Animal Extremists Get Hunting and Trapping Ban on Colorado’s November Ballot
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Monthly Archives: August 2024
Guilty of interfering with badger setts
Guilty of interfering with badger setts
Feds pitch plan to pay hunters for lead-free hunting
Seven NWRs to host incentive-based rebate program for hunters who use lead-free ammo USFWS Report Washington, D.C. — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week announced it is unfurling a pilot program at seven National Wildlife Refuges to test voluntary rebates to increase the use of lead-free ammunition by hunters on Service-administered lands this […]
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Study finds major Earth systems likely on track to collapse: 5 things to know
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Study finds major Earth systems likely on track to collapse: 5 things to know
Four key pillars of the global climate are melting in the heat trapped by rising fossil fuel emissions, a new study has found.
The relatively stable climate that nurtured human civilization depends in large part on these structures: the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic currents that warm Europe.
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Under current policies, the world faces a scenario in which those pillars have roughly even odds of either surviving or collapsing during the next three centuries, according to results published Thursday in Nature Communications.
The scientists warned that if the pillars are fatally undermined by heat, the resulting damage could prove impossible to undo — even if temperatures are successfully brought down later in the 21st century.
Even so, the long timeline of those findings makes them, if anything, optimistic relative to other recent ones: They come on the heels of a string of disturbing studies about key global systems like the conveyor-belt Atlantic current that keeps Europe temperate, or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that keeps global sea levels stable.
They also come as the impacts of rising heat become increasingly obvious, seen in a range of phenomena including record-breaking temperatures — such as those baking Olympic athletes in Paris — thousand-year storms and worsening harvests.
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Here’s what you need to know.
What did Thursday’s study find?
The Nature study found that the four “pillars” it focused on — the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest and the vast but melting Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets — are interconnected, like a row of dominoes.
And the risk of those dominoes toppling increases with every 0.1 degrees Celsius (about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of additional heat above the red line of 2 degrees Celsius set in the Paris climate agreement, the researchers wrote.
They found that that risk is most urgent for the Atlantic current, which could tip into collapse within the next 15 years, and the Amazon rainforest, which could begin a runaway process of conversion to fire-prone grassland by the 2070s.
“Following current policies this century would commit to a 45 percent tipping risk by 2300, even if temperatures are brought back to below 1.5 [Celsius],” they wrote.
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Why is the integrity of these ‘pillars’ so important?
Because they serve as bulwarks of the modern climate.
Each of these pillars is stabilized by, and contribute to, much larger patterns in the global climate and human civilization — as well as the other pillars.
Take the AMOC: It functions as a conveyor belt that brings warm water from the tropics up into the North Atlantic, causing Europe to experience much warmer temperatures than Canada.
The current’s weakening or failure would trap more hot water in the southern ocean, generating more hurricanes and speeding the melting of the Antarctic ice sheets, and lead to something like cataclysm for European agriculture — the sort of catastrophe for which preparation is of little use.
“You cannot adapt to this,” the University of Copenhagen’s Peter Ditlevsen, who co-authored a Nature study last year on the potential midcentury collapse of the AMOC with his sister Susanne, told Inside Climate News.
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If that collapse occurs, he told Inside Climate, there are “studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.”
Similarly, the Amazon stabilizes global climates and regional temperatures, locking down planet-heating greenhouse gasses and generating rain that waters fields as far away as the U.S. Midwest.
And the full collapse of the cubic miles of ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet — whose melting is one of the principal sources of current sea level rise — would lead those levels to climb 23 feet, according to NASA.
How does the new study stack up against previous findings?
The Nature study builds upon prior research that suggested human civilization was brushing up against a wide array of potential tipping points.
There was the Ditlevsens’ finding last year that the AMOC was both slowing down and beginning to wander more — both “early-warning signs” for a collapse that they estimated could come as soon as midcentury.
That was bolstered by February findings in Science that confirmed such tipping in the AMOC was a real possibility.
This was “bad news for the climate system and humanity,” the authors of that study noted, because up until recently scientists could hope that AMOC tipping was “only a theoretical concept” that would vanish once scientists took a global view of the climate system and all its circling feedback loops.
If the AMOC collapsed, the Science authors suggested, there would be “strong and rapid cooling of the European climate” of 3 degrees Celsius, or up to 5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade — a level that, echoing Ditlevsen, the scientists said “no realistic adaptation measures can deal with.”
