Tag: Climate change
Alabama’s John Christy May Be the Country’s Best Known and Most Criticized Climate Change Skeptic
Alabama State Climatologist John Christy is considered an outsider, if not a pariah, among most climate researchers. His critics say his work has been plagued by errors and many of his conclusions dismissed. Yet he defends his research and continues to have an outsized influence on the climate change debate well beyond Alabama’s borders. Read more.
The Connection Is Growing Between Climate Change and Big Storms
The connection between climate change, hurricanes and tornadoes is not so clear. But data is beginning to show some relationship. Read more.
Meet the Alabama Scientists Connecting Soaring Global Temperatures to Carbon Dioxide
Two Alabama researchers study ice cores and fossil records from Antarctica, helping connect an alarming increase in the earth’s temperature to rising levels of carbon dioxide. Read more.
Hurricane Sally Just the Latest Storm to Attack the Environmentally Fragile Alabama Coastline
The eye of Hurricane Sally crept onto land near Gulf Shores bringing heavy rains and a strong storm surge for hours on end. Both are threats to the fragile environment along the coast. The storm surge began eroding sand dunes even before the hurricane arrived, according to the Weather Channel, as well as swamping piers and low-lying areas. The hurricane was packing winds upward of 100 mph at its peak, and rain in some areas was estimated at 20 inches or more, according to the National Weather Service. BirminghamWatch about a year ago published several stories looking at the effects climate change and the more severe weather it’s causing are having along Alabama’s coastline.
Cloudy Future for Dauphin Island, a Canary in the Coal Mine of Climate Change
By Hank Black
Along coastal Alabama lies Dauphin Island, a narrow, shifting strip of sand inhabited by a laid-back vacation town that is becoming more endangered with every passing storm and every incremental rise in the warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Dauphin is one of perhaps 2,200 barrier islands that make up 10% to 12% of the globe’s coastline. They help absorb the blows of nature and suffer greatly for it, either eroding dramatically from catastrophic hurricane forces or gradually, almost imperceptibly, from constant wave action.
These sandy, offshore bodies are potent poster children for our planet’s warming, part of a natural, 100,000-year cycle that, according to most scientists, has greatly accelerated since the birth of the Industrial Age. Read more.
McClintock: Discovery of Warm Water Under Glacier Bodes Ill for Sea Level Rise
News of warmer water under a huge western Antarctic glacier should catch the attention of folks along coastal Alabama, a UAB polar scientist said this week.
Last week scientists announced that sea water under the Florida-sized Thwaites Glacier is 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than expected. That’s a finding that UAB polar scientist James B. McClintock expects will push expected sea level rise toward the upper range of the 0.9 to 3.6 feet predicted last year by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change.
“This is something we care about in Alabama, because it’s going to increase the calculations for sea level rise on the Gulf Coast. It’s going to be important to you if you’re living in especially low-lying areas like Bayou la Batre or the western side of Dauphin Island, for example,” McClintock said.
McClintock, a UAB Endowed University Professor of Polar and Marine Biology, is scheduled to deliver talks Thursday to the Cahaba River Society annual meeting and Saturday during a community dialogue of the Citizens’ Climate Education-Birmingham. Read more.
Local Effort Backs Carbon Emission Fee With Monthly Rebate to All Households
The most efficient way to combat climate change is to make fossil fuel use more expensive, an International Monetary Fund study found last October. The IMF also said sending the money from a tax or fee on coal and oil straight to citizens would blunt the economic disruption of that strategy. Read more.
McClintock, Hammett, Others Set for Feb. 8 Event on Climate Solutions
McClintock, Hammett, Others Set for Feb. 8 Event on Climate Solutions
A Feb. 8 event at the McWane Science Center on how to deal with the changing climate is scheduled to draw participants from multiple points of view, including energy industry heavyweight Seth Hammett, UAB polar researcher James McClintock and atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University.
“Faith Meets Business: Climate Solutions for the Common Good” is billed as a community dialogue and will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. It is sponsored by the nonprofit Citizens’ Climate Education-Birmingham. Read more.
Caught Off Guard: The American Southeast Struggles With Climate Change
Reporters from Southeastern newsrooms hold leaders in their communities accountable for reducing carbon emissions and preparing for climate change-related emergencies.
Like hundreds of other cities, Louisville, Kentucky, is searching for a path to address climate change.
