Roaming Charges: When the Old Anomaly Became the New Normal–2021, the Year in Climate

 

January 1

+ Through the first 10 months of 2020 there were no regions on the planet which experienced near record cold. When it came to heat, however…

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR-DECEMBER 31, 2021

+ This satellite image, taken back on 9 September 2020, shows some of the wildfires over Oregon, including the fire that drove us from our house. The view on the right utilizes SWIR bands to penetrate the smoke.

+ A new batch of research in the American Southwest shows that higher levels of arsenic in the water systems of Hispanic communities. There are, of course, no safe levels of arsenic.

+ There are more than 90,000 dams in the United States, many of those dams are at risk of failure. When they collapse, don’t rebuild them…

+ Over the past century, three of Hawai’i’s major islands, Oahu, Maui and Kauai, have lost around one-quarter of their beach shores. The Obamas have been complicit in their destruction…

+ On the last day of one of the hottest years on record, featuring some of the most vicious wildfires, hurricanes and cyclones in history, Alaska is about to hit by its strongest storm in more than a century (if not ever)…

+ The combined emissions of the richest 1% of the global population account for more than twice the combined emissions of the poorest 50%. The earth’s super-rich will need to reduce their carbon footprint by a factor of 30 merely to keep within the Paris Agreement targets, which we all now know are woefully inadequate to the challenge before us.

January 8

+ A new study finds that the amount of baked-in warming from carbon pollution is enough to push temperatures past 2 degrees Celsius.

+ In which John Kerry cites the murderous PLAN Colombia as a template for the kind of climate plan he is concocting for Biden: “So we put together a plan, not unlike the plan we once put together called Plan Colombia, where we put a billion dollars on the table and managed to pull Colombia back from being a failed state.”

+ California’s 2020 wildfire season spewed enough carbon dioxide into the air to equal the emissions of 24 million cars driving over the course of a year.

+ The first three months of the water year have been extremely dry across the Southwest, a region that’s in the tightening grip of a megadrought.

January 15

+ For the third year in a row, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fall survey of the Sacramento River delta turned up no (that is, Leo) Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, now likely to become extinct in the wild in 2021 or 2022.

+ It’s official: 2020 was the hottest year in the global temperature record, dating back 140 years. 2020 statistically tied with the previous record holder, 2016–a year when El Niño boosted above-average temperatures.

+ Admittedly, it’s a small measure of justice, after years of villainy, that included the poisoning of an entire city and the deaths of at least 12 people, but it was a boost to the spirit to see former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder indicted this week. Now on to the people in Obama’s EPA who turned a blind eye to Flint, starting with the person Biden just named to serve as his “domestic climate advisor,” former EPA head, Gina McCarthy.

January 22

+ Biden is getting praise from the professional environmental lobby for rejoining the Paris Accords, which are, in effect, a group of post-industrial nations who have agreed to blame developing nations for their own failures to meet climate goals.

+ Biden’s business working group is busily crafting his infrastructure plan, which seems to consist of using a carbon tax to pay for more roads and bridges to burn more carbon!

+ That may be one reason Wall Street is betting on Biden to revive slumping oil and gas stocks…

+ Here’s a map by climatologist Brian Brettschneider depicting temperatures changes over the last 60 years in the US by county…

+ A new World Health Organization study suggests that limiting air pollution (especially particulate matter and NO2) could prevent at least 51,213 premature deaths each year, and nearly 125,000 deaths annually if air pollution levels were reduced to the lowest levels recorded in the study.

January 29

+ A headline for our times…”Oil Steady as Virus Deaths Rise.”

+ Leading with science…except when it contradicts the desires of some of my leading financial backers. (When Biden says he isn’t “banning fracking” that’s no malarky. The rest of his climate agenda, however, might well prove to be…)

+ New a disturbing study published this week in Nature suggests that the magnitude of human-caused Global Warming already experienced is even more dramatic compared to natural variations than previously thought and the planet is now well outside the bounds of the Holocene. The study argues that the apparent Holocene Warm Period (from 6,000 to 10,000 years ago) was likely an artifact of seasonal rather than annual proxy measurements.

+ From 2015 to 2020, the Bering Strait became ice free, on average, 18 days earlier than it did from 2010 to 2014, according to data from the American Geophysical Union. The pace and breadth of the ice loss is accelerating rapidly. In 2018, the Bering Sea held the least amount of winter ice in any winter in the past 5,500 years. Winter sea ice used to routinely extend to down beyond the uninhabited island of St. Matthew, more than 400 miles south of the Bering Strait. For the past few years, the ice has rarely reached that far south at all.

