Europe’s latest heat wave has been linked to climate change | Science News

Global warming driven by human activity made the heat wave at least five times more likely.
Climate change made it five times more likely that Europe would experience a powerful heat wave like the one that baked the region in June, an international team of scientists reports.
The findings, released July 2 by the World Weather Attribution Network, tackle the tricky question of how the heat wave might have been linked to global warming (SN Online: 6/2/19). The extreme weather broke heat records in parts of Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, and set an all-time high for France of 45.9° Celsius (114.6° Fahrenheit).
Heat waves aren’t just about isolated high temperatures; the events are also defined by where, when and for how long they occur.  To identify heat wave patterns and determine if climate change played a role in the June event, the network’s scientists examined three-day averages of the average daily temperatures for France during the heat wave, and compared those to previous temperature observations as well as to climate simulations to assess the role of climate change.

SWELTERING SUMMER  Temperatures were blistering in Paris on June 26, as people sought relief from a brief but intense heat wave in the Trocadero Gardens fountain. A new study finds that climate change made the extreme temperature event at least five times more likely. XINHUA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Current climate conditions make the June heat wave in France up to 100 times more likely to occur than it would have been in 1901, the team found. It’s unclear exactly how much climate change contributed to that increased risk, due to several factors including that temperature observations began only in 1947. But the researchers say they are “very confident” that climate change increased the probability by at least a factor of five. The findings have yet to be peer reviewed.
Continue reading at: Europe’s latest heat wave has been linked to climate change | Science News

June Was So Hot, Mussels Cooked to Death in Their Shells

Last month was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, affecting vulnerable people worldwide.

The European Satellite Agency recently announced that June was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth — in fact, in California, it was so hot that mussels on rocks fried to death inside their shells.

Temperatures in Bodega Bay in northern California soared up to 75 degrees Fahrenheit and 97 degrees in San Francisco last month. And the mussels, which attach themselves to coastal rocks, were exposed to the scorching heat following many consecutive days of mid-day low tides in the area.

The animals can normally cool off and survive higher temperatures by venting the heat, but need sea breeze to carry it away. Unfortunately, the Californian shorelines witnessed no such breezes during the recent extreme heat waves, causing the mussels to die off in alarming numbers.

Brian Helmuth@Aquanaut1967

It's so hot that mussels are cooking in their shells and highways are buckling @CNN https://cnn.it/2ZWnWI2 

3

8:28 AM - Jul 2, 2019

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It's so hot that mussels are cooking in their shells and highways are buckling

Mussels are frying to death along the shores of northern California.

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Continue reading at: June Was So Hot, Mussels Cooked to Death in Their Shells

Jane Goodall Talks Green New Deal, Tarzan, and Avoiding the Impossible Burger

Fifty-nine years ago, Jane Goodall, an animal lover with no formal academic training, traveled to Gombe, Tanzania, to observe chimpanzees for famed anthropologist Louis Leakey. Within months, the 26-year-old witnessed a chimp extracting termites from a mound using long blades of grass, upending mankind’s very understanding of itself: Humans were no longer the only species to make tools, no longer unequivocally superior. She went on to discover that chimps,like humans, have complex social and familial hierarchies, sharp intelligence, and deep-seated wells of emotion. Goodall has spent the rest of her life devoted to conserving the world they live in, one that’s disappearing due to climate change and the interests of big business. “What we’re doing to the planet is shocking and irresponsible, and it’s all done for making money,” she says. “We’ve got to understand we need money to live, but it goes wrong when we live for money.” At 85, the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace travels over 300 days a year, spreading the gospel of conservation. She spoke to ELLE from the institute’s U.S. headquarters in Washington, DC.

MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER BROWN
The kind of slow and steady observation you did for years contrasts so much with the fast-paced, technologically driven world we live in. Growing up today, would your story have been the same?
I think my story would have been very different. Screens, in a way, are killing us. I’d hesitate to say whether they totally stifle imagination, but they certainly would have stifled
mine. I read Tarzan when I was 10 and fell in love with him, and that’s what triggered my dream of going to Africa and living with wild animals. My mother saved up to take me to an early Johnny Weissmuller film, and after about 10 minutes, I burst into tears. I told her, “But that wasn’t Tarzan!” My imagination had created my own picture of Tarzan, and that’s something that the modern world certainly prevents children from doing.
Continue reading at: Jane Goodall Talks Green New Deal, Tarzan, and Avoiding the Impossible Burger

If Climate Change Doesn't Kill Me, My Anxiety About It Will

How the earth's devastation is burrowing into our psyches.
Ever since I could read, my time-honored method of dealing with any kind of uncertainty has been to flood the zone with data. Terrifying-seeming symptom? Hit the CDC website to convince myself it’s probably not an aneurysm in progress. Unfamiliar destination? Learn so much about the terrain that I could double as a local travel guide. But one patch of my anxiety quilt has gone unassuaged by this information-seeking compulsion, and that’s climate change. I’ve probably read more about the topic than anyone who doesn’t need to for her job. And with every article I read, book I devour, or haunting image of an emaciated polar bear or trash-gorged whale I see, I sink deeper into the quicksand of hopelessness.

