Carbon Capture Must Be Part of the Climate Solution

Fossil fuel companies tout carbon capture as a way to shore up their own profits. But the technology holds the potential for good — helping us to save the planet, and ourselves, from ecological catastrophe.

Orca, the world’s first, ONLY and largest climate-positive direct air capture and storage plant, in Hellisheidi, Iceland. (Climeworks)

BYSPENCER ROBERTS

JACOOBIN

12.22.2021

Imagine a group of campers carelessly polluting the forest, leaving beer cans, plastic wrappers, and propane tanks strewn about the understory. An ecologist comes upon their campsite and explains how they are harming the forest ecosystem. The campers decide to stop polluting, but never clean up the mess. This is analogous to a climate strategy without carbon removal.

At its root, the climate crisis is a chemical imbalance. Global heating is just one of its side effects. To restore the ecological conditions in which we evolved, we must restore the balance of carbon flows between our atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. This means not only halting carbon emissions, but returning carbon to where it came from.

Where to Put All This Carbon

Since 1750, an estimated 26 to 46 percent of cumulative historical emissions have been released from the biosphere through deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction. Fortunately, ecosystems have myriad ways to reverse this process. Even on the mouth of a smokestack, the most advanced technology scrubbing the densest coal plume pales in comparison to a tropical forest, which itself pales in comparison to a mangrove. It’s true that nothing sequesters carbon more quickly than nature.

But the world’s ecosystems have a carbon ceiling, or carrying capacity. Even if we somehow returned all converted land to its preindustrial state, models estimate we could only sequester around 41 percent of cumulative historical emissions — in other words, roughly as much carbon as the biosphere originally contained.

This is because at least half of the carbon we’ve released into the atmosphere has come from the lithosphere, through burning fossil fuel from the Earth’s crust. There is no natural process to reverse this at the necessary scale and speed.

Despite this reality, many leading climate advocates argue that carbon capture is unnecessary. They point out — correctly — that if we rapidly decarbonize, the planet could make it halfway back to preindustrial carbon dioxide levels by the end of the century.

But again, the changing climate is only one consequence of the global chemistry experiment we’ve been running. If we leave all this carbon in the atmosphere, levels will eventually decrease once we stop emitting. That’s because most of it will dissolve into the ocean, triggering a chain reaction with carbonic compounds that acidifies seawater. Removing carbon from the atmosphere reverses this process. Even if we should reach preindustrial temperatures in the 2100s by emissions cuts alone, we will have done nothing to address ocean acidification. Is it a victory to achieve a planet where there are vast areas of ocean with no oysters to filter water, no corals to shelter fish, no pteropods to support food webs?

Worse yet, without burying carbon, the effects of temperature change will be catastrophic on both sea and land. We will almost certainly cross the two degree threshold, virtually dooming corals to extinction, liquidating the Arctic sea ice, sinking hundreds of cities from Bangkok to Miami, and killing millions of people in heatwaves. To survive, we must stabilize our climate — and quickly.
Ungreenwashing Carbon Capture

While leading biogeochemists have long made the case for carbon capture technology, its most visible proponent is the fossil fuel industry. Its lobbyists use it to sell carbon credits to big polluters and empty promises to world leaders. Its interest in the technology isn’t motivated by an obligation to humanity or the planet, but rather a strategy to silence critics and stay in business — whether that means emitting less or more. Today, most of the small amount of carbon the industry captures isn’t stored, but rather used in enhanced oil recovery to lubricate geological fissures and accelerate carbon extraction. Needless to say, this exacerbates the problem.

There are only a few forms of carbon capture technology that yield net-negative emissions. First, some catalyze natural processes, such as enhanced rock weathering and ocean iron fertilization. However, the sequestration potential of these approaches is generally thought to be modest — and with a high risk of negative ecological side effects.

Then there’s bioenergy carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. BECCS augments the theoretically net-neutral process of growing and burning biofuel with capturing carbon at the smokestack, storing it underground to push emissions into the red. This method could potentially sequester a lot of carbon, but at a high cost in land. While we wouldn’t have to expand cropland if we drastically reduced agricultural land use by farming fewer animals, using land to grow biofuels would sacrifice its higher potential for carbon sequestration through rewilding.

This leaves direct air capture (DAC), perhaps the most technologically challenging of all. DAC generally involves a system of enormous fans sucking air through a chemical sponge that filters roughly a thousand air molecules for every four of carbon dioxide. These are then liquefied in solvents and pumped back underground.

The drawbacks associated with direct air capture are low compared to other forms of geoengineering and related to the risks we already take during fossil fuel extraction, including seismic destabilization and injection well leaks. However, DAC is water-intensive, and although we might develop passive systems that use wind, absorbent solvents, or electrodialysis, today’s direct air capture technology demands high quantities of energy and is only emissions-negative if powered by renewables.

Therein lies the most significant caveat: carbon capture is no excuse for aggressively cutting emissions. It will only help if we also rapidly phase out the fossil fuel industry.

Unfortunately, that’s who’s getting all the funding. Fossil fuel corporations are raking in public investments and tax exemptions to research and develop carbon capture, yet posting pathetic results. Despite decades of R&D, billions in carbon capture subsidies, and proposals for $100 billion more, ExxonMobil reported capturing less than 1 percent of its emissions in 2019.

The charitable interpretation is that carbon capture engineering is uniquely challenging. A less credulous explanation is that fossil fuel corporations simply have no incentive to develop carbon capture technology. Funding isn’t contingent on progress, and scaling isn’t worth the capital of thousands of engineers and millions of construction workers. Either way, the research and development of carbon capture technology can only be successful if we decouple it from the fossil fuel industry and build it within the public sector, far from the tyranny of the profit margin.

Despite such misinvestment, net-negative carbon capture technology does exist. In August 2021, a prototype called Orca went online, making it the biggest direct air capture facility in the world. While its developer, Climeworks, is at best a net-neutral corporation — it sells carbon offsets to make a profit — Orca is net-negative, running on geothermal and drawing down a relatively impressive four thousand tons of CO2 per year. At that rate, we’d need more than eight million of them running for fifty years to capture all the fossil carbon we’ve burned (and it would take longer for the atmosphere to level out).

The good news is that the facilities are not that big — about the size of a shipping container, of which we have around 43 million — and like solar and wind, we can expect this technology to gain efficiency over time. Plus, if considering where to install them, we do already have millions of drill pads complete with tubes connected to oil deposits or porous shale strata. Lastly, it’s not all or nothing. Every atom counts.

