Earth Wise

By Randy SimonScience Education Self-Improvement Natural Sciences Nature

Earth Wise episodes

March 15, 2019 The Changing Face of Electricity
The New York Times recently published an article on how electricity is made in the United States on a state-by-state basis and how it has been changing over the past two decades. Two conclusions to draw are that the mix of energy sources is wildly different from one state to another and that the mix has been changing rather dramatically in many places.
Overall, the past two decades have seen the dramatic rise in the use
of natural gas and a dramatic drop in the use of coal. Coal plants used to account for over half of
the electricity produced in the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century. Now natural gas has passed coal as the
largest energy source at roughly 1/3 of the total generated.
Switching from coal to natural gas is a good thing since modern gas
power plants emit only about half the carbon dioxide as modern coal
plants. But industry spin about “clean
gas” is just spin. Gas is not really
clean; it is just cleaner than coal. So,
having the electric grid powered by gas is not really going to solve our
emissions problems.
That being said, there are still states that make nearly all their
electricity with coal. Indiana,
Kentucky, Missouri, Utah, Wyoming, and West Virginia are on that list. Meanwhile, Delaware, Massachusetts,
Mississippi, Nevada, and Rhode Island are powered mostly by gas. Idaho, Oregon,
Washington, and Vermont rely heavily on hydropower.
Newer renewables like solar and wind are starting to make major
contributions in many states. Wind
contributes only 6% nationwide but is much bigger in places like Iowa, Kansas,
Minnesota, the Dakotas, Oklahoma and Texas.
The face of electricity continues to change.
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Web Links
How Does Your State Make Electricity?
Photo, posted March 5, 2010, courtesy of Tennessee Valley Authority via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 14, 2019 Renewables Taking Over In Britain
A year-and-a-half ago, we reported on the steep decline in the use of coal in Britain, including the conversion of the giant Drax Power Station from burning coal to running on wood chips. Since then, Britain has been steadily moving away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources. The transformation is being driven by a surge in offshore wind farms currently under construction or about to begin operating. Britain is in the process of adding over 6 GW of offshore wind to its current total of 8 GW. Renewables generated one-third of the UK’s electricity last year, and half of that came from wind power.
In 2018, coal- and gas-fired power stations generated about 131 terawatt-hours of electricity in Britain. Renewable energy plants – including wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower – produced about 96 terawatt-hours. Based on the new projects coming online, renewable sources could generate 121 TWh by 2020 and fossil fuel plants are likely to fall to 105.6 TWh as more coal plants are retired. Thus, within the next year or so, renewables in Britain are likely to surpass fossil fuels in electricity generation.
The transformation in Britain has been rapid and dramatic. In 1974, the country generated 80% of its
electricity using coal. By 2016, that
number had dropped to 9%. Last April,
the British power grid went three days in a row without burning any coal. The UK is expected to shut down its remaining
coal plants by 2025, if not sooner.
At the same time, Britain’s renewable energy capacity has more than
quadrupled since 2010, jumping from 21 TWh that year to 96 TWh last year. Britain’s energy mix is changing fast and
getting significantly cleaner every year.
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Renewables Could Surpass Fossil Fuels in Britain by 2020
Photo, posted August 2, 2008, courtesy of Richard Allaway via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 13, 2019 The New Normal Weather
We often hear about how the weather is getting stranger all the time, but do most of us really think so? What kinds of weather do we really find remarkable and has that been changing?
A study led by the University of California, Davis used some very
modern tools to examine the question of what people might consider to be
“normal” weather. To reach their
conclusions, they quantified the timeless pastime of talking about the weather
by analyzing Twitter posts. They sampled
over 2 billion geolocated tweets to determine what kind of events generated the
most posts about the weather.
Unsurprisingly, they found that people most often tweet when temperatures
are unusual for a particular place and time of year. However, if the same weather persisted year
after year, it generated less comment on Twitter, indicating that people began
to view it as normal in a relatively short amount of time.
