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Overnight News Digest: Thousands of emperor penguin chicks drown as ice vanishes from climate change [1]

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Date: 2023-08-24  

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British Antarctic Survey

Emperor penguin colonies experienced unprecedented breeding failure in a region of Antarctica where there was total sea ice loss in 2022. The discovery supports predictions that over 90% of emperor penguin colonies will be quasi-extinct by the end of the century, based on current global warming trends. In a new study published today in Communications Earth & Environment, researchers from British Antarctic Survey discussed the high probability that no chicks had survived from four of the five known emperor penguin colonies in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea. The scientists examined satellite images that showed the loss of sea ice at breeding sites, well before chicks would have developed waterproof feathers.

BBC News

A catastrophic die-off of emperor penguin chicks has been observed in the Antarctic, with up to 10,000 young birds estimated to have been killed. The sea-ice underneath the chicks melted and broke apart before they could develop the waterproof feathers needed to swim in the ocean. The birds most likely drowned or froze to death. The event, in late 2022, occurred in the west of the continent in an area fronting on to the Bellingshausen Sea. It was recorded by satellites. Dr Peter Fretwell, from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said the wipeout was a harbinger of things to come.

Medium via Archive Today

[…] We will keep ratcheting up the heat as long as we continue dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Only when we finally stop burning fossil fuels (or somehow magically neutralize their emissions) will we stop adding to the human-caused heating of the planet. What is easy to forget with all the cacophony and politicization around climate change today is this: We completely control when and at what level human-caused global heating will stabilize. It will never stop increasing until we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere. And when that happens, either voluntarily (via policy choice) or involuntarily (via climate disasters and resource depletion), it will determine the planet’s climate for the next several thousand years. So when the IPCC says we must reduce CO2 emissions by 43% by 2030, it is saying, in effect, “this is what you must do to have any chance of limiting human-caused global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures”. At the same time the IPCC is telling us we must do this, it is also telling us we’re not doing this. Not even close.

The Nation

[…] When do we know that a civilization is on the verge of collapse? In his now almost 20-year-old classic, [Jared] Diamond identified three key indicators or precursors of imminent dissolution: a persistent pattern of environmental change for the worse like long-lasting droughts; signs that existing modes of agriculture or industrial production were aggravating the crisis; and an elite failure to abandon harmful practices and adopt new means of production. At some point, a critical threshold is crossed and collapse invariably follows. Today, it’s hard to avoid indications that all three of those thresholds are being crossed. […] Finally, today’s powerful elites are choosing to perpetuate practices known to accelerate climate change and global devastation. Among the most egregious, the decision of top executives of the ExxonMobil Corporation—the world’s largest and wealthiest privately-owned oil company—to continue pumping oil and gas for endless decades after their scientists warned them about the risks of global warming and affirmed that Exxon’s operations would only amplify them. As early as the 1970s, Exxon’s scientists predicted that the firm’s fossil-fuel products could lead to global warming with “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.” Yet, as has been well documented, Exxon officials responded by investing company funds in casting doubt on climate change research, even financing think tanks focused on climate denialism. Had they instead broadcast their scientists’ findings and worked to speed the transition to alternative fuels, the world would be in a far less precarious position today.

ABC News

The world’s corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for it, according to a study by economists of nearly 15,000 public companies. The “corporate carbon damages” from those publicly owned companies analyzed — a fraction of all the corporations — probably runs in the trillions of dollars globally and in the hundreds of billions for American firms, one of the study authors estimated in figures that were not part of the published research. That's based on the cost of carbon dioxide pollution that the United States government has proposed. Nearly 90% of that calculated damage comes from four industries: energy, utilities, transportation and manufacturing of materials such as steel. The study in Thursday’s journal Science by a team of economists and finance professors looks at what new government efforts to get companies to report their emissions of heat-trapping gases would mean, both to the firm’s bottom lines and the world’s ecological health.