+ February is coming and it’s likely to be warm, especially in Alaska …

+ The fossil fuel lobby remains bullish on Biden and believes his “green infrastructure” plan will in the long run prove profitable for the oil and gas industry.

+ According to a story in the BBC, big battery technology (often dependent on rare earth minerals such as lithium) could make fossil fuels obsolete. We’ll have to measure the cost in terms of coups per kilowatt hour.

+ The government of Alberta paid a home-school teacher living in England $28,000 to write a report claiming hundreds of climate journalists are part of a conspiracy to end industrial civilization.

+ Overfishing and warming oceans have depleted populations of some shark and ray species by more than 70 percent in the last half-century, leaving a “gaping, growing hole” in ocean life…

February 5

+ Satellite data shows that the snowpack in the Uinta and Wasatch Mountains of Utah is melting earlier and earlier, dramatically changing when and how much Great Salt Lake is refilled.

+ Analysts at Morgan-Stanley project that by 2033, coal will no longer be part of the US power generation system. Why wait?

+ Who needs a Democratic-controlled Senate? On Thursday, seven Democratic senators joined all of the Republicans in voting for the Braun Amendment, which prohibits the EPA and the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality from banning fracking:

Bennet (CO)
Casey (PA)
Heinrich (NM)
Frackenlooper (CO)
Lujan (NM)
Manchin (WV)
Tester (MT)

+ According to a new report by the UN, the global food production system is the key driver behind biodiversity loss and species extinction. A shift to plant based diets is needed to slow the damage being done to nature.

February 12

+ By a vote of 52-48, the Senate passed a resolution backing the Keystone XL pipeline. The two Democrats who pushed it over the top? Manchin and Tester.

+ Trafigura, a multinational commodity trader, with backing from a Moscow bank, is investing in one of the biggest and potentially most destructive oil and gas development schemes in the Arctic: the Vostok Oil Project.

+ A study conducted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, found that a reduction in shipping traffic coincided with an average decrease of 1.5 decibels in waters near the Port of Vancouver.

+ Logging is responsible for 85% percent of the carbon emissions from US forests,

+ Arch Coal Co. announced this week plans to close its massive Coal Creek mine in Wyoming, prompting one longtime coal analyst to sigh: “People are now beginning to say what used to be unspeakable: The end [of coal] is now potentially in sight.”

+ Methane emissions from coal mines are approximately 50% higher than previously estimated, according to a recent study by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Raven Ridge Resources and Ruby Canyon Engineering.

+ Kill it off while it’s down…

March 5

+ On Biden rejoining the Paris Accords: Obama proved that it’s a lot easier to get away with widespread oil drilling, natural gas fracking and tar-sand pipeline construction if you pretend to believe in climate change.

+ Through February 2021, the Earth’s oceans have experienced 537 consecutive months with global sea surface temperatures higher than the average for the 20th Century

Map by Brian Brettschneider.

+ I Shall be Released….Scientists have found that permafrost buried beneath the Arctic Ocean holds 60 billion tons of methane and 560 billion tons of organic carbon — making it one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases not currently included in climate projections.

+ And the consequences are becoming clear: Methane (CH) levels hit a record high in November 2020 at 1891.9 ppb. November 2019’s global methane abundance was 1875.6 ppb….

March 12

+ David Wallace-Wells on climatological end times: “Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it.”

+ Carbon dioxide (CO₂) averaged 416.75 ppm in February 2021, a 2.41 ppm increase since February 2020, despite the COVID slowdown in the economy.

+ A study of Epaulette sharks (native to waters off Australia and New Zealand)  found that warmer ocean conditions caused by climate change accelerated the sharks’ growing process, causing them to from eggs earlier, be born exhausted and struggle for survival.

+ New Mexico’s Senate just passed Roxy’s Law, a bill banning traps, snares & poison on state/fed public lands. More than 150,000 animals in New Mexico alone have been killed this way since 2008.

+ Two-thirds of the world’s tropical rainforests have now been seriously degraded or destroyed, with more than have of the loss since 2002 taking place in the Amazon and bordering rainforests…

+ The Amazon from carbon sink to greenhouse gas emitter?

+ Are economic sanctions driving the rapid deforestation of North Korea?