VICKI KING
Then there’s the never-ending soundtrack that is my inner monologue: Am I abetting the decline of my own civilization? Sure, I recycle, I don’t buy throwaway fashion, I call my representatives, but I’m a part of an industry (fashion) known for stoking a demand for more, more, more, even as my own habits tend toward self-abnegation. I’m incalculably lucky that my day-to-day life hasn’t been affected by climate change in the way that so many others have. But the fact that the threat is more abstract only makes the black hole seem more menacing. When will it swallow me, my hypothetical kids, and my even-more-hypothetical grandkids?
Continue reading at: If Climate Change Doesn't Kill Me, My Anxiety About It Will

June was the hottest ever recorded on Earth

Experts say climate change contributed to record-breaking temperatures across Europe
Last month was the hottest June ever recorded, the EU‘s satellite agency has announced.
Data provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the EU, showed that the global average temperature for June 2019 was the highest on record for the month.
The data showed European average ​temperatures were more than 2C above normal and temperatures were 6-10C above normal over most of France, Germany and northern Spain during the final days of the month, according to C3S.

A German Police helicopter pours water over a forest fire near Lieberoser Heide in Germany on 25 June. Reuters
The global average temperature was about 0.1C higher than during the previous warmest June in 2016.
Experts have said climate change made last week’s record-breaking European heatwave at least five times as likely to happen, according to recent analysis.
Continue reading at: June was the hottest ever recorded on Earth

Polluters Bear No Responsibility While Michigan’s Water and Communities Suffer - Michigan Currents -- June 2019 | Clean Water Action

In Antrim County, an estimated 13 trillion gallons of groundwater are contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE). As of 2016, the state has already spent more than $20 million on remediation and clean water access efforts in the County.
In 1985, the toxic chemical dioxane was discovered in residential drinking water wells in Washtenaw County. The plume is still there to this day, with the threat of the plume reaching drinking water sources growing more ominous everyday.

Michigan taxpayers’ money is funding the ongoing cleanup efforts at these polluted sites because state law makes it very difficult to hold those polluters who caused the contamination accountable. As of 1995, the state has to prove in court that a company is liable for contamination before they are required to spend any money on cleaning up the mess they created. We must put healthy communities and a clean environment ahead of corporate interests and make polluters pay again.
One of the fastest growing concerns regarding water contamination is PFAS, a class of thousands of chemicals that are harmful in very small amounts. As of May 2019, Michigan has identified more PFAS contaminated sites than any other state in the nation. From Gwinn to Rockford to Howard Township, we are finding new sites all the time.
Continue reading at: Polluters Bear No Responsibility While Michigan’s Water and Communities Suffer - Michigan Currents -- June 2019 | Clean Water Action

UNEP Previews Global Resources Outlook 2019 | News | SDG Knowledge Hub | IISD

The Global Resources Outlook 2019 analyzes the demographic and socioeconomic forces driving the extraction and use of natural resources globally, and reports on how these drivers and pressures have determined our current state.
The report assesses the environmental and well-being impacts, and considers the distribution and intensity of the environmental and human health impacts resulting from the changing state of our environment.

It concludes that decoupling of natural resource use and environmental impacts from economic activity and human well-being is an essential element in the transition to a sustainable future.

An average person living in a high-income country consumes over 13 times what is consumed by someone in a low-income country.

• The use of natural resources has more than tripled from 1970, and continues to grow; 
• Historical and current patterns of natural resource use are resulting in increasingly negative impacts on the environment and human health;
• The use of natural resources and related benefits and environmental impacts are unevenly distributed across countries and regions;
• In the absence of urgent and concerted action, rapid growth and inefficient use of natural resources will continue to create unsustainable pressures on the environment;
• The decoupling of natural resource use and environmental impacts from economic activity and human well-being is an essential element in the transition to a sustainable future;
• Achieving decoupling is possible and can deliver substantial social and environmental benefits, including repair of past environmental damage, while also supporting economic growth and human well-being;
• Policymakers and decision makers have tools at their disposal to advance worthwhile change, including transformational change at local, national and global scales; and
• International exchanges and cooperation can make important contributions to achieving systemic change.

Continue reading at: UNEP Previews Global Resources Outlook 2019 | News | SDG Knowledge Hub | IISD