The Governor should issue a ban on open burning, but has not so far ….

From an Article by Chris Lawrence, WV Metro News, November 6, 2023

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The low humidity, warmer temperatures, and the steady wind in recent days has turned the West Virginia forest and the new leaf litter on the forest floor into a potential tinder box.

As of Monday, the West Virginia Division of Forestry reported more than 100 forest fires in the state and Deputy State Forester Tony Evans believed the number was well beyond.

“Over the weekend we’ve had so many fires that have popped up, we definitively know we have more than that,” said Evans. Some of the fires were large in scale.

“We have several big fires. One down in McDowell County is several hundred acres. Raleigh County’s got a big fire Kanawha has a couple. Boone County has several fires that are going to be several hundred acres, same thing with Mingo County,” he explained.

According to Evans, the Southern West Virginia topography lends itself well to a wildfire and they tend to get out of control faster in the steep hills of the coalfields than in other parts of the state. The terrain also makes them more difficult to put out.

The fires are so widespread, Evans said they are asking people to stop calling 911 with just reports of seeing or smelling smoke. Since those kind of reports are too vague to help pinpoint a fire. “Unless they see an actual fire or a big column of smoke coming up from a specific place, don’t call 911 just if they are seeing or smelling smoke in the air,” he explained..

The Kanawha County Commission penned a letter to the Division of Forestry asking for a total burning ban until some measurable rainfall comes. Evans said that decision would have to come from the Governor’s office.

The fall forest fire rules are in effect, meaning that any outdoor burning must be done between 5 p.m. and 7 a.m. However, under the present conditions, Evans said use common sense.

“You know if it’s dry and windy, wait until we get some moisture. It doesn’t take very much for the wind to pick up an ember and put it out into the woods or dry grass and we have a forest fire,” he said.

In Egypt from Nov. 7th to Nov. 18th.

From The Climate Reality Project of Al Gore, et al., October 31, 2022

What an October it was! Earlier this month, we hosted 24 Hours of Reality: Spotlight on Solutions and Hope, a global day celebrating action and solutions that we can use in our fight against the climate crisis. Below you can check out some powerful stories from the day, and learn how you can get involved to build the future we all want.

Now, we’re looking ahead to COP 27, the formal annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). At COP 27, attendees will push for urgent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, building resilience, adaption to climate impacts, and financing climate action in developing nations. And it can’t come at a more critical time – a new report from UNFCCC says we’re failing to meet our climate pledges.

Climate Reality staff and some of our Climate Reality Leaders will be on the ground this year to bring you behind the scenes information from the conference. Follow along at #C2COP27 on social media from November 6-18!

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SEE ALSO: Cornell students to work at UN’s COP27 conference in Egypt, Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle, October 31, 2022

At the United Nations’ upcoming Conference of the Parties – better known as COP27, the annual convention to ensure countries meet global climate targets set by the Paris Agreement – 11 Cornell students will help delegations from specialized agencies and small countries gain a stronger voice.

The undergraduate and graduate students, all taking Cornell’s Global Climate Change Science and Policy course in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), will travel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Nov. 6-18.

See the full article for more details.

Urgent Attention is Needed to Preserve & Protect Public Lands

From an Article by Carole King, Opinion Editorial, New York Times, August 25, 2022

Ms. King is a singer, songwriter, author and environmental advocate.

My career as a songwriter began in Manhattan, not far from where I was born. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1968, I became part of the singer-songwriter community that coalesced around Laurel Canyon. I thought California would be wild in the sense of nature. It turned out to be wild in the sense of drugs and parties. I wanted to live close to the kind of wild nature that must exist somewhere on a large scale. Somewhere turned out to be Idaho.

In 1977 I moved to a mobile home on Robie Creek, a 40-minute drive from Boise. For the next three years, I lived in the backcountry northeast of McCall in a cabin with no running water or electricity. After that I lived adjacent to the Salmon River for 38 years, with a national forest as my nearest neighbor.

The future of America’s national forests is being shaped now. The Biden administration is developing a system to inventory old-growth and mature forests on federal land that the president wants to be completed by next April. But given the immediate threats facing many of these forests and their importance to slowing climate change, bold action is required immediately to preserve not just old-growth and mature trees but entire national forest ecosystems comprising thousands of interdependent species.