+ Burned forests are not growing back the way the once did. Some of them aren’t growing back at all. The latest research in the Rocky Mountains estimates that by 2050, about 15% of the forests would not grow back if burned by stand-replacing fire because climate conditions would no longer suit them. In Alberta, Canada, nearly half of all existing forests could vanish by 2100. In the Southwestern US, which currently in the grip of a “megadrought”, nearly 30% of existing forests are at risk of converting to shrubland or another kind of ecosystem.

+ The toxic airborne particles dispersed by wildfires have resulted in 10 times as many respiratory-illness related hospitalizations as other types of pollution…

March 19

+ The Guarani people in Brazil have been violently attacked this week by ranchers who invaded Guarani lands. Survival International has put together this short video of torture victims recounting what is taking place.

+ Christopher Heinz, the step-son of Biden climate czar John Kerry, has been paid more than $1 million since 2007 to lobby for the American Petroleum Institute.

+ Smoke from western wildfires wiped out all of the air quality gains made by the slowdown from the pandemic in the US….

+ “Clean coal” is one of the most destructive oxymorons of our time, along with sustainable development, smart bombs and humanitarian intervention….

+ Enbridge, the Canadian oil and pipeline company, is “funding and incentivizing” Minnesota police departments to crack down on its opponents, most of whom are female.

+ Is the Gulf Stream itself being slowly killed off? Sure as hell looks like it…

March 26

+ As the Biden administration scolds Germany and other European nations about how buying Russian natural gas is undermines their energy security, yet the US is steadily increasing its imports of Russian crude oil. Russia is now the third largest oil supplier to the U.S. market.

+ John Kerry, Biden’s climate “envoy,” said this week that the private sector, not government, will led the “fight” against climate change, and argued that regulators and elected officials work best in a support role, for the likes of Exxon and BP. This is no surprise. Kerry has always favored a neoliberal approach to environmental issue and his wife’s foundation (Heinz) has been one of the most aggressive advocates of replacing government environmental regulations with magical market forces.

+ Big Nuke is hiring….

+ Big trees store enormous amounts of carbon. In fact, experts say that just 3% of trees hold 42% of the carbon in the forest.

+ Summer weather may expand to half a year in length by the end of this century, if no mitigation efforts are done on climate change, according to a new study by the American Geophysical Union. Over the past 60 years, summer has increased by an average of 17 days across the planet.

+ An in-depth study of blood samples from children in Pennsylvania by Environmental Health News shows that the bodies of children living near fracking are contaminated with fracking-related chemicals (ethylbenzene, styrene, and toluene) at levels up to 91 times as high as the average American and substantially higher than levels seen in the average adult cigarette smoker.

+ More than 50 environmental chemicals have been found by the EPA in pregnant women and their newborns., two of the most commonly detected chemicals were perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, that are used in nonstick cookware and pizza boxes, stay in the body for prolonged periods and bio-accumulate over time. Equally worrisome is the fact that researchers know very little about 37 of the newly detected chemicals.

+ A new report found that the fracking boom that swept across Appalachia created few economic benefits or employment opportunities for local communities. The report concluded: “There has been no business case for fracking.”

April 9

+ Kamala Harris: “For years and generations, wars have been fought over oil. In a short matter of time, they will be fought over water.” Glad to see Harris admit that the US has been fighting wars for oil, though she seems a little too excited about the prospect of fighting new ones for water, don’t you think?

+ Stasis you can believe in: The Biden administration will allow oil to continue to flow through the Dakota Access Pipeline despite the ongoing threats it poses to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Missouri and the inconvenient fact that it is currently operating illegally.

+ What’s the carbon bootprint for today’s decisions by Biden to keep oil slushing through the Dakota Access Pipeline and hiking the Pentagon budget by another $10 billion? Amazing the things you can get away with after rejoining the Paris Accords…

+ In his push for high-speed rail, Biden keeps promising that trains will be able to approach the speed of jetliners, which is neither realistic nor even desirable. People just really want more legroom…

+ For the first time in history, daily CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa has topped 420 parts per million.

+ A major climate shift in the Arctic is sparking lightning-started fires that can release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases from tundra ecosystems, where historically fires have been rare, according to a new study  in Nature Climate Change.

+ 58% of the West is now in a ‘severe’, ‘extreme’ or ‘exceptional’ drought — up from 4% of the West a year ago. This latest extreme dry spell follows two decades of mostly dry years intensified by rising temperatures.

