ATLANTA, Ga. (CBS46) – More than 700 wild black vultures were recently found deceased at Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary in Locust Grove, according to Sen. Emanuel Jones.
The Georgia Department of Agriculture believes that the birds are victims of H5N1 avian influenza. GDA officials have been at the sanctuary throughout the weekend. Georgia Department of Agriculture Policy Director Bo Warren said the agency was working with other state, federal and local agencies to “assess the situation.”
Many ostriches, emu, parrots, etc. are expected to be humanely euthanized in the near future as a result of the outbreak, according to the senator’s press release. However, this has not been confirmed with Noah’s Ark or the Department of Agriculture at this time.
According to a notice posted on the sanctuary’s Facebook page, they will be closed Aug. 23…
On the current trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions, nearly all marine species will be at high or critical risk of extinction in less than 80 years, according to a studypublished Monday by Nature Climate Change.
The study, which was conducted by an international team of researchers, looked at the effects of rising air and water temperatures due to the burning of fossil fuels on the marine animals, plants, protozoans and bacteria found in the upper 100 meters of the world’s oceans. In that depth, the study noted, “climate-driven temperature changes are the most severe.”
If the world was to continue on its current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, “almost 90% of ~25,000 species are at high or critical risk of extinction,” the study concluded.
Mitigating the effects of climate change “reduces the risk…
TOOELE COUNTY, Utah — A Utah woman was hunting Saturday when a mountain lion came out of nowhere and briefly attacked her. She caught the tense interaction afterward on camera.
Laurien Elsholz was near Rush Valley in Tooele County when this happened. She wrote in aFacebook postthat she smelled something dead, then heard a crashing noise before she felt the big cat grab her leg.
FULL VIDEO BELOW: Utah woman comes face-to-face with mountain lion
California has a well-established reputation as a national and global climate leader, but despite its remarkable successes in cutting emissions between 2006 and 2016, it has recently begun showing signs of having lost its way.
California is increasingly falling behind on its emissions reduction targets, and its existing policies have now been deemed insufficient to hit its 2030 target of reducing carbon emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, according to new modeling from the climate policy think tank Energy Innovation.
“Compared to historical trends, California will need to more than triple the pace of emissions reductions to hit its 2030 target of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030,” the Energy Innovation report states.
Stay in the loop
Never miss the news and analysis you care about.
Email
The report is disappointing news, representing a weakening of the climate action that began with California’s passage of AB 32 in 2006. Otherwise known as the Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32 was a landmark program in the struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Up until 2006, the United States was the largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions in the world, and California was the second highest state in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions.
Under AB 32, California was required to reduce statewide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. It also required that California greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The California Air Resources Board, established in 1967, became the agency responsible for the implementation of the law.
California met its goal to reach 1990 emissions levels by 2020 four years ahead of schedule. In 2016, lawmakers passed SB 32 as a follow up to AB 32. SB 32 requires the California Air Resources Board to ensure the state’s greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to 40 percent below the 1990 levels by 2030.
Surprisingly enough, however, California’s emission reduction efforts appeared to lose momentum after SB 32 was signed into law.
Unsurprisingly enough, an environmental group gave California a near failing grade on the climate crisis in 2021. This was the first time that California Environmental Voters, or EnviroVoters, gave a “D” mark to the state since the group began issuing its annual scorecard in 1973.
What explains California’s woeful progress on climate solutions?
For one, California hasn’t enacted any transformative climate bills over the past 4 years. Perhaps there is a connection between California’s recent inaction on the climate crisis and the fact that fossil fuel companies “spent four times as much as environmental advocacy groups and almost six times as much as clean energy firms on lobbying efforts in California between 2018 and 2021,” according to Capital & Main.California lawmakers are failing to advance bills that include deep decarbonization initiatives.
Indeed, California lawmakers are failing to advance bills that include deep decarbonization initiatives. When a new bill AB 1395, a net-zero bill co-authored by Assembly Members Al Muratsuchi and Cristina Garcia, was introduced on the last day of last year’s legislative session, it was resoundingly defeated. It would have codified in law the state’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible and by no later than 2045. It was opposed by the oil and gas sector, the agricultural industry and business groups.