Also in February, a study in Nature found that as much as half of the Amazon — a forest that dates back to the age of the terrestrial dinosaurs — could be the site of “compounding disturbances” by midcentury that could lead to the sudden transition from forest to savanna.
That’s a possibility one study author told Carbon Brief was “very scary.”
And a 2020 study in Nature found that at about 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the upper limit set in Paris— the Antarctic Ice Sheet would be “committed to long-term partial collapse.”
The danger to the ice sheet, and to these key systems in general, is what scientists call “hysteresis” — a dynamic that can be thought of as a door that only swings one way. Once collapse occurs, it will be impossible to reverse, even if temperatures are brought back down in the future.
How big is the risk of multisystem collapse?
Considerable research suggests the systems examined in the Nature study are closely interwoven with each other, creating the risk of “climate domino effects,” as a 2021 study in Earth System Dynamics put it.
That risk is not clear cut: Interactions between the pillars cut both ways, and in some scenarios collapse in one could lead to greater stability for others, rather than a cascade of failure.
For example, on the one hand, the frigid fresh water streaming down from a collapsing Greenland ice sheet might destabilize the AMOC; on the other, a similar collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet could stabilize it.
There is also some evidence suggesting that a faltering AMOC could help halt the “dieback” of the Amazon, though researchers emphasize that the salvation would be paid for with “devastating impacts globally.”
But these potential saving graces in scenarios of collapse underscore the consistent risk raised by the scientific literature in this field: Even experts don’t really know how close we are to destabilizing the systems we rely on.
These risks go beyond the four earth systems that Thursday’s study looked at. One 2022 Science study into the risk of failure of nine key Earth systems — which include the thawing of methane-dense permafrost and coral reef die-off — found that collapse was possible even even at 1 degree Celsius of warming.
That is a level the planet has already surpassed, though the scientists noted that every fraction of a degree of heat brought the danger closer.
What are scientists proposing to stabilize the climate?
Scientists posit that the most important step for mitigating the risk of collapse is to slow global heating — which is effectively melting the diverse structures of the Earth’s atmosphere, cryosphere and biosphere toward a dangerously soupy sameness — or to blunt its effects.
Some recent strategies they’ve proposed to do so verge on science fiction.
Over the last several years, there has been a surge of interest in solar geoengineering, which pursues approaches like brightening clouds to reflect more of the sun’s light and heat back into space, away from an atmosphere that is ever more polluted with heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuels.
For example, the Environmental Defense Fund and the University of Chicago each recently stood up working groups on the technology.
Solar geoengineering is controversial, however. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists compared it to deliberately mirroring the heat-blocking impacts of volcanic eruptions or pollution from coal plants.
Recent research suggests that deflecting the sun’s light back into space would be, at best, a stopgap: A June study in Nature found that “marine cloud brightening” could cut the risk of dangerous summer temperatures by as much as 55 percent over the continental U.S. — but only over the short term.
By midcentury, the study found, the method would only slightly reduce, or even increase, “heat stress in the Western United States and across the world” — in part because of how the AMOC would respond to both ongoing planetary heating and the impacts of decreased sunlight.
Perhaps more controversial than solar geoengineering, according to Science Magazine, is the strategy discussed in a July white paper, also from the University of Chicago, in which a team of polar scientists called for research into massive dams, boreholes and barriers that could help slow the melting of the ice sheets.
Such measures could help block ice sheets from the heated ocean water that melts them, or drain away the pools of meltwater that would otherwise lubricate their slide into a warming sea.
But they’re the subject of much contention among scientists.
“I honestly feel like this is ultimately going to be a civil war in the community,” University of Michigan glaciologist Jeremy Bassis told Science. “I don’t see an awful lot of room for compromise.”
These proposals are controversial in part because of their expense, lack of proven outcomes and potential for unforeseen consequences — but also because many scientists see them as a distraction from the most obvious solution, which is drastically reducing the main force driving the heating: the burning of fossil fuels.
A 2022 study in Nature Climate Change, for example, found that only cutting emissions in half by 2030 could “minimize risks” of tipping points for the world’s ice sheets.
Echoing the upshot of most papers on the topic, the authors of Thursday’s study emphasized the need for rapid cuts in emissions.
