Did you know?
Gemenids, one of the best meteor showers of 2021, happened yesterday and was observed by expecting spectators between the moon’s descent at 2 am and their local sunrise.
Night sky enthusiasts consider the Geminids along with their twin event, Perseids in the summer, as one of the most anticipated meteor showers of the year, producing potentially a hundred or more spectacular streaks per hour that shoot across the heavens.
The Geminids originate from an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon that orbits the sun every 1.4 years, scattering pieces of itself as it travels.
The broken particles create a consistent streak of burning light as they hit the Earth’s atmospehere, bedazzling lucky viewers from above. As Earth orbits towards Phaethon’s debris field, the resulting meteors all appear to originate from the Gemini constellation in the sky, hence the meteor shower’s name. Other showers originate from comets.
Economics & Environment
Hundreds of Companies Promised to Help Save Forests. Did They?
Ten years ago, some of the world’s largest companies, including Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Walmart and Mars, pledged to change their practices to help end deforestation by 2020. Some, like Nestle and Carrefour, went even further, saying they would eliminate deforestation from their supply chains altogether.
The 2020 deadline arrived, and some companies reported advances toward their goal. No company, however, could say it had eliminated forest destruction from its supply chain.
About 80% of the trees are cleared each year in the tropics to make space for growing cocoa, soybeans, palm oil and cattle that are the raw materials for chocolate, cereal, leather seats and thousands of other products. So, cutting the process off might be harder than they could have thought.
For one thing, companies have to figure out exactly where their commodities come from. Mars, for example, is one of the world’s largest users of cocoa, which it buys from suppliers like Cargill. Those suppliers buy their cocoa too, and the long chain was traced to the growers, some of whom are small farmers in Ghana and elsewhere. By the end of 2020, Mars said that it was able to trace about 43% of its cocoa to specific farms.
The company has had better luck mapping its palm-oil supply chain. When it did, it discovered that its oil came from 1,500 palm-oil mills, a number the company described as “far too complex to manage.” It has since reduced that number to 87.
If companies can’t track a commodity’s origin, they can’t be certain that it was grown without eliminating trees. The public has to keep companies accountable while they try to enact proper standards to make sustainable progress. It goes without say that governments should enact proper legislation to see differences across the entire industry.
Daily ED: United States
Media Snippets
A planet-killing comet is hurtling toward Earth, and it seems like no one cares. That’s the premise of “Don’t Look Up,” a new star-studded dark comedy directed by Adam McKay, known for his political satires including “The Big Short” and “Vice.” The fictional planetary crisis is clearly intended as a metaphor for climate change, as two desperate scientists try to get the attention of the president of the United States and her chief of staff, who suggest “we sit tight and assess.”
Elon Musk, who has a net worth of $290 billion, responded to a tweet from leader of the United Nations World Food Programme, David Beasely on Oct. 31 that claimed just 2% of Musk’s wealth would solve world hunger. “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
He responded with “$6B will not solve world hunger, but it WILL prevent geopolitical instability, mass migration and save 42 million people on the brink of starvation. An unprecedented crisis and a perfect storm due to Covid/conflict/climate crises.”
Vanessa Nakate, a climate activist from Uganda, is launching a hard conversation about climate reparations and environmental imperialism on a global stage. “It’s important to recognise that the climate crisis was caused by the global north and it is the global south that is suffering. This creates a huge responsibility that lies with the global north to take action, to give climate justice, especially for communities on the frontlines. But this conversation is a hot tea for many people.” She attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland alongside Greta Thunberg and other to advocate for her views and welfare of African countries.
Environment & Health
Temperatures Rise and Mental Health Suffers
There is an undeniable link between climate change and worsening mental health issues like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, that disproportionately affects groups like children, women, communities of color and low-income communities, according to a new report by the Mental Health and Our Changing Climate.
For example, heat waves can exacerbate existing mental health disorders like anxiety and schizophrenia, while also causing strain on mental health services.
Plus, hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires and other climate-related disasters can displace people from their homes and lead to stress that has lasting ramifications, especially in children.
The report offers several ideas for how to address climate-related mental health, at both the individual level, like creating a plan for potential climate-related emergencies, and at the community level, like fostering climate discussions and projects.
“Of course, we want to mitigate climate change. We want to stop that so that we don’t have to deal with these effects, but unfortunately, they’re going to happen most likely, so we all have to be prepared for them,” said Howard Kurtzman, a senior science advisor at the American Psychological Association.
“And in fact, one way to protect against negative mental health impacts is to be prepared because that way you feel like you have a sense of control and you’re not just paralyzed in fear or uncertainty.”
