28 July 2017, Climate Central, Wildfire Season Is Scorching the West. The West is ablaze as the summer wildfire season has gotten off to an intense start. More than 37,000 fires have burned more than 5.2 million acres nationally since the beginning of the year, with 47 large fires burning across nine states as of Friday. The relatively early activity is quickly becoming the norm, with rising temperatures making the fire season longer than it used to be. The warming fueled by greenhouse gases is also helping to create more and larger fires as it dries out more vegetation that acts as fuel for fires. This new fire situation means that western states need to be begin to rethink how they prepare for and combat fires, as well as how fire-prone land is developed. Five large fires (those of 1,000 acres or more) are currently raging across California, the largest of which is the Detwiler fire near Yosemite National Park, which has burned more than 80,000 acres since it ignited on July 16. That fire is now 75 percent contained, but it destroyed dozens of buildings, including 63 homes. Oregon has seven large fires burning, while Nevada has six and Idaho five.Montana currently has the most large fires of any state, with 14, including the massive Lodgepole Complex fire (a series of smaller fires that merged into one), which has burned more than 270,000 acres in the eastern portion of the state. That fire is also well-contained, but has burned through tens of thousands of acres of range land, displacing thousands of cattle and burning several structures. An intense drought there has rapidly cured the grasses that have fueled the fires. Scorching temperatures and dry conditions in recent weeks have helped fuel these fires across the region, which have burned 2 million more acres than at this point in last year’s wildfire season. Read More here
Monthly Archives: July 2017
28 July 2017, Reuters, U.S. coal exports soar, in boost to Trump energy agenda, data shows. U.S. coal exports have jumped more than 60 percent this year due to soaring demand from Europe and Asia, according to a Reuters review of government data, allowing President Donald Trump’s administration to claim that efforts to revive the battered industry are working. The increased shipments came as the European Union and other U.S. allies heaped criticism on the Trump administration for its rejection of the Paris Climate Accord, a deal agreed by nearly 200 countries to cut carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal. The previously unpublished figures provided to Reuters by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed exports of the fuel from January through May totaled 36.79 million tons, up 60.3 percent from 22.94 million tons in the same period in 2016. While reflecting a bounce from 2016, the shipments remained well-below volumes recorded in equivalent periods the previous five years. They included a surge to several European countries during the 2017 period, including a 175 percent increase in shipments to the United Kingdom, and a doubling to France – which had suffered a series of nuclear power plant outages that required it and regional neighbors to rely more heavily on coal. “If Europe wants to lecture Trump on climate then EU member states need transition plans to phase out polluting coal,” said Laurence Watson, a data scientist working on coal at independent think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative in London. Read More here
27 July 2017, Climate News Network, Geo-engineers propose climate compromise. Humans have unintentionally changed the world and turned up the temperature. A climate compromise might turn down the heat. Geo-engineering, the deliberate alteration of the planet to undo its inadvertent alteration by humans over the past 200 years, is back on the scientific agenda, with a climate compromise suggested as a possible solution. One group wants to turn down the global thermostat and reverse the global warming trend set in train by greenhouse gases released by fossil fuel combustion, by thinning the almost invisible cirrus clouds that trap radiation and keep the planet warm. Another group proposes to inject sulphur particles into the stratosphere, and keep on doing so for 160 years, to block enough sunlight and lower the planetary temperature. And a third group wants to see a cocktail of both approaches: thin the high cirrus clouds that stop heat from escaping, and at the same pump particles into the stratosphere to scatter the incoming sunlight and limit the disadvantages of each approach by mixing them. The verb “wants” in all three studies is neither fair nor appropriate: all three groups concede that the healthy answer is for humans to fulfil the pledge made in 2015, and start to reduce fossil fuel emissions so drastically that global average temperatures stay well below the 2°C maximum rise agreed by 197 nations at the Paris climate conference. Read More here
24 July 2017, Climate Central, A Nebraska-Sized Area of Forest Disappeared in 2015. A Nebraska-sized chunk of the world’s forests was decimated in 2015 because of wildfire, logging and expanding palm oil plantations, according to a new study. The loss is part of a continuing trend of deforestation that could have devastating implications for the climate. About 49 million acres of forest disappeared worldwide in 2015, mainly in North America and the tropics, putting the year’s global deforestation level at its second-highest point since data gathering began in 2001. In all, the globe lost 47 percent more forested land in 2015 than it did 16 years ago, according to the study by Global Forest Watch. Deforestation accounts for more than 10 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions driving climate change. Dense tropical forests are also critical to keeping the climate stable because they suck up large amounts of human carbon pollution from the atmosphere, storing it in tree trunks, leaves, roots and soil. Using satellite data provided by Google and the University of Maryland, Global Forest Watch researchers measured the death or removal of trees at least 16 feet tall. 2014 was a record-breaking year for tree-cover loss when nearly 60 million acres of forests disappeared. 2015 saw less, but it’s too soon to say whether deforestation is truly on a downward swing because of uncertainty in some of the data, study co-author Mikaela Weisse, a research analyst for Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute, said. Read More here