President Biden should issue an executive order immediately directing his secretaries of the interior and agriculture to take all steps available to them to stop commercial logging on public land. We can’t wait a year.

One of the best technologies to store carbon is an unlogged forest with minimal human intrusion. Forests sequester vast amounts of carbon in the trunks, leaves and roots of trees of all ages and sizes and the soil beneath them. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and water from the air and ground and through the process of photosynthesis release oxygen into the air. It costs nothing to leave them as they are. Allowing commercial logging to continue in our national forests would also be a catastrophe for the biodiversity they contain.

The order I propose would bring about a significant reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide. And it will help the United States meet the requirements of the Paris agreement, which Mr. Biden rejoined on the first day of his presidency. Even with the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, he will fall short of his promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 50 to 52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Cutting more forests isn’t going to help hit that mark.

Last fall, over 200 climate scientists from around the country sent Mr. Biden a letter underscoring the consequences if timber harvesting continues in the national forests. They wrote that “greenhouse gas emissions from logging in U.S. forests are now comparable to the annual” carbon dioxide “emissions from U.S. coal burning.” Protecting federal forestlands from logging, on the other hand, would remove 84 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, they wrote.

My experience in Idaho led me to become involved as a volunteer in the ongoing effort to protect a bioregion of 23 million acres of nationally owned public land in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming by means of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act.

That legislation would designate corridors for the safe passage of wildlife between existing wilderness and roadless areas on federal forestland. It was proposed by scientists in the late 1980s who understood that protecting and connecting large-scale forest ecosystems is necessary for species to thrive. Despite the legislation receiving some bipartisan support in past years, it has not been enacted in the nearly 30 years since it was introduced.

Forest preservation is a climate solution. That’s why we need action to safeguard the forests on the public lands we all share. Federal law requires that most public lands be managed for multiple uses, such as recreation, gas and oil development, mining and logging. But this longstanding policy is running headlong into efforts to slow the warming of our planet.

Forests on federally owned land are being destroyed at breakneck speed by heavy equipment that can saw through a tree, strip its branches and set that tree on a pile of logs in the time it took me to type this sentence.

The effects of the climate crisis are undeniable. People are suffering, and the scale of the problem sometimes makes us feel helpless. But the public can do something right now by asking Mr. Biden — in numbers too big to ignore — to use all of his powers to stop the logging of the nation’s mature and old-growth forests.

In 1970, my collaborator Toni Stern wrote the lyrics to my most popular song, “It’s Too Late.” That title should not refer to the climate. That’s why, at age 80, I’m using my voice to call on Mr. Biden to stop commercial logging in our national forests. Please add your voice to mine.

>>> A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 26, 2022, Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Leave Forests Alone, Before It’s Too Late.

Fourier had no idea in 1824 of all the impacts of global warming

From an Article by Robin McKie, The Guardian News Service UK, July 30, 2022

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say.

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”

McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth at the end of 2021. He includes many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted the planet, including extremes that had struck the UK. A few months after he completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found that many of those records had already been broken. “That is the trouble with writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “By the time it is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are moving.”

Among the records broken during the book’s editing was the announcement that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on 19 July, the highest ever recorded in the UK. (The country’s previous hottest temperature, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.)

In addition, London’s fire service had to tackle blazes across the capital, with one conflagration destroying 16 homes in Wennington, east London. Crews there had to fight to save the local fire station itself. “Who would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be almost wiped out by wildfires in 2022,” says McGuire. “If this country needs a wake-up call then surely that is it.”

Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity have also swept across Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone national park. “And as we head further into 2022, it is already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.”

These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises translate into extreme weather.

“Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated up by just over one degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.”

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”

And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C.

From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further, McGuire says.

Certainly, as it stands, Britain – although relatively well placed to counter the worst effects of the coming climate breakdown – faces major headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050.

“Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire.

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.”

The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilisation.

“This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.”