They said to avoid the risk of tipping points, human society needed to “at least” zero out greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century, a process that they emphasized had to begin now.
Rapid cuts in emissions by 2030 “are critical for planetary stability,” they wrote.
How are efforts to cut emissions faring?
They’re not moving fast enough.
Last year saw record emissions from fossil fuels, according to scientists at the Global Carbon Budget, which tracks the amount of coal, oil and gas that can still be burned without pushing Earth beyond a greater than 50 percent chance of passing the critical 1.5 Celsius threshold.
As of 2024, that budget stands at 275 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — an amount that human civilization is on track to burn through within the next seven years.
There is some evidence that global fossil fuel emissions will peak this year, but even if they do, the decline is likely to be gradual and may be outweighed by other factors, such as deforestation — or an expansion in the production of such fuels.
A 2023 report by the Stockholm Environment Institute found that world government fossil fuel production plans, if met, would by 2030 produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels necessary to keep planetary heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and more than half again as much as would keep it below 2 degrees Celsius.
Both those numbers potentially surpass the level at which tipping points begin to be a risk.
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Bird flu cases among farm workers may be going undetected, a study suggests
KFF Health News | By Amy Maxmen
Published July 31, 2024 at 1:30 PM CDT
A new study lends weight to fears that more livestock workers have gotten the bird flu than has been reported.
“I am very confident there are more people being infected than we know about,” said Gregory Gray, the infectious disease researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch who led the study, posted online Wednesday and under review to be published in a leading infectious disease journal. “Largely, that’s because our surveillance has been so poor.”
As bird flu cases go underreported, health officials risk being slow to notice if the virus were to become more contagious. A large surge of infections outside of farmworker communities would trigger the government’s flu surveillance system, but by then it might be too late to contain.
“We need to figure out what we can do to stop this thing,” Gray said. “It is not just going away.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bases decisions on its surveillance. For example, the agency has bird flu vaccines on hand but has decided against offering them to farmworkers, citing a low number of cases.
But testing for bird flu among farmworkers remains rare, which is why Gray’s research stands out as the first to look for signs of prior, undiagnosed infections in people who had been exposed to sick dairy cattle – and who had become ill and recovered.
Gray’s team detected signs of prior bird flu infections in workers from two dairy farms that had outbreaks in Texas earlier this year. They analyzed blood samples from 14 farmworkers who had not been tested for the virus and found antibodies against it in two. This is a nearly 15% hit rate from only two dairy farms out of more than 170 with bird flu outbreaks in 13 states this year.
One of the workers with antibodies had been taking medicine for a lingering cough when he agreed to allow researchers to analyze his blood in April. The other had recently recovered from a respiratory illness. She didn’t know what had caused it but told researchers that untested farmworkers around her had been sick too.
Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Influenza at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, said the results confirmed his suspicions that the 13 human bird flu cases reported this year by the CDC were an undercount.
“Maybe what we see isn’t exactly the tip of the iceberg, but it’s certainly not the whole story,” Webby said.
Little testing of farm workers
Although small, the study gives fresh urgency to reports of undiagnosed ailments among farmworkers and veterinarians. The CDC has warned that if people are infected by the seasonal flu and the bird flu simultaneously, the two types of viruses could swap genes in a way that allows the bird flu to spread between people as easily as seasonal varieties.
No evidence suggests that’s happening now. And asymptomatic cases of the bird flu appear to be rare, according to a Michigan antibody study described by the CDC on July 19. Researchers analyzed blood samples from 35 workers from dairy farms that had outbreaks in Michigan, and none showed signs of missed infections. Unlike the study in Texas, these workers hadn’t fallen sick.
“It’s a small study, but a first step,” said Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical executive. She said that the state was boosting outreach to test farmworkers but its efforts were complicated by systemic issues like precarious employment that renders them vulnerable to getting fired for calling out sick.
Without more assistance for farmworkers, and cooperation between the government and the livestock industry, Gray said, the U.S. risks remaining in the dark about this virus.
“There’s a lot of genomic studies and laboratory work, but farms are where the real action is,” Gray said, “and we’re not watching.”
