Simplified map of Earth’s tectonic plates and continents, including Zealandia. Continental shelf areas shown in pale colors. Large igneous province (LIP) submarine plateaus shown by blue dashed lines: AP—Agulhas Plateau; KP—Kerguelen Plateau; OJP—Ontong Java Plateau; MP—Manihiki Plateau; HP—Hikurangi Plateau. Selected microcontinents and continental fragments shown by black dotted lines: Md—Madagascar; Mt—Mauritia; D—Gulden Draak; T—East Tasman; G—Gilbert; B—Bollons; O—South Orkney. Hammer equal area projection.

‘Nanoplastics’ found in popular bottled water brands. Here’s what to know.

A new study found that three popular brands are teeming with tiny bits of plastic

By Alexa Coultoff Globe Correspondent,Updated January 10, 2024, 12:15 p.m.

Three popular brands of bottled water are teeming with hundreds of thousands of tiny bits of plastic, according to a study published this week by researchers at Columbia and Rutgers Universities.

The findings, published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that a liter, or around 33 ounces, of bottled water contains some 240,000 detectable plastic fragments—10 to 100 times more than previously estimated.

Around 90 percent of these particles were nanoplastics, which are tiny enough to pass through the intestines and lungs directly into the bloodstream.

While this newly discovered information may sound scary, here’s what you need to know about the research and the safety of plastic water bottles.

Which brands did the researchers test?

Related

Massachusetts bans state agencies from purchasing single-use plastic bottles, Healey announces

They didn’t the reveal the specific brands but said all were common and purchased at a Walmart.

What are the health risks of drinking up these particles?

In short, we don’t know, but researchers are working to find out.

“That’s currently under review. We don’t know if it’s dangerous or how dangerous,” study co-author Phoebe Stapleton, a toxicologist at Rutgers, told the Associated Press. “We do know that they are getting into the tissues (of mammals, including people) … and the current research is looking at what they’re doing in the cells.”

What are nanoplastics?

Microplastics are defined as artificial polymer particles ranging in size from 5 millimeters (less than a quarter inch) down to 1 micrometer, which is 1 millionth of a meter. They can be produced through the disintegration of plastic products and released into the environment. Nanoplastics are microplastics that break down even further, defined as particles below 1 micrometer. (A human hair is about 70 micrometers across.)

There have been more studies on the effects of microplastics in recent years, which have shown that exposure to them can result in oxidative stress and negative immune responses. Studies on nanoplastics specifically found that they can easily travel into the bloodstream and damage cell membranes.

How surprising are the findings?

“I have to say that it’s not unexpected that we would be finding these particles in water bottles, because these particles are ubiquitous,” said Paul Anastas, a professor of chemistry at Yale University.

A 2018 study found that 93 percent of 259 collected plastic water bottles contained signs of microplastic contamination.

“It’s long been known that there are microplastics in our drinking water, and of course they’re going to further degrade. It’s a matter of, if we look, we’re going to find them,” said Kathryn Rodgers,a Boston University Ph.D. student in the Department of Environmental Health.

Where did the nanoplastics in the bottled water come from?

The scientists found several types of plastics in the water. One common one was polyethylene terephthalate or PET, which many water bottles are made of. It probably gets into the water as bits slough off when the bottle is squeezed or gets exposed to heat, or even as the cap is opened and closed, according to a press release that accompanied the study. 

Another substance the researchers identified was polyamide, a type of nylon, which probably came from plastic filters used to purify the water before it was bottled, according to Columbia.

Are there other unsafe things about plastic water bottles?

Rodgers said she’s more concerned about chemical additives that are commonly added to plastic than the microplastics and nanoplastics themselves.

“BPA is added to plastics to make them more rigid, and it’s known that microplastics can leach BPA and phthalates out overtime,” she said. “It’s not just the health effects from plastics themselves, but exposure to chemical additives that are used in plastic production that come with their own set of health risks.

What’s the best way to avoid the potential dangers of nanoplastics?

In short, Anastas and Rodgers said, avoid plastic bottled water.

Rodgers said there is no way to use plastic water bottles and be one hundred percent sure of their safety. Bottles that have been consistently refrigerated, however, are safer than those left in cars for long periods of time, because heat can cause chemical additives to disintegrate, she said.

Anastas said his research in green chemistry has opened a window into advocating for greener alternatives to plastic use, which can prevent people from consuming nanoplastics altogether. Anastas’ book, Designing Safer Polymers, explores some of those alternatives.

“If people knew that plastics don’t have to be the way they are, we don’t need to be having this conversation about microplastics and nanoplastics,” Anastas said.

Rodgers advises consumers to simply avoid any unnecessary plastic use and stick to reusuable water bottles to begin the much-needed detachment from plastic consumption.

Alexa Coultoff can be reached at alexa.coultoff@globe.com. Follow her @alexacoultoffP

The year 2023 was the hottest in recorded human history, Europe’s top climate agency announced Tuesday, with blistering surface temperatures and torrid ocean conditions pushing the planet dangerously close to a long-feared warming threshold.

According to new data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Earth’s average temperature last year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the preindustrial average, before humans began to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning and other polluting activities. Last year shattered the previous global temperature record by almost two-tenths of a degree — the largest jump scientists have ever observed.

This year is predicted to be even hotter. By the end of January or February, the agency warned, the planet’s 12-month average temperature is likely to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level — blasting past the world’s most ambitious climate goal.

The announcement of a new temperature record comes as little surprise to scientists who have witnessed the past 12 months of raging wildfires, deadly ocean heat waves, cataclysmic flooding and a worrisome Antarctic thaw. A scorching summer and “gobsmacking” autumn temperature anomalies had all but guaranteed that 2023 would be a year for the history books.

But the amount by which the previous record was broken shocked even climate experts.

“I don’t think anybody was expecting anomalies as large as we have seen,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said. “It was on the edge of what was plausible.”

The staggering new statistics underscore how human-caused climate change has allowed regular planetary fluctuations to push temperatures into uncharted territory. Each of the past eight years was already among the eight warmest ever observed. Then, a complex and still somewhat mysterious host of climatic influences combined with human activities to push 2023 even hotter — ushering in an age of “global boiling,” in the words of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres.

Unless nations transform their economies and rapidly transition away from polluting fuels, experts warn, this level of warming will unravel ecological webs and cause human-built systems to collapse.

A man cools off with a mist dispenser set up in a street in central Baghdad amid soaring temperatures, on Aug. 15. (Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)

A year that ‘doesn’t have an equivalent’

When ominous warmth first appeared in Earth’s oceans last spring, scientists said it was a likely sign that record global heat was imminent — but not until 2024.

But as the planet transitioned into an El Niño climate pattern — characterized by warm Pacific Ocean waters — temperatures took a steeper jump. July and August were the two warmest months in the 173-year record Copernicus examined.

Can you guess how crazy last year’s weather was? Try this game.

As Antarctic sea ice dwindled and the planet’s hottest places flirted with conditions too extreme for people to survive, scientists speculated that 2023 would not only be the warmest on record — it might well exceed anything seen in the last 100,000 years. Analyses of fossils, ice cores and ocean sediments suggest that global temperatures haven’t been this high since before the last ice age, when Homo sapiens had just begun to migrate out of Africa and hippos roamed in what is now Germany.

Autumn brought even greater departures from the norm. Temperatures in September were almost a full degree Celsius hotter than the average over the past 30 years, making it the most unusually warm month in Copernicus’s data set. And two days in November were, for the first time ever, more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the preindustrial average for those dates.

“What we have seen in 2023 doesn’t have an equivalent,” Buontempo said.

The record-setting conditions in 2023 were driven in part by unprecedented warmth in the oceans’ surface waters, Copernicus said. The agency measured marine heat waves from the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Parts of the Atlantic Ocean experienced temperatures 4 to 5 degrees Celsius (7.2 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) above average — a level that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration classifies as “beyond extreme.”

While researchers have not yet determined the impacts on sea life, similar heat waves have caused massive harms to microorganisms at the base of the food web, bleached corals and fueled toxic algae blooms, she added.

Though the oceans cover about two-thirds of Earth’s surface, scientists estimate they have absorbed about 90 percent of the extra warming from humans’ burning of fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect those emissions have in the atmosphere.

“The ocean is our sentinel,” said Karina von Schuckmann, an oceanographer at the nonprofit Mercator Ocean International.

The dramatic warming in the ocean is a clear signal of “how much the Earth is out of energy balance,” she added — with heat continuing to build faster than it can be released from the planet.

A helicopter fights a wildfire in Reguengo, Portalegre district, south of Portugal, on Aug. 8. Intense heat across caused fires across Portugal and neighboring Spain. (Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images)

Sunbathers pack into Macumba beach, in the west zone of Rio de Janeiro, on Sept. 24, during a heat wave. (Tercio Teixeira/AFP/Getty Images)

What drove the record warmth

Scientists are still disentangling the factors that made 2023 so unusual.

The largest and most obvious is El Niño, the infamous global climate pattern that emerges a few times a decade and is known to boost average planetary temperatures by a few tenths of a degree Celsius, or as much as half a degree Fahrenheit. El Niño’s signature is a zone of warmer-than-normal waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, which release vast amounts of heat and water vapor and trigger extreme weather patterns around the world.

But El Niño alone cannot explain the extraordinary heat of the past 12 months, according to Copernicus. Because it wasn’t just the Pacific that exhibited dramatic warmth in 2023.

Scientists also believe the Atlantic may have warmed as a result of weakened westerly winds, which tend to churn up waters and send surface warmth into deeper ocean layers. It could also have been the product of below-normal Saharan dust in the air; the particles normally act to block some sunlight from reaching the ocean surface.

Around the world, in fact, there has been a decline in sun-blocking particles known as aerosols, in large part because of efforts to reduce air pollution. In recent years, shipping freighters have taken measures to reduce their emissions. Scientists have speculated the decline in aerosols may have allowed more sun to reach the oceans.

And then there is the potential impact of a massive underwater volcanic eruption. When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai blasted a plume 36 miles high in January 2022, scientists warned it released so much water vapor into the atmosphere, it could have a lingering effect for months, if not years, to come.

NASA satellite data showed the volcano sent an unprecedented amount of water into the stratosphere — equal to 10 percent of the amount of water that was already contained in the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere. In the stratosphere, water vapor — like human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide — acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat like a blanket around the Earth.

But it won’t be clear how much of a role each of those factors played until scientists can test each of those hypotheses.

What is clear, scientists stress, is that the year’s extremes were only possible because they unfolded against the backdrop of human-caused climate change. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a record high of 419 parts per million in 2023, Copernicus said. And despite global pledges to cut down on methane — which traps 86 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over a short time scales — levels of that gas also reached new peaks.

Only by reaching “net zero” — the point at which people stop adding additional greenhouse to the atmosphere — can humanity reverse Earth’s long-term warming trend, said Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.

“That is what the physical science tells us that we need to do,” Ceppi said.

Icebergs drift as they melt due to warm temperatures along the Scoresby Sound Fjord, in Eastern Greenland on Aug. 16. (Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images)

What comes next

Almost half of all days in 2023 were 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the preindustrial average for that date, Copernicus said — giving the world a dangerous taste of a climate it had pledged to avoid.

At the Paris climate conference in 2015, nations agreed to a stretch goal of “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.” Three years later, a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that staying within this ambitious threshold could avoid many of the most disastrous consequences of warming — but it would require the world to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions in just over a decade.

But emissions have continued to rise, and now the world appears poised on the brink of surpassing the Paris target.

