In this week’s feature report, we continue with Part IV of an episode of Deep Dive: WFHB and Limestone Post Investigate. In this four-part series, WFHB looks into trees in Monroe County – what trees we have, what benefits they provide, and which trees to root for and which to root out.

Inside Climate News reports Harris stirs hope for a new chapter in climate action. Although expected to follow in Biden’s pragmatic footsteps, her record as a prosecutor and voice for justice has environmentalists looking to the future. Although President Joe Biden already has cemented an unmatched legacy of climate change action, Vice President Kamala Harris raised the bar the moment that she entered the presidential race on July 21st.

Those who care about the climate are now considering new possibilities based on Harris’ past actions: What would she do to hold Big Oil accountable? How could she push climate policy further, especially to address historic injustice? Would she be able to advance international cooperation, building on the progress made in her travels to Africa and Asia as vice president?

A new candidate has invigorated the climate movement—with some groups that have never before endorsed presidential candidates declaring support for Harris soon after Biden passed her the torch. They point to her history as a former California attorney general who took on oil companies, the environmental justice work she has focused on in the Biden administration and the historic nature of her candidacy as a woman of color. Her appeal only increased when she selected her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who implemented a $2 billion climate spending program in the state and signed a law to make the state carbon-free by 2040.

How close are the planet’s climate tipping points? Earth’s warming could trigger sweeping changes in the natural world that would be hard, if not impossible, to reverse. Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us.

According to the New York Times, we might also be changing the climate in an even bigger way. For the past two decades, scientists have been raising alarms about great systems in the natural world that warming, caused by carbon emissions, might be pushing toward collapse. These systems are so vast that they can stay somewhat in balance even as temperatures rise. But only to a point. Once we warm the planet beyond certain levels, this balance might be lost, scientists say. The effects would be sweeping and hard to reverse. Not like the turning of a dial, but the flipping of a switch. One that wouldn’t be easily flipped back.

The most significant way we could cross a tipping point would be for the ice on Antarctica to melt. The Antarctic Ice Sheet has around 60% of the world’s total fresh water, equivalent to a 240 foot rise in global sea level. Many West Antarctic glaciers flow out to sea, which means their undersides are exposed to constant bathing by ocean currents. As the water warms, these floating ice shelves melt and weaken from below, particularly where they sit on the seafloor. Like a dancer holding a difficult pose, the shelf starts to lose its footing.

With less floating ice to hold it back, more ice from the continent’s interior would slide into the ocean. Eventually, the ice at the water’s edge might fail to support its own weight and crack into pieces. Antarctica was ice free around 34 million years ago. How close today’s ice is to suffering the same fate is something scientists are still trying to figure out. One thing that would cause a total melt would be a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere to 700 ppm. We are at 428 this year.

“If you think about the future of the world’s coastlines, 50 percent of the story is going to be the melt of Antarctica,” said David Holland, a New York University scientist who studies polar regions. And yet, he said, when it comes to understanding how the continent’s ice might break apart, “we are at Day Zero.” The release of Thwaites Glacier is something that is expected this century, leading to a rapid rise of oceans by two feet.

A common criticism from fossil fuel interests is that wind turbines kill eagles and other birds. Indeed, they do kill birds, but wind turbines rank #10 in bird kill. The number one killer is easily cats. Cats kill 10,000 times more birds than wind turbines. Yet, those who oppose wind turbines keep pounding out the theme that wind turbines are an issue.

Wind turbines do kill an eagle occasionally. One golden eagle was killed near Montpellier, France in 2023. The exact location of the turbine is unclear from the report, but there is a river that passes through the city. Wind turbines should not be located near water, because of the danger to eagles. French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans to increase the country’s efforts in developing renewable energy sources, like wind turbines. “We need a massive acceleration…I want us to go at least twice as fast for renewable energy projects,” Macron said, during a speech in September, 2023.

“Our neighbors often managed to do more, better and, above all, faster.” According to the Associated Press, Macron previously called for France to increase its renewable energy sources to 23 percent by 2020, but it failed. The French president also previously called for the country to create 50 new wind farms by 2050. There are no reported deaths via wind turbines of eagles in Indiana.

The New York Times reports that parts of Canada’s Boreal Forest are burning faster than they can regrow. The delicate balance of one of the planet’s largest natural systems for storing carbon depends on the humble black spruce tree. The dead black spruce looked like a collection of giant burned matchsticks standing tall above the gray landscape as far as Jennifer Baltzer could see. But here, at the edge of one of the largest areas of scorched forest that scientists have ever documented in Canada, what caught Dr. Baltzer’s attention was closer to the ground. The spruce seedlings were gone.

Dr. Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, was a few hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, where for over a decade she has studied the health of the black spruce and the boreal forests. It was a scorching late spring morning, and she and three of her students from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, were in the Northwest Territories to document what could grow from the ashes of the record-breaking fire season that had ravaged the forest almost a year earlier. “Wow, it’s kind of crazy in here,” Dr. Baltzer said as she inspected the blackened landscape. She had never seen trees burn this soon after a previous fire.

More frequent, bigger wildfires, fueled by climate change, are a formidable challenge to the black spruce, a species that has dominated these landscapes for thousands of years. Their gradual decline, now accelerated by last year’s fire season, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the new age of wildfires aren’t just overwhelming people with the smoke and destructive blazes now raging across North America — they are overwhelming nature, too.

The dwindling number of black spruce trees, scientists say, is deeply transforming an ecosystem that is one of Earth’s biggest storage systems for planet-warming carbon dioxide, a crucial tool to keep the atmosphere from warming even more than it already has. Concerning climate change, there are associated effects that exacerbate the carbon dioxide issue. The warmer temperatures open new forest regions to the pine beetle. The warmer temperatures also melt permafrost, which releases CO2. Thus the forests we count on to absorb CO2 are disappearing.

In this week’s feature report, we continue with Part IV of an episode of Deep Dive:  WFHB and Limestone Post Investigate.  In this four-part series, WFHB looks into trees in Monroe County – what trees we have, what benefits they provide, and which trees to root for and which to root out.

Credits:

On Air……………………………………Janek Schaller

Eco Report is  looking for reporters, engineers, and segment producer to report facts on how we’re all affected by global climate disruption and the ongoing assaults on our air, land and water. We also celebrate ecologists, tree huggers, soil builders and other champions who actively protect and restore our natural world, particularly those who are active in south central Indiana. All levels of experience and all ages are welcome, and we provide the training you’ll need. WFHB also offers internships. To volunteer for Eco Report, call at (812) 323-1200, or e-mail [email protected].