The Guardian

Fossil fuels benefited from record subsidies of $13m (£10.3m) a minute in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund, despite being the primary cause of the climate crisis. The IMF analysis found the total subsidies for oil, gas and coal in 2022 were $7tn (£5.5tn). That is equivalent to 7% of global GDP and almost double what the world spends on education. Countries have pledged to phase out subsidies for years to ensure the price of fossil fuels reflects their true environmental costs, but have achieved little to date. Explicit subsidies, which cut the price of fuels for consumers, doubled in 2022 as countries responded to the higher energy prices resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Rich households benefited far more from these than poor ones, the IMF said. Implicit subsidies, which represent the “enormous” costs of the damage caused by fossil fuels through climate change and air pollution, made up 80% of the total.

NASA

On Thursday, NASA released the first data maps from its new instrument launched to space earlier this year, which now is successfully transmitting information about major air pollutants over North America. President Biden and Vice President Harris believe that all people have a right to breathe clean air. Data from the TEMPO mission will help decision makers across the country achieve that goal and support the Biden Administration’s climate agenda — the most robust climate agenda in history. From its orbit 22,000 miles above the equator, NASA’s TEMPO, or Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is the first space-based instrument designed to continuously measure air quality above North America with the resolution of a few square miles. “Neighborhoods and communities across the country will benefit from TEMPO’s game-changing data for decades to come," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "This summer, millions of Americans felt firsthand the effect of smoke from forest fires on our health. NASA and the Biden-Harris Administration are committed to making it easier for everyday Americans and decisionmakers to access and use TEMPO data to monitor and improve the quality of the air we breathe, benefitting life here on Earth.”

ABC News (Australia)

[…] Canada’s 2023 fire season has smashed all records. Almost 6,000 individual fires have broken out all over the country. Fifteen million hectares of forest — an area more than twice the size of Tasmania — has been charred. Smoke from the fires has created apocalyptic images as far afield as New York and has even drifted into western Europe. “By far, it’s the worst forest fires in [Canada’s] recorded history,” says Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change. The culprit is undisputed. “The link to climate change is very clear.” […] Canada is no stranger to fire, but this year is exceptional. Never before have so many fires burned across so many provinces. The season started unusually early and has maintained an unprecedented level of intensity throughout. Across the country, around 200,000 people have been forced to flee their homes. Just last Friday, Yellowknife, the capital city of Northwest Territories, was evacuated. The same day, the entire province of British Columbia was put in a state of emergency.

The Verge

Disasters have no borders, and a summer of unexpected catastrophe across the US shows it. California is notorious for drought and fire, not tropical storms like Hilary that barreled over Los Angeles this week. The East Coast expects hurricanes, not the pollution nightmare triggered by smoke that drifted in from blazes hundreds of miles away. Hawaii’s native greenery isn’t supposed to burn, and yet fires engulfed Maui. Climate change is sending new calamities to new places — a phenomenon that can be observed not just in the US but all over the world. It’s piling disaster upon disaster on communities figuring out how to adapt to these new realities. Often, they’re faced with some new crisis while still recovering from a previous one. “We see increasing magnitude of certain types of disasters. We see increasing socioeconomic impact from disasters. We’re also seeing disasters in places where we don’t usually see certain types of disasters, and different types of disasters interacting with one another,” says Andrew Kruczkiewicz, senior staff associate at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia Climate School.

Jacobin

As historic wildfires tore through the town of Lāhainā last week, claiming more than 115 lives and uprooting thousands more while leaving the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom in ashes, speculators were already circling like vultures. Days after the blaze began, survivors started reporting cold calls from out-of-state investors hoping to scoop up their property for bargain bin prices. On one Facebook thread, several Maui realtors described receiving similar calls. One of them told Jacobin that he received a call on August 9, just one day after the fires began. Like most locals in the close-knit Maui community, the realtor was disgusted by the opportunism.“It’s been bottom-feeders calling us, asking about what kinds of lands we have available,” he said. “This is not the time. It’s unfathomable what people are going through with loss of life, that they would be calling. But I guess that’s America.”

As Europe and other regions swelter, a UN researcher cautioned that climate change was enabling increasingly intense and long-lasting heat waves, which in some areas could soon begin to hit year-round. Extreme heat has dominated the headlines in recent weeks, from the current "heat dome" cooking much of Europe, to heat-fueled wildfires raging in Greece, Spain, Canada and Hawaii, and soaring temperatures in the middle of the South American winter. Heat waves are beginning earlier, lasting longer and becoming more intense, John Nairn, a senior extreme heat advisor at the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO), told AFP in an interview. "It's the most rapidly emerging consequence of global warming that we are seeing in the weather systems," he said, stressing that this was in line with scientific predictions. "People are far too relaxed about the signs," he said.