California’s clean-air regulators are also relying on programs and strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are of questionable nature, according to experts. The California Air Resources Board released in May a proposal called a scoping plan that ignores the need for immediate action and leans heavily on carbon dioxide removal technologies to reach the 2045 carbon neutrality target. “The plan does California a disservice,” said one state advisor, while more than 70 environmental justice groups called the proposal “a setback for the state and the world.”
Transformative pieces of legislation on the side of climate justice are also being ditched in a state with a reputation for progressive politics. Just recently, the California Justice40 Act (AB 2419) introduced by Assembly Member Isaac Bryan, which would have ensured the equitable implementation of infrastructure investments, was killed in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The bill aimed to achieve environmental justice by investing at least 40 percent of federal climate and infrastructure funding on projects that provide “direct benefits” to low-income, indigenous, and rural communities and communities of color. The California Green New Deal Coalition and many other environmental organizations had expressed strong support for AB 2419.
This was a critical piece of legislation that would have benefitted directly the communities facing the greatest environmental burdens. Infrastructure policies in the U.S. have historically promoted and exacerbated racial and economic inequality. During the New Deal, for instance, the Federal Housing Authority provided low-interest mortgages to white families but refused to issue mortgages in African American neighborhoods. Communities of color were designated as “risky areas.” The 1956 Interstate Highway Act intentionally displaced hundreds of thousands of low-income families and communities of color. A landmark 1987 report, entitled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” revealed that race was the most significant indicator for the location of toxic waste sites.The only obstacles in California to a decarbonized future are politicians stuck in “piecemeal approach” mode and the influence of corporate lobbying on climate policies.
A study released by the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that, if enacted, AB 2419 “would powerfully advance gender and racial equality in California.” The report estimated that six in ten residents of the state could benefit from infrastructure investments targeted to low-income and disadvantaged communities. The bill would benefit women of color since they are more likely to live in polluted or low-income areas. Indeed, in the San Francisco Bay area, 1.3 million women of color would benefit from AB 2419’s targeted investments, and in southern California 3.2 million women of color who live in heavily polluted communities would benefit, the report said.
But to no avail. The bill was obviously too “radical” even for the Democratic members in the Senate’s Appropriations Committee.
California is proof that simply being a liberal state is not a sufficient enough factor to secure progress in the fight against the climate crisis. Money talks. Powerful interest groups can easily hijack the policy agenda. The role of bureaucrats also cannot be overlooked when it comes to issues of critical importance for the common good. The California Air Resources Board’s view on carbon removal technology represents in reality a form of continued investment in the fossil fuel industry.
The irony is that California has at its disposal a comprehensive climate stabilization program that includes climate justice and economic growth, courtesy of a group of progressive economists at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Robert Pollin and some of his coworkers produced last year a commissioned program that demonstrates that California can achieve its official greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets by 2030 and reach zero emissions by 2045. They also showed that the program can serve as a powerful new engine of job creation and ensure a just transition for the state’s fossil fuel workers and communities.
The project was embraced by the union movement in California. Some 20 unions across the state endorsed the program, including a couple representing thousands of oil workers, so it cannot be said that there are no sustainable transition projects available to California or that such projects lack the approval of labor unions. The only obstacles in California to a decarbonized future are politicians stuck in “piecemeal approach” mode and the influence of corporate lobbying on climate policies.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
There are three factors that could lead to inflation which include demand-pull inflation, cost-push inflation and built-in inflation.
The raging inflation Americans have felt through the first half of the year already has consumers bracing for pricier meals this holiday season. But analysts are warning that the bird flu outbreak in the U.S. could mean an added dose of sticker shock when people buy their Thanksgiving turkeys.
Walter Kunisch, senior commodities strategist at Hilltop Securities Commodities, told FOX Business the American consumer should be prepared.
A platter of carved Thanksgiving turkey. (Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images / Getty Images)
“Looking ahead to the Thanksgiving holiday, we believe that the impacts from the latest outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in the U.S., combined with skyrocketing production costs, have led to a declining domestic turkey flock, lower meat supplies and higher prices,” Kunisch said.
The analyst points to sharply higher regional corn, soybean meal and diesel prices that have forced commercial production costs to surge and says the increasing cost of grains is contributing to the 5% decline in reported live weighs from 2021 and to lower domestic supplies.
Turkeys inside a barn at Out Post Farm in Holliston, Mass., Nov. 11, 2021. (Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images / Getty Images)
For perspective, Hilltop estimates that commercial turkey production costs in Minnesota, the largest turkey-producing state, have risen 18% from 2021, and it expects those costs to be passed on to the consumer.