Now available ~ Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99

Five unexpected threats posed by the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

1. Under our feet ~ As vast, thick sheets of ice disappear from high mountains and from the poles, rock crusts that had previously been compressed are beginning to rebound, threatening to trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. “We are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one,” says Bill McGuire.

2. New battlefields ~ As crops burn and hunger spreads, communities are coming into conflict and the election of populist leaders – who will promise the Earth to their people – is likely to become commonplace. Most worrying are the tensions over dwindling water supplies that are growing between India, Pakistan and China, all possessors of atomic weapons. “The last thing we need is a hot war over water between two of the world’s nuclear powers,” McGuire observes.

3. Methane bombs ~ Produced by wetlands, cattle and termites, methane is 86 times more potent in its power to heat the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, though fortunately it hangs around for much less time. The problem is that much of the world’s methane is trapped in layers of Arctic permafrost. As these melt, more methane will be released and our world will get even hotter.

4. Losing the Gulf Stream ~ As the ice caps melt, the resulting cold water pouring from the Arctic threatens to block or divert the Gulf Stream, which carries a prodigious amount of heat from the tropics to the seas around Europe. Signs now suggest the Gulf Stream is already weakening and could shut down completely before end of the century, triggering powerful winter storms over Europe.

5. Calorie crunch ~ Four-fifths of all calories consumed across the world come from just 10 crop plants including wheat, maize and rice. Many of these staples will not grow well under the higher temperatures that will soon become the norm, pointing towards a massive cut in the availability of food, which will have a catastrophic impact across the planet, says McGuire.

New weather is resulting from multiple mechanisms due to GHG

From the Wikipedia Entry on William McGuire, Emeritus Professor, University College London, August 1, 2022

William J. McGuire (born 1954) is a volcanologist and Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London. His main interests include volcano instability and lateral collapse, the nature and impact of global geophysical events and the effect of climate change on geological hazards.

BACKGROUND ~ McGuire studied at UCL and Luton College of Higher Education, now the University of Bedfordshire and has a PhD in Geology from University College London (1980). He began lecturing in Geology at the West London Institute of Higher Education in the 1980s, former home of well known TV geologist Iain Stewart.

He was then appointed Reader at Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education (now the University of Gloucestershire), and made it into the university sector in the 1990s when he was appointed Professor of Geohazards and Director of the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre at University College London. The centre is funded by the insurance industry. He relinquished the Directorship in 2011.

He was a member of the UK Government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, established by Prime Minister Tony Blair following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In 2010 he was member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), to address problems following the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull. He contributed to the IPCC summary report on extreme weather and disasters (2011).

McGuire lives in a geologically inactive area, Brassington in the Peak District, with his wife and two sons after many years in Hampton, Surrey.

RESEARCH & PROJECTS ~ McGuire is regarded as a UK expert on geological disasters including supervolcanoes, impact events, tsunamis and earthquakes.

He described Tokyo as “the city waiting to die,” referring to its placement on a prominent geological fault that could result in a highly damaging earthquake. McGuire’s main research sites are the Canary Islands, Mount Etna, and the Yellowstone National Park supervolcano in Wyoming.

In his book, Waking the Giant, he argues temperature change brought about by global warming could release pressure from melting ice caps (through post-glacial rebound) and trigger earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as well as increased landslides resulting from heavier rainfall. See Physical impacts of climate change

McGuire is a Co-Director of the New Weather Institute, a co-op and think-tank “created to accelerate the rapid transition to a fair economy that thrives within planetary boundaries.” He blogs for the Extinction Rebellion.

MEDIA APPEARANCES ~ McGuire has appeared on many TV shows including Horizon, one of the BBCs most popular and successful “Science & Nature” programmes, Countdown to Doomsday on the Sci Fi Channel, and Decoding the Past (“Earth’s Black Hole”) on The History Channel.

PUBLICATIONS ~ McGuire has written several academic and popular books on geohazards, earth sciences and geology, including:

1. McGuire, W. (2022). Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide. Icon.
2. Simms, A. and W. McGuire (eds.). (2019). Knock Three Times: 28 modern folk tales for a world in trouble. New Weather Institute.
3. McGuire, W. (2012). Waking the Giant – How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes. [14]
4. McGuire, W. and M. Maslin. (eds.) (2012). Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards. Wiley.
5. McGuire, W. (2008). ‘Seven Years to Save the Planet: The Questions and Answers (2008)[15]
6. McGuire, W. (2006). Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
7. McGuire, W. (2005). Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a threatened planet. Oxford University Press.