At least one climate science organization believes the barrier has already been crossed. Berkeley Earth said in December that 2023 is virtually certain to eclipse it, though its estimates of 19th century temperatures are slightly lower than those other climate scientists use.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the world has officially surpassed the limit set in the Paris climate agreement in 2015. That benchmark will only be reached when temperatures remain 1.5 degrees Celsius above average over a period of at least 20 years.

But scientists are already speculating that the planet could set another average temperature record in 2024. Some also say the latest spike in global temperatures is a sign the rate of climate change has accelerated.

Whether or not 2023 surpasses the 1.5 degree limit, the year “has given us a glimpse of what 1.5 may look like,” Buontempo said.

He hoped that the latest record allows that reality to set in — and spurs action.

“As a society, we have to be better at using this knowledge,” Buontempo added, “because the future will not be like our past.”

Alonzo McAdams drinks a bottle of water given to him from a Salvation Army truck handing out water, and other supplies for the homeless in Tucson, on July 26. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

The Latest

Winter is over in the Southern Hemisphere and sea ice around Antarctica has likely grown as much as it’s going to for 2023, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Antarctic sea ice reached its lowest peak by a wide margin for any year since 1979, when the continuous satellite record began.

“The ice this year is so far out of the range of all the other years that it’s a really exceptional year,” said Ariaan Purich, a climate scientist at Monash University in Australia.

By Sept. 10, sea ice had grown to cover 6.5 million square miles around the continent, or just under 17 million square kilometers. The difference this year from the 1981 to 2010 average is an area roughly the size of Alaska.

Why It Matters: Sea ice protects the continent’s ice shelf and wildlife.

Antarctica has ice both on land, in the form of its massive continental ice sheet, and in the waters around it, in the form of seasonal sea ice. The ice in the water helps protect the land ice from the warming ocean. Less sea ice could mean that the continental ice sheet melts and breaks faster, contributing to faster sea-level rise around the world.

That sea ice supports a whole ecosystem of wildlife, including both Adélie and emperor penguins. Last year, several emperor penguin colonies suffered a widespread loss of their chicks when the ice broke up early.

Background: This year’s record low follows several years of decline.

Antarctic sea ice has been growing sluggishly and staying at record lows for each month since April.

“Things got really strange,” said Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It started diverging from anything we’d seen before.”

Satellite data from 1966 showed a similarly low sea ice extent, but Dr. Meier cautioned that this earlier data is less reliable and should not be used as a direct comparison to today’s observations.

The departure from previous years is particularly significant right now, but follows several years of declining sea ice. Until 2016, the sea ice around Antarctica had remained relatively stable, unlike ice in the Arctic Ocean, even as the global temperature rose. But in the past seven years, Antarctic sea ice has reached record lows numerous times.

What’s Next: A potential new, unstable era for Antarctic sea ice.

A complicated mix of atmospheric and oceanic factors influence how much sea ice forms around Antarctica each year, and scientists still debate the relative importance of each factor. But ocean warming from global climate change seems to be a growing influence, said Dr. Purich, who published a study in September on trends for this year’s Antarctic sea ice, suggesting that Antarctica and the Southern Ocean may be tipping into a new state with persistently low sea ice.

This year’s trends might continue into 2024 thanks to the potential of what’s known as a positive feedback loop. White ice reflects sunlight, while dark ocean water absorbs it. So the less sea ice there is, the more local sea-surface temperatures are likely to rise and melt the ice further, said Marilyn Raphael, a geography professor and director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at University of California, Los Angeles.

She recently helped reconstruct a longer record of Antarctic sea ice that includes seasonal averages stretching back to 1905 using historical weather observations. The average sea-ice cover from June through August this year was far outside any other winter average even in this longer record.

Leanne Abraham is a graphics editor at The Times with a focus on cartography and data visualization. She holds a master’s degree in cartography and geographic information systems from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. More about Leanne Abraham

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 5, 2023, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Winter Peak of Antarctic Sea Ice Is Likely Lowest Ever Recorded. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

    PERSPECTIVE | The Sunday Boston Globe MAGAZINE

5 habits to build a sustainable future — without breaking the bank

In the face of unprecedented environmental upheaval, it’s not only possible to make a difference with our individual decisions — it is vital.

By Sarah Shemkus Updated April 11, 2023, 7:36 a.m.

The good news is we’re not doomed. Not yet, at least.

Reports about the climate crisis are rarely cheerful, focusing, quite rationally, on the perils: droughts that affect food production, more severe and unpredictable storms, dangerous heat waves, and many more changes — from inconvenient to catastrophic — that could be in the offing if humanity doesn’t change course.

The thing is, we know how to stop these disastrous developments — or at least how to slow them down and stabilize the climate. And we have the tools needed to make it happen. We have technologies such as LED bulbs, electric vehicles, solar panels, heat pumps, and induction stoves, which are already quite good and only getting better and cheaper.

Still, in the face of unprecedented environmental upheaval, it can be hard to imagine that buying a new lightbulb — or even a new car —could make a significant contribution to slowing the climate crisis. And yet it is not only possible to make a difference with our individual decisions and actions — it is vital.

“Much of the uncertainty [about climate change], if not all the uncertainty, comes down to: What are the choices we’re going to make?” says Juliette Rooney-Varga, a professor and director of the Climate Change Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

And a little more good news: Making choices to benefit the planet has gotten easier, thanks to the federal Inflation Reduction Act’s commitment of $370 billion to support clean energy, with $43 billion dedicated to tax credits for consumers.

So what are the best, most useful choices we can make? As a reporter covering clean energy in Massachusetts, I had some ideas, but reached out to local experts for more perspective. Here are five ways to make a difference, some of which are not only free, but could also save money.

1. Cultivate optimism: This starts off as more attitude than action, but an optimistic mind-set leads to hope, and hope leads to action, says Marcy Franck, author of “The Climate Optimist” newsletter from the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Look for the stories — they are out there — of successes in fighting climate change, such as slowing year over year growth in global carbon dioxide emissions in 2022 or the $90 billion in investments in clean energy projects companies have announced since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed. “The story of humanity rising to meet climate change is full of things that seemed impossible until they became reality,” Franck says.

2. Drive change: Transportation is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas nationally and in Massachusetts, where 43 percent of our annual carbon emissions came from tailpipes as of 2019, the latest year for which numbers are available. “We need to zero out gasoline consumption as fast as we can,” says Larry Chretien, executive director of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Cut down on car use by biking, walking, carpooling, and using more public transportation whenever possible. And consider making your next vehicle purchase electric. It’s not as pricey as many fear: Federal tax credits plus a Massachusetts state rebate could knock up to $11,000 off the cost for those who qualify, and even some used cars are eligible for incentives now.

3. Pump it up: Some 75 percent of Massachusetts residents use fossil fuel to heat their homes, creating more carbon dioxide emissions than other methods and contributing to methane escaping from the state’s leaky natural gas pipes.

Home heat pumps, which use electricity to draw heat from the surrounding air, even in cold temperatures, eliminate the bulk of these harmful gases. And state and federal incentives are making heat pumps ever more affordable; an upfront federal rebate of up to $8,000 is set to take effect this year, in addition to existing tax credits. And Mass Save, a group of utilities that administers the state’s energy-efficiency programs, also offers up to $16,000 in rebates, depending on income level, in rebates for whole-home heat pump systems in Massachusetts. Without going into the wonky details, many low-income homes could end up getting a heat pump free with these incentives.

4. Make a plan: So you’ve made up your mind to go green, but maybe, like me, you find the tangle of technologies and incentives overwhelming. I’m eager to shop for an electric car when my husband’s tenacious Camry finally gives out, but does that mean we can’t afford heat pumps right now? It’s confusing.

Thankfully, recent federal incentives are in place for 10 years, giving aspiring green consumers more time to think things through. The best way to manage these changes — and maximize your impact — is to create a plan over a five- to 10-year span, making it less overwhelming and more financially feasible. Try the savings calculator at RewiringAmerica.org and learn about the federal tax credits and upfront discounts available for electric vehicles, heat pumps, weatherization, and more, at your income level. Every little bit helps, according to Chretien. “It’s not all or nothing,” he says. “Anything we can do matters a lot.”

5. Speak up: While individual actions are powerful, they need to be backed up with practical and financial commitments from local, state, and federal leaders. “Consumers can do a lot to change the world, but they need the tools that policy can create,” Chretien says. So write to your congressperson, go to a city council meeting, or sign that petition to install more solar panels in town.

Then, spread the word. While research suggests the majority of Americans are concerned about climate change, people just aren’t having many conversations about it on a personal, day-to-day basis, Rooney-Varga notes. Making an effort to discuss your switch to bike commuting or posting about your new heat pumps on social media can ignite conversation, awareness, and, hopefully, action.

I’ll even start: My electric induction range is coming next month and I’m psyched to be using less gas and breathing cleaner air.

Every additional person prompted to help is a bonus for the planet, Rooney-Varga says. “This is a problem that’s going to take action from all of us, at all levels.”

Sarah Shemkus is a frequent contributor to the Globe Magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

By SETH BORENSTEIN, Associated Press Science Writer, March 29, 2023

America will probably get more killer tornado- and hail-spawning supercells as the world warms, according to a new study that also warns that the lethal storms will edge eastward to strike more frequently in the more populous Southern states, like Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

The supercell storm that devastated Rolling Fork, Miss., is a single event that can’t be connected to climate change. But it fits that projected and more dangerous pattern, including more nighttime strikes in a southern region with more people, poverty, and vulnerable housing than where storms hit last century.

The study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society predicts a nationwide 6.6 percent increase in supercells and a 25.8 percent jump in the area and time the strongest supercells twist and tear over land under a scenario of moderate levels of future warming by the end of the century.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

An aerial view taken on Feb. 8, 2023, shows widespread destruction in southern Turkey after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck in the early hours on Monday. (Ahmet Akpolat/Getty Images)

2023-02-06 01:17:35 (UTC)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared a three-month state of emergency after the death toll from Monday’s catastrophic earthquakes topped 5,000 and continued to rise. The World Health Organization warns the number of dead could ultimately increase eightfold, with some 23 million people affected by two major earthquakes that struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. Hundreds of aftershocks followed. The quakes caused thousands of buildings to collapse, trapping people under rubble amid freezing temperatures. 

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000jllz/executive?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ENS&utm_campaign=realtime

The Boston Globe, page A2, January 9, 2023

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/17/1149590122/greta-thunberg-detained-germany-police-coal-mine

EUROPE

Greta Thunberg was detained by German police while protesting a coal mine expansion

January 17, 20236:08 PM ET

BECKY SULLIVAN

Twitter

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was briefly detained Tuesday by police at a protest over the controversial expansion of a western Germany coal mine that has become a flashpoint for that country's climate debate. Protests at Lützerath, a tiny village slated to be cleared and demolished to make way for the nearby Garzweiler coal mine, have grown massive and contentious over the past week. At least 15,000 people demonstrated on Saturday. That included Thunberg, 20, who has been among the world's most prominent climate protesters since she addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference as a teenager. Thunberg had traveled to Germany this week to join the Lützerath demonstrations. On Tuesday, she was among a group of protesters carried away by police after they approached the edge of the mine, the German news agency dpa reported. She was released shortly after, according to Reuters. 

The Garzweiler mine is one of three massive open-pit coal mines in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The type of coal produced at the mines, lignite, is responsible for about 20% of Germany's carbon emissions. The three mines have been expanding for decades. Over the years, about 50 villages in the region, many of them centuries old, have been evicted and bulldozed to make way for the mines.  Lützerath, about 15 miles from Germany's western border, has been the focal point of the protests since a court approved its destruction about a decade ago. The hamlet was once home to about 100 residents, all of whom have been relocated since 2017, according to RWE, the company that operates the mine. Since then, protesters have squatted in the empty buildings. 