Kunisch says the number of turkeys lost to HPAI is difficult to gauge, and the estimates have varied, but he points to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s estimate of a 2.5% year-on-year decline in the domestic flock from 2021 as “highly credible.”
A rack of turkeys (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post / Getty Images)
“Year-to-date, 2022 turkey production is the lowest in 10 years and is running 5% below 2012 levels,” Kunisch said. “The USDA’s most recent data show an alarming low level of turkeys in cold storage. With 2022 turkey production estimated at -4.3% from 2021, 2022 whole 8- to 16-pound wholesale hen prices are estimated to be 23% higher than 2021.
“With the spike in turkey prices, we believe that a decline in consumption during the holidays can occur.”
A group of scientists last week announced a plan toresurrect the Tasmanian tiger, a coyote-like marsupial that has been extinct for nearly a century, using state-of-the-art gene editing technology.
The goal, researchers say, is to eventually reintroduce the creature back into the Australian wilderness, where it roamed as an apex predator before being hunted into extinction in the early 20th century. To achieve this, scientists plan to splice genetic material from old Tasmanian tigers with the DNA of its closest living relative — a mouse-sized marsupial called a dunnat — to create a new animal nearly identical to its…
This is CNBC’s live blog tracking developments on the war in Ukraine. See below for the latest updates.
The U.S. State Department issued a warning over the threat of increased Russian strikes on Ukraine during the week of its independence day on Aug. 24, urging remaining Americans in Ukraine to leave the country. Kyiv is bracing itself for fresh Russian attacks that its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned may be “particularly nasty.”
The U.N. continued to sound the alarm over the situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, demanding a demilitarization of the area and warning that the world is facing a moment of “maximum danger.” A worker at the plant died of his injuries due to Russian shelling near the facility, Ukraine’s state energy company said.
Meanwhile, the volume of grain leaving Ukraine’s ports for export has increased to more than 700,000…
In approximately 1958, as climate change began to warm the rest of the world, something odd happened in the southeastern United States: It began to cool.
Between 1895 and 2016, the average U.S. temperature has risen by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the last National Climate Assessment, with much of that warming coming after 1970. Yet in the second half of the 20th century, the hot, muggy Southeast bucked this trend, cooling by as much as a degree. Scientists call it the “warming hole”—and they don’t know exactly why or how it formed.
“This has been having scientists scratch their heads for a long time,” says Barry Keim, the Louisiana State Climatologist. “There’s been no explanation I have been happy with, that convinces me.” Agriculture, random climate variability, and even air pollution have all been theories to explain the anomaly.
“It’s only reasonable to expect (and climate models tend to agree) that in the future these cool anomalies will dissipate, or continue to be overrun, by climate change,” says Trevor Partridge, a climate scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey and lead author of a 2018 study analyzing the warming hole.
Cooling from distant oceans…
The natural climate fluctuations that might partially explain the Southeast’s decades-long reprieve from hotter temperatures can be found thousands of miles away in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
From year to year, the temperature of the sea surface changes; in the equatorial Pacific, it’s warmer during El Niño years and cooler during La Niña years. Similar cyclical fluctuations can happen on much longer time scales that last decades.
Every 20 to 30 years, sea surface temperatures along the U.S. West Coast naturally shift into warmer or cooler phases, in what’s called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). And over the North Atlantic Ocean, changes in air pressure influence the speed of winds blowing over the ocean, a process known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).
In his 2018 paper, Partridge theorized that those changes in the PDO and NAO allowed the jet stream, which blows west to east around the Northern Hemisphere, to get a little more wavy. During the period of the warming hole, he and his colleagues think, cold air from the North was able to nestle in the U-shaped trough of a wave over southern states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.
“We struggled to really pinpoint something going on right in 1958,” says Partridge. “The climate is very random and chaotic, and so it could have been by chance.”
Forests and farms
His 2018 paper also added a new piece to the warming hole puzzle. The cooling trend wasn’t just present over the Southeast, he and his study coauthors found. Also beginning around 1958, a summer warming hole appeared over the Midwest, though with a smaller temperature decline of only a fraction of a degree. But unlike the Southeast, the Midwest seemed less influenced by large weather patterns. Instead, the region seemed to change because of a booming local industry—agriculture.
