tingilinde

climate change and fall colors

A disruption is underway.

 

 

tire emissions

Dangerous and an increasing problem with heavier vehicles (like most EVs)

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When contemplating the emissions from road vehicles, our first thought is often about the various gases coming out of the tailpipe. However, new research shows that we should be more concerned with the harmful particles that are shed from tires and brakes.

Scientists have a good understanding of engine emissions, which typically consist of unburnt fuel, oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and particulate matter related to combustion. However, new research shared by Yale Environment 360 indicates that there may be a whole host of toxic chemicals being shed from tires and brakes that have been largely ignored until now. Even worse, these emissions may be so significant that they actually exceed those from a typical car's exhaust output.

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working to heat-proof india

An enormous problem that requires novel work and low-cost solutions.

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In Lal Matti, an informal settlement of tin-roofed homes in this coastal city, summer can be unbearable. Before the monsoon rains arrive, temperatures can top 37°C, with humidity at a sweltering 95%. The hot, muggy afternoons are particularly oppressive, says Tamrunissa, a young woman who lives with her extended family in a large room above a shop, accessed by a ladder. Despite running three small ceiling fans all day—the family can’t afford an air conditioner—she often gets headaches from the heat, and her children fall sick. Her elderly father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, retreats to an alcove below the apartment to nap. “He can’t handle the heat up here,” she says.

Sometimes, Mumbai’s heat becomes deadly. In April, on a day the temperature reached 36°C, 11 people sitting through an hourslong outdoor ceremony died from heat stroke. At least 20 others were hospitalized.

Indians are increasingly at risk from extreme heat and heat waves that are more frequent and last longer. The country saw a 55% rise in heat-related deaths between 2000–04 and 2017–21, according to research published last year in The Lancet. Global warming will continue to elevate the risks, particularly in India’s fast-growing urban areas, where heat-absorbing tar and concrete boost temperatures. By 2025, cities are expected to house more than half of India’s population, now at 1.7 billion.

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1.5°C likely this year

But it takes a number of years to consider the Earth has reached the 1.5° level.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

suing the oil companies

California goes after big oil for their deception.

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The civil case, filed in superior court in San Francisco, is the latest and most significant lawsuit to target oil, gas and coal companies over their role in causing climate change. It seeks creation of an abatement fund to pay for the future damages caused by climate related disasters in the state.

The lawsuit targets five companies: Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, which is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group based in Washington, is also listed as a defendant.

Seven other states and dozens of municipalities have filed similar lawsuits in recent years. But the California lawsuit immediately becomes one of the most significant legal challenges facing the fossil fuel industry.

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unconventional lawns

Alternatives to the wasteful and unhealthy English invention.

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A successfully reimagined lawn will be sustainable and require minimal or no watering, said Mr. Bittner, who, as the director of natural areas for the botanic gardens, manages 3,600 acres, including about a third of the Cornell University campus.

It will not need fertilizer or pesticides, he said. And the new version will require mowing only once or twice a year, significantly reducing the more than 800 million gallons of gasoline used annually to fuel the country’s lawn mowers and resulting carbon dioxide emissions.

The Cornell project is also looking to identify plants that, once established, will require minimal hand weeding and will form a community that is at least 85 percent native, supporting a diversity of native insects and other animals.

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did greenwashing help fuel canada's big burn this summer?

Bad environmental stewardship - massive plantings of monocultures of the wrong kind of tree.  Add heat and an exceptionally dry few seasons and fire.

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Much later, I learned that the trees we were planting, black spruce, are so combustible that firefighters call them gas on a stick. The trees evolved to burn: They have flammable sap, and their resin-filled cones open up when heated to drop seeds into charred soil. In “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World,” an investigation of the devastating wildfire in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, John Vaillant laid out how climate change had turned some forests into combustible time bombs, where “drought conditions, noonday heat and a stiff wind” can turn a black spruce tree into “something closer to a blowtorch.”

In a naturally occurring forest, black spruce is often found in a mix with trees like aspen and poplar, which are full of moisture and provide a natural resistance to fire. But as a report by the Forest Practices Board of British Columbia pointed out, “Large homogeneous patches of forest are more likely to lead to large and severe wildfires.”

The dangerous mistake we were making gets to the heart of what people often get wrong about environmental stewardship: the notion that, no matter how rapacious or careless we are, we can always dig or plant our way out through sweat, pluck and industry. Rather than leave a forest intact, we clear-cut it, then plant a new one. My troupe of planters thought we were making things better. I spent this summer watching that youthful idealism literally going up in smoke.

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sink or source

The lakes that dot the high arctic have long been thought to be a carbon sink..  that may be changing with global warming.

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The boreal forests and unglaciated polar lowlands are Earth’s most lake-rich biome, hosting nearly half of the planet’s lakes by surface area. While precise data are sparse, a 2015 satellite-based inventory estimates some 3.5 million lakes cover a total of around 150,000 square miles in the Arctic. But due to the difficulty of conducting research in the remote north, relatively little is known about how these vast freshwater ecosystems are responding to the sweeping changes underway.

One of scientists’ key questions is how rising temperatures, shrinking ice seasons, and the increasing precipitation projected for many parts of the Arctic might affect lakes’ carbon cycles. Put simply, this cycle describes the actions of aquatic microbes that break down organic material — exhaling carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — and phytoplankton that take up carbon dioxide to build their skeletons — releasing oxygen. Lakes that breathe out more carbon dioxide than they take in are net carbon sources, while those that on balance remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are sinks.

In the frozen north, lakes have, over millennia, locked up huge stores of carbon in their sediments. But are changing Arctic conditions shifting sinks to sources, unleashing emissions that will accelerate climate change? That’s what Hazuková, a PhD candidate in ecology at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, is here to find out.

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biodiversity in tropical trees

What explains the extraordinary diversity?

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This idea of repulsion — formally known as conspecific negative density dependence, or CNDD — goes back to the 1970s when the ecologists Daniel Janzen and Joseph Connell independently suggested that insects, herbivores and pathogens that prey selectively on one species could make the area around an adult tree dangerous for its seeds. Other species would not be prevented as effectively from growing in the area, though they would still be limited by nonspecific problems like a lack of sunlight under an adult tree’s canopy. The result would be that adult trees of a species would tend to maintain a kind of minimum “social distance” from each other.

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bug zappers

A poor move if you want mosquito protection.

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In 1997, the University of Florida’s medical entomological laboratory tallied the death toll from one bug zapper over a single night: 10,000 insects. Just eight were mosquitoes. Similar studies reflected those findings.

Around the same time, researchers at the University of Delaware used a bug zapper to trap 13,789 insects over a summer. Only 31 — 0.22 percent — were biting insects such as mosquitoes and gnats. What did it kill?

Beneficial bugs, mostly. Roughly half the victims — 6,670 insects — were harmless aquatic species from nearby rivers and streams, fish food in the aquatic food chain. Many of the others were parasitic wasps and beetles that naturally prey on mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes are not fooled by zappers because, along with other bloodsucking insects, they have evolved to home in on animals’ exhaled carbon dioxide, not ultraviolet light, scientists say. Even if mosquitoes are drawn in by a bug zapper, they will immediately redirect their attention to their favorite foods: warmblooded mammals, especially humans.

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