Earth Wise

According to a new study published in the journal Nature, the Greenland ice sheet is melting faster today than at any point in the last 350 years.  A team of U.S. and European researchers analyzed more than three centuries of melt patterns in ice cores from western Greenland. They then linked this historical data to modern observations of melting and runoff across the entire ice sheet.

According to the researchers, from an historical perspective, today’smelt rates are off the charts.  There is a 50% increase in total ice sheet melt water runoff since the start of the industrial era and a 30% increase since the 20th century alone.

Over the last 20 years, melt intensity has increased 250 to 575 percent compared to pre-industrial melt rates. The period from 2004-2013, the most recent decade analyzed, experienced a more sustained and greater magnitude of melt than in any previous 10-year period in the 350-year record.

The Greenland ice sheet is the largest single contributor to global sea level rise.  It is adding 72 cubic miles of meltwater to the world’s oceans every year.

The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating which is a frightening prospect.  If the sheet were to melt in its entirety, global sea levels would rise by 23 feet.  The world needs to do whatever it can to keep that doomsday scenario from happening.

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Greenland Ice Sheet Melting At Fastest Rate in 350 Years

Photo, posted September 8, 2014, courtesy of Marco Verch via Flickr.  

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

During the 20th century, sea levels rose about 18 inches near Cape

The variation is a result of a phenomenon called “post-glacial rebound.”  During the last ice age, huge sheets of ice once covered land areas in the Northern Hemisphere, including parts of the Northeast U.S.  The weight of the ice weighted down the land like a boulder on a trampoline.  At the same time, peripheral lands such as the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast rose up.  As the ice melted, the previously weighted-down regions rebounded while the peripheral lands began to sink.  While these ice sheets disappeared some 7,000 years ago, this see-sawing of post-glacial rebound continues to this day. 

Researchers combined data from GPS satellites, tide gauges, and

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Why is sea level rising faster in some places along the US East Coast than others?

Photo, posted August 24, 2014, courtesy of Bill Dickinson via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

While the future of the world’s coral reefs is very much uncertain as global heating continues, there is a recent bit of hopeful news.   According to a study published in Nature Climate Change, the response of the Great Barrier Reef to the extreme temperatures in 2017 was quite different from that of the previous year in the aftermath of back-to-back bouts of coral bleaching.

Surprisingly, corals that bleached in 2016 but managed to survive were more resistant to the recurrence of hot conditions in 2017.

Many corals don’t survive bleaching events at all and, of course,those corals don’t bleach for a second time. But the surviving corals from the 2016 bleaching event were tougher species.   As a result of bleaching, the mix of coral species on the reef is changing very rapidly.  The net result was that there was less bleaching in 2017 even though the temperatures that year were even more extreme than in 2016.

There have now been four mass bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef over the past 20 years and it is only a matter of time before another one occurs triggered by the next marine heatwave. Almost half of the corals on the northern two-thirds of the reef have been killed.  But at least some of the reef is showing impressive survival skills.

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A glimmer of hope for the world’s coral reefs

Photo, posted November 29, 2012, courtesy of Robert Linsdell via Flickr. 

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The most important one is that the fundamental shift toward slow-carbon technologies is continuing. This shift is taking place despite diminishing government policy support and even active government efforts to thwart it.  There is just too much momentum to stand in the way of low-carbon energy technologies.

Analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimate that over the next 30 years over 11 trillion dollars will be invested in energy power generation and power storage assets with 85% of it aimed at zero-carbon emission.  Dramatic reductions in green energy costs have resulted in legitimate cost competition between zero carbon sources of energy and fossil fuel generation.

In the coming year, battery technology will continue to play a growing role both as a storage medium for energy generated by sun and wind and for powering vehicles.

Another trend is that the world’s wealthiest economies are learning to grow without growing the demand for electricity.  This is important in the battle to reduce overall emissions.

Another key issue is addressing the energy needs of people who have no meaningful access to it and there are around 1.5 billion people in that category.   Emerging technologies based on solar power, wind energy, microgrids and other innovations mean that traditional power grids that remain out of reach to these people are not necessary.  There is the potential to address those needs without contributing to climate change.

The world is struggling to deal with the growing problem of the changing climate, but there are trends that provide at least some hope that we can move in the right direction.

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Top 3 clean energy trends to watch out for in 2019

Photo, posted April 5, 2013, courtesy of Flickr. 

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Predicting which languages will survive and which won’t is difficult.  A potential tipping point for languages is the same one affecting the survival of species:  climate change.  Many small linguistic communities are located on islands and coastlines that are vulnerable to hurricanes and rising sea levels.  Other communities live in places where increases in temperatures and erratic rainfall threaten traditional farming and fishing economies.

These climate-related changes will force communities to relocate,creating climate change refugees. Dispersing these people will lead to the splintering of linguistic communities and the need for the use of other languages.  Such changes will place additional pressures on languages that are already struggling to survive.

There are endangered languages in many places around the world.  Some are exotic such as the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, which is home to dozens of distinct languages spoken by no more than a few thousand people. Others are much closer to home, such as in indigenous communities in Canada.

The rich tapestry of human language is just another of many things threatened by the changing climate.

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The Conversation: The impact of climate change on language loss

Photo, posted May 19, 2009, courtesy of Flickr. 

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

A team of researchers from the UK has developed a date palm fiber polycaprolactone composite that is completely biodegradable, renewable,sustainable and recyclable, in contrast to synthetic composite materials reinforced by glass and carbon fibers. The team tested the mechanical properties of the material and found that it achieved better low-velocity impact resistance than traditional man-made composites.

