Climate Change News & Discussions

ReactiveWaters
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Climate change: 'Fifty-fifty chance' of breaching 1.5C warming limit

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Climate change: 'Fifty-fifty chance' of breaching 1.5C warming limit

The likelihood of crossing a key global warming threshold has risen significantly, according to a new analysis.

UK Met Office researchers say that there's now around a fifty-fifty chance that the world will warm by more than 1.5C over the next five years.

Such a rise would be temporary, but researchers are concerned about the overall direction of temperatures.

It's almost certain that 2022-2026 will see a record warmest year, they say.


Full story : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61383391
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Climate change is pushing the pine beauty moth northward 50 years ahead of earlier predictions

10 May 2022

In Finland, climate change is causing the pine pest Panolis flammea, or pine beauty moth, to shift its range northward 50 years ahead of predictions. Changes in both the distribution and size of the pine beauty moth population are linked to higher temperatures, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows. The findings were reported in Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research.

“This is not unexpected, since many scientists have previously predicted that some insect pests will shift their distribution range northward as a result of rising temperatures caused by climate change. However, what is astonishing is that this is happening 50 years ahead of earlier predictions,” Doctoral Researcher Alexander Pulgarin Diaz from the University of Eastern Finland says.

The larvae of the pine beauty moth feed on the needles of different pine species across Central Europe, developing periodical outbreaks often controlled with chemical insecticides. These outbreaks co-occur with other pine insect pests and diseases and could reach thousands of hectares. Outbreaks have not been reported in Finland, but conditions for their development could become favourable as a result of increasing temperatures and forest health decline —both of which are consequences of climate change.

Earlier studies have shown that temperature is closely related to the development and distribution of insects.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/952211


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Credit: Olli-Pekka Tikkanen.
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Trees Aren’t a Climate Change Cure-all – Two New Studies on the Life and Death of Trees in a Warming World Help Show Why
William R.L. Anderegg
(The Conversation) When people talk about ways to slow climate change, they often mention trees, and for good reason. Forests take up a large amount of the planet-warming carbon dioxide that people put into the atmosphere when they burn fossil fuels. But will trees keep up that pace as global temperatures rise? With companies increasingly investing in forests as offsets, saying it cancels out their continuing greenhouse gas emissions, that’s a multibillion-dollar question.

The results of two studies published in the journals Science and Ecology Letters on May 12, 2022 – one focused on growth*, the other on death** – raise new questions about how much the world can rely on forests to store increasing amounts of carbon in a warming future. Ecologist William Anderegg, who was involved in both studies, explains why.

What does the new research tell us about trees and their ability to store carbon?

William Anderegg: The future of forests is on a knife’s edge, with a tug of war between two very important forces: the benefits trees get from increasing levels of carbon dioxide and the stresses they face from the climate, such as heat, drought, fires, pests and pathogens.

Those climate stresses are increasing a lot faster as the planet warms than scientists had expected. We’re seeing immense wildfires and drought-driven forest die-offs much sooner than anyone had anticipated. When those trees die, that carbon goes back into the atmosphere. We’re also seeing evidence that the benefits trees get from higher levels of carbon dioxide in a warming world may be more limited than people realize.
Read more by William Anderegg here: https://theconversation.com/trees-arent ... hy-182944


* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4875
(Science) Uncoupled carbon uptake and storage

Forests are expected to help mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon, with elevated carbon dioxide boosting photosynthesis and carbon uptake. However, the amount of carbon that can be stored in wood also depends on temperature, water, and nutrient availability. Cabon et al. examined temporal correlations between trees’ carbon uptake and woody growth by combining data on tree rings and gross primary productivity measures from 78 forests with carbon dioxide flux towers...

Abstract
Uncertainties surrounding tree carbon allocation to growth are a major limitation to projections of forest carbon sequestration and response to climate change. The prevalence and extent to which carbon assimilation (source) or cambial activity (sink) mediate wood production are fundamentally important and remain elusive.
**https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.14018
(Ecology Letters)

Abstract
Forests are currently a substantial carbon sink globally. Many climate change mitigation strategies leverage forest preservation and expansion, but rely on forests storing carbon for decades to centuries. Yet climate-driven disturbances pose critical risks to the long-term stability of forest carbon. We quantify the climate drivers that influence wildfire and climate stress-driven tree mortality, including a separate insect-driven tree mortality, for the contiguous United States for current (1984–2018) and project these future disturbance risks over the 21st century. We find that current risks are widespread and projected to increase across different emissions scenarios by a factor of >4 for fire and >1.3 for climate-stress mortality. These forest disturbance risks highlight pervasive climate-sensitive disturbance impacts on US forests and raise questions about the risk management approach taken by forest carbon offset policies. Our results provide US-wide risk maps of key climate-sensitive disturbances for improving carbon cycle modeling, conservation and climate policy.
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Sea ice can control Antarctic ice sheet stability, new research finds
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-sea-ice-a ... ility.html
by Sarah Collins, University of Cambridge
Despite the rapid melting of ice in many parts of Antarctica during the second half of the 20th century, researchers have found that the floating ice shelves which skirt the eastern Antarctic Peninsula have undergone sustained advance over the past 20 years.

Ice shelves—floating sections of ice which are attached to land-based ice sheets—serve the vital purpose of buttressing against the uncontrolled release of inland ice to the ocean. During the late 20th century, high levels of warming in the eastern Antarctic Peninsula led to the catastrophic collapse of the Larsen A and B ice shelves in 1995 and 2002, respectively. These events drove the acceleration of ice towards the ocean, ultimately accelerating the Antarctic Peninsula's contribution to sea level rise.

