June 12
A polar bear walks along the beach in Kaktovik, Alaska, at sunset on Sept. 7, 2012.
As Arctic sea ice dwindles, polar bears are spending more time on land. Now a long-term study tracks the dramatic change in behavior over the recent warming in the Beaufort Sea off northern Alaska and northwestern Canada.
Polar bears in the beleaguered southern Beaufort Sea population are now three times as likely to come ashore in summer and fall as they were in the mid-1980s, according to the study, by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and two universities. The bears that come ashore are also staying there much longer than bears did in the past, according to the study.
The big changes, the study found, have happened over the past decade and a half — corresponding to big reductions in summer and fall sea ice.
“That’s where we found a turning point in the data series. Prior to 2000, there really was no trend,” said Todd Atwood, a USGS wildlife biologist and the study’s lead author.
Since the late 1990s, the open-water season in the southern Beaufort Sea has expanded by 36 days on average, and polar bears have responded in kind, said the study, published online in the journal PLOS ONE. Since that time, the study said, the polar bears that swim to shore are spending 31 more days a year there.
Before then, the polar bears that went ashore in the late summer and fall tended to make brief exploratory forays, not the extended stays that are happening now, Atwood said.
The study uses data from movements of 228 adult female polar bears that, over the period from 1986 to 2014, were fitted with 389 radio collars. Only adult females can wear the tracking collars; males’ necks are too wide to allow collars to stay in place.
The study also uses data from aerial surveys conducted from 2010 to 2013. Those surveys tracked all polar bears — male and female, adult and subadult.
The newly open Beaufort Sea water, a trend continuing this year, is forcing polar bears in summer and fall to make a choice — swim north to the receding edge of the pack ice, or swim south to land, Atwood said.
The bears that come ashore still make up only a minority of the population, but they may be making the better choice, Atwood said. They seem to be making a beeline for piles of meat- and blubber-laden bones left after local Inupiat hunters butcher bowhead whales on the beaches, according to scientists’ data.
4 hikers die in Arizona as record-breaking heat scorches southwestern US/John Kerry just rode a boat up to the most stunning example of our changing climate
4 hikers die in Arizona as record-breaking heat scorches southwestern US
By Jordan Root, Meteorologist
June 20, 2016; 8:00 AM ET
Heat will continue to plague the southwestern United States early this week after a brutal weekend that led to at least four deaths.
Four hikers died in separate incidents in Arizona where temperatures soared to record levels in some areas. One man is still unaccounted for in Ventana Canyon in Pima County, near Tucson.
Firefighters from the Lompoc City Fire Department take shelter behind their engine Thursday, June 16, 2016, as wind-driven flames advance from the Sherpa Fire. The flames were crossing Calle Real near El Capitan State Park in Santa Barbara County. (Mike Eliason/Santa Barbara County Fire Department via AP)
Pima County police issued a statement encouraging people to limit physical activities during “extreme temperatures.”
The heat also led to some travel delays. Minutes before landing in Phoenix on Sunday, a Mesa Airlines flight was forced to turn back to its departure point in Houston due to the heat.
Phoenix broke a daily record and recorded its fifth highest all-time temperature on Sunday, hitting 118 degrees Fahrenheit.
Extreme heat can affect airline equipment, making for unsafe landing conditions.
More: http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/dangerous-wildfires-continue-a/58263804
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© Evan Vucci/AP Secretary of State John F. Kerry speaks during a tour of the Jakobshavn Glacier and the Ilulissat Icefjord, near the Arctic Circle, on Friday. On Friday, John Kerry — who has led a push on climate change like perhaps no other U.S. secretary of state, culminating in the Paris climate accord late last year — visited perhaps the starkest indicator of the problem in our hemisphere: the enormous Jakobshavn (or Sermeq Kujalleq) glacier of Greenland.It was part of a far-northern tour that also took Kerry — who this year is leading the United States’ chairmanship of the Arctic Council — to the remote Arctic island of Svalbard, where he saw another glacier named Blomstrand. But it’s nothing like the monster of Greenland’s southwest coast, not far from the town of Ilulissat, one of the frozen island’s most populous settlements.
