Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[viper37]

More good news on the climate front
A world without clouds?

[Syt]

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/07/asia/russia-kamchatka-toxic-marine-life-death-intl/index.html

A suspected toxic spill in Russia's Far East has killed 95% of marine life on the seabed

(CNN)A suspected toxic spill along a beach on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula has killed 95% of marine life on the surrounding seabed, local scientists have said, following a weeks-long campaign to investigate the mysterious incident.

Local surfers were the first to spot that something was wrong at Khalaktyr beach after about 20 people in a surf camp experienced severe retina burns and symptoms similar to food poisoning.

In early September, the water changed color to a greyish-yellow, with a thick milky foam on the surface, and a strong foul smell filled the air. A few days later, octopuses, seals and other sea creatures began to wash up on the beach.

The local authorities at first dismissed the reports. But amid mounting pressure, Russia's Investigative Committee Wednesday launched a criminal probe into suspected violations in the use of environmentally hazardous substances and waste and marine pollution.

In a meeting with Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov, local scientists reported that the majority of marine life on the seabed was dead.

"On the shore, we did not find any large dead sea animals or birds," scientist Ivan Usatov said according to a report posted on the governor's official website. "However, when diving, we found that there is a mass death of benthos [bottom-dwelling organisms] at depths from 10 to 15 meters -- 95% are dead. Some large fish, shrimps and crabs have survived, but in very small numbers."

The scientists said they believe the contaminated area is much larger than the parts they examined and that the remaining marine life is under threat due to lack of any sustenance left for them to survive on.

A photographer who participated in the underwater expedition with the scientists also experienced a retina burn, the report added.

The findings concur with earlier accounts from locals posted on social media.

"Our guys went diving and they came back to surface with tears on their eyes! The entire seabed was full of dead animals' corpses," a local tour guide Kristina Rozenberg wrote on her Instagram page. "All of our underwater beauty is of gray and yellow colors, the fish looks like they've been boiling in hot water... and this is all happening just 200 meters away from the house I live in."

Initially, Kamchatka's Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology insisted there was no such issue, saying the color of the water and the smell was normal in the area and that "nothing abnormal" had been recorded.

That statement drew a social media backlash, which gained more traction after a post from a prominent YouTuber Yury Dud, featuring drone shots of a dark layer on the surface of the water and dozens of dead animals on the shore, went viral.

It is still unclear what caused the contamination. Initial probes showed that levels of phenol, a substance often used as antiseptic or disinfectant, were 2.5 times higher than normal, and petroleum levels 3.6 times higher. Local media outlets have speculated about a possible oil tanker leak or military drills gone wrong, which the Defense Ministry denied.

"The investigators are checking all possible sources of pollution, including the territories of landfills adjacent to the Avachinsky Bay and the coastal strip of Khalaktyr where toxic chemicals are stored," the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

The Russian branch of Greenpeace pointed to a nearby toxic waste dump as a possible source of the leak. Kamchatka officials revealed Tuesday that the perimeter at Kozelsky site, which stores over 100 tons of toxic substances, including pesticides, had been breached.

The Kamchatka governor insisted Wednesday that the area would be recultivated "no matter what."

This is the latest in a string of ecological disasters Russia has seen in recent years, coming four months after 20,000 tons of fuel from a damaged tank poured into a nearby river in the Siberian city of Norilsk.

[Duque de Bragança]

No more Kamchatka crab for a while? 

[viper37]

No more Kamchatka crab for a while? 

not a huge loss

btw, Quebec&Canada produce crab, and with our wonderful economic treaty, I'm sure our fishermens would gladly ship a few tons your way

[merithyn]

You've got to be kidding me....

Friends said there were a few fires back in Illinois. Half the state is on a fire watch, with multiple fires in fields from Galesburg to south of Effingham. (That's roughly 300 miles.)

UPDATE 9:19 P.M. -- The National Weather Service says peak winds over the last 12 hours reached 43 miles per hour at the Peoria Airport and 45 miles per hour at the Central Illinois Regional Airport.

The highest wind speeds were seen at the Willard Airport in Champaign County at 49 miles per hour.

(WEEK) -- Central Illinois saw multiple field and brush fires reported Wednesday.

