperatures on sea level rise. The team pooled its data and introduced a novel synthesis method, treating the alternative estimates as expert voters, to map out likely effects of temperature increases ranging from 1.5 C to 5 C compared to preindustrial times.

The scientists found, not unexpectedly, that the effects of rising seas on extreme sea level frequency would be felt most acutely in the tropics and generally at lower latitudes compared to northern locations. Locations likely to be affected most include the Southern Hemisphere, areas along the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Peninsula, the southern half of North America’s Pacific coast, and areas including Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Philippines and Indonesia. In many of these regions, sea level is expected to rise faster than at higher latitudes.

Regions that will be less affected include the higher latitudes, the northern Pacific coast of North America, and the Pacific coast of Asia.

“One of our central questions driving this study was this: How much warming will it take to make what has been known as a 100-year event an annual event? Our answer is, not much more than what has already been documented,” said Tebaldi, who notes that the globe has already warmed about 1 C compared to preindustrial times.

The new study mirrors the assertion of the 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which stated that extreme sea level events would become much more common worldwide by the end of the century due to global warming.

“It’s not huge news that sea level rise will be dramatic even at 1.5 degrees and will have substantial effects on extreme sea level frequencies and magnitude” said Tebaldi. “This study gives a more complete picture around the globe. We were able to look at a wider range of warming levels in very fine spatial detail.”

The best- and worst-case scenarios put forth by the study vary, due to uncertainties that the study authors represented in remarkable detail. In one scenario, at the pessimistic end, 99 percent of locations studied will experience a 100-fold increase in extreme events by 2100 at 1.5 C of warming. In another, at the optimistic end, about 70 percent of locations don’t see much of a change even with a temperature increase of 5 C.

The authors call for more study to understand precisely how the changes will affect particular communities. They point out that the physical changes that their study describes will have varying impacts at local scales, depending on several factors, including how vulnerable the site is to rising waters and how prepared a community is for change.

Authors of the paper include Roshanka Ranasinghe of the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands; Michalis Vousdoukas of the European Joint Research Centre in Italy; D.J. Rasmussen of Princeton University; Ben Vega-Westhoff and Ryan Sriver of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Ebru Kirezci of the University of Melbourne in Australia; Robert E. Kopp of Rutgers University; and Lorenzo Mentaschi of the University of Bologna in Italy.

Tebaldi, the corresponding author, is a scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between PNNL and the University of Maryland where researchers explore the interactions between human, energy and environmental systems.

The study was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and DOE’s Office of Science.

# # #

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in sustainable energy and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit PNNL's News Center. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

JOURNAL

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-021-01127-1

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Extreme sea levels at different global warming levels

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Aug-2021

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Wednesday, September 01, 2021

Biofuels offer a cost-effective way to lower shipping emissions

Early COVID-19 shutdowns helped St. Louis area avoid thousands of deaths

Prehistoric climate change repeatedly channelled human migrations across Arabia

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DOI

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ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

Extreme sea levels to become much more common worldwide as Earth warms

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