Equilibrium/Sustainability — Groundhogs disagree over spring’s start date

Today is Wednesday. Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Subscribe here: digital-stage.thehill.com/newsletter-signup.   

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow on Wednesday morning — indicating another six weeks of wintry weather, Lehigh Valley Live reported.    

Not to be outdone by the western Pennsylvanian prophet, however, rival rodents Staten Island Chuck and North Jersey’s Stonewall issued forecasts of an early spring. Meanwhile, in a stroke of marmot misfortune, Milltown Mel met an untimely death on Monday, just a day before he was due to take his central Jersey stage, NPR reported.   

When not being conscripted for weather divination rituals each Feb. 2, groundhogs largely remain, well, in the shadows, with relatively little information available about their social lives, The New York Times reported.  

“These guys are much more social than we thought,” Christine Maher, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Southern Maine, told the Times.  

Maher is studying the “fates and relationships” of some 513 groundhogs in a sanctuary along Maine’s coast — taking note of their family trees, interactions and behaviors as individuals, according to the Times. While some of the animals do leave home as juveniles, Maher has found that almost half cling to their families for a full year.    

“It depends on whether they can strike an agreement with their mother,” she told the Times. “Some moms are willing to do that. Others are not.” 

On this pivotal day for mammalian meteorology, we’ll dive into some broader climate issues — starting with research from the Monterey Bay Aquarium indicating that extreme heat has become the “new normal” for the planet’s oceans. Then we’ll consider the possibility that we could buy decades to transition off fossil fuels — if we’re all willing to switch to plant-based meats. 

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@digital-stage.thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@digital-stage.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin.  

Let’s get to it. 

 

Climate-driven extreme heat is ‘new normal’ 

More than half of the planet’s ocean surface has surpassed historical extreme heat thresholds on a regular basis since 2014, a new study has found. 

The study, published in PLOS Climate, concluded that such excessive ocean temperatures, fueled by climate change, have now become the “new normal.”  

These heat extremes are threatening crucial marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, seagrass meadows and kelp forests, by altering their structure and function, while jeopardizing their ability to provide sustenance to human communities, according to the authors.  

First words: “Climate change is not a future event,” Kyle Van Houtan, who headed the research team during his tenure as chief scientist for Monterey Bay Aquarium, said in a statement. 

“The reality is that it’s been affecting us for a while,” he added. “Our research shows that for the last seven years more than half of the ocean has experienced extreme heat.”  

How did they come to this conclusion? The Monterey Bay researchers mapped out 150 years of sea surface temperatures in order to identify a fixed historical benchmark for marine heat extremes — as well as how often and how much of the ocean exceeded this point, a news release accompanying the study said.  

While 2014 was the first year in which more than half of the ocean surpassed that threshold, this upward trend continued in the years that followed, and reached 57 percent of the ocean by 2019, according to the study.  

As a basis of comparison, just 2 percent of the ocean surface was experiencing such warm temperatures at the end of the 19th century, the authors found.   

The scientists were initially looking at something else: The temperature shifts identified by the researchers grew out of an initial exploration of the history of changes in kelp forests throughout California, according to the news release.  

As part of that study, Van Houtan and his colleagues began quantifying and mapping out sea surface heat extremes — key stressors for kelps — along California’s coast over the past century.  

The authors said they later decided to expand their investigation beyond California, with a goal of understanding the frequency and location of extreme marine heat around the world. 

‘ONCE-IN-50-YEAR EXTREME WARMING EVENTS’

The scientists used historical records to determine average temperatures for the ocean’s surface from 1870 to 1919 — identifying the top 2 percent of temperature increases during that period as “extreme heat,” according to the study.    

Then they mapped extremes for the next century that followed, to determine whether such events were becoming more frequent.  

“Today, the majority of the ocean’s surface has warmed to temperatures that only a century ago occurred as rare, once-in-50-year extreme warming events,” Van Houtan said in a statement.   

Oceans need people to curb “the driver of climate change”: Given the increasing evidence that extreme heat has become a new normal across most of the ocean’s surface, the authors emphasized the need to curb emissions generated by burning fossil fuels, which they described as “the driver of climate change.” 

As the ocean heats up and as its ecosystems collapse, so too does their ability to buffer low-lying coastal regions from severe weather — or to serve as a carbon sink for human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, according to Van Houtan.    