ABC News (Australia)

El Niño and La Niña events could last for up to two or three years in the future, according to new international research. An international team of scientists has found that changes to the Pacific Walker Circulation (PWC) — shifts in atmospheric patterns above the Pacific Ocean — have implications for weather events. El Niño periods are often marked by severe bushfires and drought in Australia, while La Niña typically brings with it wetter conditions, include flooding. ANU College of Science postdoctoral fellow Georgy Falster, who became involved in the research at Washington University in St Louis before returning to Australia, said we could expect to see slower transitions between La Niña and El Niño. She said it was clear that climate change was a factor in the shift. "The circulation of the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean has changed," Dr Falster said.

BBC News

A cargo ship fitted with giant, rigid British-designed sails has set out on its maiden voyage. Shipping firm Cargill, which has chartered the vessel, hopes the technology will help the industry chart a course towards a greener future. The WindWings sails are designed to cut fuel consumption and therefore shipping's carbon footprint. It is estimated the industry is responsible for about 2.1% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The Pyxis Ocean's maiden journey, from China to Brazil, will provide the first real-world test of the WindWings - and an opportunity to assess whether a return to the traditional way of propelling ships could be the way forward for moving cargo at sea.

The Guardian

Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets. Amid growing evidence that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating and can sometimes be linked to alleged human rights concerns, there is a growing pile of carbon credits equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth largest polluter, that are unused in the unregulated voluntary market, according to market analysis. […] In the US, the derivatives market regulator has issued a whistleblower alert relating to fraud and misconduct in carbon markets and has created a new environmental fraud taskforce.

Nature

Luciana Gatti stares grimly out of the window of the small aircraft as it takes off from the city of Santarém, Brazil, in the heart of the eastern Amazon forest. Minutes into the flight, the plane passes over a 30-kilometre stretch of near-total ecological devastation. It’s a patchwork of farmland, filled with emerald-green corn stalks and newly clear-cut plots where the rainforest once stood. “This is awful. So sad,” says Gatti, a climate scientist at the National Institute for Space Research in São José dos Campos, Brazil. Gatti is part of a broad group of scientists attempting to forecast the future of the Amazon rainforest. The land ecosystems of the world together absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels; scientists think that most of this takes place in forests, and the Amazon is by far the world’s largest contiguous forest.

Live Science

Climate change could be gradually making the world's tropical rainforests too hot for photosynthesis to occur, and it may eventually trigger their collapse, a new study has warned. Using data collected from the International Space Station (ISS), scientists found that a small yet growing percentage of tree leaves in tropical forests are approaching the maximum temperature threshold for leaves to photosynthesize. The average critical temperature beyond which photosynthetic machinery in tropical trees begins to fail is 116 degrees Fahrenheit (46.7 degrees Celsius). Currently, only 0.01 % of all leaves surpass this critical temperature every year. But scientists warn that air temperature rises of 7.2 F (4 C) could push trees in tropical forests beyond a tipping point and into mass death.

E&E News

Eight locations along the nation’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts experienced a record surge in high-tide flooding days last year, a trend intensified by rising sea levels and weather patterns that El Niño is expected to escalate in 2024, NOAA said Tuesday. Coastal communities are expected to face three times as many high-tide, or “sunny day,” flooding instances through next April, compared to two decades ago, agency officials said in a press call. “Increased high-tide flooding is not isolated to a few regions but is accelerating in many locations across the country due to sea-level rise,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, assistant administrator for NOAA’s National Ocean Service. “A new factor in the mix this year is the strengthening of El Niño conditions that are predicted to further amplify high-tide flooding frequencies at more than a third of NOAA’s tide gauge locations in the East and West coasts.” Particularly susceptible are the mid-Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts, where El Niño conditions are likely to compound the effects of rising seas.

The New York Times

It was an unusual litmus test for a Republican primary debate, one that quickly descended into personal attacks and obfuscation: The candidates were asked whether humans had contributed to climate change. There is no scientific dispute that the answer is yes, but hardly any of the Republican candidates gave a straight answer.