The Real Net Zero

Carbon capture is not the easy road to net zero that oil lobbyists want to sell us. The real net zero is somewhere around 280ppm CO2. We should think of carbon capture more like putting an imperceptibly diffuse toothpaste back into countless millions of leaky tubes — essentially reverse-engineering fossil fuel, our most disastrous geoengineering experiment ever. It’s a moonshot, yet it’s not rocket science. And while there is a complex engineering case for carbon capture, the ecological case is simple: we need to rebury carbon to reverse ocean acidification.

Carbon capture is a challenge we cannot afford to turn away from, regardless of the venal purposes for which the technology has so far been developed. Today, it is used as a justification for prolonging our dependence on fossil fuel and enriching those who have profited from its extraction. Tomorrow, it may be the only way to remedy the crime against nature that precedes and precipitates climate change — the distortion of planetary chemistry.

This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Spencer Roberts is a science writer, musician, ecologist, and rooftop solar engineer from Colorado.

Nothing funny about bad year for Maine’s clownish puffins
By PATRICK WHITTLE


FILE - In this July 1, 2013, file photo, a puffin prepares to land with a bill full of fish on Eastern Egg Rock off the Maine coast. This year's warm summer was bad for Maine's beloved puffins. Far fewer chicks fledged than need to to stabilize the population.

 (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)


PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s beloved puffins suffered one of their worst years for reproduction in decades this summer due to a lack of the small fish they eat.

Puffins are seabirds with colorful beaks that nest on four small islands off the coast of Maine. There are about 1,500 breeding pairs in the state and they are dependent on fish such as herring and sand lance to be able to feed their young.

Only about a quarter of the birds were able to raise chicks this summer, said Don Lyons, director of conservation science for the National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute in Bremen, Maine. About two-thirds of the birds succeed in a normal year, he said.

The puffin colonies have suffered only one or two less productive years in the four decades since their populations were restored in Maine, Lyons said. The birds had a poor year because of warm ocean temperatures this summer that reduced the availability of the fish the chicks need to survive, he said.

“There were fewer fish for puffins to catch, and the ones they were able to were not ideal for chicks,” Lyons said. “It’s a severe warning this year.”'

 In this July 19, 2019, file photo, research assistant Andreinna Alvarez, of Ecuador, holds a puffin chick before weighing and banding the bird on Eastern Egg Rock, a small island off the coast of Maine. This year's warm summer was bad for Maine's beloved puffins. Far fewer chicks fledged than need to to stabilize the population.

 (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

The islands where puffins nest are located in the Gulf of Maine, a body of water that is warming faster than the vast majority of the world’s oceans. Researchers have not seen much mortality of adult puffins, but the population will suffer if the birds continue to have difficulty raising chicks, Lyons said.

The discouraging news comes after positive signs in recent years despite the challenging environmental conditions. The population of the birds, which are on Maine’s state threatened species list, has been stable in recent years.

The birds had one of their most productive seasons for mating pairs in years in 2019. Scientists including Stephen Kress, who has studied the birds for decades, said at the time that birds seemed to be doing well because the Gulf of Maine had a cool year that led to an abundance of food.

The puffins are Atlantic puffins that also live in Canada and the other side of the ocean. Internationally, they’re listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

 

Cyclones starve North Atlantic seabirds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CNRS

 

IMAGE: ATLANTIC PUFFIN view more 

CREDIT: © DAVID GRÉMILLET

Every winter, thousands of emaciated seabird carcasses are found on North American and European shores. In an article published on the 13 September in Current Biology, an international team of scientists including the CNRS1 has shown how cyclones are causing the deaths of these birds. The latter are frequently exposed to high-intensity cyclones, which can last several days, when they migrate from their Arctic nesting sites to the North Atlantic further south in order to winter in more favourable conditions. After equipping more than 1,500 birds of the five main species concerned (Atlantic puffins, little auks, black-legged kittiwakes, and two species of guillemots) with small loggers2 and by comparing their movements with the trajectories of cyclones, the scientists were able to determine the degree of exposure of the birds to these weather events. By modeling the energy expenditure of birds under such conditions, the study suggests, surprisingly, that the birds do not die from increased energy expenditure, but as a result of their inability to feed during a cyclone. The species studied are particularly unsuited to fly in high winds and some cannot dive into a stormy sea, preventing them from feeding. Trapped during a cyclone, these birds will starve if the unfavourable conditions persist beyond the few days that their body reserves allow them to survive without food. As the frequency of severe cyclones in the North Atlantic increases with climate change, seabirds wintering in this area will be even more vulnerable to such events.

CAPTION

Flight of a little auk equipped with a GLS system (eastern Greenland).

CREDIT

© David Grémillet

Notes

 

1 – Among those who took part in the study are scientists from the Centre d'écologie fonctionnelle et évolutive (CNRS/Université de Monptellier/IRD/EPHE), the laboratory Littoral, environment et societies (CNRS/La Rochelle Université) and the Centre for biological studies of Chizé (CNRS/La Rochelle Université).

The following major international structures took part (among others): the University of Wisconsin, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.

2 - GLS (Global Location Sensor) tags are tiny tracking devices weighing around 1g, capable of recording light levels in the vicinity of the bird, allowing the position of the equipped individual to be calculated. Though less accurate (range of about 200 kilometres) than a GPS device, these loggers require little energy and have a long life span. They are placed on the metal rings that scientists put on the birds’ leg.

 

---

JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2021.06.059 

ARTICLE TITLE

North Atlantic winter cyclones starve seabirds

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2021

Trump’s National Labor Relations Board Is Sabotaging Its Own Mission
The federal agency that’s supposed to protect union rights is instead championing the interests of bosses.

By Michelle ChenTwitter THE NATION SEPT 7,2020

SEPTEMBER 21/28, 2020, ISSUE

SCABBY THE RAT
Photo illustration by Cindy Lee.

On a June afternoon in 2019, in front of a statue of George Washington at Federal Hall in New York City’s financial district, more than 100 construction workers and activists gathered for a First Amendment rally. Amid chants of “Free speech, free speech!” an approximately 15-foot-tall gray inflatable rat with glaring red eyes bobbed in the sun. The workers, mostly members of Laborers Local 79, weren’t defending speech, exactly. Rather, they were demanding their right to display Scabby the Rat, the mascot deployed at job sites to shame anti-union bosses.