Granted, it isn’t clear how close Kerry was able to get to the glacier, which lies at the end of the World Heritage listed Ilulissat Icefjord, which is often filled with a melange of huge icebergs. On board the HDMS Thetis, a Danish ship, alongside foreign ministers from Greenland and Denmark, Kerry put it like this:
So out of this particular ice fjord, the most active ice flow in the Northern Hemisphere there’s 86 million metric tons of ice each day flowing out into the ice flow, breaking off. I was told coming in here by the pilot of our airplane, who has lived here all his life, that there is enough water being emptied off the ice flow into the Arctic that it would take care of the city — and each day, there is enough water that would take care of the city of New York for an entire year. So this is gigantic transformation taking place and you can see it in the naked eye as you see where the ice has retreated from just in the last 15, 20 years, where the marks are still left.
The figure above, 86 million metric tons of ice per day, may sound impossible to believe. But actually, it translates into 31.39 billion tons per year, which is quite consistent with what one Greenland expert, Ian Joughin of the University of Washington in Seattle, told me about Jakobshavn for an earlier story. He said it’s losing 25 billion to 35 billion tons of ice per year.
And it could actually get worse.
Consider a 2014 study of Jakobshavn by Joughin and three colleagues, which called it “Greenland’s fastest glacier.” Joughin found that its flow speed in 2012 was “nearly three times as great” as in the 1990s. It also found that in just over a decade, between 2000 and 2011, Jakobshavn alone raised sea levels around the globe by almost a millimeter. That may not sound like much, but it means the glacier lost about 360 gigatons, or billion tons, of ice.
As the glacier loses ice in enormous iceberg calving events, it also retreats inland — and, in this case, into a deeper and deeper part of the fjord, where depths are above 1,300 meters. This, in turn, increases the flow speed further.
Thus, the paper predicted that the glacier’s speed could, at the extreme, increase beyond the current factor of three to a factor of 10 faster than in the 1990s, because of its travel through such an incredibly deep basin. In the process, it would retreat backward 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) and hurl forth additional millimeters of global sea level rise.
Last summer, Jakobshavn saw an enormous and possibly record-size iceberg calving event, suggesting that the rapid retreat continues.
According to news reports, Kerry was advised on the trip by David Holland, a professor at New York University who studies Greenland and the Antarctic. Holland has previously published research suggesting that Jakobshavn’s great increase in flow speed was triggered by warmer waters reaching its base. Per these reports, Holland said Jakobshavn could actually retreat 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) in the next century.
According to a recent lecture by NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot, Jakobshavn is one of “three major floodgates” for the Greenland ice sheet, which overall contains about 20 feet of potential sea-level rise. Out of this, Jakobshavn contains the potential to contribute almost two feet.
What’s really scary about Jakobshavn, though, is that it’s still nothing like what could happen in parts of Antarctica, where ice volumes are far greater, and glaciers can be even larger. Yet Jakobshavn, because of its size, still gives a hint of what really rapid ice loss could look like there.
Kerry signaled in Greenland that his thinking tends in this direction. Or as he put it:
I wanted to come up here today to both underscore the urgency but also to learn — and I did learn. I learned more about the threat of the Antarctic, which in many ways is far greater than the threat of the ice melt here in Greenland, what I’ve learned today — and an area where we don’t know enough, where we need to do more research, and where we need to respond to greater effect.
No wonder that, floating amid icebergs unleashed by this giant, Kerry spoke bluntly about how just how big the climate-change problem is.
“So what we did in Paris with the Paris accord on global climate change is critical now to be implemented, but it’s not even enough,” he said.
Sarah Palin does the Climate Hustle…
In case she hasn’t noticed, Alaska is seeing its share of climate changes
Scorching temperatures. Melting ice caps. Killer hurricanes and tornadoes. Disappearing polar bears. The end of civilization as we know it! Are emissions from our cars, factories, and farms causing catastrophic climate change? Is there a genuine scientific consensus? Or is man-made “global warming” an overheated environmental con job being used to push for increased government regulations and a new “Green” energy agenda?
CLIMATE HUSTLE will answer these questions, and many, many more. Produced in the one-of-a-kind entertaining and informative style that has made CFACT and Marc Morano’s award-winning ClimateDepot.com one of the world’s most sought after sources for reliable, hard-to-find facts about climate issues, this groundbreaking film will tear the cover off of global warming hype, and expose the myths and exaggerations of this multi-billion dollar issue.