WV Interfaith Power & Light is part of a national campaign for bold action

Dear WVIPL Friends and Supporters,

We wanted to make sure you know about an upcoming event for which we are co-sponsors, along with Citizens’ Climate Lobby of West Virginia, WV Rivers Coalition, ReImagine Appalachia, WV Citizen Action Education Fund, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and the First Presbyterian Church of Charleston.

This Conference on Climate will take place at Charleston’s First Presbyterian Church (16 Leon Sullivan Way, Charleston, WV 25301) on Saturday, June 4, from 10am-3pm.

Featured speakers at the conference will include the following:

** — Bill Myers, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Charleston, WV

** — Rev. Jeff Allen, United Methodist Pastor and Executive Director of WV Council of Churches

** — Rev. Mitch Hescox, President, The Evangelical Environmental Network

** — Rev. Ron English, Restorative Justice Facilitator with American Friends Service Committee; ordained into the ministry by Drs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA

** — Robin Blakeman, Ordained Minister, Presbyterian Church of the USA, with validated ministry in environmental stewardship; Steering Committee, WV Interfaith Power & Light

** — Bishop Marcia Dinkins, Founder and Executive Director of Black Women Rising

All are welcome, and we encourage you to share this information widely with your networks! If you are on Facebook, there is also a shareable event there. This conference is free of charge to attend, and you can register and/or find more information at: https://tinyurl.com/wvaclimate.

We look forward to seeing you there! Sincerely,

>>>> WVIPL Staff and Steering Committee

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See Also: California Interfaith Power and Light’s Allis Druffel on CNN HLN Local Edition – YouTube

Allis Druffel is the Southern California Outreach Director for California Interfaith Power & Light, and recently appeared on CNN Headline News Local Edition alongside David Mowry of Unitarian Universalist Church of Riverside, a member congregation of CIPL

Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology Research

From an Article of Cornell Chronicle, May 5, 2022

Staggering declines in bird populations are taking place around the world, according to a study from scientists at multiple institutions published May 5 in the journal Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

Loss and degradation of natural habitats and direct overexploitation of many species are cited as the key threats to avian biodiversity. Climate change is identified as an emerging driver of bird population declines in the study, “State of the World’s Birds.”

“We are now witnessing the first signs of a new wave of extinctions of continentally distributed bird species,” said lead author Alexander Lees, senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom and also an associate researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Avian diversity peaks globally in the tropics and it is there that we also find the highest number of threatened species.”

The study finds approximately 48% of existing bird species worldwide are known or suspected to be undergoing population declines. Populations are stable for 39% of species. Only 6% are showing increasing population trends, and the status of 7% is still unknown. The study authors reviewed changes in avian biodiversity using data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” to reveal population changes among the globe’s 11,000 bird species.

The findings mirror the results of a groundbreaking 2019 study which determined that nearly 3 billion breeding birds have been lost during the past 50 years across the United States and Canada. The lead author of that study is also an author on this global status report.

“After documenting the loss of nearly 3 billion birds in North America alone, it was dismaying to see the same patterns of population declines and extinction occurring globally,” says conservation scientist Ken Rosenberg of the Cornell Lab, now retired. “Because birds are highly visible and sensitive indicators of environmental health, we know their loss signals a much wider loss of biodiversity and threats to human health and well-being.”

Despite their findings, study authors say there is hope for avian conservation efforts, but transformative change is needed. “The fate of bird populations is strongly dependent on stopping the loss and degradation of habitats,” Alexander Lees said. “That is often driven by demand for resources. We need to better consider how commodity flows can contribute to biodiversity loss and try to reduce the human footprint on the natural world.”

“Fortunately, the global network of bird conservation organizations taking part in this study have the tools to prevent further loss of bird species and abundance,” Rosenberg said. “From land protection to policies supporting sustainable resource use, all of it depends on the will of governments and of society to live side by side with nature on our shared planet.”