This article was reported in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Puffin Foundation.

The challenge to these workers came from a seemingly unlikely quarter: the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing labor law. The NLRB’s general counsel, Peter Robb, had launched a legal assault to ban Scabby from a nonunion construction site at a Staten Island supermarket. Arguing that its menacing presence amounted to illegal protest activity against a “neutral” business under the National Labor Relations Act, Robb, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017, sought a federal court injunction that could effectively outlaw Scabby across the country.

On the steps outside the hall where the Bill of Rights was ratified, Chaz Rynkiewicz, Local 79’s director of organizing, took the microphone and denounced Robb as “an anti-union lawyer that, before he was head of the NLRB, worked for corporations to break unions…. If you know any Trumpsters out there, let them know, educate them. They need to know that they can’t love [their] union and love Trump.”

So far, Scabby has survived the legal attacks. In July 2019, a federal district court judge denied Robb’s request for a preliminary injunction in the Staten Island case. But the giant rat remains under threat: An earlier case against Scabby in Philadelphia is still pending before the NLRB.

The zeal with which Robb has pursued the cherished totem of union solidarity reflects how far the NLRB’s agenda has shifted under Trump. A report by The Nation and Type Investigations—based on interviews with more than 25 labor advocates, attorneys, and current and former NLRB staff members—reveals that the federal agency that’s supposed to protect union rights is instead championing the interests of management.

The NLRB is tasked with administering union elections and processing unfair-labor-practice cases under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which protects “concerted activity,” the collective action that workers take to try to improve conditions on the job. Over the years, the NLRB’s rulings have tended to oscillate between pro-worker and pro-management decisions, depending on which party holds the White House.


But with management-side lawyers dominating the agency, which is run by a five-seat board and a general counsel, labor advocates say the NLRB is more stridently anti-labor than ever before and is sabotaging its own mission. Not only has Trump’s board consistently sided with bosses, but career civil servants at the NLRB’s regional branches say they are being deprived of funding and staff.
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Even before Trump’s appointees began to undermine the agency, labor organizers were frustrated with the NLRB. Cases often require years of litigation, and remedies typically entail only back pay or reinstatement after a worker is unlawfully fired—not penalties stiff enough to deter employers from abuse.

After the rally in New York, Rynkiewicz told me, “As an organizer for 20-plus years, I’ve never viewed the NLRB as an ally of labor. It’s a shame to say.”

Just before Scabby was deflated, Rynkiewicz added, “The right-wing anti-union people want to portray the NLRB as a friend of labor. It’s not—even on a good day…. When you have the board’s majority put in place by the Democrats, you get nothing. When you have the board’s majority put in by the Republicans, you get an attack.”
RADICAL ROLLBACKS

The shortcomings of the NLRB are to some degree baked into its structure. During the labor uprisings of the 1930s, police and the National Guard members frequently killed striking workers. Established by the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the NLRB was designed to maintain labor peace by absorbing the often violent conflicts into the legal arena. The act, a compromise between labor and management, forced companies to bargain with unions, but it also excluded whole categories of workers, such as farm laborers, and effectively limited collective bargaining to individual companies, not whole industries or sectors.

After World War II, conservative majorities in Congress gutted the National Labor Relations Act with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which expanded employers’ power to suppress workplace organizing, allowed the government to break up strikes deemed “national health or safety” threats, and required anti–Communist Party pledges from union officers, which led organized labor to purge many of its most militant union members.
Dangerous web: A 1947 cartoon shows unions trapped in a web labeled “Taft-Hartley compliance.” A spider marked “NLRB” sits at the top. (Phil Drew / The Dispatcher)

Over the next several decades, organized labor withered in numbers and political clout. With private sector union membership now down to about 6 percent, workers and unions are often left seeking justice through this byzantine, Depression-era judicial apparatus.
Ready to blow: A 1948 cartoon from a union newspaper warns of the explosive effects of the Taft-Hartley Act. (Phil Drew / The Dispatcher)

The NLRB’s board is currently dominated by three conservative Trump appointees, two with ties to law firms that have represented some of the country’s largest employers. Board chairman John Ring and board member William Emanuel are lawyers who defended companies such as Marriott International and Uber, respectively. A third member, Marvin Kaplan, previously worked on labor policy as a counsel for House Republicans. The board’s lone Democrat, Lauren McFerran, left when her term expired in late 2019 but was reappointed in August. Neither the Trump administration nor the Senate has moved to fill the board’s fifth seat, which has been vacant since August 2018.

Robb, the NLRB’s general counsel, operates independently of the board and is a veteran management-side lawyer who worked with the Reagan administration to bust the air traffic controllers’ union. While the NLRB’s regional branches process most of the unfair-labor-practice charges—handling investigations, adjudications, and settlements—Robb shapes the agenda for the board, which rules on complaints appealed from the regional level, setting precedents for how the National Labor Relations Act is applied and enforced.

Shortly after being sworn into office in November 2017, Robb set about reversing the legacy of the previous board, which had incrementally expanded workers’ rights. In a series of sweeping decisions, the board scrapped rules instituted under Barack Obama barring workplace policies that impinge on the right to organize, axed a prohibition against employers making unilateral changes to collective bargaining agreements, and overturned a ruling allowing workers to form smaller bargaining units within a larger workforce.

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One of the board’s most influential decisions dealt a severe blow to efforts to extend collective bargaining rights for contracted workers. Under Obama, the NLRB loosened the joint employer standard, which determines whether a company can be considered an additional employer of workers hired through a contractor, such as a franchise operator or subcontracted cleaning agency. In 2015, the board ruled that a company could be considered a joint employer if it exercised “indirect control” over workers or had the ability to exercise control.

The Trump board restored a more restrictive joint employer standard—first through a 2017 decision, which the board vacated because of a conflict-of-interest issue, then in 2020 through the administrative rulemaking process. The move upended a multiyear legal challenge brought by McDonald’s workers, who claimed that the company had enough influence over its franchisees to be considered a joint employer and was therefore liable for retaliation against workers involved with the Fight for $15, the campaign for a $15 hourly minimum wage and a union.