ENVIRONMENT A Coal-Mining 'Monster' Is Threatening To Swallow A Small Town In Germany

A court ruling last week cleared the way for the squatters to be evicted and the hamlet destroyed. The demonstrations have since grown in size and contentiousness, with clashes between police and protesters in recent days. Climate activists say expanding the mine will lead to more greenhouse gas emissions, which could cause Germany to miss its climate targets under the Paris Agreement. Energy has been perhaps the hottest political issue in Germany over the past two years. The country has traditionally relied on fossil fuels, but in 2019 committed to dramatically scaling back greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Then, the timeline was sped up in 2021, when the country's high court ruled that the government must do even more to cut back on emissions. 

WORLD Amid an energy crisis, Germany turns to the world's dirtiest fossil fuel

But after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022 – and subsequently cut off natural gas deliveries to Europe – Germany turned again to coal power. At least 20 coal-fired power plants across the country were resurrected or extended past their original closing dates in an effort to keep the lights on through this winter. Germany missed its climate targets in 2022, and officials have warned that it will likely miss 2023 targets, too. In October, RWE and the German government announced a deal to shut down the company's coal operations sooner than planned in exchange for moving ahead with the demolition of Lützerath. 

EUROPE Germany Bulldozes Old Villages For Coal Despite Lower Emissions Goals

The deal called for RWE to close its coal mines in 2030, eight years earlier than originally planned. That plan would spare five other villages and three farmsteads once slated for demolition. But the destruction of Lützerath, located so close to the mine's current edge, was still "needed to make optimal use" of coal until then, RWE said.  All of that has incensed climate activists, who have staged near-daily protests in recent months, including demonstrations blocking major city streets and the runways at airports in Munich and Berlin.

"The company regrets that the planned demolition process can only take place under substantial police protection and that opponents of the opencast mine are calling for illegal disruptions and also criminal acts," RWE said in a statement last week.

A crack in the Brunt Ice Shelf during a flyover by the British Antarctic Survey in January 2021.

Credit...British Antarctic Survey/EPA, via Shutterstock

Economists and policy experts largely agree the bill could help mitigate inflation, although they cautioned that its effects may be moderate. They also noted that the roughly $300 billion in deficit payments over the next decade would put a relatively small dent in the overall debt of the United States.

Still, if the new legislation passes the House and Senate, it would be the largest climate investment ever made by Congress, amounting to roughly $385 billion over 10 years. Experts said the measure could provide fresh momentum to international climate talks and prod other nations to do more. It could also help reduce the cost of various clean-energy technologies, potentially making it easier for other countries to transition away from fossil fuels.

The bill will not solve global warming on its own. A United Nations report last year estimated that humanity will likely need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by an additional 15 to 30 billion tons by 2030, compared with its current trajectory, to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Mr. Jenkins’s analysis suggested the new Senate bill would supply about one billion tons of additional cuts.

“Assuming it passes, I think this clearly strengthens U.S. influence in the international talks and will spur further action by other major emitters,” said Dan Lashof of the World Resources Institute. “I think the history of climate action shows that when the United States makes a significant investment in clean energy technology, countries like China and India don’t want to be left behind.”

The legislation could transform nearly every aspect of American energy production. Mr. Jenkins’s analysis estimates that companies would install twice as much solar and wind power per year by 2030 as they would have without the bill. The bill would also offer incentives for utilities to keep their nuclear plants open for longer. Without that provision, as much as one-third of the nuclear fleet, still the nation’s largest source of low-carbon energy, is at risk of closing by 2030, Rhodium Group has estimated.

The bill would also give companies incentive to install devices to capture carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and bury it underground before the gas can escape into the atmosphere and heat the planet. While this technology has struggled to gain traction because of high costs, Mr. Jenkins’s modeling suggests that new tax credits could help spur the capture of roughly 200 million tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030.

Calpine Corporation, a Houston-based firm that owns the nation’s largest fleet of natural gas power plants, has identified 11 facilities that are good candidates for retrofitting with carbon capture technology. The expanded tax credits could offer a significant boost in helping to get the first few projects up and running this decade, said Caleb Stephenson, Calpine’s executive vice president of commercial operations.

There are still uncertainties around the bill’s precise effects, however, in part because it does not require companies to cut their emissions. Much will depend on how quickly new low-emission energy sources displace coal, oil and natural gas, the major drivers of global warming. For example, if oil prices stay high, the tax credits for electric vehicles could spur consumers to ditch their gasoline-powered cars more quickly. But if gasoline gets cheap again, the transition might unfold more slowly.

And clean energy could face other hurdles: While the bill would give companies financial incentive to build more wind and solar power, such projects could be hobbled by local opposition or a lack of new transmission lines. The availability of tax credits for electric vehicles will depend on whether automakers can source their battery materials from the United States or its free-trade partners, which could be a difficult hurdle to clear.

The legislation also has several provisions that could increase emissions in some places. To secure the support of Mr. Manchin, the bill would mandate lease sales for new oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and the Cook Inlet in Alaska. And it would require the Interior Department to hold auctions for fossil fuel leases if it plans to approve new wind or solar projects on federal lands.

But the impact of those measures is likely to be small. Analysts at Energy Innovation calculated that for each ton of emissions created by the leasing provisions, “at least 24 tons of emissions are avoided by the other provisions.”

June 16, 2022

N Engl J Med 2022; 386:2303-2314

DOI: 10.1056/NEJMra2117706

For years, research journals devoted to the earth sciences have warned of the dire consequences that could result from global warming and pollution going unchecked.

Now, one of the nation’s oldest medical journals has committed itself to increasing the public’s knowledge about the health effects of the planet’s changing climate.

Beginning with the issue published Thursday, The New England Journal of Medicine is expanding its coverage of the intersection of climate issues and public health, starting with a series on fossil fuel-driven health harms. The Journal plans to devote regular coverage to the topic—on its pages and in its affiliated journals—going forward.

The opening article focuses on how children—particularly children of color and those from poor and working class communities—are affected by such factors as extreme weather events, heat stress and air and water quality.

“People care about children, and families and children are going to suffer the most from long term climate change issues,” said one of the authors, Kari Nadeau, who is the Naddisy Foundation Endowed Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and the director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University.

“For example, my children will see three times as many climate change extreme events than their grandparents did,” Nadeau said. “In their lifetime there will be 5 million deaths across the world due to climate change—we need to really focus our efforts on communicating how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. And we have those tools.

“The time is now, it’s urgent and we can do something about it.”

The article is just the beginning of a much-needed focus on the consequences of climate issues by leading researchers in the medical community, a deputy editor at the journal said. 

After the editors of 200 health journals—including the New England Journal of Medicine—signed an editorial in September 2021 urging world leaders to take action against climate change, Caren Solomon, deputy editor at the journal, said she and others felt compelled to redouble their efforts to address the implications for health. 

“We’re coming together and attempting to address this topic from a range of perspectives,” said Solomon, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a primary care physician. She hopes the series will help doctors and their patients, and she said she hopes it helps people learn more about this issue and become more motivated to engage in climate action.

In the article, Nadeau and her co-author, Frederica Perera, a environmental health sciences professor at Columbia University and the director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, write that the effects of climate change are “a growing concern” for the health of children—both physically and emotionally.

“All children are at risk,” Nadeau and Perera wrote, “but the greatest burden falls on those who are socially and economically disadvantaged. Protection of children’s health requires that health professionals understand the multiple harms to children from climate change and air pollution and use available strategies to reduce these harms.”

Those strategies, the authors said, include mental health counseling related to climate change or displacement, development of a heat action plan, education on the air-quality index and pollen monitoring as well as use of home air-filtration systems. Health professionals “have the power to protect the children they care for by screening to identify those at high risk for associated health consequences,” they said, “by educating them, their families, and others more broadly about these risks and effective interventions; and by advocating for strong mitigation and adaptation strategies.”

One strategy has been partnering with families to document the climate impacts on health that they are seeing firsthand.

Kim Gaddy, an activist, said she suspected that one in four children in Newark, New Jersey has asthma. And as a Black mom in a heavily polluted city, she said she knows the burden of the disease all too well: she has asthma and so did three of her children. Her eldest died last summer at the age of 32 after a heart attack. Founder of The South Ward Environmental Alliance, Gaddy is the national environmental justice director for Clean Water Action. She said she began to team up with a coalition of healthcare professionals to research how prevalent asthma was in her city. The data they collected proved her hypothesis was right—children in Newark have one of the highest rates of asthma in the nation. 

“They analyzed what was happening with asthma and they said, ‘Kim, you are spot on—one out of four,’” Gaddy said. “We need that validation from the health officials who oftentimes don’t sit at the table with us. And it’s a great thing when we can partner with a pediatrician and nurses who can now go out to these systems and share the information.”

“Medical journals generally have not been concerned with pollution. Medical journals mostly focus on treatments, new drugs, new procedures, new tests,” Bernstein said. “The New England Journal is really putting a stake in the ground here.” 

For a journal at the forefront of research into medical tests, treatments and innovations, the article is a recognition that global warming can put many of those advancements at risk.

“I think this article in the series is a signpost that when it comes to climate change, all of what we worked so hard to do in medical care is at risk,” he said. “We will not be able to implement all these great advances that they’re publishing about—the new drugs and the new tests—if we don’t act on climate.”

Victoria St. Martin

Health and Environmental Justice Reporter, Philadelphia

Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. During a 20-year career in journalism, she has worked in a half dozen newsrooms, including The Washington Post where she served as a breaking news and general assignment reporter. Besides The Post, St. Martin has also worked at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, The Trentonian, The South Bend Tribune and WNIT, the PBS-member station serving north central Indiana. In addition to her newsroom experience, St. Martin is also a journalism educator who spent four years as a distinguished visiting journalist with the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. She currently teaches at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. St. Martin is a graduate of Rutgers University and holds a master’s degree from American University’s School of Communication. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and has written extensively about the prevalence of breast cancer in young women. In her work, St. Martin is particularly interested in health care disparities affecting Black women.

What The MA Senate Climate Bill Says About Phasing Out Gasoline

Posted by Anna Vanderspek on Wednesday, April 27, 2022 @ 12:25 PM

The Massachusetts Senate made big news last week by passing a massive climate bill that tackles transportation, buildings, and our electricity supply. This bill is supposed to put the pedal to the metal so that the state has the policies it needs in place to achieve the emissions reduction targets included in last year’s Climate Roadmap bill: first and foremost, a 50% reduction in economy-wide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions under 1990 levels by 2030. Here’s what this bill means for our efforts to phase out gasoline in Massachusetts – and the key next steps.

What We Need 

Transportation is the largest source of GHG emissions in Massachusetts (42%). To reduce our emissions enough to meet our 2030 goal, the state needs a two-pronged approach: investments in walking, biking, and transit to reduce vehicle-miles-traveled AND the widespread and rapid electrification of all the vehicles currently burning gasoline and diesel on our streets. On the latter, we’ve spent the past couple of months speaking with legislators and advocates about the need for a firm date, preferably 2030, by which all new car sales in the Commonwealth should be electric AND a clear plan for electrifying public fleets, public transit, and other medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. 

The Senate climate bill had several important transportation provisions already, and then Senators adopted a couple of key additional amendments. Here’s the breakdown of some key parts of the bill: 

Passenger Vehicles 

• Phase-out date: Sections 28 and 58 together call for the phase-out of new gas-powered cars by 2035. This is in line with what is called for in the 2030 Clean Energy & Climate Plan and what the Advanced Clean Cars II regulations would result in. 