CLIMATE HUSTLE will reveal the history of climate scares including global cooling; debunk outrageous claims about temperatures, extreme weather, and the so-called “consensus;” expose the increasingly shrill calls to “act immediately before it’s too late,” and in perhaps the film’s most important section, profile key scientists who used to believe in climate alarm but have since converted to skepticism.
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Sarah Palin Says Bill Nye Isn’t a Real Scientist. He Is.
http://mic.com/articles/140966/sarah-palin-says-bill-nye-isn-t-a-real-scientist-he-is#.ukvA4yCCO
By Melanie Ehrenkranz April 15, 2016Palin, climate change truther and the former governor of Alaska, made the claim Thursday in Capitol Hill while promoting her film Climate Hustle.
“Bill Nye is as much a scientist as I am,” Palin said. “He’s a kids’ show actor, he’s not a scientist.”
Nye, the science educator, television host and CEO of the Planetary Society and fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, where he also taught as a visiting professor. Nye worked at Boeing for years before becoming an entertainer. He is still an active scientist: Nye even developed sundials used in NASA’s Mars rover missions.
Palin claims that by saying global warming is manmade, “fearmonger” scientists are holding us back, according to the Hill. Palin also coaxed parents to pass down climate change skepticism to their children and to “ask those questions and not just believe what Bill Nye the Science Guy is trying to tell them.”Palin targeted Nye likely due to his appearance in the film she was promoting, a film conservative news site Breitbart called “dynamite,” and Cal Thomas, who compares belief in climate change to belief in the tooth fairy, reportedly called “tremendous.”
Nye published his own video Tuesday on YouTube to discuss Climate Hustle, pleading with Morano to reverse his stance on climate change.
“If you embraced mainstream science just think of the good you could do,” Nye said. “I’m not kidding, man, I’m not joking with you. Just think what you could do for the world if you came around. You could be a force for good.”
Morano also asks Nye if it was embarrassing for him to watch clips from a documentary painting Nye’s side of the climate change movement as incorrect. To which Nye succinctly responds: “No.”
Want to Do Your Part to Tackle Climate Change? Go Vegan
Can we eat our way out of climate change? That question has come to the forefront again with the Monday release of yet more research connecting global dietary patterns and global warming. While no one’s arguing diet alone can stop the world from warming, there’s now more evidence that changing the way we eat could have a big impact.
Even though the agricultural sector accounts for a substantial share of our collective greenhouse gas emissions—almost 15 percent worldwide—it’s long been more or less ignored when it comes to international climate negotiations, including the landmark climate conference in Paris at the end of last year. Yet with the international community finally starting to take serious action to cut emissions from power plants and transportation, the total share of emissions from agriculture is only expected to rise—so much so that experts say it could essentially cancel out the cuts in other sectors.
RELATED: Are We All Going to Be Vegetarians by 2050?
The biggest culprit? Livestock, particularly cattle. As past research has shown, raising beef generates between nine and 27 times the amount of global warming pollution that producing an equivalent number of calories growing things like beans, nuts, and vegetables does. As just about everyone knows by now, red meat consumption has been linked to a host of health problems, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.
In the Oxford study, published in the journal PNAS, researchers peered into the future to 2050 and asked what might happen in four different diet scenarios. In the first, the world keeps eating the way we are now, with a predicted rise in meat consumption. The other three put everyone on a diet, so to speak, each with an increasingly restricted amount of meat, all the way to global veganism.
The upshot? The less meat the world eats, the better it is for our collective health, the health of our climate, and the global economy.
A worldwide shift to a vegetarian diet, for example, was shown to save 7.3 million lives and cut global warming pollution from the agricultural sector by 63 percent. Going vegan saved an estimated 8.1 million lives, cut climate pollution by 70 percent, and saved a whopping $31 trillion between now and 2050.
The study’s authors openly admit that’s not going to happen, but it’s important that the world’s growing penchant for American-style bacon burgers and meat lovers’ pizza become part of the climate debate.