The idea would be to use the material in non-structural auto parts such as car bumpers and door linings.   The result would be to reduce the weight of vehicles, contributing to less fuel consumption and lower emissions.  The new material can be produced using less energy than glass and carbon fibers and is biodegradable and therefore easier to recycle.

Date palm fibers are one of the most available natural fibers in many parts of the world.  The trees produce a large quantity of agricultural waste, which is mostly burned or land-filled,causing serious environmental problems.

Convincing industry to use a new class of materials such as natural-fiber reinforced composites is challenging.  First it is necessary to obtain consistent,reliable properties from the material. Then the industries need to work closely with the developers to test the materials and convince themselves of the viability of using them.  The team, led by researchers at the University of Portsmouth, has been working with industry to test the viability of parts made from a variety of other sustainable materials as well including flax, hemp, and jute.  Someday, our cars may have bumpers made from agricultural waste.

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Agricultural waste drives us closer to greener transport

Photo, posted October 27, 2017, courtesy of David Stanley via Flickr. 

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

But despite all this, commercial whaling was never actually banned.  Instead, in 1986, members of the International Whaling Committee (IWC) agreed to a whaling moratorium in order to allow whale stocks to recover.  Pro-whaling nations like Japan, Iceland, and Norway expected the moratorium to be temporary until the whales stocks recovered, and a consensus on catch quotas could be established.  But the temporary moratorium became a quasi-permanent ban, much to the delight of conservationists and to the dismay of whaling nations. 

As a result, Japan recently announced it is leaving the international

Once popular in Japan, whale meat consumption has plummeted, falling 98% between 1962 and 2016. The industry employs fewer than 1,000 people and is dependent on government subsidies. 

Many governments and conservationist groups condemned Japan’s

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Japan to Resume Commercial Whaling, Defying International Ban

Photo, posted February 5, 2009, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

There are both low-tech and high-tech methods for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and both are likely to be needed. 

On the low-tech side, afforestation (planting trees where there were none before), reforestation, changes in forest management, rebuilding the carbon backbone in agricultural soils, and the use of energy from waste biomass are all ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere.

On the high-tech side, direct air capture technologies that take CO2 out of the air and store it in the ground are making rapid progress.   Right now, they are still very expensive,but that is changing.  There is an analogy to wind and solar technology. Not very long ago, both of those technologies were quite expensive but now their costs have plummeted to the point where they are often the cheapest way to make electricity.  With sufficient development effort and deployment, direct air capture technology could become quite affordable.

Some people advocate geoengineering as a solution for climate change.  While removing carbon dioxide amounts to tackling the root cause of the warming climate,geoengineering would address the problem by changing the climate again in some other way.  It is at best an extremely dangerous approach.

Removing CO2 using a combination of natural and man-made techniques is an important part of mitigating the effects of climate change.

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Climate Solutions: Is It Feasible to Remove Enough CO2 from the Air?

Photo courtesy of Climeworks. 

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

It is estimated that air conditioners use about 6% of all the electricity produced in the United States for an annual cost of $29 billion.  With rising temperatures, this expense is only going to get larger.

A significant part of the heat load in buildings arises from heat coming through windows.  It turns out that for every square meter of window, about 500 watts of heat energy can be brought in by sunlight, equivalent to 5 old-fashioned light bulbs.

Researchers at MIT and the University of Hong Kong have developed a heat-rejecting film that can applied to a building’s windows that will reflect 70% of the sun’s incoming heat.  The film is similar to transparent plastic wrap. It remains highly transparent at temperatures below 89 degrees Fahrenheit.  Above that temperature, tiny microparticles embedded in the film shrink and the film becomes more translucent or frosted, still letting in a good amount of light, but rejecting a lot of heat.

There are already so-called smart windows on the market, similar to the electrochromic mirrors in cars that darken to prevent trailing headlights from blinding drivers.  But that technology is not very effective in rejecting heat and it requires power to operate, which means you would have to pay to turn windows opaque.

Tests of the new film demonstrated its ability to reject heat and lower temperatures.  The researchers estimate that if every exterior-facing window in a building were covered in the heat-rejecting film, the building’s air conditioning and energy costs could drop by 10%.  Saving ten percent of tens of billions of dollars is no minor matter.

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See-through film rejects 70 percent of incoming solar heat

Photo courtesy of MIT researchers/MIT. 

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Caffeine itself has a particularly bitter taste.  Surprisingly, a new study at Northwestern University has found that the more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink. That sensitivity is actually a genetic variant.

So, one would think that people who are especially sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee.  The counter intuitive result suggests that coffee consumers acquire a taste or an ability to detect caffeine as a result of the learned positive reinforcement (in other words, the buzz) elicited by caffeine.  People with a heightened ability to taste coffee’s bitterness learn to associate good things with it.

The study also found in contrast that people sensitive to the bitter flavor of a different compound called 6-n-propylthiouracil (known as PROP)avoided coffee as well as red wine.

The study made use of applied Mendelian randomization, a technique commonly used in disease epidemiology, to test the causal relationship between bitter taste and beverage consumption in more than 400,000 men and women in the United Kingdom.

These results shed some light on the disdain many coffee drinkers have for decaf coffee.  It may not be just the lack of buzz that turns them off.  Some of them with the right genes may be missing that extra bit of bitterness that alerts them that something good is about to happen.

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Why we shouldn’t like coffee, but we do

Photo, posted May 22, 2009, courtesy of Olle Svensson via Flickr.  

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.