john torrison president
The Coachmen's Clubhouse
  • Club History
  • Club Home
  • Club Members
  • Listen with Bill
    • Bill's History
  • Turntable
    • TT History
  • The FlipSide
  • Picturesque!
  • Skips Corner
  • Gulliver's Travels
  • The Club Pub
    • Sucks News
  • Boardroom

The Club PUBlication  07/19/2021

7/19/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture

IS THE AMAZON FACING A CRITICAL SHIFT?
Part of the rainforest now a net emitter of carbon.
By RACHEL PANNETT Washington Post

Picture

The Amazon is emitting more carbon than it can absorb, in what scientists say is a disturbing new signal that the Earth may be reaching a tipping point on climate change.

A study recently published in the journal Nature suggests that fire and deforestation, along with warmer temperatures and markedly drier conditions, mean the world's largest rainforest is gradually losing its ability to be a carbon sink.

The impact of changes to the Amazon reach far beyond South America. For generations, the rainforest has stored an immense amount of carbon in its soil and enormous trees, playing an important role in keeping the global environment stable.

When this study shows that the carbon budget from a believed carbon sinking area is actually a source of 0.3 billion tons of carbon per year, it sounds the alarm bells, said Lucas Domingues, an environmental scientist and one of the paper's co-authors.

We need to rethink global strategies to combat climate change, speeding up actions in effective ways, added the researcher, now based at New Zealand's GNS Science institute.

Over the course of nearly a decade, the researchers used small planes to collect hundreds of air samples at up to 14,800 feet above sea level. They found that not only were carbon emissions greater in eastern parts of the Amazon than in the west, but that the southeastern area, a hot spot of deforestation, is now acting as a source of carbon emissions into the atmosphere rather than a carbon sink.
Areas with higher levels of deforestation were responsible for a carbon emission 10 times greater than preserved areas, Domingues said.

In recent years, the combination of rising temperatures, crippling wildfires and ongoing land clearing for cattle ranching and crops has extended dry seasons, killed off watersensitive vegetation and created conditions for more fire.

The number of fires in the Amazon in 2020 exceeded the total from the previous year, when the smoldering rainforest dominated news for weeks and inspired global calls for emergency action. Between August 2019 and July 2020, the Amazon lost the equivalent of two Delaware's worth of forest, the Washington Post previously reported.

The revelation that parts of the Amazon are becoming a source of emissions is not new. But previous studies were conducted with satellite data, which can be affected by cloud cover, and ground measurements of trees over a smaller area. This study is the first to use direct atmospheric measurements spanning a wide region.

The world has experienced about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since the late 19th century, according to NASA, largely because of greenhouse gas emissions.

If the Amazon and boreal forests are irreversibly damaged, it would mean you have lost control of the climate, said David Bowman, a professor of pyrogeography and fire science at Australia's University of Tasmania, who was not part of the study.

Luciana Gatti, a researcher at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research and lead author of the study, told the environment news site Mongabay: My question is, if we stop now with fires and deforestation and start the very important repair process for forests, could we reverse the picture? . . . I don't know.
0 Comments

The Club PUBlication  - Global Warming Part 4

7/12/2021

0 Comments

 

CLIMATE CHANGE 
​& 


Picture
CITIZENS OF THE PLANET/EDUCATION IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES Drought tolerant green roof garden in Los Angeles incorporates many sustainable features into its design and is a Leed certified building.
Picture
Picture


Your lifestyle


Risk:  Changing seasonal climates
Impact
: 
Tougher gardening conditions

For decades, gardeners have relied on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) plant hardiness maps to know which species can survive the winter in their region. But in 2012, the agency updated its maps to reflect a warmer world. The new map generally showed a 5-degree change in the average minimum winter temperatures across much of the country. While a longer growing season helps some — gardeners who historically were unable to grow heat-loving crops, such as watermelon and oranges, sometimes now can — the change also presents challenges.

Higher summer temperatures affect the productivity of many flowers and vegetables, while other crops need a certain number of winter chill units — measured as the number of hours between 32 and 45 degrees — to produce blossoms or fruit.

A changing climate also alters the geographic distribution of garden pests. Patty Glick, author of The Gardener's Guide to Global Warming: Challenges and Solutions, once grew bountiful roses in Seattle, but that changed when aphids moved into her garden. “I decided I wasn't going to grow roses anymore because I didn't want to spray,” she says.
​
The good news, says Glick, is that strategies to adapt gardens to climate change often help in other ways. A thick bed of mulch helps hold moisture in drought-stricken beds while preventing erosion in downpours — increasingly common extremes. It also adds organic matter to the soil, which simultaneously improves fertility and sequesters carbon.

​
​Risk:  Hotter weather and rising sea levels
Impact:  Lost travel opportunities

Time to edit our bucket lists? Destinations we long had on our “someday” travel lists — the Great Barrier Reef, Alaska's ice fields, the Taj Mahal, Antarctica — are endangered by warming temperatures, pollutants and rising seas. In 2019, Venice, Italy, experienced its highest tides in more than 50 years. At Everglades National Park, mangrove trees have been growing farther inland as the amount of freshwater marsh has been shrinking while sea levels rise. Even New York City's Lady Liberty is sweating it out. Relentless storm surges during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 left Liberty Island and nearby Ellis Island with more than $77 million in weather-related damage.

Over the past 150 years, the soft chalk that makes up the famous White Cliffs of Dover in England has been eroding 10 times faster than in the previous 7,000 years. When it was established in 1910, Montana's Glacier National Park had nearly 150 active glaciers. Now there are only about 25.
​
"Even if we don't notice these losses as travelers today,” says Nicole Sintov, assistant professor of behavior, decision-making and sustainability at Ohio State University's School of Environment and Natural Resources, “our grandchildren certainly will.”