“We do not expect everybody to become vegan,” the study’s lead author, Marco Springmann of the Oxford Martin Program on the Future of Food, told Reuters. “But climate change impacts of the food system will be hard to tackle and likely require more than just technological changes. Adopting healthier and more environmentally sustainable diets can be a large step in the right direction.”
AK Murre Die-Off
Among the First of the Climate Refugees
Map courtesy of United State Forest Service
The Mission Project encompasses about 50,000 acres in the Libby Creek and Buttermilk Creek watersheds.
Plan is part of ‘landscape vision’ for forest management
By Ann McCreary, Dec 7, 2015
If nature were allowed to run its course, portions of the Libby Creek and Buttermilk Creek watersheds would have experienced natural fires every five to 15 years.
Those fires historically played a role in keeping forests healthy — burning at low intensity, clearing out smaller trees and brush, and ultimately preventing extreme wildfires that spread out of control and destroy forests.
Humans, however, have changed the natural course of fire throughout the West, just as they have in the Libby and Buttermilk watersheds.
“There would have historically been more frequent fires, about every 10 years in those dry, ponderosa pine sites,” said Mike Liu, Methow Valley district ranger for the U.S. Forest Service.
“Since the 1940s and ’50s, it’s up to six cycles that fire has been suppressed. Because of effective firefighting, what fires did start we caught them small, so you didn’t see the historic under-burning,” said Liu.
As a result, the forests in the Libby and Buttermilk areas, like many forests around the nation, have become unnaturally dense, overgrown and vulnerable to extreme fire, insects and disease, according to Forest Service officials.
The Forest Service is developing plans to conduct thinning, prescribed burning and other forest and aquatic treatments in the Libby and Buttermilk watersheds as part of the “Mission Project,” which will employ the Okanogan-Wenatchee Forest Restoration Strategy for the first time in the Methow Ranger District (see related story).
The strategy aims to restore forests’ natural resilience to wildfire, insects, disease and climate change. It differs from past forest treatment practices in some key ways, most notably the size of the project area. The Restoration Strategy emphasizes evaluating and planning for large landscapes and developing interventions designed to benefit the entire area.
In the case of the Mission Project, the area encompasses about 50,000 acres in the two watersheds at the western edge of the Carlton Complex Fire perimeter.
Those watersheds are a priority for restoration because they are among the drier watersheds in the Methow Valley and have consequently missed numerous natural fire cycles, said Liu.
Support, suspicion
The prospect of forest restoration work in the Mission Project area is welcomed by some Methow Valley residents, and greeted with skepticism by others.
When Robert Rivard learned about the Mission Project, he wanted to make sure that Forest Service land bordering his property, near Buttermilk Creek off Twisp River Road, was included in the project.
The initial proposed boundary of the project ran along a ridge above the area where Rivard lives, and he wanted the lines redrawn to include densely wooded Forest Service land adjacent to about 80 homes and cabins in the area.
At the suggestion of Forest Service officials, Rivard helped organize his neighbors into a Firewise Community in October, because that designation improved the likelihood for funding treatments on adjacent federal forests. The designation also helps communities compete for funding to conduct treatments on private land. To be designated a Firewise Community, homeowners must obtain a risk assessment, create an action plan, conduct a firewise event and invest in firewise activities.
“We were able to get this Firewise Community [designation] through the state in record time — nine days,” said Rivard, who worked for 15 years as a firefighter and smokejumper and is uneasy about the condition of nearby national forests.
“I look at the woods. I see the potential,” he said. “We asked that the thin strip between Buttermilk drainage proper be extended to include us.”
The Buttermilk area was threatened by the Little Bridge Fire in 2014, and the Twisp River Fire last summer, raising consciousness among his neighbors, Rivard said.
“The timing was right for the Mission Project. We felt we needed to talk to the Forest Service and some kind of joint agreement. And with another big fire season this year and with the [firefighter] fatalities, we felt we needed to get something going,” Rivard said.
As a result of the Buttermilk landowners’ request, the Forest Service revised the Mission Project boundaries to include the small stretch of section of forest land where Buttermilk Creek comes into the Twisp River drainage by the Buttermilk neighborhood.
Pema Bresnahan, a resident of Libby Creek, has a different view of the Mission Project and has spoken publicly against it. “I see a lot of problems in the scale they are talking about, both in ecological effects and cost,” she said.