Communication breakdown
A dairy worker in Colorado told KFF Health News that he sought medical care about a month ago for eye irritation — a common symptom of the bird flu. The doctor conducted a usual checkup, complete with a urine analysis. But the farmworker hadn’t heard of the bird flu, and the clinician didn’t mention it or test for the virus. “They told me I had nothing,” he said in Spanish, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation from employers.
This dairy worker and two in Texas said their employers have not provided goggles, N95 masks, or aprons to protect them from milk and other fluids that could be contaminated with the virus. Buying their own gear is a tall order because money is tight.
As is going to the doctor. One worker in Texas said he didn’t seek care for piercing headaches and a sore throat because he doesn’t have health insurance and can’t afford the cost. He guessed the symptoms were from laboring long hours in sweltering barns with limited water. “They don’t give you water or anything,” he said. “You bring your own bottles.” But there’s no way to know the cause of symptoms — whether bird flu or something else — without testing.
About a fifth of workers on livestock farms are uninsured, according to a KFF analysis, and a similar share have household incomes of less than $40,000 a year.
The three farmworkers hadn’t heard of the bird flu from their employers or state health officials, never mind offers of tests. The CDC boasted in a recent update that, through its partnership with Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, bird flu posts have flickered across computer and smartphone screens more than 10 million times.
Such outreach is lost on farmworkers who aren’t scrolling, don’t speak English or Spanish, or are without smartphones and internet access, said Bethany Boggess Alcauter, director of research and public health programs at the National Center for Farmworker Health. She and others said that offers of protective gear from health officials weren’t reaching farms.
“We’ve heard that employers have been reticent to take them up on the offer,” said Christine Sauvé, policy and engagement manager at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “If this starts to transmit more easily person to person, we’re in trouble,” she said, “because farmworker housing units are so crowded and have poor ventilation.”
Clinics might alert health officials if sick farmworkers seek medical care. But many farmworkers don’t because they lack health insurance and could be fired for missing work.
“The biggest fear we hear about is retaliation from employers, or that someone might be blacklisted from other jobs,” Sauvé said.
Flu surveillance
The CDC assesses the current bird flu situation as a low public health risk because the country’s flu surveillance system hasn’t flagged troubling alerts.
The system scans for abnormal increases in hospital visits. Nothing odd has turned up there. It also analyzes a subset of patient samples for unusual types of flu viruses. Since late February, the agency has assessed about 36,000 samples. No bird flu.
However, Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist who specializes in disease surveillance, said this system would miss many emerging health threats because, by definition, they start with a relatively small number of infections. Roughly 200,000 people work on farms with livestock in the United States, according to the CDC. That’s a mere 0.1% of the country’s population.
Scarpino said the CDC’s surveillance would be triggered if people start dying from the bird flu. The 13 known cases have been mild. And the system will probably pick up surges if the virus spreads beyond farmworkers and their closest contacts — but by then it may be too late to contain.
“We don’t want to find ourselves in another COVID situation,” Scarpino said, recalling how schools, restaurants, and businesses needed to close because the coronavirus was too widespread to control through testing and targeted, individual isolation. “By the time we were catching cases,” he said, “there were so many that we were only left with bad options.”
Troubling signs
Researchers warn that the H5N1 bird flu virus has evolved to be more infectious to mammals, including humans, in the past couple of years. This drives home the need to keep an eye on what’s happening as the outbreak spreads to dairy farms across the country.
The bird flu virus appears be spreading mainly through milk and milking equipment. But for the first time, researchers reported in Mayand July that it spread inefficiently through the air between a few laboratory ferrets kept inches apart. And in cattle experiments, some cows were infected by breathing in virus-laden microscopic droplets — the sort of thing that could happen if an infected cow was coughing in close proximity to another.
Cows do, in fact, cough. The new study from Texas notes that cattle coughed during outbreaks on the farms and showed other signs of respiratory illness.
Other observations were ominous: About half of some 40 cats on one farm died suddenly at the peak of its outbreak, probably from lapping up raw milk suffused with bird flu virus.
Most people diagnosed with the bird flu have been infected from animals. In his new study, Gray saw a hint that the virus may occasionally spread from person to person, but he added that this remains conjecture. One of the two people who had antibodies worked in the farm’s cafeteria adjacent to the milking parlor — alongside farmworkers but not cattle.
“We need to find ways to have better surveillance,” he said, “so we can make informed decisions rather than decisions based on guesswork.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Copyright 2024 KFF Health News
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