As the area covered by intensively cultivated crops like corn and soy rapidly expanded in the mid 20th century, that farming cooled the surrounding atmosphere, says Partridge’s coauthor, Dartmouth College geographer Jonathan Winter.
“When you irrigate [crops], just like when you get out of the pool and the water evaporates off your skin, it cools. These plants transpiring all this water just cools the region,” he says.
Another study, published by Partridge and Winter in 2019, found that Midwestern agriculture even benefited from its own cooling effect—boosting corn yields every year by roughly 10 percent since the warming hole phenomenon emerged in the middle of the century.
Other climate scientists say land-use changes have also helped the Southeast stay cooler than it otherwise would be. Rampant regional deforestation in the 19th and early 20th centuries left only one percent of forests untouched—but the trees have since come back. Forests now cover 60 percent of Georgia, much of it in the form of tree plantations, says Pam Knox, a climate scientist at the University of Georgia. Alabama is nearly 70 percent forested, most of it on private land.
“When you have a forest, the ground is shaded and tends to not be as hot,” says Knox.
To Partridge, cooling in the Midwest and the Southeast as a result of crops and tree cover shows how much influence humans have on climate, beyond our emissions from fossil fuels.
“What we do to our land surface can have pretty profound effects on local climate,” Partridge says.
Another theory for the warming hole’s origin points to pollution by aerosols, small particles that float in the atmosphere and block the sun. Sulfate particles from coal-fired power plants are especially effective at reflecting sunlight, and historically, the eastern half of the U.S. has had a higher concentration of coal plants.
Aerosol pollution peaked in the 1980s and has since fallen to half those levels, largely thanks to the Clean Air Act signed in 1970. Scientistshave varying theories over how much these aerosols influenced the warming hole. Because not every region subjected to aerosol pollution experienced a warming hole, Partridge and Winter say it may have simply amplified the effect in both the Southeast and Central U.S., rather than playing a leading role.
One study published in 2017 looked at aerosol pollution and natural climate variability and split the difference, suggesting that aerosols contributed to summertime cooling in the middle of the last century, while the winter cooling that persisted in later decades was the work of natural variations in climate.
Regardless of the cause, warming holes are rare. Another cooling anomaly has been observed—in the North Atlantic—and possibly results from climate change-caused shifts in ocean currents that keep warmer waters away from that area.
A warmer future everywhere
Depending on the time period studied or metric used—winter, summer, or annual temperatures, averages or maximums—the effects of the Southeast warming hole might or might not still be detectable.
According to a 2015 study, it vanished two decades ago, when Pacific surface temperatures shifted into a cooler phase. It’s unlikely to re-emerge, says Gerald Meehl, lead author of the study and climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“In the end, the increase in warming is going to win out. These internal fluctuations won’t be as noticeable,” says Meehl.
Already, the world has warmed by about 2°F since the late 19th century. According to figures usedin the last National Climate Assessment in 2018, the Southeast has still not caught up with the rest of the country in terms of the cumulative warming it has experienced—and it lags well behind the Northeast, say, or Alaska.
But in the coming decades, the region is likely to see a serious increase in extreme, hazardous heat, according to a recent county-by-county mapping study by the First Street Foundation. The reprieve it enjoyed in the late 20th century will probably be no more than a distant memory.
Woolly mammoths, the iconic giants of the last ice age, went extinct around 4,000 years ago.
But one company is trying to revive the species—or at least something resembling it—and the scientist at the head of the project envisions thousands of these animals roaming the Arctic.
Colossal Biosciences is a start-up launched by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and renowned geneticist George Church that is aiming to resurrect the woolly mammoth, or more accurately to create a genetically engineered Asian elephant that will be cold-resistant and have all the core biological traits of its extinct relative.
While not an exact replica, the hybrid animal will look like a woolly mammoth and be capable of inhabiting the same ecosystem that the extinct animal once roamed.
Stock image: Artist’s reconstruction of two woolly mammoths. Colossal Biosciences is attempting to develop an elephant-mammoth hybrid with that could thrive in the Arctic tundra.ISTOCK
The science side of the ambitious (and somewhat controversial venture) is being guided by Church, whose pioneering work has contributed to the development of DNA sequencing and genome engineering technologies.
Church leads synthetic biology research efforts at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He is also a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, while also holding positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), among other institutions.