This study was conducted by scientists from Manchester Metropolitan University, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Birdlife International, the University of Johannesburg, Pontifical Xavierian University and the Nature Conservation Foundation.

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Cornell Lab of Ornithology Nearly Three (3) Billion Birds Gone

A new study finds steep, long-term losses across virtually all groups of birds in the U.S. and Canada …

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/

Marine extinction rebellion to warn and protest

From an Article by Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, April 28, 2022

A new study suggests that warming, oxygen-starved seas could lead marine species to vanish at a rate matching the planet’s biggest extinction event on record.

If greenhouse gas pollution remains unchecked, global warming could trigger the most catastrophic extinction of ocean species since the end of the Permian age, about 250 million years ago, scientists warned in a new study today. During the end-Permian Extinction, researchers estimate up to 90 percent of marine organisms died out in overheated, acidic and deoxygenated oceans.

The Great Dying, as it’s sometimes called, the worst known mass extinction event in the history of the Earth, wiped out more than half of all biological families, including more than 70 percent of land-dwelling vertebrates, leaving a clear mark in the fossil record.

That cataclysmic change may have resulted from giant volcanic eruptions that went on for 2 million years. But a 2021 study suggested that carbon dioxide emissions from current human activity are twice as high as those that caused the Permian climate to shift.

Ocean temperatures and oxygen levels are already approaching deadly thresholds for some organisms, such as corals and Arctic cod, and potentially threaten thousands more species, said Curtis Deutsch, a Princeton University geoscientist who co-authored the new research published on Thursday in Science.

One of the reasons the researchers chose the Permian extinction as a basis for comparison was that its causes “seemed most clearly related to the kind of climate changes we are seeing now,” he said. “There were enough important similarities, the CO2-driven warming, the loss of oxygen, and the big response in the marine biosphere, that it seemed like the right comparison to start with.”

Additionally, the researchers wanted to measure their results against “the clearest, biggest magnitude of signal in the geologic record,” he said. “When you think about 90 percent of ocean species disappearing, it’s extreme.”

Extinction is Hard to Measure

Human impacts, including global warming, may have already triggered a sixth mass extinction of an as-yet to be determined scope. Just in the last few years, there have been the first documented climate extinctions of species, like a tiny Australian rodent believed to have died out in 2019, and global waves of mass amphibian and insect die-offs. A study published this week in Nature reported that 21 percent of reptiles are threatened with extinction.

But uncertainty about the total number of species on the planet makes it hard to calculate the magnitude of the recent die-offs as compared to past extinctions. If the starting quantity is unknown, it’s hard to measure what’s being lost.

Tracking extinctions in the oceans is even harder. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s top ocean research institutions, states it is impossible to know the exact number of species that live there because more than 80 percent of the oceans are unobserved and unexplored.

To overcome those challenges, Curtis Deutsch and study co-author Justin Penn, a geoscientist at Princeton University, used a decades-long database of marine animals’ tolerance of warming water and decreasing oxygen. With that data, they created 10 groups of simulated marine species types with similar tolerance characteristics to create a global biogeography of marine life, and modeled how different levels of warming will change the distribution of species and potentially wipe some out.

They chose two very different emissions scenarios to show that today’s climate policy choices will make a big difference in the long run, Deutsch said. A high emissions path with up to 4 degrees Celsius warming by 2100 leads toward a mass extinction of ocean species that “would leave a clearly visible mark on the fossil record,” he said. But the path delineated by the Paris Agreement, keeping warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, could avert the devastation of ocean biodiversity. “We can pretty much avoid a mass extinction,” he said. “It’s not going to look like a biotic collapse in the fossil record.”

Some climate scientists have recently questioned whether the high emissions scenario is still a useful metric. Rapid growth of renewable energy and new government and business promises to reduce emissions could hold warming to about 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, but policies to make that happen are still not in place.

Global greenhouse gas concentrations are reaching new record levels each year, and Deutsch said that, given the political and economic uncertainties highlighted by events like the invasion of Ukraine, the possibility that diplomatic efforts to curb warming could fizzle can’t be ruled out.