Last words: “These dramatic changes we’ve recorded in the ocean are yet another piece of evidence that should be a wake-up call to act on climate change,” he said in a statement. “We are experiencing it now, and it is speeding up.” 

If we lose cows, we can keep cars: study 

Eliminating animal agriculture over the next 15 years would effectively stop global warming in its tracks — effectively halting the increase of greenhouse gasses for the next 30 years, according to a recent study in PLOS Climate. 

The largest contributor to that decrease in heating: a massive rise in prairie, forest and grassland as the global economy converts away from land-dependent practices like cattle-raising, co-author Patrick Brown, a Stanford biochemistry professor, said in a statement. 

First words: “Five hundred years ago, nobody in Italy had ever seen a tomato,” Brown said, suggesting that the proposed change is less far-fetched than it sounds. “Sixty years ago, nobody in China had ever drunk a Coke. Mutton was once the most popular meat in America.” 

Brown is hardly impartial: In addition to his scientific credentials, he is the founder and CEO of plant-based protein company Impossible Foods, which is valued at an estimated $7 billion and aims to go public sometime this year — and would stand to benefit handsomely under the transition described. 

Nonetheless, these dynamics are well understood. We have long known that animal agriculture is a potent source of greenhouse gasses, primarily as a result of methane and nitrous oxide released from livestock waste.   

These are more significant problems, molecule for molecule, than the carbon dioxide released from tail pipes and smokestacks. For its first century in the atmosphere, methane — released from cow burps and hog waste pits — warms the atmosphere between 25 and 80 times as intensely as carbon dioxide, into which it gradually degrades, according to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data cited on Factcheck.org 

Nitrous oxide is even worse, rising from manure pits and fertilizer to the atmosphere, where it heats the atmosphere about 260 times as much as carbon, the IPCC said. 

Then there’s the land problem: Livestock takes up about 80 percent of the world’s agricultural land — about half the habitable surface of the earth though much of this is unsuited for crops — though it provides less than 20 percent of the calories in the world diet, according to Our World in Data.  

A third of the world’s forests and two-thirds of its grasslands have been lost permanently since the last ice age — with half of that loss occurring in the last century. according to Our World in Data. 

CUT BEEF, BUY TIME FOR FOSSIL FUEL REDUCTIONS

By putting together these two factors — the reduction in emissions with the increase in wildlands — Brown and his co-author Michael Eisen found that the global switch to a plant-based diet would have the same effect as cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 68 percent. 

Since the primary source of carbon dioxide is the burning of fossil fuels in cars and powerplants, this measure would also buy disproportionate time, Brown and Eisen said.  

What does that mean in big picture terms? It would also get the world about halfway to the emissions cuts necessary to keep global warming below the dangerous red line of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).  

The reductions would take place from the dwindling, then end of methane pollution, and as methane levels currently in the air began to degrade. Also, the replacement of the farms and ranchlands currently devoted to cattle and sheep with forests and pasture would begin pulling down carbon. 

What if I really, really like chicken? Ninety percent of the benefits could be attained by just removing ruminants like cattle and sheep, the study found — both of which need lots of land and are prone to methane-producing burps. 

Last words:  “As the methane and nitrous oxide emissions from livestock diminish, atmospheric levels of those potent greenhouse gasses will actually drop dramatically within decades,” Brown said in a statement.  

 

Wintry Wednesday

An enormous storm bears down on Northern U.S., Texans feel a shiver of deep-freeze anxieties and yes, climate change is making this worse. 

Winter storm slams 80 million Americans from New Mexico to Maine   

• A severe winter storm is spewing snow and slush over more than 80 million Americans, in a massive onslaught from New Mexico to Maine, The Washington Post reported. The National Weather Service forecasted “prolonged” storms, including “several rounds of winter weather” in the central U.S., before shifting to the Northeast on Thursday.   

Texas governor can’t ‘guarantee’ power will stay on 

• As the massive storm bore down on Texas on Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) told state residents to prepare for “treacherous” driving conditions and said “no one could guarantee” that there wouldn’t be power outages — contradicting a December promise that he could keep the lights on, according to The Texas Tribune. 

Yes, climate change is helping cause Northeast snowstorms 

• The polar vortex — a low-pressure zone of cold air that swirls close to the North Pole — is weakening, as heat from burning fossil fuels melts the Arctic and allows freezing temperatures to escape the Northern latitudes, The Washington Post reported. So severe is this trend that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, according to the Post.  

 

Please visit The Hill’s sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you on Thursday.