• Incentives: Section 25 sets up an “EV Adoption Incentive Trust Fund” to issue direct consumer incentives for the purchase of EVs as well as outreach; Section 53 funds it with $100 million. The rebates are to be available for new and used EVs, for individual and corporate purchases, and for light-duty as well as medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. The bill maintains the existing $50,000 price cap for light-duty vehicles and trucks, increases the rebate from the current $2,500 to $3,500-$5,000 and offers higher rebates for individuals trading in gas-powered cars. 

  • Amendment #10 calls for linguistically diverse & culturally competent outreach. 

  • Amendment #27 adds an extra $1,500 to the consumer rebate for low- and moderate-income consumers. 

• Time-of-use rates: We’ve written before about the importance of time-of-use (TOU) rates for EV charging. Section 47 of the Senate climate bill called for distribution companies (National Grid and Eversource) to submit TOU rates to the Department of Public Utilities (DPU) within six months of the passage of the act. We worked with Senator Jamie Eldridge to file Amendment #85 to make sure that electric utilities include all the benefits of charging off-peak when calculating the off-peak rebate so that it is appropriately sized AND that the DPU approves such an off-peak charging rebate by June 30, 2023. This amendment was adopted! 

Charging Infrastructure 

• Building Codes: Section 29 amends building codes so that 10% of spaces in new construction and renovation must be EV parking spaces (for commercial & residential buildings and also parking facilities).  

• Charging Corridors: Section 45 directs the Department of Transportation (DOT) to install EV charging stations at all service plazas along the Mass Pike by July 1, 2023. Amendment #25 adds some commuter rail stations, subway stations, and at least one ferry terminal to the list. 

• Planning & Deployment: Section 46 sets up an interagency coordinating council to “assess and report on strategies and plans necessary to deploy electric vehicle charging infrastructure to establish an equitable, interconnected, accessible and reliable electric vehicle charging network” as well as “coordinate grant programs under each secretariat.” This kind of planning and coordination is absolutely key! Section 53 puts $50 million into a “Charging Infrastructure Deployment Fund.” 

Public Transit & Other Fleets 

• Electric Transit Buses: Section 41 sets a timeline that all buses operated by the MBTA must be electric by 2040 and that as of 2028, all MBTA bus procurements must be electric. Amendment #123 directs DOT to provide Regional Transit Authorities (RTAs) with assistance to create an electric bus rollout plan. 

• Commuter Rail: Amendment #13 directs the MBTA to develop short, mid, and long term plans to electrify commuter rail and sets a deadline of no diesel purchases after 2030. 

• School Buses: Amendment #111directs the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, together with DOT, to prepare a report by December 15, 2022, on electric school bus adoption, including “recommendations on how to structure a state incentive program to replace or support the replacement of all school buses from fossil fuel powered-school buses to zero-emission school buses.”  

• Transportation Network Companies (TNCs): Section 30 directs the Commonwealth to establish vehicle electrification and GHG requirements for TNCs (read: Uber and Lyft and the like). (Section 54 says regulations must be promulgated by January 1, 2024.) 

What’s Next 

S.2819 is remarkable in that it touches on lots of aspects of cleaning up our transportation system: passenger vehicle adoption, charging infrastructure, public transit, rate design, and more. Are there things we would still like to see? Absolutely. For example, we were heartened to see the addition of commuter rail electrification with Amendment #13 and are glad to see the MBTA, RTA, and school bus fleet electrification on the docket, but without a dedicated source of funding, meeting those goals will be near impossible. 

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published two studies on the efficacy of mask mandates in school districts throughout the country, demonstrating in both that schools with rules in place requiring facial coverings see significantly fewer instances of COVID-19 outbreaks.

In one study, which reviewed a number of schools in the state of Arizona, schools that didn’t require masks were 3.5 times more likely to see a coronavirus outbreak occur, versus schools that did have requirements in place. Nearly 60 percent of the outbreaks that were observed within that study happened in schools that didn’t have mask mandates.

“CDC recommends universal indoor masking by students, staff members, faculty, and visitors in kindergarten through grade 12 (K–12) schools, regardless of vaccination status, to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,” the agency reiterated in the opening paragraph of the study.

LETTERS 

Behind vaccine resistance, there lies a dip in science education 

We’re paying the price for the poor ways we teach science

 Tim Ritchie, president of the Museum of Science (“In weighing vaccine mandates, follow the evidence, not the science,” Opinion, Aug. 23), presents a strong case for making a distinction between weighing evidence and “following the science,” as so many implore, when it comes to making public health decisions. He writes, “Science is an act of continuing discovery that by its very nature demands being open to changing one’s mind and expanding one’s understanding. It always . . . welcomes the skeptical voice.”

Coincidentally, a recent news analysis in The New York Times claims, “Most Americans have a decent grasp of basic health concepts. . . . But many are never taught how science progresses.” While Ritchie makes an important point, according to the Times piece, it is probably lost on most Americans.

These two pieces taken together suggest that we are paying the price for not having attended adequately to science education from elementary school onward. Despite talk about its importance, when we have taught science, we have tended to focus on facts and certainty while avoiding the time-consuming, messy, meandering process that truly reflects the scientific process. We have focused on what scientific information should be taught at the expense of how science is actually practiced.

Jeff Winokur, Needham

The writer has been an early childhood and elementary science educator for 40 years. 

Our secondary schools are falling short in providing solid foundation

The Museum of Science is a wonderful resource for science education, and Tim Ritchie should be proud of his institution. However, many of our secondary schools fall far short of providing our students with a solid foundation in math and science.. 

The Programme for International Student Assessment is an international exam that is given to 600,000 15-year-olds from 64 countries every three years. The most recent results from 2015 and 2018 revealed that US students, respectively, finished 35th and 30th in math and 17th and 11th in science. When our teenagers are so far behind in math and science, it is little wonder that, as adults, they can follow neither the evidence nor the science.

Dr. Kevin R. Loughlin, Boston 

The writer is a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School

OPINION

In weighing vaccine mandates, follow the evidence, not the science

One reason we are having trouble even discussing how to respond to the coronavirus is because we continue to rely on the misleading admonition: “Follow the science.” That, most surely, will settle nothing.

By Tim Ritchie Updated August 23, 2021, 3:00 a.m.

In my career leading science centers in California, Alabama, and Massachusetts, I have generally found science to be common ground, something that brings people together in shared wonder and inspiration. I still believe this is the case, but heated disagreements about COVID-19 vaccines have ruptured this shared ground like an earthquake.

In this polarized environment, how should leaders think through the decision on whether to mandate vaccinations? In recently announcing that the Museum of Science in Boston will mandate vaccinations for all staff and volunteers, I personally wrestled with this question. This is the common price of institutional leadership, and, in this case, the result of tension between the principles of science and public health.

Government, civic, and business leaders must step into this tension and decide how best to ensure that our communities reach herd immunity. Until then, needless deaths and illness will continue to surge.

One reason we are having trouble even discussing how to respond to the coronavirus is because we continue to rely on the misleading admonition: “Follow the science.” That, most surely, will settle nothing. Science is an act of continuing discovery that by its very nature demands being open to changing one’s mind and expanding one’s understanding. It always explores, always doubts, and always welcomes the skeptical voice. It is a joyful exercise of learning and growth.

A more humble and more trustworthy standard for resolving these issues is to “Follow the evidence.” That is what public health officials seek to do. They consider the evidence based on research, repeatable results, and verifiable data. They make difficult decisions based on the best evidence at hand. They cannot insist on 100 percent certainty when lives are at stake. In public health, one cannot wait until all the evidence is in to make the hard decisions.

When the Museum of Science decided to require COVID vaccinations as a condition of employment, we put ourselves in the position of public health officials rather than that of traditional scientists. We asked ourselves: How can we best help staff be safe and feel safe? How do we protect our visitors? How should we fulfill our leadership obligations on this most pressing public health issue? We assessed a mountain of evidence showing that vaccinations and masking are our best defense against the coronavirus. We also considered a smaller body of evidence casting doubt on that conclusion. We weighed both and chose the mountain.

Of the three questions we asked ourselves, perhaps the most difficult was the third: What does leadership require? It is a terrible thing to tell people they cannot be a part of your organization unless they do something they are opposed to doing. I struggled with this decision for many nights, not because the right answer was unclear from a public health perspective, but because I could see the faces of my colleagues whom I thought it would affect at an individual level.

Leaders of institutions, cities, states, and nations cannot wait for complete agreement when the consequence of inaction is death or serious risk. They must follow the evidence if it tips strongly in favor of taking action. Science embraces doubt, and rightly so. Leaders act in spite of doubt and take an evidence-based stand. They must give a clear message that everyone can follow.

To be sure, we still need more data about the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety. But the global effort and unprecedented number of clinical trials, the rigor of the studies, and disease prevention we’ve witnessed thus far gave us all the data we needed.

I sit at the helm of an institution that for nearly 200 years has been one of the public’s most trusted science communicators. In that role, I am committed to creating the conditions for science to be common ground. Whether the issue is mandating vaccinations or responding to climate change, we will assemble, debate, and consider all of the evidence. We will encourage and value dissenting opinions. And we will also act when called upon — and even call for action by others — when an issue is important and the evidence suggests that the benefits of acting exceed the potential harm.

We need not be neutral to be open-minded. In the case of the coronavirus, the evidence is compelling: The time to require vaccines has come. We encourage leaders of every institution, city, and state to take up the question of mandating vaccinations. Do what the evidence suggests. Do what is hard if you are persuaded it is right so we can prevent further harm and shore up our fractured lives and communities.

Follow the evidence.

Tim Ritchie is president of the Museum of Science.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51711227

Second-Strongest Storm to Hit North Atlantic Lashes United Kingdom

FEB 18, 2020

The second-strongest non-tropical storm ever recorded in the North Atlantic Ocean is wreaking havoc in towns across the United Kingdom. British authorities have issued over 300 warnings as “bomb cyclone” Dennis has produced 80-foot waves and winds reaching up to 90 miles per hour. The record rains and flooding disrupted air and train travel and killed at least two people. Amid the catastrophic weather event, the British Environment Agency will reportedly announce homeowners should no longer expect to be protected from major floods because they will be seen as inevitable due to the worsening climate crisis.

Geothermal heating district could rise in Mattapan

City officials say they’re backing the project because it would further Boston’s ‘commitment to climate action’

By Jon Chesto Globe Staff,Updated February 11, 2020, 6:05 p.m.

The redevelopment of the old Boston State Hospital in Mattapan has added hundreds of modest-priced residences to the city during the past two decades.

But now the state has put the final 10-acre slice of this sprawling 175-acre campus up for grabs. And the Walsh administration has weighed in, singling out one of the bidders for its unusual component: a more environmentally friendly way to heat and cool our homes.

That bidder is Thomas F. Welch & Associates, whose proposal for the 140-unit Orchard Village project at first looks like other residential projects of its size — with one major exception: The entire assemblage of apartments and townhouses would be heated and cooled by geothermal energy, not natural gas. City officials say they’re backing the project because it would further Boston’s “commitment to climate action.” They see its potential to become a model for other micro-district heating systems, a success story that could be replicated elsewhere.

Geothermal systems circulate fluids through pipes drilled down 200 feet or more, using the consistent 50- to 60-degree temperatures from deep underground to provide heating and cooling. The technology isn’t new, but it has primarily been put to use around here by schools and other institutions (such as a Mass Audubon nature center, on a different part of the state hospital campus) or some committed homeowners. Residential developments of this size and scope? Not so much. The upfront costs deter most developers, even with the possibility of state and federal incentives.