The board’s initial moves to nullify Obama-era provisions have been followed by rulings that limit workers’ rights far beyond those under previous Republican administrations. In August 2019 it reduced workers’ rights to protest on private property, determining that management could block musicians with the San Antonio Symphony from leafleting at a performance venue because it was not owned by their employer. It also excluded faculty at religious colleges and universities from its jurisdiction and allowed bosses to bar workers from organizing on company technology and equipment, including the use of e-mail.

In recent months, the board has also used its rule­making process to roll back pro-worker regulations, especially in regard to union elections; make it easier for employers to interfere with voting; weaken rules that protect unionizing construction workers; and shorten the time that employers must wait before petitioning to oust a union.

“It’s breathtaking how many areas of the law, how many precedents they’ve managed to overturn,” said Wilma Lieb­man, a chair of the NLRB under Obama. “And they just kind of snap their fingers and do it, in my view, with little regard for the quality of the legal thinking or reasoning, reaching out to decide issues that aren’t before it.”

Some NLRB staffers fear that Robb is making it more difficult for them to scrutinize employers. In June he directed staffers to dramatically alter their investigative procedures. In some cases, bosses can now preview recordings that could be used as evidence and be present when former supervisors testify against them. NLRB spokesperson Edwin Egee told The Nation and Type Investigations that the “dissemination of information during the investigation” enables the agency to “more fairly enforce the [National Labor Relations Act]” and “aid settlement efforts.” But labor advocates say the measures discourage whistleblowers and compromise the integrity of cases.

The NLRB’s rightward shift under Trump has deterred some unions from taking cases to the agency. A current NLRB staff member, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, said she has observed unions opting to settle to avoid triggering an unfavorable ruling. Unions, she said, “are just less likely to turn to us because they…don’t want to create bad law.”

Several graduate student employee unions, including at Boston College, withdrew their cases in 2018 to prevent the board from overturning the Obama-era precedent that supported the collective bargaining rights of graduate workers at private institutions. “We pulled our petition to protect the rights of graduate student workers at private universities nation­wide,” said Sam Levinson, a Boston College graduate student worker, in an e-mail. “The current NLRB has consistently chipped away at the collective bargaining rights for which the labor movement has fought for decades. We decided to organize and build power, instead of allowing Boston College to put the fate of our rights into the hands of Trump and his appointees.”

Even though the petition was dropped, the board initiated a rulemaking process last September to strip collective bargaining rights from graduate student ­employees—another attempt to change policy through an administrative rule change rather than case law.

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INNER TURMOIL

For career staffers who joined the NLRB to help enforce the rights of workers, the Trump board has been demoralizing. “There’s a host of decisions that have come out that are destructive of workers’ rights, and it’s an extremely sad time to be at this agency and work here,” said a second NLRB staff member, who also requested anonymity. “The only hope is that [the administration] will turn before too much damage is done.”

In early 2018, according to Bloomberg Law, Robb floated a proposal to centralize case-­handling authority under officials who report directly to him. The NLRB’s 26 regional directors protested, calling the move a unilateral concentration of authority by a Trump appointee. And Senator Patty Murray (D-Wa.) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) sent a letter expressing concern. At the time, an NLRB spokesperson told Bloomberg Law that “no plan involving the restructuring of our Regional Offices system has been developed.” Facing congressional scrutiny and a backlash from staff, Robb seemingly shelved the idea.

But in August he appeared to have revived his consolidation efforts with a plan to combine case handling across several branches in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Denver, and Phoenix. Democrats in Congress criticized the proposal as a backdoor attempt to undercut the regional directors. Egee said the plan did not constitute a reorganization of the local offices and was merely a “resource sharing” initiative intended to “address chronic workload imbalances” between regions.

In 2018, Robb antagonized staffers with a memo recommending dozens of ways to speed up investigations. Although Egee said the guidance was drawn “directly from NLRB employees,” the NLRB Union, which represents workers in the regional offices, responded by arguing that it will “result in a reduction in quality, not an improvement.”

Staffers say they are under pressure to process cases quickly, prioritizing efficiency above all else. Meanwhile, the workforce has shrunk. While the number of field staffers has been decreasing since 2011, Robb exacerbated that trend by offering buyouts and early retirement incentives to eligible employees, according to the NLRB Union. The result, it said, has been a more than 20 percent reduction in staffing since fiscal year 2017—from more than 900 to about 717 full-time equivalents as of June 30. (Egee cited different statistics, stating that the total number of employees has declined less than 4 percent since fiscal year 2018.)

During fiscal year 2019, according to the NLRB’s annual performance report, the processing time from initial filing to judgment for unfair-labor-practice cases fell from 90 to 74 days. Yet the agency’s funding has shrunk by an inflation-adjusted 15 percent since fiscal year 2011, according to the NLRB Union.

A third NLRB field staffer said being asked to work faster with fewer resources feels like an attack on the agency. “If you are trying to [end] the administrative state and you want to get rid of the agencies you like the least—ours is probably one of them—then this is what you do. You really starve the staff, and you decrease morale.”

Some NLRB employees have left the agency on principle, according to another current staff member. “It is really tough when you believe in Section 7 rights and you have to write [a legal rationale] that you believe is eroding them,” the person said, noting that the NLRB was losing both experienced senior staffers and talented younger lawyers. “We’ve had some incredibly bright attorneys hired in the last five or so years who are jumping ship…. They’re still in labor law. They’re still in the fight. But they’re not going to fight from within the board.”

The agency’s two staff unions—the NLRB Union and the NLRB Professional Association, which represents employees at the headquarters—have been waging a modest resistance. They have accused the board of under­staff­ing the agency, refusing to bargain in good faith over the Professional Association’s contract, and letting millions of dollars in the agency’s budget go unspent. (The board has disputed the allegations and attributed the underspending to contracts that were not completed or came in under budget.)

Last November, the unions held a rally at the NLRB’s Washington, D.C., headquarters and passed out leaflets reading, “NLRB Leadership is destroying the agency from within by refusing to spend funds to hire staff.” They even brought Scabby the Rat to stand guard.
Industrial unrest: Anti-union vigilantes attack striking workers in Ambridge, Pa. The NLRB was designed to reduce the number of labor actions. (Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

A RANK-AND-FILE STRUGGLE

As Trump’s board whittles away labor rights, unions and workers increasingly see the legal bureaucracy of the NLRB as irrelevant or even antithetical to their efforts.

