Climate Change News & Discussions

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wjfox
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"Biblical" Swarms Of Cannibalistic Mormon Crickets Cause Havoc In Oregon

Oregon’s ongoing problem with Mormon crickets may be bad, but the worst could be yet to come.

Jun 28, 2022 5:24 PM

Vast swarms of cannibalistic Mormon crickets have become a growing bane for farmers in the American West over the past few years – and climate change is threatening to make the problem even more severe.

A recent report by the Associated Press has chronicled the recent battles against the insect pests in Oregon.

Despite their name, the insects are not crickets (or Mormons). The species is actually a shield-backed katydid. The prefix of their name dates back to the 19th century, when they wreaked havoc on the fields of Mormon settlers in Utah. The insects have a voracious appetite for grain crops, but they can also turn cannibalistic if hungry.

[...]

Research in 2018 found that insects consume 5 to 20 percent of major grain crops globally, but the amount of yield lost to insects will increase by up to 25 percent per degree Celsius of global warming. As per their findings, insect-induced maize losses in the US could increase by almost 40 percent if climate change is allowed to let rip.

“Temperate regions are currently cooler than what’s optimal for most insects. But if temperatures rise, these insect populations will grow faster,” Scott Merrill, co-author of the 2018 study and researcher at the University of Vermont, said at the time. “They will also need to eat more, because rising temperatures increase insect metabolism. Together, that’s not good for crops.”

https://www.iflscience.com/biblical-swa ... egon-64241
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Unprecedented 32.5C in the Arctic Circle during month of smashed global temperature records
Friday 1 July 2022

Countries across Europe broke temperature records in June - with an unprecedented 32.5C (90.5F) reported in the Arctic Circle.

Norway's Meteorological Institute has warned the high temperatures are a clear signal of climate change.

In Banak, where this new record was broken, average temperatures for June typically stand at 13C (55F).

The World Meteorological Organization tweeted: "Many June temperature records have tumbled in Asia, North Africa, parts of the Arctic and Europe.

"Stations throughout Scandinavia on Wednesday had 'tropical days' above 30C (86F). Central Asia and Japan are gripped by intense heat."
https://news.sky.com/story/unprecedente ... s-12643828
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wjfox wrote: Sat Jul 02, 2022 11:01 am
No wonder they are the second-largest climate producer. What is Biden doing?
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Logging is Destroying Southern Forests – and Dividing U.S. Environmentalists
by Christopher Ketcham
June, 2022

Introduction:
(Grist) n the fight against climate change, the $300-billion U.S. logging and woods products industry has positioned itself as a purveyor of “natural climate solutions.” The idea is intuitive: Trees are the ultimate renewable resource. After they are cut they can be replanted, absorbing carbon once again as they mature.

Wood energy succored Homo sapiens and its ancestors for millions of years, the argument goes, and only during the last couple of centuries was it replaced with fossil fuels like coal. As our civilization begins the slow process of jettisoning fossil energy, logging interests assure us that wood products are not a retrogression but a way forward. The industry claims that forests that are felled sustainably — for construction, say, or for burning to produce electricity in utility-scale power plants — can provide jobs and energy, stimulate the economy, and even reduce society’s net carbon emissions.

Weyerhaeuser, the world’s largest private owner of timber as well as its largest paper and pulp company, now markets how “wood products help remove and store CO2 and reduce the impacts of climate change.” The U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, a lobbying group for the biomass industry, proclaims that burning wood pellets from logged trees is “one of our best available tools to mitigate climate change, and achieve renewable energy goals.” The National Alliance of Forest Owners, a timber industry lobby group, has trumpeted “the important role sustainably managed forests and forest products can play in mitigating climate change.” In 2020, the CEOs of dozens of forestry businesses announced “an agreement of principles” stipulating that logged forests are beneficial for the climate.