Daily ED: International
Science Snippets
Birds in the Amazon are getting smaller but have longer wingspans because of climate change, a new study found. The findings were based on a 40-year-long dataset on nonmigratory birds in the Brazilian Amazon and published this month in the journal Science Advances. All 77 bird species analyzed saw a decrease in average body mass over the study period, shrinking by as much as 1.8% per decade since 1980, while wing length increased in about one-third of the species.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Exeter examined more than 9,000 soil samples collected from around the world and found that the ability of soils to store carbon decreases as temperature increases.
That’s because rising temperatures lead to increased activity of microbes in the soil that decompose carbon-rich organic matter, generating carbon dioxide as a byproduct. More research is needed to determine the rate at which carbon will be released from warming soils to understand the time scale of these future emissions.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found a way to make a nontoxic, biodegradable alternative glitter, using particles extracted from wood pulp or cellulose nanoparticles. The nanoparticles come from plants so they are biodegradable, unlike plastic glitter. The material is white or transparent, but by altering its structure, researchers were able to change the way the particles bent light to reflect different colors. They detailed their findings in a recent paper published in the journal Nature Materials.
Climate & Science
A Drought Study Uncovers the Complexity of Climate Change
Average global temperatures have already increased by 1.1˚C compared with preindustrial levels. Scientists have said that nations need to try to prevent temperatures from rising more than 1.5 ˚C, or 2.7 ˚F, which is the threshold beyond which they say the likelihood of catastrophic fires, floods, drought, heat waves and other disasters increases dramatically. Current policies put the planet on pace for roughly 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.
World Weather Attribution initiative, an international scientific collaboration which specializes in pinpointing the links between climate change and individual weather events, performed a drought analysis study using climate projections. They concluded that human-induced climate change does not appear to be the driving cause of some draughts like the one happening in Madagascar.
It may seem counterintuitive that global warming does not contribute to a clear increase in the likelihood of drought. However, scientists have found that the relationship is not so simple.
“Drought has so many dimensions,” Dr. van Aalst said. “It’s not as straightforward as just, how much average annual rainfall do you get? The question is also, do you get it nicely distributed, or do you just get it in massive amounts at once? Do you get it in the right seasons?”
Climate change generally causes more intense rain events, but it also shifts rainfall patterns. For climate scientists, “droughts are a combination of factors that’s much more difficult to deal with” than, say, heat waves, said Piotr Wolski of the Climate System Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
“We have this predominant narrative these days that droughts are driven largely by anthropogenic climate change,” said Dr. Wolski, who also worked on the Madagascar study. “It’s not a bad narrative, because they are — it’s just not everywhere and not in every single case.”
Southern Madagascar is facing its worst drought in 40 years and experiencing drier than normal rainy seasons for the past several years, leaving more than 1.3 million people without food security and on the brink of malnutrition.
Sustainability
Europe Met a Climate Target. But Is It Burning Less Carbon?
In 2009, European Union announced an ambitious target. A three-part plan that it promised to meet by 2020, nicknamed the 20-20-20 Pledge:
The countries would reduce their emissions by 20% from 1990 levels, increase renewable energy to 20% of electricity use, and increase energy efficiency by 20%.
By the 2020 deadline, the European Union had achieved 2 of its 3 goals — an example of a major emitter achieving a climate pledge. Overall emissions were 24% lower than in 1990, and renewable energy was about 20% of its electricity use. But many climate scientists and others involved in the process question the European Union’s accounting.
An emissions trading system, the world’s most ambitious effort to put a price on polluting with carbon, was set on too low of a price to be taken seriously when it was launched in 2006. Then, in 2013, Britain set a fixed minimum price of carbon for power producers. The rest of Europe followed suit. By 2017, coal had fallen to 7% of Britain’s electricity generation from 40% in 2013.
As coal use declined across Europe, the power sector shifted to renewable sources. However, to the dismay of most scientists, the European Union chose to count biomass energy as a renewable, carbon-neutral source, akin to wind and solar.
Most biomass is wood that comes from cutting down forests and making the material into pellets. Because pellets can be burned in existing coal-fired power plants, they provide an easy, comparatively cheap way for countries to reduce their emissions — at least on paper.
The European Union and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change count carbon emissions from biomass where the trees are cut down, not where the material is burned. That means they don’t factor in the carbon footprint of processing trees into wood pellets, shipping them across the ocean or burning them for fuel.
Trees can regrow, which is why the European Union considers biomass renewable, but critics argue its true emissions impact has been underestimated. Trees planted for timber aren’t as effective as native forests at storing carbon, and it can take many years — a century, by some estimates — for newly planted forests to accumulate as much carbon as mature ones. And burning wood can be even less efficient than burning coal; it releases more carbon into the atmosphere per megawatt produced.
Europe’s renewable energy production has doubled since 2004. While solar power has grown the fastest, by 2016, biomass accounted for almost 60% of the bloc’s total renewable energy. Therefore, EU promises to revise their renewable energy policies and cut emissions 40% by 2030.