“The Mission area is my home. It’s one of the remaining unburned areas and it’s an oasis for wildlife,” she said.
Bresnahan said she is concerned about the project’s potential impact on an18,000-acre roadless area within the project boundaries, and questioned the effectiveness of logging to improve forest resiliency.
“One can find volumes of research to show that this approach, especially in our area, is not economical or necessarily effective in reducing fire severity,” Bresnahan said. As an example, she cited a 2008 study in the Open Forest Science Journal, which found that while treatments to reduce forest fuels can be effective, the probability of treated areas encountering fire before fuels come back is lower than generally assumed.
Bresnahan said she is concerned that a “landscape-level logging operation on the Libby Creek and Buttermilk watersheds” will be the result of the Mission Project. “How much of it [the project area] is going to be actually impacted by huge machines that run on those tracks and destroy everything they go over?” Bresnahan said in a recent interview.
“I don’t think mechanical thinning is appropriate in that area, except in proximity to structures,” she said, suggesting that thinning be restricted to areas within one-quarter mile of residences. “I want a buffer zone around the houses and leave the rest of the reforest as is, and give the Forest Service the opportunity to do controlled burns.”
Liu said he understands why the public may question the Forest Service restoration plans.
“I think some of the individuals have looked at past logging practices and have been disappointed with that,” Liu said. “Maybe there is a lack of faith in the current science that’s being used, or a lack of confidence that what we’re proposing will in fact benefit the system.”
Forest Health Collaborative
The Forest Service is being assisted by the North Central Washington Forest Health Collaborative in moving the project forward. Formed two years ago, the collaborative includes conservation, timber industry, government and tribal representatives interested in increasing the scale and pace of forest restoration projects.
While the Mission Project will evaluate approximately 50,000 acres, the actual area of land to be treated is more likely to be about 10 percent of the total area, said Lloyd McGee of The Nature Conservancy, one of the organizations in the Forest Health Collaborative.
“We start with a landscape vision. This does not mean we’re going to log the whole landscape. What it means is when we do thinning, we want to be able to see where it fits into the larger landscape … where we can strategically place thinning treatments so that we don’t get a megafire,” McGee said.
“That 10 percent or so [to be treated] is based on where there is current access, and where there is no other protection prohibiting management because of endangered species or some other designation that does not allow mechanical treatment or prescribed burning,” McGee said.
The Forest Health Collaborative hired Derek Churchill, a University of Washington researcher and forestry consultant, to conduct a landscape analysis and develop recommendations for possible treatments in the watersheds.
The landscape analysis looks at a range of factors, Churchill said. Using aerial photos and historical photos, it evaluates how much the area has changed from its natural, pre-fire suppression state; it evaluates the risk of extreme fire; it assesses the condition of habitat for species such as spotted owls and salmon.
“It really is a holistic landscape or watershed-wide approach. We’re looking at habitat, fire, insects and disease, aquatics across whole watersheds. We’re looking at all of those and the tradeoffs of those together in one framework,” Churchill said.
The analysis also evaluates how the watershed could be affected by climate change, and compares current conditions in the project area to historical conditions in drier watersheds to guide how treatment can take into consideration a warmer, drier future.
“We think Buttermilk in 50 years is going to be more similar to other watersheds in the region that are currently in a drier condition,” Churchill said.
To assist in the project, McGee and other members of the Forest Health Collaborative have conducted field surveys to gather information on potential aquatic restoration needs and proposed treatment areas.
Liu said the work done by the collaborative and Churchill has been helpful because much of his staffs’ time has been consumed by dealing with two consecutive extreme fire seasons.
“They’ve been able to keep this project moving forward even when we were occupied with fire suppression, suppression repair and recovery,” Liu said.
Liu said he expects the collaborative to provide the Methow Ranger District the results of the landscape analysis and recommendations for areas that could benefit from treatment before the end of the year.
“We’ll review that recommendation and I’m sure modify as we feel necessary,” Liu said. “That will be packaged up as a proposed action, which will be sent out for scoping as we initiate the NEPA [National Environmental Protection Act] process. Scoping could begin in January — that’s a rough target.”
