Climate Change News & Discussions

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Due to climate change, Nevada says goodbye to grass
Source: CBS News
In Las Vegas, Nevada, it's come to this: climate change has helped make water ever more scarce, so under a new Nevada law, the grass has got to go. "When we look at outdoor water use in Southern Nevada, landscaping far and away is the largest water user, and of that, it's grass," said Bronson Mack of the Las Vegas Water Authority.

The city's already pulled up about four million square feet of grass on public property so far this year, because thirsty green parkways are something they just can't afford anymore. "The grass that you see behind me is not long for this world," Mack told correspondent Tracy Smith. "In fact, within the next couple of months to a year, this grass will be completely eliminated, and it'll be replaced with drip-irrigated trees and plants."



Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/due-to-cli ... 00-10abd1h
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We Must Pass This Imperfect Climate Bill—and Then Continue to Fight for the Future We Deserve
by Amy Goodman and Dennis Moynihan
August 11, 2022

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) The climate emergency intensifies daily as the planet warms. More frequent and powerful heat waves, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes are costing billions of dollars while driving unprecedented human migration that fuels conflict. Despite the enormity of the problem, there is still good news to report. As governments prepare for the upcoming United Nations global climate summit to be held in Egypt in mid-November, developments in the fight against catastrophic climate change suggest that, against all odds, hope is not lost.

In the United States, the world’s greatest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses, the Senate passed what has been called the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history. The bill passed by reconciliation, requiring only 50 votes rather than the usual 60. The vote was 51 to 50, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaker.

After the House passes the bill and it’s signed into law by President Biden, roughly $370 billion will fund a broad array of programs intended to cut U.S carbon emissions by 40% by the year 2030, over 2005 levels. Tax credits and other incentives to buy and install renewable energy equipment like solar panels and wind turbines, and to invest in clean energy manufacturing make up a bulk of the funding. Up to $60 billion in environmental justice funding is for incentives to bring wind, solar and other renewable technologies into poor, marginalized communities long shut out of green investments.

The bill, however, includes significant trade-offs, including major handouts to the fossil fuel industry, primarily to win the needed support of conservative Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. Manchin has made a personal fortune worth millions from his family coal business. He is the largest recipient of fossil fuel industry donations in Congress. Among the concessions Manchin won was a side agreement to expedite fossil fuel permitting, including for the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline. If built, the MVP will carry two billion cubic feet of fracked gas across more than 1,000 streams and wetlands in Appalachia, including parts of West Virginia.

“It’s doubling down on fossil fuels to get to renewables,” Tara Houska Indigenous lawyer and founder of Giniw Collective, said on the Democracy Now! news hour.
Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/views/202 ... e-deserve
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Antarctica's ice shelves could be melting faster than we thought
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-antarctic ... ought.html
by California Institute of Technology
A new model developed by Caltech and JPL researchers suggests that Antarctica's ice shelves may be melting at an accelerated rate, which could eventually contribute to more rapid sea level rise. The model accounts for an often-overlooked narrow ocean current along the Antarctic coast and simulates how rapidly flowing freshwater, melted from the ice shelves, can trap dense warm ocean water at the base of the ice, causing it to warm and melt even more.

The study was conducted in the laboratory of Andy Thompson, professor of environmental science and engineering, and appears in the journal Science Advances on August 12.

Ice shelves are outcroppings of the Antarctic ice sheet, found where the ice juts out from land and floats on top of the ocean. The shelves, which are each several hundred meters thick, act as a protective buffer for the mainland ice, keeping the whole ice sheet from flowing into the ocean (which would dramatically raise global sea levels). However, a warming atmosphere and warming oceans caused by climate change are increasing the speed at which these ice shelves are melting, threatening their ability to hold back the flow of the ice sheet into the ocean.
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Ice core taken in Antarctica contains sample of atmosphere from five million years ago
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-ice-core- ... phere.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. has successfully pulled an ice core from Antarctica's Ong Valley that contains samples of Earth's atmosphere from up to 5 million years ago. In their paper published in The Cryosphere, the researchers explain why they chose to drill in the Ong Valley and what they hope to learn from their study of the ice core.

Scientists have been drilling and pulling ice cores in Antarctica for many years—the idea is to study the air bubbles that have been trapped in the ice, some of which go back millions of years, to learn more about the Earth's atmosphere back then. Until now, most such core samples have been pulled from sites in eastern parts of Antarctica because the ice there has been deposited slowly in clean layers over millions of years.