Maybe not for much longer. Utility giants National Grid and Eversource are starting to show a keen interest in geothermal. Eversource has three proposed pilot programs under review at the state Department of Public Utilities. The Mattapan property is in National Grid’s gas service area; National Grid spokeswoman Danielle Williamson said the utility is talking with Welch about its possible involvement, including the ownership and cost issues.

If Welch wins the bid, Williamson said, National Grid will do more work to determine the best approach to make this “geothermal micro district” a reality.

That victory is not a sure thing. The competition remains strong for this last portion of the state hospital, located behind the UMass Medical MassBiologics lab and between Walk Hill Road and Morton Street. There are four other housing proposals in the running, along with a “green economy” center for small businesses that would feature greenhouses and food manufacturing.

A citizens advisory committee met twice last week to review all six proposals. That committee will work with the state Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance to pick a winner. A spokesman for the state agency declined to say whether the geothermal concept gives the Orchard Village proposal a leg up.

Joseph Savage, Welch’s project manager, said his team is working with the Cambridge nonprofit HEET to flesh out the geothermal proposal. The selling point: reducing carbon emissions by up to 60 percent for each household, compared to energy generated by burning natural gas. Savage also pointed to the potential for savings. While this approach adds thousands of dollars to the cost of each new unit at the outset, the energy costs drop significantly in the long run. The geothermal system still needs electricity to run. But the environmental impact of that power, Savage said, will improve over time as the region’s power grid becomes more reliant on renewable energy.

Controlling heat-related emissions — the stuff that blows out of our chimneys on these cold winter days — will be instrumental in the state’s aggressive ambitions to curb greenhouse gases over the next 30 years. Considerable headway has been made in the power generation sector. The Baker administration is starting to tackle transportation. But widespread solutions to addressing carbon pollution from buildings have proven elusive so far.

Pulling it off requires attractive options to natural gas, the dominant heating source for new construction in Massachusetts.

We could be entering the era of Peak Natural Gas, though. Some communities have imposed moratoriums on new hookups because of pipeline supply constraints. Others are considering them for environmental reasons: Brookline recently became the first in the state to approve a ban on new gas infrastructure, and more than a dozen other communities may follow Brookline’s lead. The 2018 explosions in the Merrimack Valley highlighted one big downside to gas reliance. So did the National Grid labor dispute that year.

Boston officials appear eager to embrace geothermal energy as a viable alternative at the neighborhood level. It will be interesting to see how many other communities are also willing to give it a shot.

Iceberg twice the size of Washington, D.C., cleaves off Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, in a sign of warming

By Andrew Freedman Washington Post, February 10, 2020, 5:53 p.m.

An iceberg about twice the size of the District of Columbia broke off Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica sometime between Feb. 8 and 9, satellite data shows, confirming yet another in a series of increasingly frequent calving events in this rapidly warming region.

The Pine Island Glacier is one of the fastest-retreating glaciers in Antarctica, and along with the Thwaites Glacier nearby, it’s a subject of close scientific monitoring to determine whether these glaciers are in a phase of runaway melting, potentially freeing up vast inland areas of ice to flow to the sea and raising sea levels.

According to NASA, the region surrounding the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers contains enough ‘‘highly vulnerable ice’’ to raise global sea levels by about 4 feet.

The new iceberg from Pine Island did not last long as a single chunk of ice, instead breaking off into smaller pieces that will gradually head out to sea. But this behavior is consistent with recent studies of this glacier.

The calving event resulted from two cracks that were first spotted last year using satellites.

While this calving did not give rise to a record-large iceberg, as occurred with the Larsen C ice shelf in 2016, scientists are nonetheless concerned that such events are becoming increasingly common as the glacier flows into the sea via a floating ice shelf. If the shelf destabilizes sufficiently, the glacier — like Thwaites nearby — could begin a rapid and potentially unstoppable cycle of ice loss, since the land upon which the ice rests dips downward as one heads inland.

This could allow relatively mild ocean waters to penetrate well inland, melting more ice and speeding its movement into the sea.

According to the European Space Agency, Pine Island Glacier’s ice velocity has accelerated to exceed 33 feet per day. The faster movement of ice causes the ice shelf to stretch and crack. Large calving events used to take place at Pine Island Glacier every four to six years, but they’re now a nearly annual occurrence.

Calving events have occurred in 1992, 1995, 2001, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, and now in early 2020. The 2018 iceberg was larger than this one, at about the size of the city of Chicago.

In addition, the large cracks in the ice shelf are forming in places scientists hadn’t seen before, such as the middle.

‘‘There have been 6 previous calvings from the Pine Island Glacier since 2000 and the time intervals between them have been getting smaller,’’ said Adrian Luckman, a geographer at Swansea University who closely follows this glacier, via e-mail.

‘‘These events themselves are part of the normal behavior of large glaciers with floating sections so, whilst spectacular, this event is not significant in its own right. However, we know that, like Thwaites, the glacier has been thinning, and its shear margins have been getting weaker, all as a result of warmer ocean waters eroding the ice,’’ Luckman said.

As was recently confirmed at Thwaites, the Pine Island Glacier is losing mass due to a combination of factors. First, calving events, such as the one over the weekend, can suddenly move the front of the ice shelf closer to the point where the ice meets the ground below, which is a boundary known as the grounding line. In addition, the ice shelf is melting from below as relatively warm waters eat away at the underside of the ice. 

Both these factors are moving the front of the ice shelf backward, toward the grounding line, which threatens to destabilize the land ice behind it.

Powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake hits between Cuba and Jamaica

By Michael Weissenstein Associated Press, Updated January 28, 2020, 5:41 p.m.

HAVANA (AP) — A powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck in the Caribbean Sea between Jamaica and eastern Cuba on Tuesday, shaking a vast area from Mexico to Florida and beyond, but there were no reports of casualties or heavy damage.

The quake was centered 139 kilometers (86 miles) northwest of Montego Bay, Jamaica, and 140 kilometers (87 miles) west-southwest of Niquero, Cuba, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It hit at 2:10 p.m. (1910 GMT) and the epicenter was a relatively shallow 10 kilometers (6 miles) beneath the surface.

Dr. Enrique Arango Arias, head of Cuba’s National Seismological Service, told state media that there had been no serious damage or injuries reported.

Gov. Carlos Joaquín González of Mexico’s Quintana Roo, which is home to Cancun, Tulum and other popular beach resorts, said the earthquake was felt in multiple parts of the low-lying Caribbean state but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially warned that the quake could generate waves 1 to 3 feet above normal in Cuba, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Honduras, Mexico and Belize, but issued a later message saying the danger had passed.

The initial tremor was followed by a series of strong aftershocks, including one measured at magnitude 6.1.

The quake was felt strongly in Santiago, the largest city in eastern Cuba, said Belkis Guerrero, who works in a Roman Catholic cultural center in the center of Santiago

“We were all sitting and we felt the chairs move,” she said. “We heard the noise of everything moving around.”

She said there was no apparent damage in the heart of the colonial city.

‘‘It felt very strong but it doesn’t look like anything happened,'’ she told The Associated Press.

It was also felt a little farther east at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on the southeastern coast of the island. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damages, said J. Overton, a spokesman for the installation, which has a total population of about 6,000 people.

Several South Florida buildings were evacuated as a precaution, according to city of Miami and Miami-Dade County officials. No injuries or road closures were reported. No shaking was felt at the Hard Rock stadium in Miami Gardens, which will host the Super Bowl on Sunday.

The quake also hit the Cayman Islands, leaving cracked roads and what appeared to be sewage spilling from cracked mains. There were no immediate reports of deaths, injuries or more severe damage, said Kevin Morales, editor-in-chief of the Cayman Compass newspaper.

The islands experience so few earthquakes that newsroom staff were puzzled when it hit, he said.

“It was just like a big dump truck was rolling past,” Morales said. “Then it continued and got more intense.”

Dr. Stenette Davis, a psychiatrist at a Cayman Islands hospital, said she saw manhole covers blown off by the force of the quake, and sewage exploding into the street, but no more serious damage.

Claude Diedrick, 71, who owns a fencing business in Montego Bay, said he was sitting in his vehicle reading when the earth began to sway.

“It felt to me like I was on a bridge and like there were two or three heavy trucks and the bridge was rocking but there were no trucks,” he said.

He said he had seen no damage around his home in northern Jamaica.

The USGS initially reported the magnitude at 7.3.

Scientists announced that 2019 was the second-warmest year on record. In a database of more than 3,500 cities compiled by AccuWeather, about 83 percent saw average temperatures higher than normal last year. This is how Boston campares.

Earth had its hottest decade on record in 2010s

By SETH BORENSTEIN The Associated Press,Updated January 15, 2020, 11:26 a.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The decade that just ended was by far the hottest ever measured on Earth, capped off by the second-warmest year on record, two U.S. agencies reported Wednesday. And scientists said they see no end to the way man-made climate change keeps shattering records.

“This is real. This is happening,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said at the close of a decade plagued by raging wildfires, melting ice and extreme weather that researchers have repeatedly tied to human activity.

The 2010s averaged 58.4 degrees Fahrenheit (14.7 degrees Celsius) worldwide, or 1.4 degrees (0.8 C) higher than the 20th century average and more than one-third of a degree (one-fifth of a degree C) warmer than the previous decade, which had been the hottest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The decade had eight of the 10 hottest years on record. The only other years in the top 10 were 2005 and 1998.

NASA and NOAA also calculated that 2019 was the second-hottest year in the 140 years of record-keeping. Five other global teams of monitoring scientists agreed, based on temperature readings taken on Earth's surface, while various satellite-based measurements said it was anywhere from the hottest year on record to the third-hottest.

Several scientists said the coming years will be even hotter, knocking these years out of the record books.

“If you think you've heard this story before, you haven't seen anything yet. This is going to be part of what we see every year until we stabilize greenhouse gases” from the burning of coal, oil and gas, said Schmidt, who was at the American Meteorological Society convention in Boston, where last weekend it was so warm he went jogging in shorts and a T-shirt. Boston had its hottest January day on Sunday, at 74 degrees, which is 2 degrees warmer than the old record.

“It’s sobering to think that we might be breaking global temperature records in quick succession,” said Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb. “2020 is off to a horrifying climate start, and I fear what the rest of the year will bring to our doorsteps.”

NASA's Schmidt said that overall, Earth is now about 1.2 degrees C (nearly 2.2 F) hotter since the beginning of the industrial age, a number that is important because in 2015 global leaders adopted a goal of preventing 1.5 C (2.7 F) of warming since the rise of big industry in the mid- to late 1800s. He said that shows the global goal can’t be achieved. (NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization put the warming since the dawn of industry slightly lower.)

“We have strong human-induced global warming,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford. “What we observe here is exactly what our physical understanding tells us to expect and there is no other explanation.”

Other explanations that rely on natural causes — extra heat from the sun, more reflection of sunlight because of volcanic particles in atmosphere, and just random climate variations — “are all much too small to explain the long-term trend,” Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said.

Scientists said the the decade-long data is more telling than the year-to-year measurements, where natural variations like El Nino, the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean, come into play.

“Human-caused climate change is responsible for the long-term warming — it’s responsible for why the 2010s were warmer than 2000s, which were warmer than the 1990s, etc.,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said in an email. “But humans are not responsible for why 2016 was warmer than 2015 or why 2019 was warmer than 2018.”