“A lot of people—the layman, the regular worker [or] union worker…they think that the board is there to protect them,” said Rob Atkinson, a former UPS driver. But under the current administration, “it’s obvious with their decisions that they’re no longer a friend of the working man and woman. They’re now a watchdog for the national Chamber of Commerce and Trump’s buddies.”

UPS fired Atkinson, a longtime Teamsters shop steward in western Pennsylvania, in 2014 for allegedly violating package delivery procedures. He filed two grievances, saying he was fired for his activism in a rank-and-file Teamsters movement, but he got no relief from what he said was a biased internal grievance panel.

Atkinson sought justice with the NLRB, and shortly before Trump took office, a lower-level judge found that his dismissal had been retaliatory, invoking an Obama-era ruling that said the board can override a grievance panel when considering certain violations of the National Labor Relations Act. But last December, the Trump-appointed majority on the board reversed that precedent, deciding that the grievance panel should have had the last word.

“My panel was made up of political enemies and people who wanted me gone,” Atkinson said. But his struggle with his former employer “really opened my eyes and showed me how cold and callous big businesses are and how we really need huge, strong unions and a strong National Labor Relations Board…to hold these companies accountable.”

In a statement, UPS said the board “recognized that an internal dispute resolution process can be relied upon to make fair and regular decisions on claims that might take years to resolve in other forums.”

Atkinson is appealing his case in federal court. His experience turned him into something of an NLRB watchdog; he now runs a Facebook group that tracks cases and educates other workers about what Trump is doing to labor law. “Look what the NLRB is doing to our rights and how they’ve turned into an antagonistic organization to the average working man or woman instead of an organization that’s there to uphold us,” he told me.
LABOR

BIDEN NEEDS TO TALK ABOUT JOBS ON LABOR DAY. AND EVERY DAY.

Jane McAlevey

THERE IS POWER EVEN WITHOUT A UNION

P.E. Moskowitz

MCDONALD’S HAS A REAL SEXUAL HARASSMENT PROBLEM

Bryce Covert

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to fresh labor clashes: Meatpacking workers have walked off the job, nurses have protested nationwide demanding more protective gear, and Whole Foods workers have filed suit after being disciplined and fired for wearing Black Lives Matter masks and apparel. Yet the NLRB continues to make it harder for workers to organize.

In July the NLRB Union and other labor groups denounced the board’s safety guidelines for resuming in-­person union elections as inadequate and advocated a move to online or mail-in voting instead. At the same time, the NLRB’s advice division, which provides legal guidance to regional offices, has issued memorandums that seem to give employers the green light to act uni­lateral­ly in response to the pandemic. One advisory suggests that an employer can refuse to bargain with a union over requests for pandemic-related “paid sick leave and hazard pay.” The NLRB also indicated that a person can be fired after speaking out against a company’s Covid-19 safety protocols.

Sharon Block, the director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and an NLRB member under Obama, said that during the pandemic, it was “incumbent on worker protection agencies like the [NLRB]…to be exceptionally vigilant on behalf of workers and attuned to violations of their rights, because it is so hard to feel secure enough to speak out. [But] this is a board that we watched operate for three years in a way that would not give that kind of security to workers.”

Nonetheless, she added, the systemic problems with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act go beyond the Trump administration. “Even with board members…and a general counsel with the best of intentions who really believe in the spirit and the purpose of the act, it’s just a tool that doesn’t work anymore.”

The Labor and Worklife Program wants to overhaul labor law and extend protections to domestic and undocumented workers. It also advocates for sectoral bargaining, which would enable workers in an industry to negotiate en masse.

In the more immediate term, Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would expand the rights of workers to strike and organize at work, institute meaningful penalties for bosses who violate labor law, and allow workers to sue employers in civil courts rather than be forced to rely solely on lengthy litigation at the NLRB.

Despite its limitations, workers continue to use Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, often to ward off campaigns to suppress organizing. Since April, Amazon workers belonging to the grassroots group Amazonians United in Chicago filed several unfair-labor-practice charges with the NLRB, alleging that they were unfairly disciplined by the company after staging walkouts and slowdowns to demand better health protections. Amazonians United member Ted Miin said he and his coworkers were reprimanded for allegedly violating social distancing guidelines at work, which he sees as retaliatory selective enforcement. (Amazon did not return a request for comment.)

Concerned that it might not be worth the effort, Miin was wary of filing a charge. But when the official probe began, the atmosphere at work changed. “Management has basically loosened up on us a lot at our warehouse since we’ve had active NLRB cases open,” he said.

Miin knows his charges may lead to nothing. He acknowledged that “the Trump administration has been rewriting the NLRB rules to favor bosses over workers.” But whatever form their resistance takes, he added, “as workers, we have to protect ourselves. No one’s coming to save us…not the NLRB, not politicians, not reporters. As workers, we have to get organized ourselves.”




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The First Stegosaur Tracks in Scotland Were Just Discovered on This Windy Island
Mike McRae

Stand on the wind-swept crags lining Scotland's western coast today, and you'd be lucky to spot a puffin or two. But the closer we look, the more evidence we find it was once home to an incredibly diverse array of ancient beasts.© Warpaintcobra/istock/Getty Images Artist impression of a stegosaur

The discovery of new sets of fossilised tracks has expanded the list of potential dinosaur populations that roamed what is now the Isle of Skye. Among them are tracks left by an animal that would have belonged to one of the most famous plate-backed herbivore suborders, Stegosauria.

Scottish and Brazilian researchers have spent the past couple of years analysing two recently found tracksites at a spot on the island's north-eastern coast called Rubha nam Brathairean, or Brothers' Point.

"These new tracksites give us a much clearer picture of the dinosaurs that lived in Scotland 170 million years ago," says University of Edinburgh palaeontologist Stephen Brusatte.

Back then, the lands making up the British Isles were nothing like they are today. Jurassic Scotland sat far closer to the equator, roughly in alignment with where Greece is today. Warm seas and a sub-tropical climate established ecosystems that were bustling with life.

Still, just because it was a virtual paradise doesn't mean it's been perfect for preserving the remains of ancient life. The Jurassic isn't exactly fossil friendly as it is, but Scotland has always seemed especially thin on dinosaur tracks and bones.

In spite of a rich history of fossil hunting throughout much of the United Kingdom, the first clear traces of dinosaur wildlife in Scotland were finally uncovered in the early 1980s when palaeontologists John Hudson and Julian Andrews found the "unmistakable print from a large dinosaur" in a fallen limestone block at Brothers' Point.