The study indicates that people have short memories when it comes to
what they consider normal weather. On
average, most people base their idea of normal weather on what has happened in
just the past two up to maybe eight years.
This disconnect with the historical climate record may obscure the
public’s perception of climate change.
After repeat exposures to historically-extreme temperatures, people
talk less about the weather, even though particularly hot or cold weather
conditions make them unhappy and grumpy.
Even though we are experiencing conditions that are historically
extreme, we might not consider them to be particularly unusual if we tend to
forget what happened more than a few years ago.
Things may be getting worse, but they apparently are just the new normal.
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Tweets tell scientists how quickly we normalize unusual weather
Photo, posted March 11, 2013, courtesy of Adedotun Ajibade via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 12, 2019 Ice Melt In Greenland
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warns that Greenland’s ice Is melting much faster than previously thought. The ice loss rapidly accelerated around 2002-2003 and by 2012 the annual loss was nearly four times the rate in 2003.
Most of the new ice melt is in southwest Greenland, a part of the
island that wasn’t known to be losing ice that rapidly and is not where most of
the large glaciers are in Greenland. The
loss is coming from the land-fast ice sheet itself.
Data from NASA satellites and GPS stations scattered around
Greenland’s coast shows that between 2002 and 2016, Greenland lost
approximately 280 billion tons of ice per year.
That is enough melt to cover the entire states of Florida and New York
hip deep in meltwater, as well as drowning Washington, D.C. and one or two
other small states.
Global warming of just 1 degree Celsius is the main driver behind this
massive meltdown of ice. The temperature
rise coupled with a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation causes
rapid surface melt of the ice sheet during summers. The Oscillation is a natural, irregular
change in atmospheric pressure that brings warm, sunny weather to the western
side of Greenland during its negative phase.
The Greenland ice sheet is 2 miles thick in some places and contains
enough ice to raise sea levels 23 feet if it all melted. The melting Greenland ice is already slowing
the Gulf Stream, which is wreaking havoc with European weather. If we don’t get a handle on global
temperature rise, things are only going to get worse.
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Greenland’s ice is melting four times faster than thought—what it means
Photo, posted April 21, 2017, courtesy of Markus Trienke via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 11, 2019 Forecasting A Bad Year For Carbon
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years, and they continue to grow. The United Kingdom’s national meteorological service – known as the Met Office – issues annual predictions of global CO2 levels based in part on readings taken at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. Their forecast for this year is that there will be one of the largest rises in atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration in the 62 years of measurements at Mauna Loa.
Since 1958, there has been a 30% increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This has been caused by emissions from fossil fuels, deforestation and cement production. The increase would actually have been even larger if it were not for natural carbon sinks in the form of various ecosystems that soak up some of the excess CO2.
Weather patterns linked to year-by-year swings in Pacific Ocean temperatures are known to affect the uptake of carbon dioxide by land ecosystems. In years with a warmer tropical Pacific – such as El Niño years – many regions become warmer and drier, which limits the ability of plants to grow and to absorb CO2 . The opposite happens when the Pacific is cool, as was the case last year.
The Met Office predicts that the contribution of natural carbon sinks
will be relatively weak, so the impact of human-caused emissions will be larger
than last year. The predicted rise in
atmospheric CO2 is 2.75 parts-per-million, which is among the highest rises on
record. The forecast for the average
carbon dioxide concentration is 411 ppm, with peak monthly averages reaching
almost 415 ppm. With global emissions
not really declining, the numbers just get higher and higher.
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Web Links
Faster CO₂ rise expected in 2019
Photo, posted March 18, 2006, courtesy of Darin Marshall via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 08, 2019 Climate Change And Infertility
Many of us are all too familiar with the effects of climate change. Our changing climate, as a result of our actions, is leading to rising global temperatures, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, wildfires, more weather extremes like floods and droughts. But a lesser known effect of climate change could lead to frightening consequences: infertility.