This rosy view of logging, however, is hotly contested. In 2020, more than a hundred climate and forest scientists submitted a letter to Congress advising lawmakers not to trust the industry’s sustainability claims.
Read more here: https://grist.org/energy/logging-bioma ... servancy/

Here are extracts from that letter to Congress:
We find no scientific evidence to support increased logging to store more carbon in wood products, such as dimensional lumber or cross-laminated timber (CLT) for tall buildings, as a natural climate solution. The growing consensus of scientific findings is that, to effectively mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, we must not only move beyond fossil fuel consumption but must also substantially increase protection of our native forests in order to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere and store more, not less, carbon in our forests…

Furthermore, the scientific evidence does not support the burning of wood in place of fossil fuels as a climate solution. Current science finds that burning trees for energy produces even more CO2 than burning coal, for equal electricity produced (Sterman et al. 2018), and the considerable accumulated carbon debt from the delay in growing a replacement forest is not made up by planting trees or wood substitution (noted below). We need to increase growing forests to more rapidly close the gap between emissions and removal of CO2 by forests, while we simultaneously lower emissions from our energy, industrial and agricultural sectors.

In your deliberations on this serious climate change issue, we encourage you to consider the following:
§ The logging and wood products industries suggest that most of the carbon in trees that are logged and removed from forests will simply be stored in CLT and other wood products for buildings instead of being stored in forest ecosystems. However, this is clearly incorrect. Up to 40% of the harvested material does not become forest products and is burned or decomposes quickly, and a majority of manufacturing waste is burned for heat. One study found that 65% of the carbon from Oregon forests logged over the past 115 years remains in the atmosphere, and just 19% is stored in long-lived products. The remainder is in landfills.
§ Logging in U.S. forests emits 617 million tons of CO2 annually…
Source: https://forestlegacies.org/wp-content/ ... May20.pdf
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wjfox wrote: Mon Jul 04, 2022 4:01 pm Image


This is how we solve climate change. We remove the co2 from the atmosphere and learn to manage our climate system.
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High Water and Prolonged Flooding are Changing the Ecosystem of the Upper Mississippi River, a New Report Finds
by Madeline Heim
June 28, 2022

Introduction:
(Milwaukee Sentinel via Investigate Midwest) High water and longer-lasting flooding are changing the habitat along the Upper Mississippi River, according to a new report analyzing nearly 30 years of data.

The upper basin is the natural floodplain that spans from Minnesota through Wisconsin and Iowa to Cairo, Illinois. It’s an ecologically diverse area, consisting of wetlands, marshes and forests.

The report, released last week, shows increasingly wetter conditions in the Upper Mississippi over the past few decades, a trend that — spurred by climate change and land-use practices — looks likely to continue.

The report was conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior, Army Corps of Engineers and Upper Mississippi River Basin Association. It is the third of its kind produced by the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program, which was created in 1986 to conduct long-term monitoring of the basin and focus on habitat rehabilitation.

Kirsten Wallace, executive director of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, said the findings are a good start to understanding what has impacted the river habitat.
Read more here: https://investigatemidwest.org/2022/06 ... rt-finds/

Here is a link to the very lengthy report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2022/1039/ofr20221039.pdf
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San Antonio Congregation Shows Churches’ Eco-Stewardship Can Protect ‘the Tree of Life’
by Marv Knox
July 1, 2022

Introduction:
(Baptist News Global) With research, planning and commitment, a single congregation can provide a faithful ecological witness and take steps to combat climate change, members of Woodland Baptist Church in San Antonio told participants at the 2022 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly.

Jeni Cook Furr, a retired hospital chaplain; Ray Cook Furr, a retired minister, public relations practitioner and general contractor; Mike Massar, Woodland’s associate pastor; and Garrett Vickrey, the church’s senior pastor, led a workshop session titled “Getting Started on Eco-Stewardship in the Church.”

They described Woodland’s 18-month process of theological study, practical research and early steps toward implementing strategies and practices that help the church steward natural resources and go easier on creation.

“Our collective responsibility is to take care of God’s creation,” Jeni Cook Furr said. “Every church is going to do things differently because of what is going on around them. But all of us can be responsible stewards. Our faith demands we do it.”

The environmental ministry, called Oikonomos for the Greek word for stewardship, was the brainchild of Massar, who hit upon the idea while thinking about what he could do for his young granddaughter. “We may be the first generation leaving the world worse than we received it,” he explained. “I came up with the idea of helping clean up her ‘backyard.’”
Read more here: https://baptistnews.com/article/church ... on-shows/
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