The National Weather Service at Lincoln issued a Red Flag Warning for much of the area until 7 p.m -- meaning critical fire conditions are occurring or will occur. Low humidity and winds up to 20-30 miles per hour are expected.

The NWS as of 2:59 p.m. also reports several fires have developed and have gotten out of control.

High winds have knocked down a utility pole in the northwest area of Peoria on Southport Road that caused a brush fire.

Limestone Fire Chief Larry Gilmore says a utility pole was blown over and a loose wire sparked a fire.

The incident happened at about 3:20 p.m. Wednesday in the 3900 block of Southport Road.

A Peoria city official said the westbound lanes were blocked, but are now open as of 4:30 p.m.

In Tazewell County, roughly 12 fire departments are responding to a field fire near Delavan and Green Valley, according to the Tazewell County Consolidated Communications Center.

Delavan Fire Chief Rodney Ashby said the fire was contained as of 5:28 p.m., which was a combine that caught on fire south of Toboggan Avenue.

"With the high wind that we have today, it did jump Toboggan and Fisher road and continued north," Ashby said.

Ashby added with smoke blowing across the roadways, visibility was poor, causing a multiple vehicle accident.

"A couple of vehicles trying to drive through the smoke on before we were able to get the road shut down all the way there was an accident," Ashby said.

No injuries were reported, but one firefighter was getting checked out for smoke inhalation.

TazCom also says a house fire in Pekin in the 1400 block of Mechanic is being reported due to a power line.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Did you piss off Surtr?

[merithyn]

Did you piss off Surtr?

I mean, I did recently kill a Fire Giant in my Scion game.

[mongers]

Is this still even a thing, what with politicking over Coronavirus and Trump's twitter feed tacking centre stage?

[Valmy]

The fires? Yes. Yes they are.

Fortunately snow is coming to the Rockies which I hope puts an end to this at least for this year.

[crazy canuck]

Yep, unfortunately California still not out of danger.  New fire started today.  22 wildfires still burning

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/us/california-wildfires-pge-outages.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

[PDH]

Normally the rainy season here in CA doesn't start for a few more weeks.  As it is this year, we are likely going to see no rain.

[Syt]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-giant-arctic-methane-deposits-starting-to-release-scientists-find?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

'Sleeping giant' Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find

Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the "sleeping giants of the carbon cycle" – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal.

High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating.

The slope sediments in the Arctic contain a huge quantity of frozen methane and other gases – known as hydrates. Methane has a warming effect 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years. The United States Geological Survey has previously listed Arctic hydrate destabilisation as one of four most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change.

The international team onboard the Russian research ship R/V Akademik Keldysh said most of the bubbles were currently dissolving in the water but methane levels at the surface were four to eight times what would normally be expected and this was venting into the atmosphere.

"At this moment, there is unlikely to be any major impact on global warming, but the point is that this process has now been triggered. This East Siberian slope methane hydrate system has been perturbed and the process will be ongoing," said the Swedish scientist Örjan Gustafsson, of Stockholm University, in a satellite call from the vessel.

The scientists – who are part of a multi-year International Shelf Study Expedition – stressed their findings were preliminary. The scale of methane releases will not be confirmed until they return, analyse the data and have their studies published in a peer-reviewed journal.

But the discovery of potentially destabilised slope frozen methane raises concerns that a new tipping point has been reached that could increase the speed of global heating.

The Arctic is considered ground zero in the debate about the vulnerability of frozen methane deposits in the ocean.

With the Arctic temperature now rising more than twice as fast as the global average, the question of when – or even whether – they will be released into the atmosphere has been a matter of considerable uncertainty in climate computer models.

The 60-member team on the Akademik Keldysh believe they are the first to observationally confirm the methane release is already under way across a wide area of the slope about 600km offshore.

At six monitoring points over a slope area 150km in length and 10km wide, they saw clouds of bubbles released from sediment.

At one location on the Laptev Sea slope at a depth of about 300 metres they found methane concentrations of up to 1,600 nanomoles per litre, which is 400 times higher than would be expected if the sea and the atmosphere were in equilibrium.