​
Risk:  Heat and poor air quality
Impact:  Becoming housebound


​Beyond the risk to your health, climate change can affect your fitness and social life. Those who do the responsible thing and heed warnings to stay indoors on days with a high heat index or poor air quality are nonetheless missing out on regular walks, rounds of golf with friends and fishing trips with the grandkids. And it isn't even just the heat that's at play. “Any change in climate that affects weather will affect the older population most directly and keep people housebound,” says Casey J. Wichman, an environmental economist at the Georgia Institute of Technology

It's clear, too, that we are making our homes more comfortable. In Northeastern states, only about 50 percent of all new homes were built with central air-conditioning in 1975. By 2015, that figure exceeded 90 percent.
​
But this is one area of climate change that may not be all bad news. While summers are getting hotter, the flip side is that winters and shoulder seasons are milder, and that means more opportunities for cycling, hiking, fishing, camping and other outdoor pursuits on days
between 60 and 70 degrees.
​
Risk:    Shifting seasonal climates
Impact:   Birding flies away


The American robin once returned from wintering in Florida and Mexico as a harbinger of spring across the continental U.S. Now robins are spotted as far north as Alaska and New England all winter long. “People think of climate change as a future problem, but birds are the great messengers that these changes are happening now,” says Brooke Bateman, director of climate science for the National Audubon Society.

​Older Americans who are interested in bird-watching don't need binoculars to see the problems. Two-thirds of America's birds are threatened with extinction from climate change, which puts 389 of our 604 bird species on the brink — a finding Audubon calls “the fifth alarm in a five-alarm fire."

​

0 Comments

The Club PUBlication  -  Global Warming Part 3

7/5/2021

0 Comments

 

Climate change and . . . 

Picture
AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN Residents of New York's Lower East Side neighborhood escape the heat in one of the city's designated cooling centers.
Picture
Picture

Your health

Risk: Seasonal changes
Impact: More allergies and bug bites

Think your plants are blooming earlier? You're not imagining things. One of the ways the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tracks climate change is by cataloging the spring blooms of honeysuckle and lilacs across the country. The evidence shows that “earlier dates appear prevalent in the last few decades."

Earlier blooms and grass growth have two measurable health effects. The first is more pollen in the air; pollen seasons in the U.S. are, on average, 20 days longer now than in 1990 — and the air is filled with 21 percent more pollen, according to a University of Utah study published in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In counties where the pollen season was trending earlier (from 2002 to 2013), hay fever rates were 14 percent higher than in counties where spring arrived in the normal range, according to a 2019 University of Maryland study.
​

A second factor is the rise of dangerous bug bites. Cases of diseases carried by ticks, mosquitoes and fleas tripled in the United States between 2004 and 2016, according to a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC reports that the rate of Lyme disease alone doubled between 1991 and 2014, driven at least in part by climate change; disease-carrying deer ticks are most active in warmer temperatures — and their American habitat range is expanding.

​
Risk: Hotter climate
Impact: Heat-related ailments

Yes, Los Angeles is known for its dry heat. But in September 2020, L.A. County recorded its highest temperature on record — 121 degrees — a few weeks after California's Death Valley reached what might be the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth: 130 degrees. In such conditions, going outside for mere minutes is treacherous for anyone, but especially for older people.

"As we age, our physiological responses to hot temperatures — such as sweating, releasing heat through dilated blood vessels at the surface of the skin, and thirst — diminish,” says Soko Setoguchi, M.D., professor of medicine and epidemiology at Rutgers University's Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and its School of Public Health.

Heat-related illnesses and hospitalizations are increasing. Says the EPA, which surveys health data as an indicator of climate change: “Relatively high hospitalization rates in the Southeast and Midwest suggest a connection between hotter and more humid summers and increased rates of heat-related illness, compared with other regions.” Hospital admissions and emergency room visits for kidney failure, urinary tract infections and other health problems have also increased for older adults during heat waves. It appears that our medicines don't help the situation. In a 2020 study of more than 375,000 older adults with chronic health conditions, Setoguchi found that drugs such as loop diuretics, ACE inhibitors/angiotensin II receptor blockers, and antipsychotics boosted the odds of hospitalization for heat-related problems by up to 33 percent.

​Risk: Rising ozone levels
Impact: Increased lung disease

It's well known that smoking rates in America have been declining — from nearly 21 percent of adults in 2005 to 14 percent in 2019, according to the CDC. And so it would stand to reason that lung disease would also be declining. That may be true in many instances, but not for emphysema; rates of this breath-stealing ailment have remained generally steady, the American Lung Association says.

One culprit, scientists surmise, is rising levels of ground ozone, an invisible gas associated with automobile exhaust and factory emissions. The link to climate change is this: Heat and sunlight convert pollutants into ozone. (This is different from the Earth's “ozone layer,” which is 9 to 18 miles above the surface. That atmospheric ozone protects us against radiation from the sun, and is a good thing.)

In 2019, Joel Kaufman, a University of Washington physician and epidemiologist, released a study of 7,000 urban-dwelling midlife and older adults that found ozone was significantly associated with the progression of emphysema-like changes on lung scans and a decline in lung function. “I was very surprised,” says Kaufman of the lung scans that he examined. “Fractions of the pixels on the scans showed there was air where normal lung tissue should be. These emphysema-like changes in the lungs were as much in relation to outdoor ozone concentrations at people's homes as they were to smoking cigarettes."
​

Similarly, 1 in 4 Americans with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) today are nonsmokers, a 2017 CDC study found.

0 Comments

    Archives

    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018

    RSS Feed