Church has co-authored hundreds of scientific papers, has dozens of patents to his name, and has set up more than 20 companies. He has long dreamed of bringing back the woolly mammoth, and after teaming up with Lamm, this dream could become a reality, although significant scientific and logistical obstacles will need to be overcome first.
Genome Editing Examples
Colossal’s aim to create a hybrid elephant with woolly mammoth traits—such as thick fur and layers of insulating fat, among other cold climate adaptions—will involve the use of advanced gene editing technology.
Church told Newsweek that the approach is very similar to research one of his companies has demonstrated with pigs, where scientists made roughly 40 edits to the genome of these animals in order to make their organs suitable for transplantation into humans.
He said Colossal was planning to make a similar number of edits in cells taken from Asian elephants, an endangered species that is the woolly mammoth’s closest living relative, sharing around 99.6 percent of its DNA.
“Indeed, the Asian elephant and the woolly mammoth are closer to each other than either of them is to the African,” Church told Newsweek.
In order to determine which edits to make, Colossal’s researchers have to compare elephant genomes to that of the woolly mammoth to identify where the key differences are. Fortunately, some mammoth remains have been preserved remarkably well, with some tissue samples containing intact DNA, from which researchers can build at least partial genomes.
Once the differences are identified, scientists can begin making genetic edits to cells taken from Asian elephants with the aim of creating a more mammoth-like animal. The number of edits will be similar to the 40 or so made to the pig genome in previous research.
“We’d typically use CRISPR [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats], or a variety of other editing tools, to edit the cell by going in and adding DNA. And then we take the nucleus out of that cell and put it into an egg.
“Then we implant that into a surrogate mother and wait, in the case of elephants, 22 months. Then you’ve got a calf. That’s classical cloning, as was done with Dolly the Sheep,” Church said. “The point is not to resurrect a species, but to resurrect individual genes in a constellation that would help specifically with cold tolerance.”
Artificial Womb or Surrogate Mother
Another method that the Colossal team is working on in parallel is to develop the elephant-mammoth hybrid embryo in an artificial womb instead of using a surrogate mother.
The surrogate would likely be an African elephant rather than an Asian one because it is a larger species that will have less difficulty delivering an elephant hybrid and is slightly less of a conservation concern.
“We will let it develop outside the body as kind of happens for a little while in in vitro fertilization. But then, we want to carry it further, all the way to term,” Church said.
This has never been done before for any mammal, but researchers have previously made headway in some animals. For example, a team at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia managed to support a fetal lamb for four weeks, although the size of a mammoth calf, which usually weighs more than 200 pounds at birth, will present a far greater challenge.
While using a surrogate mother is more feasible because the technology has already been demonstrated (to some extent at least) in other mammals, Church said most of the team favors the artificial womb approach—despite the technological challenges—because it can scale better and doesn’t interfere with the reproduction of living elephants.
Colossal’s goal, which Church said was “not necessarily a promise,” is to produce a viable elephant-mammoth hybrid in six years.
Environmental Benefits
If Colossal does manage to achieve this, the company hopes that introducing enough of them into the wild could restore the health of the Arctic environment and decelerate melting of the Arctic permafrost, a process which releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases, threatening efforts to curb climate change.
Mammoths were keystone species that were vital to maintaining the health and biodiversity of the ecosystems in which they inhabited. The loss of mammoths over the last few thousands years has contributed to a reduction of grasslands, which once efficiently absorbed carbon, in the Arctic regions. Now this ecosystem is dominated by mossy forests and wetlands.
Restoring these grasslands could help to prevent the thaw and release of greenhouse gases within the arctic permafrost, according to Colossal.
“Elephants tend to knock down trees, and hence restore grasslands,” Church said. “So, there’ll be a mixture of trees and grass, rather than right now, there’s almost no grass.”
“The main side effect that we’re interested in is the maintenance of cold arctic soil by [elephants] trampling the snow to let the cold air in in the winter.”
In addition, grasslands do a better job of reflecting sunlight than trees currently found across the Arctic because they are lighter in color. Thus, more grassland, would help to cool the ecosystem.
Church said Colossal is focusing on the regions of the Arctic that have the highest carbon content because more methane—a potent greenhouse gas—would be released if we let the permafrost thaw from these areas.
“The carbon content of these carbon-rich areas add up to more than the rest of the forests of the world put together,” Church said.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/53ZXKL4QJRCYFIMVMI3JNBINQ4.jpg)
Exposing the Big Game 