NOAA said the average global temperature in 2019 was 58.7 degrees (14.85 C), or just a few hundredths of a degree behind 2016, when the world got extra heat from El Nino. That’s 1.71 degrees (0.95 C) higher than the 20th century average and 2.08 degrees (1.16 C) warmer than the late 19th century.

The past five years have been the hottest five on record, nearly 1.7 degrees (0.9 C) warmer than the 20th century average, according to NOAA.

The last year Earth was cooler than the 20th century average was 1976, before Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, French President Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump Jr. were born.

If you want to know what this means for people and the world, just look at wildfire-stricken Australia, Schmidt and others said.

Global warming is already being seen in heat waves, ice sheet melt, more wildfires, stronger storms, flood-inducing downpours and accelerating sea level rise, said Hans-Otto Portner, who heads the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that looks at the impact of climate change.

Dr. Renee Salas, a Boston emergency room physician and Harvard professor who studies climate change’s effects on health, said “these temperatures are not just statistics but have names and stories,” mentioning a construction worker and an elderly man with no air conditioning who were her patients this summer.

“The planet has a fever," Salas said, "and that’s its symptom."

In New Jersey, a slow-motion evacuation from climate change

By WAYNE PARRY and TED SHAFFREY Associated Press, December 23, 2019

WOODBRIDGE, N.J. (AP) — Patricia Kambach couldn’t bear to watch a crew demolish her longtime neighbor’s home this month, so she went inside her own house in Woodbridge, New Jersey, where she has lived since John F. Kennedy was president. 

“I lived here 56 years, and it’s hard,” said Kambach. 

Hard but not rare. The state has bought and torn down 145 homes since 2013 in Woodbridge, with eight homes demolished this month alone. Dozens more are slated to be torn down in the near future. 

It’s all part of an effort to get ahead of climate change. Some neighborhoods in this town of over 100,000 residents just off the bustling New Jersey Turnpike are projected to be partly or fully underwater in coming decades as global sea levels rise.

“A lot of people are taking the buyout because they are getting good price for their house and we do have problems with the water,” said Kambach, 80. Soon she will move out, and her home will be demolished. 

Buyouts of flood-prone properties have become a reality in numerous coastal states, as well as inland. New York, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota and others have programs.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 opened the eyes of people in low-lying New Jersey towns like Woodbridge to the dangers of rising waters.

The goal of the state buyout program, Blue Acres, is twofold: To remove people and property from the danger of future floods, and to use the vacant land left behind as a buffer or sponge to help absorb the water from those floods.

“Typically when we think of a disaster we think of a major storm or catastrophic fire — something that happens really quickly,” said Rutgers University biologist Brooke Maslo. “Climate change is a disaster; it’s just that it is happening in slow motion.” 

On a recent morning, Maslo tended to a series of plastic tubes that protect and nourish tree seedlings in the footprints of homes where just a few years ago people raised families and grew old. After those houses were torn down, she designed the area into a flood plain forest of native trees, shrubs and grass. 

“The idea is first and foremost to move people to higher ground, to protect human health and safety,” she said. “The second part of the process is to increase the resiliency for the remaining houses.”

Blue Acres has so far lined up funding to buy 1,156 properties statewide. It has made offers on nearly 1,000 homes, closed deals on more than 700, and knocked down more than 640 in flood-danger areas across New Jersey, according to Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection.

But none of the buyouts has happened along the ocean, where the damage from Sandy was catastrophic. The reason is simple: That land is simply too valuable; no property owners have thus far signed up for the buyout program, which is strictly voluntary.

Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, said Blue Acres has done some good in places like Woodbridge, which suffered regular flooding from a nearby river and creek, exacerbated by storm surge during hurricanes. But he said it needs to be expanded to other areas.

“We need the same success and program along the shore to get people and their properties out of harm’s way,” he said. 

In places like Woodbridge, the Blue Acres program has thrown a lifeline to people who might have trouble selling their homes otherwise. Tall chain-link fences surround homes that are slated for demolition. Christmas decorations have been lovingly placed on other homes nearby. 

But not everyone wants to sell. The state gave Jeff Colgan, 66, a Blue Acres application to sell the home where he’s lived for 25 years with his wife. But he decided not to apply for a buyout. 

“You can’t worry about 2050 right now,” said Colgan, after adjusting the Christmas wreath on his front door as the crunching sound of demolition came from half a block away. “It’s just sad to see the houses go and not having the opportunity for other people to move in.” 

Johanna Larsen, 73, lives a block away in her home of 50 years. Several houses across the street have been bought and will soon be demolished. 

“I guess once they get knocked down I don’t know what’s going to happen afterwards, how far the water is going to come here,” she said, taking a break from blowing leaves away from the Virgin Mary statue in her front yard. “For some reason, I think the homes there probably stopped a lot of the water coming on our side.”

Maslo, the Rutgers biologist, has a broader perspective on the transformation of a neighborhood. 

“We’ve labeled this as a coastal retreat,” she said. “We don’t like as humans or Americans to retreat; that almost suggests defeat. What we need to start realizing is that climate change is about adaptation.”

___ 

Follow Shaffrey on Twitter: @TedShaffrey and Parry on Twitter: @WayneParryAC 

In ‘Strongest’ Climate Ruling Yet, Dutch Court Orders Leaders to Take Action

By John Schwartz

Mr. Schwartz, a climate reporter, holds a law degree from the University of Texas. He has worked at The New York Times since 2000.

• Published Dec. 20, 2019 Updated Dec. 21, 2019, 12:05 a.m. ET

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands on Friday ordered the government to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by the end of 2020. It was the first time a nation has been required by its courts to take action against climate change.

Because of climate change, “the lives, well being and living circumstances of many people around the world, including in the Netherlands, are being threatened,” Kees Streefkerk, the chief justice, said in the decision. “Those consequences are happening already.”

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the decision was groundbreaking. “There have been 1,442 climate lawsuits around the world,” he said. “This is the strongest decision ever. The Dutch Supreme Court upheld the first court order anywhere directing a country to slash its greenhouse gas emissions.”

It was the third court victory in the case for the environmental group Urgenda, which filed the lawsuit in 2013 against the Dutch government with nearly 900 co-plaintiffs.

In 2015, The Hague District Court ordered the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent from 1990 levels in the following five years. The lawsuit had demanded reductions of between 25 percent and 40 percent. 

That decision, based partly on theories of human rights, stated that the possibility of damages to current and future generations was so great and concrete that, given its duty of care, “the state must make an adequate contribution, greater than its current contribution, to prevent hazardous climate change.”

The government appealed that decision. In October 2018, The Hague Court of Appeal ruled in favor of Urgenda. In that case, the court, citing obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, stated that the government was “acting unlawfully” by not taking stronger action to reduce emissions, and that “a reduction obligation of at least 25 percent by end-2020, as ordered by the district court, is in line with the State’s duty of care.”

The government appealed that decision as well, this time to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. In September, the procurator general and advocate general, who advise the court, published an opinion urging the justices to reject the government’s arguments.

Ruling Says Netherlands Must Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

June 24, 2015

In the ruling Friday, Justice Streefkerk said the argument that a cut in emissions in the Netherlands would not have a big effect on a global level did not absolve a country from taking measures to reduce its own emissions. “Every country is responsible for its share,” he said.

In practical terms, the decision Friday will very likely require the government to take stronger action to reach the 25 percent reduction. That might include closing coal-fired power plants, some of which opened as recently as 2016. 

The Dutch government had already committed to reducing emissions, and the country’s environmental agency has estimated that its efforts will reduce emissions between 19 and 26 percent by the end of 2020. 

Since the decision requires reductions of at least 25 percent, the estimates at the lower end are now unacceptable, said Dennis van Berkel, legal counsel for the Urgenda Foundation. 

He added that the case had application far beyond his small country. “These human rights, they’re not unique to the Netherlands,” he said. “We think and expect that other lawyers and courts will be looking at this judgment for inspiration about how to deal with this issue.”

The Dutch case has already inspired similar suits against national governments in Europe — including in Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, Switzerland and Norway — and from plaintiffs around the world against the European Union, part of a larger trend of citizens seeking action from the courts on climate issues.

In the United States, climate policy has been influenced by the courts numerous times, and the number of lawsuits against the federal government has grown. 

In a 2007 case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court supported the state’s argument that the Clean Air Act empowered the government to regulate greenhouse gases. A federal suit on behalf of young people awaits trial in Oregon after a labyrinthine path of pretrial filings and appeals that have reached the Supreme Court twice already. 

Global governmental action on climate change has lost momentum since the 2015 Paris climate agreement was reached. President Trump has begun the process of withdrawing the United States from the agreement, and the most recent climate talks to move the process forward, which were held in Madrid, were widely considered a disappointment. 

In response to Friday’s ruling in the Netherlands, Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and a former president of Ireland, said, “After the U.N. climate talks in Madrid, the urgency of increasing our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could not be clearer.” The new decision, she said, “affirms that governments are under a legal obligation, as well as a moral obligation, to significantly increase their ambition on climate change. Our human rights depend on it.”

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Damian Rau, was 12 years old when the case was first filed. In a statement from Urgenda, he called the judgment “an example to the world that no one is powerless and everybody can make a difference.”

Claire Moses contributed reporting.

John Schwartz is part of the climate team. Since joining The Times in 2000, he has covered science, law, technology, the space program and more, and has written for almost every section. 

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 21, 2019, Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Dutch Court Orders Leaders To Act on Climate Change. 

Australia records its hottest day, at least for now

By Jamie Tarabay New York Times, December 18, 2019, 4:12 p.m.

It is so hot, birds are abandoning the sky.

Hours after Australia set a record for its warmest day across the continent, with even hotter temperatures in the near forecast, Greg Marshall, a garden designer in Adelaide, said he had found birds of different species gathered on the ground Wednesday, under the shade of trees.

It was 41.1 degrees C (106 degrees F).

“I’ve been walking around the parklands, turning on the taps at the bottom of the trees,” he said. The birds — “with their beaks open, all gasping for air,” he said — huddled around the faucets, trying to get a drink.

A national heat wave, triggered by a confluence of meteorological factors that extends well beyond Australia’s shores, pushed high temperatures across the country on Tuesday to an average of 40.9 degrees C (105.6 degrees F), breaking the record of 40.9 degrees C (104.5 degrees F), set on Jan. 7, 2013.

On Thursday, said Dean Narramore of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the heat will spread even farther across the central and southern parts of the country, like an inkblot blooming and growing on a page.

As the temperatures have risen, so has the threat of fires, which have ravaged large swathes of the country and shrouded Sydney in smoke.

Late monsoons in India, an imbalance in sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean, and strong winds have hampered rainfall in Australia. The country was already in the grip of a yearslong drought.

“Friday looks like it will be a very bad day,” Narramore said, adding that lightning strikes in bush land could start even more fires.

For weeks, Australians on the eastern coast have been living under a total fire ban as bush fires have raged unabated, burning through houses, killing wildlife, and making the air dangerous to breathe. The Air Quality Index, which measures pollution, has exceeded 400 in some parts of Sydney. Readings of 100 and above are considered “poor.”

“All of this is connected,” Narramore said. “A record-late monsoon in India means the rain will be late coming to Australia, it’s the worst fire season we’ve seen across Australia, it’s warming through climate change, and it’s only the third week of summer.”

Forecasters have said that the heat wave could bring temperatures never before seen in Australia.

The highest temperature ever recorded in the country was 50.56 degrees C (123 degrees F) on Jan. 2, 1960, in Oodnadatta, a remote outback town in South Australia. On Wednesday, the hottest place on the continent was Birdsville, Queensland, which reached 47.2 degrees C (117 degrees F).