In this new effort, the researchers chose to drill instead in the Ong Valley, located in the Transantarctic Mountains, which, as their name suggests, separate eastern and western Antarctica. Ice in the Ong valley was deposited there by glaciers that slid down from the mountains. As the ice on top melted, rocks pulled down from the mountains created a layer of rock that protects the ice beneath it. And prior research has suggested that the ice underneath could be from as far back as 5 million years ago. In addition to being older than the ice in the east, the ice in the Ong Valley is also less thick, which means getting a useful core does not require drilling as deep.
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The New U.S. Climate Bill
by Jessica McKenzie
August 9, 2022

Introduction:
(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) After more than a year of wheeling and dealing with resistant holdouts, the Senate Democrats finally passed a package of climate legislation on Sunday under the umbrella of the Inflation Reduction Act. The bill, if it passes the House (which it has - caltrek) as expected and is signed into law by President Biden, will be the country’s first major climate law.

The package earmarks $369 billion for energy security and climate change programs over the next 10 years, including: $44 billion in tax credits for wind, solar, and other renewable power sources like hydrogen and another $30 billion for investing in renewable energy technologies, including solar panels and wind turbines; $30 billion for nuclear power companies, to discourage existing power plants from shutting down; $9 billion to encourage investments in efficient heating and cooling systems; and $36 billion to encourage individuals to buy new or used electric vehicles.

The bill also includes some boons for the fossil fuel industry, making it easier to build fossil fuel pipelines and providing tax credits for carbon capture. It also mandates that the Interior Department auction off oil and gas leases before permitting new wind and solar projects on federal land, although whether industry will even want those drilling leases remains to be seen.

A preliminary assessment of the bill by the Rhodium Group, a think tank, estimates the bill’s provisions could reduce US greenhouse gas emissions from 31 percent to 44 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, which is lower than the goal of a 50 percent reduction in that time frame, but still significant.

“Congress finally resisted the temptation to make the perfect be the enemy of excellent,” Susan Solomon, a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board, wrote in an emailed statement.
Read more here: https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/new-cl ... t-heading
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The Fervent Debate Over the Best Way to Confront Global Warming
by Madeline Ostrander
August 12, 2022

Introduction:
(Undark) IN THE LATE 1950S, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies — which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains — worked well for holding back intermediate amounts of water. But they gave people a false sense of safety. After a levee went up, sometimes more people actually built and moved onto the land behind it. Then, if an oversized flood eventually poured over or broke through the levee, the disaster could damage more property and cause more havoc than it might have before engineers began meddling.

The paradox would become a classic lesson in how not to adapt to the hazards nature might throw at the human-built environment. It was also an important cautionary tale for an even larger set of disasters and dilemmas caused by climate change. (The problem was on full display when New Orleans’ levees failed in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, submerging parts of the Lower Ninth Ward with up to 15 feet of water by some estimates. That storm was also made worse by shifting climate conditions and rising sea levels.)

Burton began to work on climate change in the 1990s. He jumped into an emerging but then somewhat stunted field called “climate change adaptation”: study and policy on how the world could prepare for and adapt to the new disasters and dangers brought forth on a warming planet. Among Burton’s colleagues, “I was the only one who put my hand up” to work on adaptation, he says now.

In that moment, he also walked into an area of controversy and misunderstanding that may have ultimately stymied work on climate change for years or even decades thereafter. Some climate experts felt that any talk about adaptation distracted from the work of keeping pollution out of the atmosphere: it sounded less like a coping mechanism and more like giving up.
Read more here: https://undark.org/2022/08/12/the-ferv ... -warming/
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Climate Researchers Correct Faulty Rainfall Predictions for China’s Breadbasket
August 17, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Climate models had until recently not been performing very well predicting variation in the spring rainfall over northeast China, home to some of the country’s main cereal production. This uncertainty potentially puts the food security of the country—and even the world—at risk. Researchers have however now identified the problem: a previously unidentified major shift that occurred in the mid-1980s in atmospheric flows from the North Atlantic as a result of a weakening jet stream.
Conclusion:
Moving forward, climate scientists need to pay close attention to such decadal shifts, the researchers say, in order to produce better predictions of climate variation for northeast China and perhaps even the whole of northeast Asia in the spring.

Having identified the cause of the of the faulty climate predictions for the region, the researchers now intend to develop a better, decadal-varying seasonal prediction model covering a century-long period.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962062
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