Since then, a plethora of tracks belonging to a wide range of long-necked sauropods and fleet-footed theropods have been identified, turning the Isle of Skye into a landmark site for Jurassic researchers.

The most recent additions include teapot-sized holes that haven't been found elsewhere on the island – impressions that are described in palaeontological terms as belonging to a category called Deltapodus.


a close up of a sign: stegosaur footprints skye
© Provided by ScienceAlert
stegosaur footprints skye Deltapod tracks on Isle of Skye (dePolo et al., PLOS One, 2020)

"These discoveries are making Skye one of the best places in the world for understanding dinosaur evolution in the Middle Jurassic," says Brusatte.

Without a means of narrowing down the exact species of dinosaur responsible, the researchers are careful about jumping to any conclusions.

But it's fair to say that this group includes a type of cow-sized dinosaur famed for its lines of geometric plates adorning its spine, and a wicked clump of 'thagomising' spines on its tail.

The team also uncovered another potentially new addition to the list, in the form of large imprints of something with three stubby toes possibly belonging to a group of heavyweight herbivores called ornithopods.

"We knew there were giant long-necked sauropods and jeep-sized carnivores, but we can now add plate-backed stegosaurs to that roster, and maybe even primitive cousins of the duck-billed dinosaurs too," says Brusatte.

Not only do the tracks provide tantalising evidence that stegosaurs once trod along the muddy Scottish coastline, the age of the tracks provides some of the earliest evidence of this particular dinosaur's existence.

Only last year, a species of stegosaur was dug up in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco. At an estimated age of around 168 million years old, the fossilised remains of Adratiklit boulahfa are officially the oldest of its kind.

These tracks at Brother's Point are closer to 170 million years old. While there's no way to confirm what kind of stegosaur might have left them behind, it does help establish timelines and distributions describing their evolution.

"In particular, Deltapodus tracks give good evidence that stegosaurs lived on Skye at this time," says the study's lead author, Paige dePolo from the University of Edinburgh.

With such a rich assortment of tracks being found across the island, this part of Scotland is representative of an important period in evolutionary history, where the late Jurassic's zoo of classic creatures was just beginning to develop their famous characteristics and spread out around the globe.

This research was published in PLOS One.

‘A red-flag warning’: Scientists alarmed by mass death of 1 million seabirds from a hot ocean ‘blob’



Dead common murres were found on the beach in Cochrane Bay, Prince William Sound on Jan 10, 2016. These birds were part of the large die-off of common murres across the Gulf of Alaska in 2015-2016. (Photo: Sarah Schoen/USGS Alaska Science Center)

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams January 16, 2020

On the heels of new research showing that the world’s oceans are rapidly warming, scientists revealed Wednesday that a huge patch of hot water in the northeast Pacific Ocean dubbed “the blob” was to blame for killing about one million seabirds.

The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, was conducted by a team of researchers at federal and state agencies, conservation groups, and universities. They tied the mass die-off to “the blob,” a marine heatwave that began forming in 2013 and grew more intense in 2015 because of the weather phenomenon known as El Niño.

“About 62,000 dead or dying common murres (Uria aalge), the trophically dominant fish-eating seabird of the North Pacific, washed ashore between summer 2015 and spring 2016 on beaches from California to Alaska,” the study says. “Most birds were severely emaciated and, so far, no evidence for anything other than starvation was found to explain this mass mortality. Three-quarters of murres were found in the Gulf of Alaska and the remainder along the West Coast.”

Given that previous studies have shown “that only a fraction of birds that die at sea typically wash ashore,” the researchers put the death toll closer to a million.

“The magnitude and scale of this failure has no precedent,” lead author John Piatt, a research biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, said in a statement. “It was astonishing and alarming, and a red-flag warning about the tremendous impact sustained ocean warming can have on the marine ecosystem.”


A New Study About the Death of 1 Million Seabirds Should Scare the Crap Out of You #ClimateReality #ClimateActionhttps://t.co/7A17ZEGV1x pic.twitter.com/OJ01VIGlxP
— CenterForTheBlueEconomy_MIIS (@CBE_MIIS) January 16, 2020

Piatt and study co-author and University of Washington professor Julia Parrish explained that the team believes the blob—which spanned hundreds of miles—limited food supply in the region, leading the birds to starve.

“Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often,” Parrish said. “We believe that the smoking gun for common murres—beyond the marine heatwave itself—was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock, and Pacific cod greatly increased.”

Piatt added that “food demands of large commercial groundfish like cod, pollock, halibut, and hake were predicted to increase dramatically with the level of warming observed with the blob, and since they eat many of the same prey as murres, this competition likely compounded the food supply problem for murres, leading to mass mortality events from starvation.”

According to CNN, which reported on the study Thursday:

The blob devastated the murres’ population. With insufficient food, breeding colonies across the entire region had reproductive difficulties for years afterward, the study said. Not only did the population decline dramatically, but the murres couldn’t replenish those numbers.

During the 2015 breeding season, three colonies didn’t produce a single chick. That number went up to 12 colonies in the 2016 season—and in reality it could be even higher, since researchers only monitor a quarter of all colonies.

Thomas Frölicher, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who was not involved in the new study, discussed the blob’s connection to the human-caused planetary emergency with InsideClimate News.

“It was the biggest marine heatwave so far on record,” said Frölicher, who noted that such events have doubled in frequency over the past few decades. “Usually, we are used to heatwaves over land. They are much smaller in size, and they do not last as long. In the ocean, this heatwave lasted two or three years.”

Frölicher warned that “if we follow a high-greenhouse-gas-emissions scenario, these heatwaves will become 50 times more frequent than preindustrial times” by 2100. He said that even if the international community achieves a low-emissions scenario in line with the Paris climate agreement, marine heatwaves would still be 20 times more frequent.

“What that means is that in some regions, they will become permanent heatwaves,” he added. “This gives us some insight into the future.”

The study—which its authors expect to inform research on other mortality events related to marine heatwaves—was published just weeks after University of Washington scientists found what some have called “the blob 2.0” forming in the Pacific. That discovery came as “quite a surprise” to those researchers.

University climatologist Nick Bond told local media that “the original blob was so unusual, and stood above the usually kind of variations in the climate and ocean temperatures that we thought ‘wow, this is going to be something we won’t see for quite a while.'”