Malin Pinsky, a Rutgers ecologist and evolutionary biologist who wrote a Perspective article about the new research by Deutsch and Penn, said global policy choices the last few decades have already prompted massive and rapid ocean changes, such as sea level rise, ocean acidification and global shifts of species, which are affecting food security in developing countries. More than half of all human-caused CO2 produced since 1750 have been emitted in just the last 30 years.

“We already know marine life is on the front lines, with species moving faster toward the poles than on land,” he said, citing the black sea bass, a fish species that has moved from offshore Virginia to offshore New Jersey in just a few decades. “It’s part of a massive reorganization of life on earth, and this paper really does a nice job of making clear the stark choices in front of us,” he said.

The findings are important and sobering, said Michael Burrows, a marine ecologist with the Scottish Association for Marine Science, who was not involved in the study. Projecting long-term changes in dynamic and naturally variable ocean ecosystems for which there is very little monitoring is tough to begin with, Burrows said, and “a big problem with such projections, based on the present-day associations between species occurrence and climate (usually temperatures), is that the future climate conditions don’t exist anywhere on Earth right now.”

But biodiversity has responded to climatic changes of similar magnitude in the past, he said. “By showing that their model of projected losses produces changes similar to that seen in past mass extinctions associated with similar climatic changes, the research has resulted in a more credible forecast of the upcoming extinctions due to anthropogenic climate change,” he said.

Has It Already Started?

Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped on the Earth’s surface by greenhouse gas pollution, building up at a rate equivalent to five atom bomb explosions per second. The average ocean temperature has reached record highs almost yearly, and its surface waters have grown 30 percent more acidic in the past 200 years.

Hot water is already killing marine life, and has perhaps already resulted in extinctions of regionally endemic species, especially during extreme events like marine heat waves. There’s not enough data to know if the sixth great extinction is already underway in the oceans, but there are clear warning signs that global biodiversity is collapsing under the weight of human activities.

Scientists estimate that more than 1 billion sea creatures, including birds, died during last summer’s extreme heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. The 2003 heat wave that killed about 70,000 people in Europe also extended over the Mediterranean Sea, where it triggered a series of mass die-offs of different ocean species, including rare corals. Recent global assessments suggest 40.7 percent of amphibians, 25.4 of mammals and 13.6 of birds are threatened with extinction.

Elsewhere around the planet, warming seas have driven many coral reef ecosystems to the point of functional extinction. Other signs of disruption include increasing jellyfish invasions and rapidly expanded Sargassum seaweed in the Caribbean. Hot water was also implicated in a mass die-off of starfish along the West Coast of North America, diminishing kelp forests and a federally designated “unusual mortality event” for gray whales lasting from 2019 into 2022.

“There is some evidence that extinctions have started ticking up already, but other human impacts are larger threats at the moment,” Pinsky said. But the new paper shows that global warming will soon overshadow other impacts like direct habitat degradation or pollution, he added. “What we do know is that extirpations, local extinctions already happen,” he said. “We do have evidence from a coral reef that even short periods of low oxygen can result in permanent displacement of a species from that reef.”

Sabine Mathesius, with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, worked on a 2015 study showing that long-term plans to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere won’t do much to protect marine organisms from ocean acidification. By the time any large-scale atmospheric CO2 removal happens, some species sensitive to acidification could already be gone, she said. “I think there are many demonstrated impacts of warming and acidification, especially the impacts of warming,” she said. “There have been these huge coral bleaching events, so that’s reason for great concern.”

Bleaching occurs when ocean water temperatures become too warm and cause corals to expel the algae living in their tissues, turning their color white. But reducing emissions, rather than removing them from the atmosphere, can lower the possibility of a mass extinction, Deutsch said. “Species go extinct naturally all the time,” he said. “If we were to take that optimistic scenario and start reducing emissions now, it’s possible that we don’t really see a significant bump in extinction rates.”