Los Angeles Times

At the beginning of this month, as a thermal dome pushed temperatures in parts of the Middle East past 122 degrees, Iran ordered a two-day shutdown of schools, banks and public institutions, which helped relieve the burden on the nation’s faltering power grid. Authorities in Iraq did much the same in the country’s sizzling southern regions a few days later, while Jordan, where such shutdowns are rare, decreed work stoppages during peak heat hours. Last week, Egypt told public employees to work from home one day a week until September. The government has rationed electricity since July, with rolling blackouts that have left many Egyptians sweaty and frustrated.

The Kyiv Independent

Ukraine will not allow its independence to be torn apart, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech in Kyiv on Aug. 24, marking 32 years of Ukrainian statehood. While there have been many attempts throughout history to divide the country, Zelensky said, there has not been a single day since the start of the full-scale invasion that Ukraine lacked unity. Ukrainians know what they are capable of, while also remembering what their ancestors went through, he added. Zelensky highlighted that while the majority of the world stands with Ukraine, it is important that Ukraine is able to defend itself. This defense has a wider impact, he said. Thanks to Ukraine's soldiers, "our country already guarantees common European security."

Euronews

The apparent assassination of the Wagner chief marks just another turn in Putin's effort to shore himself up, but it won't change the disastrous trajectory of the Ukrainian war. Reports that Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has been killed in a plane crash immediately raised suspicions that he had been assassinated by the Kremlin. Having publicly criticised the Russian military's dire performance in Ukraine, Prigozhin then led a brief mutiny against the Russian government earlier in the summer. That event was defused by a deal with Vladimir Putin's government under which he would relocate to Belarus in exchange for the lifting of criminal charges against him.

Deutsche Welle

Japan began the release of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant on Thursday, facility operator TEPCO said. The process of pumping treated water into the Pacific Ocean through a special kilometer-long tunnel was started despite opposition from fishermen, environmentalists and China. An earthquake and tsunami caused core meltdowns at the plant in 2011. Since then, the shut-down reactors have had to be cooled with water that was then stored in tanks. However, according to TEPCO, capacity is running out. […] Japan has said that it will discharge at most 500,000 liters per day, with the release of the water planned to take some 30 years to complete.

The Seattle Times

The death of Tokitae the southern resident orca on Friday in Miami was a shock to those who had been working to return her to her home waters of the Pacific Northwest, after 53 years in captivity. And the shocks would continue as a necropsy got underway just hours after the whale’s death. Tokitae’s body was trucked that evening from Florida to the University of Georgia where it was cut into pieces and placed in 20 50-gallon barrels, and the larger bones put in bins with the goal of using them to make castings for multiple displays of her skeleton. Incineration of the remains would have been the next step. But on Saturday morning the office of U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., had tried to slow down the process and requested the body be kept as intact as possible to respect the wishes of the Lummi Nation, said Ansley Lacitis, spokesperson and deputy chief of staff for the senator. “It all happened very quickly; there are still some questions that need to be answered,” said Tony Hillaire, chairman of the Lummi Nation, which has worked for decades to return Tokitae to her home waters. “It was a shock we were not consulted.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Atlanta witnessed history Thursday as […] Donald Trump was booked into the Fulton County Jail on charges that he engineered a vast conspiracy with 18 allies to overturn his 2020 election defeat in Georgia. […] Trump appeared only briefly in the jail before he was released on a $200,000 bond that his former attorneys and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis agreed on last week. […] Minutes after his plane took off, his mug shot was released by the sheriff’s office, an image of a scowling Trump peering at the lens. It was Trump’s fourth booking on criminal charges this year, and in some sense it … has become a hauntingly familiar site.

CNBC

A Georgia judge on Thursday scheduled the first trial for a co-defendant of […] Donald Trump for criminally interfering in the state's 2020 election to begin on Oct. 23. The co-defendant, Kenneth Chesebro, on Wednesday had filed a demand for a speedy trial in the case in Atlanta. Earlier Thursday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, responded to that request by asking a a judge to set Oct. 23 as the trial date for Trump, Chesebro and the other 17 defendants. […] Chesebro, Trump and the other defendants were indicted by a grand jury on Aug. 14. Prosecutors accuse the defendants of a wide-ranging criminal enterprise that intended to use several strategies to reverse Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Citizens for Ethics

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