After public comments are gathered, the district will draft an Environmental Assessment, which would be available sometime in the spring of 2016, Liu said.
Arctic Sea Ice Is in Record Low Territory (Again)
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/arctic-sea-ice-record-low-again-20044?utm_content=buffer0b3f8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
February 18th, 2016
By Brian Kahn
The winter of discontent in the northern latitudes continues.
Persistent warmth has baked the region, making snow a no show in parts of Alaska and, perhaps more importantly, slowing the growth of Arctic sea ice. Though it’s still likely a month before the Arctic sea ice reaches its maximum, the current trajectory is not a good one.
Slow and at times non-existent growth has already led to a record low January extent and preliminary data from February indicate sea ice continues to set daily record lows. It was just last year that Arctic sea ice set its record low winter extent, a record that could be short-lived.
January Arctic sea ice extent. The orange line shows the 1981-2010 average. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
As one of the key indicators of planetary health, the continued disappearance of sea ice raises major concerns about how the planet is faring as the climate warms.
The decline continues a long-term trend. Winter Arctic sea ice extent has been decreasing by 3.2 percent per decade since 1979 when accurate satellite measurements began. The region is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the globe, a trend that’s largely responsible for disappearing ice.
This year is no different with weirdly warm weather slowing sea ice’s annual growth across the region. Ice is missing in large areas across the Barents, Kara and East Greenland seas in the Atlantic region and the Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk in the Pacific side of the Arctic, according to NASA Earth Observatory. All told, sea ice extent was 402,000 square miles below average in January. That’s enough missing ice to cover an area four times the size of Colorado.
| RELATED | Watch 28 Years of Old Arctic Ice Disappear in One Minute Arctic Gets Check-Up: Temperature Highest on Record 2015 Arctic Sea Ice: How Low Will It Go? |
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The terms “heat wave” and “Arctic winter” are not usually synonymous, yet that’s what the main story has been in the region this winter (OK, heat wave might be a bit much so let’s call it a mild wave). Temperatures were as much as 23°F above normal in January, a key driver in the planet having its most abnormally warm month ever. That includes a period of time early in the month when temperatures cleared freezing around the North Pole, a rarity in a region where clearing 0°F is a stretch during the frigid winter.
Background conditions have also been warming, including the ocean which has driven some of this year’s loss.
“The low winter ice conditions in the Barents have been in part a result of the increase in Atlantic Ocean temperatures in the 1990s,” Julienne Stroeve, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said.
She said that it’s possible ice losses could slow there — or they could even grow — due to the flood of cold water that’s been found there in recent years. The cold water isn’t exactly good news, though, as it’s being driven by increasing melt of Greenland’s ice sheet and is also slowing down the Atlantic Ocean’s main conveyor belt.
One thing that’s not clear is what this year’s low winter ice will mean for summer. After growing all winter, Arctic sea ice starts a decline in the spring before dwindling to a seasonal low, usually around late September.
Preliminary daily data showing 2016 Arctic sea ice extent. The graph also includes 2012, which set a record low minimum, and 2015, which set a record low maximum, as well as the median. Credit: NSIDC
If winter ice decline is a thing, then summer ice decline has been The Thing.
“Certainly the summer ice conditions are unprecedented with the nine lowest in the last nine years,” Stroeve said.
That includes the record set in 2012 as well as last year, which was the fourth-lowest extent ever recorded for Arctic sea ice.
It’s tempting to look at this winter’s anemic ice extent and think this summer could also be record low, but Stroeve cautioned against comparing the two. That’s because while climate change is driving the long-term downward trend in sea ice, weather events also play a major role in the ebb and flow of sea ice in a given year. Still, if the past decade (and longer) is any indication, this summer isn’t likely to set any records for highs.
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Wildfires leave Okanogan Co. wildlife hungry
I remember back (not long ago) when wildfires were just a natural events that left the forest refreshed and renewed. Now, human manipulation and ultimately, anthropogenic climate change, have made fires more and more catastrophic for all–including the wildlife.
OKANOGAN COUNTY, Wash. – Okanogan residents said today a bear that died last week in their area likely woke up from hibernation too early from a lack of food before winter.