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An Interview with the Ocean, Transcript

From the Living On Earth, PRX, April 29, 2022

As we close out Poetry Month, we share the timeless poem “I Go Down to the Shore” read by the late Mary Oliver, and a sound rich performance of a creative piece it inspired. Author Kate Horowitz wrote “An Interview with the Ocean” and joined Living on Earth’s Aynsley O’Neill to bring it to the airwaves.

Jacob Fourier in France understood the “greenhouse effect” in 1824.

From Tom Rodd, Executive Director, WV Center on Climate Change, March 21, 2022

Here’s our final reminder about the upcoming Wednesday, March 23 @ 7 PM live climate science program from Morgantown, WV — featuring a great speaker, Dr. Julie Brigham-Grette.

§§§ — Details and registration are here.

Julie Brigham-Grette is a world-renowned scientist who studies the polar regions. She is tremendously alarmed at the ongoing environmental collapse of these areas that are so vital to our planetary well-being. See her recent article on this topic here.

Dr. Brigham-Grette will be speaking and answering questions about how the polar climate has already changed, what we can expect as global climate change continues, and why we urgently need to address the climate crisis to protect humanity’s future.

Dr. Brigham-Grette will be joined by two West Virginia University Professors, Dr. Amy Weislogel, Associate Professor of Sedimentary Geology, and Dr. Christopher J. Russoniello, Assistant Professor of Geology. More information on all of these speakers is here at the registration page.

Wednesday, March 23rd @ 7 PM — The in-person venue will be a “smart conference room” at the WVU Media Innovation Center, in the Evansdale Crossing Building, 62 Morrill Way, Morgantown WV 26506. There will be audience seating, cameras and microphones for online participation, and a large screen displaying online speakers and audience questions. Doors open at 6:30 PM USET, and the online program will go from 7:00 to 8:00 PM USET. Reservations are not required. WVU COVID protocols currently require masking.

Don’t miss this unique chance to engage with these outstanding scientists who are joining this program to discuss the most important challenge of our time. The stakes could not be higher — let’s make them welcome!

We have more than 130 registrants so far – and for anyone in the Morgantown area, this will be a special gathering with other climate-concerned folks! Please share this invitation with your friends, and I hope to see you, in-person or online!

>>> Tom Rodd, Director, West Virginia Center on Climate Change

### ~ To attend and participate in this program — either online or in person — register here. For more information, email info@wvclimate.org. Thanks for your climate concerns!

P.S. Please share this message with others who might be interested! They will appreciate it!

Clean Air Moms want you to understand Frontline Impacts

I am thrilled to commend everyone in the Halt the Harm Network for joining over 500,000 comments submitted nationwide on the EPA Methane Rule as of Monday. Over 8500 of these comments came from our grassroots leaders and concerned members of HHN.

We were also successful in promoting community voices at the Frontline Impacts from the EPA Methane Rule webinar on January 26.

Thank you to everyone who submitted comments, shared this to their network, and joined us for the January 26 webinar. We have all had a significant impact on strengthening the EPA methane rules to truly protect communities across the country.

The methane rule campaign is being created by leaders in Halt the Harm Network – a project focused on building a stronger and more connected movement to fight oil & gas. Join the network discussion here.

Please join us in the ongoing Methane Rule discussion space in particular to know when EPA’s supplemental comment period opens in March.

>>> Thank you! Raina Rippel, Senior Fellow, Halt the Harm Network

Halt the Harm Network, 5335 Wisconsin Ave NW,
Suite 440, Washington, District of Columbia 20015

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See also: Federal pipeline agency shifts focus to cut methane – Mike Soraghan, E&E News, January 18, 2022

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) was given a broad new responsibility by Congress to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and the “thousands” of inquiries it’s planning to make to companies about their methane emissions this year will be some of the earliest tangible signs of that mandate. “Congress was very clear that we must not just reduce these emissions, but we must do all we can to minimize these emissions,” Tristan Brown, PHMSA’s deputy administrator, said in a speech late last year.

In late 2020, Congress ordered pipeline companies to update their inspections and maintenance plans to find ways to reduce methane emissions. It ordered PHMSA to check those plans with inspections. Meanwhile, the agency is also writing rules on methane, requiring companies to find and fix leaks. It says it’s aiming to have a proposed rule published in the Federal Register by May.