Pacific 'blob' heatwave feared to have killed a million birds

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Image captionTens of thousands of birds were found dead in the west of the US

Tens of thousands of seabirds found dead on the west coast of the US in 2015-16 were probably killed by an unprecedented heatwave, scientists say.

Around 62,000 common murres washed up on the coast of the Pacific Ocean but up to a million birds are thought to have died.

The scientists said that warmer sea waters, known as the "blob", led to a shortage of the fish the birds feed on.

Other fish, birds and mammals also died in the same period.

• Climate change link to puffin deaths

The study, published on Wednesday by the PLOS One scientific journal, found that the seabirds probably starved to death due to a 1,000-mile body of warmer water that affected the north-eastern Pacific between 2013 and 2016.

The higher temperatures impacted their food supply, with diminishing supplies of plankton leading to a both a drop in the population of the smaller fish eaten by the birds and increased competition from other predators.

More than three-quarters of the dead murres were found in the Gulf of Alaska, but the actual number is likely to be around one million as only a small number of birds that die at sea are normally washed ashore.

• Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction'
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The scientists said that mass deaths of murres, also known as common guillemots, happen sporadically, but described the scale of the incident in 2015-16 as "unprecedented and astonishing".

Study links warming to 'Blob' that killed Pacific seabirds

About 1 million common murres died during a 2015-16 heat wave, scientists have said. Researchers believe that a disrupted food supply led to the mass die-off of the North Pacific seabirds.

   

Approximately 1 million seabirds known as the common murre died because of food-supply disruptions during a heat wave from summer 2015 to spring 2016, according to a study published Wednesday in PLOS One. Julia Parrish, a University of Washington ecologist and co-author of the paper, linked the "relatively new" increased frequency of such heat waves to climate change.

Read more: Hundreds of dead porpoises found on Germany's Baltic coast

The study called the number of birds — many of breeding age — killed over a geographic area the size of Canada "unprecedented and astonishing." According to researchers, "the most powerful marine heat wave on record," which ran from 2014 to 2016, created a mass of seawater known as "the Blob." That coincided with the warmed Pacific of an El Nino period.

Read more: Oceans play role in Australian bushfires drama, say experts

About 62,000 emaciated murres washed ashore dead or dying along the North American Pacific coastline during the heat wave. Scientists estimate the total deaths at between 500,000 and 1.2 million.

Read more: Bushfire evacuations urged as Australia braces for 'dangerous' conditions

'Very different environment'

Parrish said the heat wave had a twofold effect. First, elevated temperatures reduced the quality and quantity of phytoplankton, reducing the quantity and quality of herring, sardines and anchovies: fish eaten by common murres, which measure 1 foot (30 centimeters), fly fast and can hunt 650 feet below the water's surface. Second, warming waters meant that salmon and Pacific cod, which compete with the murres, needed to eat more.

Read more: Climate change and deforestation increase the global wildfire risk

The murres' need to consume half of their body mass every day has become their evolutionary "Achilles heel" as the climate changes, John Piatt, a research biologist at the US Geological Survey's Alaska Science Center and the paper's lead author, told the AFP news agency. "Everything they do depends on that breast muscle," he said. "When they can't eat three or four days, they burn up all that muscle" — and can no longer fly or dive.

Read more: Hotter, higher seas to worsen extreme floods without 'urgent and ambitious' action, United Nations warns

Murre colonies across the entire region failed to produce chicks for years during and after the heat wave event, the study found. Several other species experienced mass die-offs during the same period, including tufted puffins, Cassin's auklets, sea lions and baleen whales. But, by all metrics, including overall number and geographic extent, the common murres experienced by far the largest die-off.

Taken together, the mass deaths demonstrate that "a warmer ocean world is a very different environment and a very different coastal ecosystem for many marine species," Parrish said, calling seabirds, as highly visible members of that system, "bellwethers of that change."

DW mkg/sms (AFP, PLOS One)

'The blob,' food supply squeeze to blame for largest seabird die-off

by University of Washington JANUARY 15, 2020

Adult common murres return to island and sea stack colonies from California to Alaska, spending three months during each summer to breed. A single chick takes two parents to hunt for fish, such as the rockfish -- a staple of the California murre diet -- pictured here. Credit: Jane Dolliver

The common murre is a self-sufficient, resilient bird.

Though the seabird must eat about half of its body weight in prey each day, common murres are experts at catching the small "forage fish" they need to survive. Herring, sardines, anchovies and even juvenile salmon are no match for a hungry murre.

So when nearly one million common murres died at sea and washed ashore from California to Alaska in 2015 and 2016, it was unprecedented—both for murres, and across all bird species worldwide. Scientists from the University of Washington, the U.S. Geological Survey and others blame an unexpected squeeze on the ecosystem's food supply, brought on by a severe and long-lasting marine heat wave known as "the blob."

Their findings were published Jan. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE.

"Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often," explained second author Julia Parrish, a UW professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. "We believe that the smoking gun for common murres—beyond the marine heat wave itself—was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock and Pacific cod greatly increased."

Common murres washing onto beaches in the Homer, Alaska, area were so abundant in early 2016 that volunteer beach surveyors were forced to collect and photograph them in batches. Credit: COASST

Common murres nest in colonies along cliffs and rocky ledges overlooking the ocean. The adult birds, about one foot in length, are mostly black with white bellies, and can dive more than two football fields below the ocean's surface in search of prey.

Warmer surface water temperatures off the Pacific coast—a phenomenon known as "the blob"—first occurred in the fall and winter of 2013, and persisted through 2014 and 2015. Warming increased with the arrival of a powerful El Niño in 2015-2016. A number of other species experienced mass die-offs during this period, including tufted puffins, Cassin's auklets, sea lions and baleen whales. But the common murre die-off was by far the largest any way you measure it.

From May 2015 to April 2016, about 62,000 murre carcasses were found on beaches from central California north through Alaska. Citizen scientists in Alaska monitoring long-term sites counted numbers that reached 1,000 times more than normal for their beaches. Scientists estimate that the actual number of deaths was likely close to one million, since only a fraction of birds that die will wash to shore, and only a fraction of those will be in places that people can access.

Many of the birds that died were breeding-age adults. With massive shifts in food availability, murre breeding colonies across the entire region failed to produce chicks for the years during and after the marine heat wave event, the authors found.