According to researchers at the University of Liverpool, rising
temperatures could make some species sterile and lead them to succumb to the
effects of climate change far earlier than currently thought. Their work was
recently published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and it was
produced in collaboration with scientists from the University of Leeds,
University of Melbourne, and Stockholm University.
Biologists and conservationists are trying to predict where species
will be lost due to climate change so that suitable reserves can be established
in other locations. But the problem is
that most data on when temperature will make an area unlivable for a species is
based on its ‘critical thermal limit’ or CTL.
This is the temperature at which a species would collapse, stop moving,
or die.
The authors of the article fear that the impact of climate change on
species survival is being underestimated.
Because rather than zeroing in on lethal temperatures, the scientists
argue the focus should be on the temperatures at which organisms can no longer
breed. Extensive plant and animal data
suggest organisms lose fertility at a lower temperature than their CTL.
The scientists have proposed a new fertility-based metric to gauge how
organisms function as temperatures climb: Thermal Fertility Limit or TFL. Understanding when a species will cease to
reproduce will certainly help conservation measures.
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Web Links
Climate change and infertility — a ticking time bomb?
Photo, posted August 11, 2013, courtesy of Mike Lewinski via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 07, 2019 Hydrogen From Water And Sun
There are research efforts around the world seeking ways to produce hydrogen starting from water and using clean energy. Finding an economical and scalable way to do this is a key to the so-called hydrogen economy.
A recent study at Argonne National Laboratory makes use of a chemical
reaction pathway central to plant biology to create a process that converts
water into hydrogen using energy from the sun.
The process combines two membrane-bound protein complexes to perform
the conversion of water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.
The first protein complex, which the researchers call Photosystem I,
is a membrane protein that uses energy from light to feed electrons to an
inorganic catalyst that makes hydrogen.
But this represents only half of the overall process.
A second protein complex that they call Photosystem II uses energy
from light to split water and take electrons from it. The electrons are then fed to Photosystem I.
The two protein complexes are embedded in thylakoid membranes, which
are like those found inside the oxygen-creating chloroplasts in plants. This membrane is an essential part of pairing
the two photosystems. It supports both
of the photosystems and provides a pathway for transferring electrons between
the proteins.
The researchers also make use of a synthetic catalyst made from nickel
or cobalt that replaces expensive platinum catalysts used in conventional
water-splitting schemes. Combining the
light-triggered transport of electrons with the synthetic catalyst results in
what the researchers call the “Z-scheme”, an adaptation of photosynthesis to
produce hydrogen.
The next step is to incorporate the scheme into a living system which the researchers hope will lead to a practical system for hydrogen production.
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Web Links
Discovery adapts natural membrane to make hydrogen fuel from water
Photo, posted December 25, 2017, courtesy of Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 06, 2019 Fire-Driven Thunderstorms
In 2016 and 2017, wildfires in western Canada spawned thunderstorms
that ignited additional fires, in some cases tens of miles away from the
original fire. These fire-triggered
thunderstorms are technically known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or “pyroCb’s”.
The physics of pyroCb’s is complex.
When super-heated updrafts from an intense fire suck smoke, ash, burning
materials, and water vapor high into the air, these elements cool and form
so-called fire clouds that look and act like the cumulonimbus clouds associated
with classic thunderstorms. What is
different is that the heat and particulates in the smoke almost always arrest
the ability of the cloud to produce rain.
Instead, what remains is a lightning storm that moves across the
landscape, triggering more fires.
These PyroCb events appear to be happening far more often, producing
more energy, and erupting in places where they have never been seen
before. As the world warms, wildfires themselves
are becoming larger and hotter. In the
past decade, wildfires have been burning more than twice as many acres as they
did before the turn of the 21st century. Along with the growth in wildfire activity,
there has been an increase in PyroCb events, and there are now an average of 25
per year in western North America.