Nine of Australia’s 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005, with last year the third-hottest. As the country bakes and burns, the government has come under criticism for refusing to actively address climate change through sharper emissions cuts.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison generated disapproving headlines on Wednesday after it was reported that he had left Australia for a Hawaii vacation as authorities raised emergency warnings across the country, fires continued to burn, and Australians sweltered.

In Perth, a man drew wide attention on social media after roasting pork inside his old Datsun car, whose interior he said reached 178 degrees.

In Adelaide, people were still outside working, delivering parcels and laboring on building sites, Marshall said. He normally tours one or two of his gardens during a workday, largely for maintenance. On Wednesday, he visited 12.

“Some of the larger ones are really suffering,” he said. “Right now, we’re waiting for the fire. It’s a tinderbox, and everything’s aligning for Friday. It’s pretty bad.”

The five states that get the largest percentage of their power from wind turbines — Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma and North Dakota — all voted for Mr. Trump. So did Texas, which produces the most wind power in absolute terms. In fact, 69 percent of the wind power produced in the country comes from states that Mr. Trump carried in November.

Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say

That’s according to 26 separate satellite measurements and 89 scientists who have produced them

By Chris Mooney Washington Post

Dec. 10, 2019 at 11:00 a.m. EST

The Greenland ice sheet’s losses have accelerated so fast since the 1990s it is now shedding more than seven times as much ice each year, according to 89 scientists who use satellites to study the area.

The sheet’s total losses nearly doubled each decade, from 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to an average now of 254 billion tons annually. Since 1992, nearly 4 trillion tons of Greenland ice have entered the ocean, the new analysis found, equivalent to roughly a centimeter of global sea-level rise.

While a centimeter may not sound like much, that uptick is already affecting millions.

“Around the planet, just 1 centimeter of sea-level rise brings another 6 million people into seasonal, annual floods,” said Andrew Shepherd, a University of Leeds professor who co-led the massive collaboration with NASA researcher Erik Ivins.

The results, from a scientific group called the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE), were published Tuesday in the journal Nature.

The research suggests an alarming pace of change for the Earth’s second-largest body of ice, which could theoretically drive more than 20 feet of sea-level rise over a millennium.

The recent Greenland losses, the experts suggest, match a more dire sea-level projection outlined by the United Nations’ chief climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Under that high-end scenario, Greenland could contribute about 16 centimeters, or around half a foot, to ocean levels by 2100.

“What that means is that really, the midrange scenario becomes what was previously the upper scenario, and they will have to invent a new upper scenario, because one currently doesn’t exist,” Shepherd said.

Much more sea-level rise would then come from melting in Antarctica and smaller glaciers around the world, along with the expansion of ocean water that stems from warmer temperatures. It is not yet clear whether these other components of the sea-level equation are also following the high end, or worst-case, path, however, and the current study was focused only on Greenland. (While Greenland is the biggest contributor to sea-level rise at the present moment, Antarctica ultimately has a larger long-term potential to raise seas.)

Sea-level rise would only continue — and, perhaps, accelerate further — after 2100.

Greenland is the world’s largest island, covered with a continuous sheet of ice produced by many thousands of years of snowfall. The ice sheet’s size rivals that of Alaska, and its center is well over a mile thick.

The ice flows outward under its own weight toward the ocean, but because of Greenland’s mountainous and rocky coastline, it usually reaches the sea in fingerlike glaciers that extend outward through fjords. These fjords are partially submerged valleys, which were themselves excavated over vast stretches of geological time by the glaciers’ movement.

Several large glaciers account for the biggest ice losses — with Jakobshavn Glacier, in central Greenland, leading the way. But there are hundreds of glaciers overall, and now more are losing ice as warming seas come in contact with them through the fjords.

The ice sheet itself is also being exposed to warming air temperatures. Most of Greenland has warmed by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) already, compared with the late 19th century, according to a Washington Post analysis of the globe’s fastest-warming regions. That is double the global average rate of warming.

In summer, these higher temperatures produce more and more meltwater atop the ice sheet, which also runs into the ocean. A little more than half of the Greenland losses have arisen through this process, the study found, which is happening too quickly to be offset by annual snowfall.

The remaining losses are driven by the faster flow of the glaciers out into the extremely deep waters of Greenland’s fjords, where they break off into the ocean in pieces.

This faster flow may account for the fact that the ice sheet is losing more mass than previously expected. More and more glaciers are losing ice, said study co-author Beata Csatho, a Greenland expert at the University at Buffalo in New York. This includes several very large glaciers in Greenland’s far north, she said, which lie closest to the Arctic Ocean and had previously been slow to change.

The new research is based on 26 separate satellite analyses, all individually published as separate studies. These employ a variety of methods to measure the recent change in the Greenland ice sheet.

In some cases, scientists tracked how rapidly ice is flowing toward the sea; in others, they sought to measure how the loss of ice has decreased the total mass of the ice sheet, based on the gravitational tugs it makes on satellites positioned high above.

Each approach has its own quirks. But by synthesizing all of them into a single study, it represents close to a consensus on what is happening in Greenland.

The IMBIE group, which has been trying to collate scientific results in this way for about six years now, has done the same analysis for Antarctica. It found rapidly increasing losses there as well.

The new Greenland report comes just months after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the central source for sea-level-rise projections — suggested in a special report that it could be higher than it previously estimated. But the number was increased, by about half a foot, because of additional possible ice losses from Antarctica, rather than Greenland. Now, some experts say, the forecast may need to be raised yet again.

“If the [report] were starting now instead of two years ago, we would certainly take a hard look at the [Greenland] estimates and take this new paper into account,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton climate scientist who co-led the sea-level-rise chapter of that report.

Even if Greenland is tracking a high-end sea-level pathway at the moment, however, ice losses would still have to continue to escalate over the course of the century to reach that scale.

Csatho said prior research had already suggested Greenland was trending toward higher losses than expected, but individual studies varied significantly. The consensus of these different studies, she said, confirms the ice sheet’s major losses.

“Now there is one voice,” she said. “This is what is coming out from taking it all together. It’s a much stronger argument.”

More than 11,000 scientists from around the world declare a ‘climate emergency’

Analysis outlines six major steps that ‘must’ be taken to address the situation.

By Andrew Freedman 

November 5, 2019 at 10:18 a.m. EST

A new report by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency,” and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it.

The analysis is a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming, such as those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in that it does not couch its conclusions in the language of uncertainties, and it does prescribe policies.

The study, called the “World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency,” marks the first time a large group of scientists has formally come out in favor of labeling climate change an “emergency,” which the study notes is caused by many human trends that are together increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The report, published Tuesday in the journal Bioscience, was spearheaded by the ecologists Bill Ripple and Christopher Wolf of Oregon State University, along with William Moomaw, a Tufts University climate scientist, and researchers in Australia and South Africa.

The paper clearly lays out the huge challenge of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

“Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament,” the study states.

The paper bases its conclusions on a set of easy-to-understand indicators that show the human influence on climate, such as 40 years of greenhouse gas emissions, economic trends, population growth rates, per capita meat production, and global tree cover loss, as well as consequences, such as global temperature trends and ocean heat content.

The results are charts that are, at least compared with the climate graphics presented by the IPCC, surprisingly simple, and that help reveal the troubling direction the world is headed.

The study also departs from other major climate assessments in that it directly addresses the politically sensitive subject of population growth. The study notes that the global decline in fertility rates has “substantially slowed” during the past 20 years, and calls for “bold and drastic” changes in economic growth and population policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Such measures would include policies that strengthen human rights, especially for women and girls, and make family-planning services “available to all people,” the paper says.

On energy, the report calls for the world to “implement massive energy efficiency and conservation practices” and cut out fossil fuels in favor of renewable sources of energy, a trend it notes is not happening fast enough. It also calls for remaining fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, to remain in the ground, never to be burned to generate energy, a key goal for many climate activists.

Maria Abate, a signatory of the scientists’ warning and a biology professor at Simmons College in Boston, says she hopes the paper will raise awareness. “Like other organisms we are not adapted to recognize far-reaching environmental threats beyond our immediate surroundings,” she said via email. “The reported vital signs of our global activity and climate responses give us a tangible, evidence-based report card that I hope will help our culture to develop a broader awareness more quickly to slow this climate crisis.”

Other items on the study’s list of policy priorities include quickly cutting emissions of short-lived climate pollutants, such as soot and methane, which could slow short-term warming. The study also calls for a shift to eating mostly plant-based foods and instituting agricultural practices that increase the amount of carbon the soil absorbs. On the economy, the study states that improving long-term sustainability and reducing inequality should be prioritized over growing wealth, as measured using gross domestic product. The authors also advocate for policies that would curtail biodiversity loss and the destruction of forests, and they recommend prioritizing the preservation of intact forests that store carbon along with other lands that can rapidly bury carbon, thereby reducing global warming.

“This is a document that establishes a clear record of the broad consensus among most scientists active at this point in history that the climate crisis is real, and is a major, even existential, threat to human societies, human well-being, and biodiversity,” said Jesse Bellemare, an associate professor of biology at Smith College who is a signatory of the study’s emergency declaration.

He said via email that the presence of so many biologists and ecologists on the list of signatories may reflect the fact that they are observing so many changes from an amount of climate change much smaller than what is projected for the future.

Ripple, of Oregon State, is no stranger to organizing scientific calls to action, having founded the Alliance of World Scientists and organized scientists’ “Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” in 2017, which was also published in Bioscience and focused on the urgent need to solve a broad array of environmental problems including climate change and biodiversity loss.

Thousands of scientists issue bleak ‘second notice’ to humanity

“We’re asking for a transformative change for humanity,” Ripple said in an interview. Many of the signatories to the warning do not list themselves as climate scientists but, instead, as biologists, ecologists and other science specialists. Ripple says that is intentional, as the authors sought to assemble the broadest support possible.

“The situation we’re in today with climate change,” he says, “shows that this is an issue that needs to move beyond climate scientists only.”

Moomaw says the paper comes from researchers who are seeing the consequences of a rapidly changing planet, and is in part “a statement of frustration on the part of many in the scientific community.”

“Scientists, and in particular those that are studying what is happening in a changed climate, have become the most alarmed at how rapidly these changes are taking place and the urgency of needing to take far more drastic action,” Moomaw said.

The term “climate emergency” has been championed by climate activists and pro-climate action politicians seeking to add a sense of urgency to the way we respond to what is a long-term problem. The Climate Mobilization, an advocacy group, is seeking to have governments in the United States and elsewhere declare a climate emergency and enact response measures commensurate with such a declaration.

New York’s City Council has declared a climate emergency, as has San Francisco. European cities have also taken this step. Bills labeling global warming as an emergency are pending in both the House and the Senate, endorsed by prominent liberals including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

The youth climate movement, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has been leading the charge to ratchet up the language used in describing global warming.

To date, scientists have been reluctant to use such language. However, this study may change that.

Phil Duffy, a climate researcher and president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who added his name to the paper Monday, said he finds the term fitting, considering the scale of the problem and lack of action so far.

“The term ‘climate emergency’ … I must say, I find it refreshing, really, because you know, I get so impatient with the scientists who just are always just waffling and mumbling about uncertainty, blah, blah, blah, and this certainly is, you know, is much bolder than that,” he said. “I think it’s right to do that.”

Climate change activists marching to R.I. State House to press Governor Raimondo

By Edward Fitzpatrick Globe Staff, December 6, 2019, 2:28 p.m.

The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led movement to stop climate change, will march to the State House at 1 p.m. today as part of a national “climate strike.” The group also plans to begin a sit-in at Governor Gina M. Raimondo’s office at about 1:20 p.m., pressing the Democratic governor to sign a “No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge.”