"The magnitude and scale of this failure has no precedent," said lead author John Piatt, a research biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Alaska Science Center and an affiliate professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. "It was astonishing and alarming, and a red-flag warning about the tremendous impact sustained ocean warming can have on the marine ecosystem."

On Jan. 1 and 2, 2016, 6,540 common murre carcasses were found washed ashore near Whitter, Alaska, translating into about 8,000 bodies per mile of shoreline -- one of the highest beaching rates recorded during the mass mortality event. Credit: David B. Irons

From a review of fisheries studies conducted during the heat wave period, the research team concluded that persistent warm ocean temperatures associated with "the blob" increased the metabolism of cold-blooded organisms from zooplankton and small forage fish up through larger predatory fish like salmon and pollock. With predatory fish eating more than usual, the demand for food at the top of the food chain was unsustainable. As a result, the once-plentiful schools of forage fish that murres rely on became harder to find.

"Food demands of large commercial groundfish like cod, pollock, halibut and hake were predicted to increase dramatically with the level of warming observed with the blob, and since they eat many of the same prey as murres, this competition likely compounded the food supply problem for murres, leading to mass mortality events from starvation," Piatt said.

As the largest mass die-off of seabirds in recorded history, the common murre event may help explain the other die-offs that occurred during the northeast Pacific marine heat wave, and also serve as a warning for what could happen during future marine heat waves, the authors said. UW scientists recently identified another marine heatwave forming off the Washington coast and up into the Gulf of Alaska.

"All of this—as with the Cassin's auklet mass mortality and the tufted puffin mass mortality—demonstrates that a warmer ocean world is a very different environment and a very different coastal ecosystem for many marine species," said Parrish, who is also the executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, known as COASST. "Seabirds, as highly visible members of that system, are bellwethers of that change."

---

More information: Piatt JF, Parrish JK, Renner HM, Schoen SK, Jones TT, Arimitsu ML, et al. (2020) Extreme mortality and reproductive failure of common murres resulting from the northeast Pacific marine heatwave of 2014-2016. PLOS ONE (2020). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226087

Warm ocean water triggered vast seabird die-off, experts say

by Dan Joling FEBRUARY 10, 2017

In this Jan. 7, 2016 file photo, dead common murres lie washed up on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat.(AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)

A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat.

Elevated temperatures in seawater affected wildlife in a pair of major marine ecosystems along the West Coast and Canada, said John Piatt, a research wildlife biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. Common murres are an indicator of the regions' health.

"If tens of thousands of them are dying, it's because there's no fish out there, anywhere, over a very large area," Piatt said.

To see such effect over two sizeable marine ecosystems is extraordinary, he said.

Deaths of common murres in Alaska likely were multiplied when starving birds in December 2015 were hit by vicious Gulf of Alaska winter storms, Piatt said.

Common murres look like thin penguins. They can fly miles in search of schools of finger-length fish and can dive and swim nearly 600 feet deep to capture them. However, the birds' high metabolism means they have to eat a lot. If they don't eat prey matching 10 to 30 percent of their body mass daily, they can use up fat reserves and drop to a critical threshold for starvation within three days.

Common murres eat small forage fish: capelin, from the smelt family, and juvenile pollock, which as adults are caught for fast-food fish sandwiches. Both fish were largely absent when the National Marine Fisheries Service conducted surveys in summer 2015.

In this Jan. 7, 2016, file photo, shows dead common murres on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)

Common murres paid the price. Volunteers and federal researchers last year counted the carcasses of 46,000 dead murres in Alaska and another 6,000 in California, Oregon and Washington.

Die-offs of seabirds occur periodically, but this one was spectacular. Only a fraction of the dead birds likely reached shore, Piatt said. And only a fraction of Alaska coastline was surveyed. A conservative extrapolation indicates 500,000 or more common murres died, Piatt said.

Nearly all were emaciated. As birds starved, they consumed their own fat and protein until they lost deadly amounts of body mass.

"You can't keep yourself heated, and then you die," Piatt said. "It's an agonizing, awful death. And then on top of that, some of them probably drowned."

Starting in 2014, the temperature in the upper 300 feet of water was as much as 4.5 degrees warmer than normal. NASA explained it like this: An unusually strong and persistent ridge of atmospheric high pressure appeared over the northeastern Pacific, weakening winds and easing normal, wind-driven churning, which promoted upwelling of deep, cold water to the surface. It led to a lens of unusually warm surface water that a University of Washington meteorologist dubbed "the Blob."

Forage fish feed on zooplankton, and cold water produces the biggest, fattiest versions, said Shannon Atkinson, a physiologist and researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

In this March 11, 2016, file photo, Wildlife biologists Rob Kaler of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Sarah Schoen of the U.S. Geological Survey examine body parts of a common murre during a necropsy in Anchorage, Alaska. Kaler and Schoen are among scientists attempting to find out the reason for a massive common murre die-off in the North Pacific that began one year ago. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat. (AP Photo/Dan Joling, File)

"What that means is there's not as much energy, and the energy that's being transferred up the food web is not as energetically rich," Atkinson said.

Warm ocean temperatures also affect big North Pacific fish such as halibut, cod, pollock and arrowtooth flounder, Piatt said. Their metabolism increases as the temperature increases, and they have to eat more.

"The dominant food for those fish is—get ready—juvenile pollock, capelin, sand lance," Piatt said. "These fish are in direct competition with the birds now, and typically in most of these northern ecosystems, the large, predatory fish eat an order of magnitude more of those forage prey than the birds and mammals combined."

The rates of carcass recovery by volunteers monitoring beaches in the Gulf of Alaska returned to normal levels in July 2016, Piatt said. However, common murres continued to have trouble finding food, and it showed up in breeding, he said.

Common murres lay eggs in approximately 230 Alaska cliff colonies. Heather Renner, supervisory wildlife biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, monitors some of the largest.

"In 2016, we had widespread breeding failure at all of the colonies in the Gulf of Alaska, as well as the Bering Sea," she said. "It was a highly unusual event. Murres don't fail regularly."

In this Jan. 7, 2016, photo, dead common murres lie on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)

Breeding was normal at colonies in the Arctic and the Aleutians, she said.

There's no question for Piatt that Pacific warmth was the ultimate cause of the common murre die-off.

"They died of starvation because there was no food," Piatt said. "There was no food because there was no fish. And there was no fish because these warm waters did something to them."

Data gaps hinder explanation for Alaska seabird die-off

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