Source: US Drought Monitor.

+ According to the California Department of Water Resources, 2021 has been the third-driest water year on record for the Golden State, The department’s annual snow survey released this month recorded precipitation levels at 50 percent below the annual average. The odds are increasing for another deadly wildfire, season after last year’s record-shattering blazes.

+ Meanwhile, PG&E has been charged with five felonies and 28 misdemeanors, including unlawfully causing a fire that resulted in great bodily injury, unlawfully causing a fire that resulted in the burning of inhabited structures and unlawfully causing a fire that resulted in the burning of forest land. How this will translate into prosecutions and who, if any one,  will be put in the dock remains unclear.

+ Nearly 80 fossil fuel companies, including some of the world’s biggest names in oil and gas, reaped more than $8 billion dollars in federal COVID-related rebates and loans, little of which trickled down the actual workers in the oil and gas industry. A study by BailoutWatch show most of those same companies laid off around 60,000 people last year.

+ Extreme drought conditions prevail across much of southwestern Oregon, as well. According to the US Bureau of Reclamation, Emigrant Lake stood at 21% full, Hyatt Lake was 14% full and Howard Prairie was only 8% full last week.

+ This week’s science moment with Marjorie Taylor Greene: “How much taxes and how much money did the people back in the ice age spend to warm up the earth?… Maybe perhaps we live on a ball that *rotates* around the sun, that flies through the universe, and maybe our climate just changes.”

+ Northern California’s kelp forests, the redwoods of the sea, are in a state of collapse, from which they seem unlikely to recover.

April 16

+ A hurricane a week before the 2020 elections nearly toppled a deep-water drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico, narrowly averting a catastrophe similar to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Yet, the incident was covered-up by the oil company and federal regulators for nearly five months and only came to light after a group of rig-workers filed a lawsuit.

+ Nuclear power is to “green” energy what economic sanctions are to “humanitarian” diplomacy…

+ Despite the pandemic, the clearing of tropical forests increased by 12 percent last year.

+ Despite the pandemic and the economic slowdown, global carbon and methane emissions continued to climb in 2020. The global surface average for carbon dioxide (CO2) was 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, rising by 2.6 ppm during the year, the fifth-highest rate of increase in NOAA’s 63-year record, following 1987, 1998, 2015 and 2016. The annual mean at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii was 414.4 ppm during 2020.

+ Climate-change driven wildfires in the western United States seem to be spreading rare fungal infections, like Valley Fever, which has increased more than sixfold in Arizona and California from 1998 to 2018, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

April 23

+ According to a “State of the Air” report from the American Lung Association, 4-in-10 Americans live in counties where the air is so toxic it could do permanent damage to your lungs. Among the worst: Fairbanks, Alaska and Los Angeles.

+ Doctor Moreau, I presume? The EPA has just approved the released into the Florida Keys of the first horde of genetically-engineered mosquitoes.

+ A new study published in Nature Communications suggests that climate change is dramatically decreasing male fertility across the spectrum of species and that fertility rates are one of the best predictors of the likelihood of extinction rates caused by global warming. The study of tropical fruit flies showed that the temperature at which males could no longer reproduce was much lower than the temperatures that killed them.

+ Last Friday night I got what I thought was an alarmist alert on my iPhone that the Portland area was under a fire warning for the next few days, a result of low humidity, high temps (80-ish) and strong east winds pouring out of the Columbia Gorge. Then on Saturday afternoon a big fire erupted right here in Oregon City. It’s mid-April. In Western Oregon. Maybe it’s happened before. But I don’t remember it…

Smoke from Oregon City forest fire. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

+ As ranches, logging operations, mines, and tourist resorts gobble up their former habitat and Ivory poachers haunt their migration routes, the range of African elephants has shrunk to just 17 percent of what it could be.

+ The discovery that Tryannosaurs hunted in packs (not as solo predators) may bolster efforts to restore the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments to their original size, which Trump slashed by 85 percent. The reason? Both areas are littered with similar fossil sites and are vulnerable to excavation by private collectors and looters.

+ Despite spending billions, the effort to remove “space junk” is not going very well, according to a report in Scientific American. Perhaps because Elon Musk keeps putting more up junk every week…

+ Some say the world will end with a bang, others a whimper. But it may be the mad rush to produce biomass energy that finally pushes it over the edge…

+ The Great Carbon Offsets Scam, brought to you by The Nature Conservancy…

April 30

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