Sunrise protesters have called for Raimondo to sign “The Green New Deal Pledge.” Raimondo has said she is concerned about climate change but as governor, she said she “has nothing to do with” the federal proposal by US Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Protesters have said Raimondo could back state legislation addressing climate change and asked why she “continues to take money from fossil fuel companies?” The governor says she does not.

On Thursday, Brown University student and Sunrise Providence member Emma Bouton noted, for example, that Raimondo accepted contributions such as $1,000 from Invenergy CEO Michael P. Polsky in 2015 and another $1,000 in 2016, and Invenergy made a failed bid to build a $1-billion fossil fuel-burning power plant in Burrillville. The group wants Raimondo to “pledge not to take contributions over $200 from oil, gas, and coal industry executives, lobbyists or PACs.”

Spokesman Josh Block said Raimondo and members of her cabinet will be meeting with Sunrise Movement leaders this morning “to discuss ways in which they can work together to further expand renewable energy and address the impacts of climate change.”

Fueled by Climate Change, California’s Raging Wildfires Are Threatening Vulnerable Communities First

By Henry Fountain

• Published Oct. 28, 2019Updated Oct. 29, 2019, 10:19 a.m. ET

California is bracing for a day of strong winds as climate change-fueled wildfires continue to burn from Los Angeles to north of the Bay Area. After a chaotic weekend of mass evacuations and blackouts that left millions in the dark, firefighters in Sonoma, California, made headway Monday, containing 15% of the massive Kincade fire that has burned nearly 75,000 acres. But as high winds pick up again today, firefighters still face an uphill battle in combating the at least 10 blazes raging across the state, including the growing Getty fire, which erupted in one of Los Angeles’s most opulent communities Monday. Fires in California are typical this time of year, but the length and severity of the state’s fire season has grown due to climate change. 

Earth just experienced its hottest September, as 2019 heads for the record books

This makes four straight months of record or near-record global heat.

By Andrew Freedman

Editor for The Washington Post focusing on extreme weather, climate change, science and the environment.

October 4, 2019

September 2019 was the warmest such month on record, tying the old record set in 2016, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an organization funded by the European Union that tracks global temperatures. This makes September the fourth-straight month “to be close to or breaking a temperature record,” according to an agency statement.

Based on Copernicus’s data, which uses computer models fed with billions of observations from air, land and sea, June 2019 set a record high for that month, July 2019 was the warmest month ever recorded, and August 2019 was the second-warmest such month globally. Other agencies, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are expected to release their monthly data, which will be based on other methods, during the next one to two weeks.

According to Copernicus, September was about 1.02 degrees above the 1981-2010 average for the month, and about 1.2 degrees above the preindustrial level. It was also slightly warmer, by about 0.04 degrees, than September 2016, which had been the warmest such month on record. The small margin between the two years indicates the two months are statistically tied, according to Copernicus’s statement.

Importantly, the warmth this year occurs in the absence of a strong El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean. El Niño is a natural climate cycle that tends to boost global temperatures by bringing more ocean heat to the surface and adding it to the atmosphere, as well. A powerful El Niño occurred in 2015 and 2016, contributing to the record heat at that time.

Regions that were particularly warm in September included the central and eastern United States, where many cities saw their hottest September on record. In addition, large portions of the Arctic had above-average temperatures stemming in part from an extensive sea-ice melt. Much of Europe was also above average for the month, whereas southwestern Russia and parts of Antarctica saw much below-average temperatures, the Copernicus analysis found.

“The recent series of record-breaking temperatures is an alarming reminder of the long-term warming trend that can be observed on a global level. With continued greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting impact on global temperatures, records will continue to be broken in the future,” said Jean-Noël Thépaut, director of Copernicus at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, in a statement.

The Northern Hemisphere had its hottest summer on record since 1880, according to NOAA data released last month. The five hottest summers in the Northern Hemisphere, which contains most of the world’s land masses and population, have each occurred during the past five years. It’s almost 100 percent certain that 2019 will be a top-five warmest year, NOAA found.

Leatherback turtles found dead off Cape Cod Bay

By Jeremy C. Fox Boston Globe Correspondent, October 10, 2019, 12:33 p.m.

A half-dozen leatherback turtles have been found dead along the Massachusetts coast since mid-September, including three found off Cape Cod Bay in the last two weeks, as this largest turtle species expands its territory northward among warming waters, a researcher said.

In past years, the leatherbacks would have come and gone in August, but “everything seems to be later and later now” as oceans and the atmosphere warm, said Robert Prescott, executive director emeritus and director of the sea turtle program at the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.

“September is the new August,” Prescott quipped. “Water temperatures are staying warmer later, and the jellyfish bloom that the leatherbacks feed on is happening in September.”

The finding of the turtles was first reported in the Cape Cod Times.

Some of the turtles appeared to have become tangled in fishing lines or other materials, but others were too decomposed for scientists to say what may have caused their deaths.

The giant creatures range in weight from 600 to 1,500 pounds, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The International Union for Conservation of Nature officially classifies leatherbacks as a “vulnerable” species, but many subgroups of the turtles are listed as “critically endangered.”

The dead leatherback found most recently was at Sesuit Harbor in Dennis on Monday. One was found Sept. 29 on Breakwater Beach in Brewster, and another on Sept. 27 at Bayview Beach in Dennis. Two earlier leatherbacks were found on Horseneck Beach in Westport and along the Marion coastline, Prescott said.

Last year, a living leatherback washed up in Eastham as late as Nov. 11, but it later died, recalled Prescott, who coordinated the turtle’s rescue.

“To have one in November, alive, is pretty amazing,” he said.

He said that, as more and more data become available, it looks increasingly like the expansion of the turtles’ migratory territory is related to climate change. Going back to the 1980s, sea turtles mostly went no farther north than Long Island Sound, off the coasts of New York and Connecticut, he said, but now some venture as far as the Gulf of Maine.

“The Gulf of Maine had its highest temperatures ever recorded in 2012, and it hasn’t gone down from there. . . . It’s a pretty fast-warming body of water,” Prescott said.

Prescott encouraged anyone who spots a sea turtle — dead or alive — to call Mass. Audubon at 508-349-2615 to help the organization track the creatures. And he asked that boaters exercise caution.

“If you’re on the water, you want to be careful because they are around,” Prescott said. “What is the expression? ‘Autopilot doesn’t see turtles’? ”

Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.

Toxic chemicals are found in blades of artificial turf

By David Abel Boston Globe Staff, October 9, 2019, 8:32 p.m.

FRANKLIN — For two years, an abandoned pile of artificial turf had decomposed on a bluff here, a few feet above wetlands that are part of the suburb’s drinking water supply. Nearby, ripped bags with the infill of the turf, tiny pellets of shredded tires, littered the embankment.

Public health advocates have long raised alarms about artificial turf pellets, which simulate the give of natural grass but have been shown to contain benzene, cadmium, and other known carcinogens. Now, for the first time, a new series of tests has found that the blades, and their plastic backing, may also contain toxic chemicals.

The test results showed that the turf contained elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals known as PFAS, which have been linked to kidney cancer, low infant birth weights, and a range of diseases. The findings have raised concerns about the safety of millions of square feet of artificial turf installed in recent years on public fields and playgrounds across the country.

“This is huge. It’s the first time that PFAS chemistry used in plastic production has been found in finished consumer products,” said Jeff Gearhart, research director of the Ecology Center, a nonprofit environmental research group based in Michigan that tested the turf. “This finding is maybe the tip of the iceberg. We suspect these PFAS chemicals may be found in other plastic building and consumer products.”

The concentrations of chemicals found in the wetlands near Franklin’s Beaver Field are below current federal and state health guidelines but well above standards some states have recently adopted in light of research suggesting that even low PFAS concentrations in drinking water can be harmful. Concerns about PFAS, called “forever chemicals” because they never fully degrade, have mounted in recent years. Developed in the 1940s, the chemicals have been used in products such as flame retardants, nonstick pans, pizza boxes, clothing, and furniture.

In Franklin, questions about the discarded turf led local environmental activists to send swatches of the turf and water samples for testing. The Ecology Center, working with the New England office of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group, found that the swatch of turf from Franklin contained 190 parts per trillion of one of the most common PFAS chemicals, well above federal safety standards for drinking water.

The group recently filed a complaint with state environmental officials about the discarded turf, saying it violated wetland protections. The water samples there contained nearly 10 parts per trillion of the same chemical found in the turf, as well as a combined 40 parts per trillion of two other PFAS chemicals.

Jamie Hellen, the Franklin town administrator, said he had no idea that the old turf was left there or that it was potentially toxic. He said he is waiting for guidance from the state Department of Environmental Protection on how to proceed.

“We will work with DEP to resolve the matter,” he said.

He noted there is no definitive link between the chemicals found in the turf and those in the water. After the Globe inquired about the piles of old turf, crews removed the material within hours.

The Ecology Center also tested samples of turf installed this summer at Oliver Ames High School in Easton and found similarly high levels of another PFAS chemical. In addition, they tested eight other samples of turf blades, which they acquired directly from distributors of artificial turf, and found that all contained high amounts of fluorine, a chemical suggesting the presence of PFAS.

With as many as 1,500 new artificial turf fields installed every year — there are now some 13,000 in the United States, including hundreds in Massachusetts — public health advocates worry the potentially tainted runoff could contaminate water supplies around the country.

“PFAS in synthetic turf should sound alarm bells for all municipalities with these fields,” said Kyla Bennett, science policy director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “All turf manufacturers should immediately disclose whether they use PFAS in their manufacturing process.”

The EPA currently recommends municipalities alert the public if two of the most common PFAS chemicals reach 70 parts per trillion in drinking water, and Massachusetts uses the same threshold for five common PFAS chemicals.

But some recent studies have recommended that children not consume water with levels above 1 part per trillion and states such as New Hampshire and New Jersey have adopted stricter standards. Massachusetts is considering adopting a standard similar to one recently enacted in Vermont, advising residents to avoid drinking water if the concentration of six of the chemicals cumulatively reaches 20 parts per trillion.

A DEP spokesman said the agency is reviewing the wetlands complaint regarding Franklin, reaching out to town officials and planning a site visit.

Many communities have installed artificial turf fields because they offer clear advantages over natural grass. They don’t have to be mowed or watered, require no expensive fertilizers, and allow for substantially more playing time.

Dan Bond, president of the Synthetic Turf Council, a trade group for an industry that earns $2.5 billion a year, said repeated studies have shown no elevated health risks from artificial turf, pointing to research by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the EPA, and state agencies.

“I haven’t seen any other reports that have shown any of these concerns,” Bond said, referring to the PFAS findings.

The owner of one company that produced some of the turf that the group tested was skeptical about the findings.

“We have never heard any concerns about the chemical composition of our product,” said Mike Hall, co-owner of Turf Factory Direct, a Georgia company. “I’d like to have my lawyer look at this.”

Susan Farris, a spokeswoman for Shaw Industries, another Georgia company that sells artificial turf said, “These chemicals are commonly used by synthetic turf manufacturers as a non-stick agent in the manufacturing equipment.”

Given the recent concerns about PFAS, she said, the company has phased out their use in other products, such as flooring and carpeting.

“As new formulations are available to perform the same or similar functions as PFAS chemicals have historically, Shaw has shifted to new ingredients,” she said.

Questions about the safety of artificial turf emerged five years ago when Amy Griffin, a University of Washington soccer coach, cited a large number of goalkeepers who play on turf and had contracted cancer, mainly blood-related lymphomas. By January 2019, her list included 260 young athletes with cancer.