Apart from starting new fires, pyroCb’s also have similar effects as
moderate-sized volcanic eruptions. Smoke
and aerosols from wildfires can rise high into the stratosphere, where they can
linger for months. Eventually, the
particles carried aloft in the atmosphere do come down, dumping dangerous
chemicals on far flung regions of the earth.
But unlike volcanic eruptions, which are relatively rare events, pyroCb’s
are happening more and more each year.
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Web Links
Fire-Induced Storms: A New Danger from the Rise in Wildfires
Photo, posted July 31, 2013, courtesy of Loren Kerns via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 05, 2019 A Quiet Clean Energy Revolution
While the Trump administration seeks to prop up and promote use of fossil fuels, the country continues to move in the opposite direction. Last year was actually a pretty positive year for clean energy in the U.S.
In terms of public opinion, 70% of Americans surveyed believe the
country should produce 100% of its electricity from renewable energy sources
and more than half of survey respondents think renewables are a good idea even
if they raise energy bills.
Companies in the U.S. purchased a record 6.43 gigawatts of renewable
power, enough to power 1.5 million homes.
The number of corporations entering into renewable energy deals doubled
last year.
More than 300 U.S. cities, towns or counties have made commitments to
climate action and, as of November, 99 cities have committed to 100% renewable
energy, doubling the total from a year ago.
A number of gubernatorial candidates running on ambitious renewable energy platforms were elected in November including those in Illinois, Colorado, New Mexico, Maine and Nevada.
Utilities are responding to the growing demand for clean energy. Consumers Energy in Michigan plans to cut
carbon emissions by 80% and stop using coal.
Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy will become the first U.S. utility to
source 100% of its electricity from renewable sources next year. Xcel Energy, one of the biggest utilities in
the country, has committed to be 80% carbon-free by 2030 and go completely
carbon-free by 2050.
The fossil fuel industry with its supporters in high places is still
kicking and screaming, but there is no doubt that the U.S. energy system is changing,
and the quiet clean energy revolution will only pick up more steam in 2019.
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The US Underwent a Quiet Clean Energy Revolution Last Year
Photo, posted August 15, 2009, courtesy of Ken via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
March 04, 2019 The Threat From Nurdles
Just when we thought we knew all about the environmental threats caused by plastics, environmentalists have identified yet another problem. It is called a nurdle.
Nurdles are tiny pellets of plastic resin no bigger than a pencil
eraser that manufacturers transform into packaging, plastic straws, water
bottles and all the other things that are wreaking havoc on the environment.
It turns out that nurdles themselves are a problem because billions of them are lost from production and supply chains during handling, shipping and production every year, spilling or washing into waterways. There is limited information on the extent of this kind of plastic pollution and global researchers are still struggling to make an accurate assessment. A study last year estimated that 3 million to 36 million pellets escape every year from just one small industrial area in Sweden.
Eunomia, a British environmental consultancy, contends that nurdles
are the second-largest source of microplastic pollution and estimated that the U.K.
could be unwittingly losing billions of pellets into the environment every
year.
New research is revealing the ubiquity of plastic pellets, from the
bellies of fish caught in the South Pacific, to the digestive tracks of
short-tailed albatross in the north and on the beaches of the Mediterranean.
A shareholder advocacy group called As You Sow has filed resolutions
with Chevron, DowDupont, Exxon Mobil, and Phillips 66 asking them to disclose
how many nurdles escape their production process each year and how they plan to
address the issue. Several of the
companies have responded with statements saying they are working to develop
solutions that keep plastic out of our environment.
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Web Links
There’s a Tiny Plastic Enemy Threatening the Planet’s Oceans
Photo, posted January 15, 2014, courtesy of Hillary Daniels via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min

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From green business and new environmental legislation to how nature impacts our environment in ways never before considered, Earth Wise offers a look at our changing environment.