Igor Semiletov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is the chief scientist onboard, said the discharges were "significantly larger" than anything found before. "The discovery of actively releasing shelf slope hydrates is very important and unknown until now," he said. "This is a new page. Potentially they can have serious climate consequences, but we need more study before we can confirm that."

The most likely cause of the instability is an intrusion of warm Atlantic currents into the east Arctic. This "Atlantification" is driven by human-induced climate disruption.

The latest discovery potentially marks the third source of methane emissions from the region. Semiletov, who has been studying this area for two decades, has previously reported the gas is being released from the shelf of the Arctic – the biggest of any sea.

For the second year in a row, his team have found crater-like pockmarks in the shallower parts of the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea that are discharging bubble jets of methane, which is reaching the sea surface at levels tens to hundreds of times higher than normal. This is similar to the craters and sinkholes reported from inland Siberian tundra earlier this autumn.

Temperatures in Siberia were 5C higher than average from January to June this year, an anomaly that was made at least 600 times more likely by human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. Last winter's sea ice melted unusually early. This winter's freeze has yet to begin, already a later start than at any time on record.

Article on the Siberian sinkholes here: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/04/world/craters-tundra-siberia-trnd-scn/index.html

[The Brain]

False positive triggered by an event in Alaska?

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/17/people-cause-global-aviation-emissions-study-covid-19

1% of people cause half of global aviation emissions – study

Frequent-flying "'super emitters" who represent just 1% of the world's population caused half of aviation's carbon emissions in 2018, according to a study.

Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated. The analysis draws together data to give the clearest global picture of the impact of frequent fliers.

Only 11% of the world's population took a flight in 2018 and 4% flew abroad. US air passengers have by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. Its aviation emissions are bigger than the next 10 countries combined, including the UK, Japan, Germany and Australia, the study reports.

The researchers said the study showed that an elite group enjoying frequent flights had a big impact on the climate crisis that affected everyone.

They said the 50% drop in passenger numbers in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic should be an opportunity to make the aviation industry fairer and more sustainable. This could be done by putting green conditions on the huge bailouts governments were giving the industry, as had happened in France.

Global aviation's contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18. Flight numbers in 2020 have fallen by half but the industry expects to return to previous levels by 2024.

"If you want to resolve climate change and we need to redesign [aviation], then we should start at the top, where a few 'super emitters' contribute massively to global warming," said Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, who led the new study.

"The rich have had far too much freedom to design the planet according to their wishes. We should see the crisis as an opportunity to slim the air transport system."

Dan Rutherford, at the International Council on Clean Transportation and not part of the research team, said the analysis raised the question of equality.

"The benefits of aviation are more inequitably shared across the world than probably any other major emission source," he said. "So there's a clear risk that the special treatment enjoyed by airlines just protects the economic interests of the globally wealthy."

The frequent flyers identified in the study travelled about 35,000 miles (56,000km) a year, Gössling said, equivalent to three long-haul flights a year, one short-haul flight per month, or some combination of the two.

The research, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, collated a range of data and found large proportions of people in every country did not fly at all each year – 53% in the US, 65% in Germany and 66% in Taiwan. In the UK, separate data shows 48% of people did not fly abroad in 2018.

The analysis showed the US produced the most emissions among rich nations. China was the biggest among other countries but it does not make data available. However, Gössling thinks its aviation footprint is probably only a fifth of that of the US.

On average, North Americans flew 50 times more kilometres than Africans in 2018, 10 times more than those in the Asia-Pacific region and 7.5 times more than Latin Americans. Europeans and those in the Middle East flew 25 times further than Africans and five times more than Asians.

The data also showed a large growth in international flights from 1990-2017, with numbers tripling from Australia and doubling from the UK.

...

[Richard Hakluyt]

According to the ICAO there were about 8,000 billion passenger-kilometres travelled last year. If the article is correct and the climate damage is about $100bn then a levy of 1.25 cents per kilometre would cover that. I don't think that such a levy would stop any but the most frivolous air travel, a return flight from London to New York would cost $140 more for example. The problem would be spending the money raised on effective climate change mitigation.

I would welcome such a charge as it would enable me to fly with a clearer conscience; Filipino migrant workers might not be so keen though.

One should also note that passenger jets usually also have high-value freight in their holds; some part of the cost could be charged there.