Currently, the jury is out on exactly how sea ice around Antarctica will evolve in response to climate change, and therefore influence sea level rise, with some models forecasting wholescale sea ice loss in the Southern Ocean, while others predict sea ice gain.

Now, an international team of researchers, from the Universities of Cambridge and Newcastle in the UK, and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, have used a combination of historical satellite measurements, along with ocean and atmosphere records, to get the most detailed understanding yet of how ice conditions are changing along the 1,400-kilometer-long eastern Antarctic Peninsula.
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Italy's longest river, fed by melt from the Alps, dries up, threatening agricultural collapse

May 18, 2022

The Italian river Po travels 403 miles from the Alps to the wilds of the Po river delta in the East, where it finally empties into the Adriatic Sea. Along the way, the water nourishes the agricultural fields that Italians have farmed for thousands of years. Today, the agricultural products it grows provides 40% of the nation’s GDP.

Euro News reports that currently, a drought so severe that it threatens the breadbasket of Italy has dried up the Po River so severely that seawater has been able to be ‘sucked back upstream.’ The reason is that the water in the delta is “higher than upstream. This is because the vacuum left by the lack of river water is being filled by seawater,” Giancarlo Mantovani, the Director of a consortium that protects the delta’s biodiversity, which can be seen flowing back upstream in some areas. For farmers in the area, it means saltwater seeping into the earth and poisoning crops, which are blackened and wilting.”

There has been no rain for three months and counting, but the source of the problem starts in the Alps, where snowfall is now at its lowest level in over twenty years, measuring fifty percent lower than average. It is not only reduced snowfall, but the Alp’s glaciers which are the reservoirs for freshwater, have rapidly thinned, enabling permafrost to thaw and massive boulders of rock to break off the towering mountains.

The process is playing out across the world, from the Himalayas to the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras in the United States and Canada. Scientists have warned of this process for decades and are becoming a severe threat from climate shocks that reduce the freshwater supply for billions of people worldwide. A warming planet is turning the agricultural lands of Italy into a ‘salty wasteland while putting hundreds of thousands of livelihoods at risk. “It is a 360-degree disaster,” states Mantovani to Rebecca Ann Hughes of Euro News.

The problem is now even direr as groundwater has begun to be pumped by farmers where they find only saltwater allowing, even more, to move upstream. A feedback loop is now set in motion, The result will be a loss of thirty percent of agricultural production to dead soil.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/5 ... g-collapse
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Massachusetts Court Rules Exxon Must Face Trial Over Climate Lies
by Kenny Stancil
May 22, 2022

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) The Massachusetts high court on Tuesday rejected ExxonMobil's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the state, meaning the biggest oil giant in the U.S. must stand trial for allegations that it lied to the public about the climate emergency and the fossil fuel industry's role in driving it.

The lawsuit filed in 2019 by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey accuses Exxon of violating the state's consumer protection laws through a decadeslong effort to conceal what it knew about the negative environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels.

In particular, the complaint says, Exxon deceived investors about the risks that global warming poses to its business and misled consumers by downplaying the dangerous effects of its products and overstating what the company is doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

As The Guardian reported, "Exxon claimed the lawsuit was in breach of legislation against what are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPS, used by wealthy individuals and corporations to silence critics."

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, however, ruled unanimously that the state's "anti-SLAPP" law is not applicable to government enforcement actions, affirming a lower court's decision to deny Exxon's special motion to dismiss the case.
Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/ ... imate-lies
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Fastest Carbon Dioxide Catcher Heralds New Age for Direct Air Capture
May 28, 2022

Extract:
(EurekAlert) Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new carbon capture system which removes carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere with unprecedented performance. Isophorone diamine (IPDA) in a “liquid-solid phase separation” system was found to remove carbon dioxide at the low concentrations contained in the atmosphere with 99% efficiency. The compound is reusable with minimal heating and at least twice as fast as existing systems, an exciting new development for direct air capture.
...
A team led by Professor Seiji Yamazoe of Tokyo Metropolitan University have been studying a class of DAC (direct air capture) technology known as liquid-solid phase separation systems. Many DAC systems involve bubbling air through a liquid, with a chemical reaction occurring between the liquid and the carbon dioxide. As the reaction proceeds, more of the reaction product accumulates in the liquid; this makes subsequent reactions slower and slower. Liquid-solid phase separation systems offer an elegant solution, where the reaction product is insoluble and comes out of solution as a solid. There is no accumulation of product in the liquid, and the reaction speed does not slow down much.

The team focused their attention on liquid amine compounds, modifying their structure to optimize reaction speed and efficiency with a wide range of concentrations of carbon dioxide in air, from around 400ppm to up to 30%. They found that an aqueous solution of one of these compounds, isophorone diamine (IPDA), could convert 99% of the carbon dioxide contained in the air to a solid carbamic acid precipitate. Crucially, they demonstrated that the solid dispersed in solution only required heating to 60 degrees Celsius to completely release the captured carbon dioxide, recovering the original liquid. The rate at which carbon dioxide could be removed was at least twice as fast as that of the leading DAC lab systems, making it the fastest carbon dioxide capture system in the world at present for processing low concentration carbon dioxide in air (400ppm).

The team’s new technology promises unprecedented performance and robustness in DAC systems, with wide implications for carbon capture systems deployed at scale. Beyond improving their system further, their vision of a “beyond zero (emissions)” world now turns to how the captured carbon may be effectively used, in industrial applications and household products.
Source: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/953826
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