2 On Your Side found it the same problem is affecting animals across Central Washington. It was all thanks to two years of historic wildfires that caused massive amounts of land damage.
“A lot of animals were killed in the fire itself last summer,” Okanogan resident Jon Wyss said. “And many more died shortly after from burns and other injuries. But now, 6 months later, there is plenty of wildlife still suffering.”
The fires destroyed many of the habitats for the animals which meant no food and little shelter. Thousands of deer were left without food after trees and grass were burned.
“When you burn 250,000 acres in 2014 and 500,000 acres in 2015, there’s not a lot of forage,” Wyss said.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officials told 2 On Your Side it could take up to a decade for all the foliage to regrow. That could lead to many animal populations to struggle for years and farmers could carry the burden.
“There’s 11,000 deer without food,” Wyss said. “They’re struggling and they’re competing against our agriculturalists, eating limbs off the trees, the buds, the hay.
2 On Your Side learned that with so many deer going on to farmland for food, it can bring predators like wolves and cougars closer to homes.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officials also said the harder it is for deer means it’s easier for predators. But officials also said that nature will correct itself and the wildlife population will rebound eventually.
Methane release from melting permafrost could trigger dangerous global warming
Not to mention the methane being released by animal agriculture, or as a byproduct of drilling for oil or natural gas, or the carbon emitted by modern catastrophic fires, etc. All these, and their feedback loops, are a result of out-of-control human activity–including breeding!
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A policy briefing from the Woods Hole Research Center concludes that the IPCC doesn’t adequately account for a methane warming feedback
While most attention has been given to carbon dioxide, it isn’t the only greenhouse gas that scientists are worried about. Carbon dioxide is the most important human-emitted greenhouse gas, but methane has also increased in the atmosphere and it adds to our concerns.
While methane is not currently as important as carbon dioxide, it has a hidden danger. Molecule for molecule, methane traps more heat than carbon dioxide; approximately 30 times more, depending on the time frame under consideration. However, because methane is present in much smaller concentrations (compared to carbon dioxide), its aggregate effect is less.
But what has scientists focusing on methane is the way it is released into the atmosphere. Unlike carbon dioxide, which is emitted primarily through burning of fossil fuels, methane has a large natural emission component. This natural emission is from warming permafrost in the northern latitudes. Permafrost is permanently frozen ground. Much of the permafrost is undisturbed by bacterial decomposition.
As the Earth warms, and the Arctic warms especially fast, the permafrost melts and soil decomposition accelerates. Consequently, an initial warming leads to more emission, leading to more warming and more emission. It is a vicious cycle and there may be a tipping point where this self-reinforcing cycle takes over.
Recently, a policy briefing from the world-leading Woods Hole Research Center has moved our understanding of this risk further through a clearly-written summary. The briefing cites two recent papers (here and here) that study the so-called permafrost carbon feedback.
One of these studies makes use of projections from the most recent IPCC report to estimate that up to 205 gigatons equivalent of carbon dioxide could be released due to melting permafrost. This would cause up to 0.5°C (up to 0.9°F) extra warming. Just as bad, the permafrost melting would continue after 2100 which would lock us into even more warming. Under this scenario, meeting a 2°C limit would be harder than anticipated. The current IPCC targets do not adequately account for this feedback.
To put this in perspective, permafrost contains almost twice as much carbon as is present in the atmosphere. In the rapidly warming Arctic (warming twice as fast as the globe as a whole), the upper layers of this frozen soil begin to thaw, allowing deposited organic material to decompose. The plant material, which has accumulated over thousands of years, is concentrated in to upper layers (half of it is in the top 10 feet). There is a network of monitoring stations that are measuring ground temperatures have detected a significant heating trend over the past few decades and so has the active layer thickness.
I communicated with Woods Hole expert Robert Max Holmes, who told me,
It’s essential that policymakers begin to seriously consider the possibility of a substantial permafrost carbon feedback to global warming. If they don’t, I suspect that down the road we’ll all be looking at the 2°C threshold in our rear-view mirror.
So, this means that reducing carbon dioxide pollution is even more important. If we are to stop the warming–thawing–more warming cycle, it is critical to reduce emissions now. According to these experts, this is a serious issue, and we should listen to them.
Exposing the Big Game 