Mayor Greg Fischer has declared a climate emergency, proposed a climate action plan and set a goal of reducing citywide carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.
To get there, however, Fischer needs the cooperation of the region’s electric utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Co., which depends on coal and, with its related companies, has committed only to cutting carbon emissions 70 percent from 2010 levels by 2050.
Even that more modest commitment, though, is now in doubt, based on recent comments by LG&E’s chief operating officer, Lonnie Bellar, at an energy conference last fall, dominated by coal interests. In discussing his company’s own carbon reduction plan, Bellar declined to make any promises about a clean energy future.
At the fall meeting of the Southern States Energy Board, an organization of Southern governors and lawmakers, Bellar said his company was planning for different carbon reduction options, “free of commitments.”
”We want to continue to provide energy to our customers at a low reasonable cost,” he said. “If that means coal it means coal. If that means some other resource, it means some other resource.”
Louisville illustrates a fairly common obstacle: communities with little control over the monopoly electric utilities that serve them.
Today, in Caught Off Guard, InsideClimate News and nine newsrooms across seven Southeastern states are publishing stories on the progress and problems their communities face in relation to climate change. The region lags behind others in renewable electricity and faces some of the biggest global warming threats in the nation.
In reporting their stories, the journalists found communities struggling with funding, or with a lack of political will, and the need for technological breakthroughs to meet climate change head on. Read more.
Cattle, Catfish and Cover Crops: Alabama Farms Play Role in Slowing Climate Change
This is the last in a series of four stories about how changing weather patterns are and will affect the Black Belt.
Once a swath of tall-grass prairie of unparalleled fertility and diversity, the Alabama Black Belt’s rich land was depleted by the practice of farming one or two crops, initially cotton and later corn and soybeans, on a large scale.
But more beneficial farming and ranching practices are taking hold in Alabama, and some in the state’s western Black Belt region are taking leadership roles.
A family in Pickens County uses no-till row farming, combined with regular rotation of crops and use of cover crops, to help rebuild once-rich prairie soil. A farm in Perry County enhances those practices by using primarily compost and organic fertilizers and by rotating different animal species through its pastures.
Progressive agricultural practices already are helping feed the planet’s increasing population. Now new ways of treating the land are seen as an important piece of a complex effort to slow the impact of accelerating climate change, as described in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on Climate Change and the Land.
Most climate change emphasis has been on displacing fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy. But emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases continue to rise in the face of pledges from the Paris and Spain climate summits, according to other United Nations reports. It’s become increasingly evident that strategy will take too long to avoid major consequences of higher temperatures responsible for more severe storms, intense rainfall and flooding, as well as longer periods of drought.
2019 was the second-warmest year since the temperatures began to be recorded, in 1850, according to the research group Berkeley Earth.
Technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere have not fully emerged, and it’s not clear they can be scaled up enough to make a difference, either. Read more.
More stories in the series:
Sunday: In West Alabama, Life Is Hard. Warmer Weather Forecasts Worse Problems
Monday:Audubon Study Finds Warming Climate May Be Inhospitable to Alabama State Bird
Tuesday:Wood Pellet Plants in Job-Hungry Southern Towns Prompt Environmentalists’ Warnings
Wood Pellet Plants in Job-Hungry Southern Towns Prompt Environmentalists’ Warnings
The tiny West Alabama town of Epes, population 172, is set to play a role in the international climate-change battle. The initiative that has reached Epes is spreading across the state and much of the South and is prompting debate about whether it is progress or problem.
Maryland-based Enviva is building a $175 million facility at Epes to produce wood pellets from forests, sawmills and other sources and to load them on barges at the nearby port on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway bound for the United Kingdom, Europe and potentially Asia.
The pellets will be burned for electric power in plants formerly fueled by coal.
In 2009, the European Commission directed its member countries to use renewable sources of power for at least 20% of its electricity production in order to reduce carbon emissions and meet climate change goals. The commission categorized wood as a carbon-neutral alternative to coal on the belief trees would be replaced one-to-one with seedlings that eventually would grow and absorb the carbon dioxide released in creating power.
Wood instead of coal – a good thing for the world, right?
Not so fast. Most environmental and clean-energy advocates, including the Southern Environmental Law Center, say the carbon-neutral assessments are based on faulty initial assumptions, are not the clean power source as touted by industry, and shouldn’t be grouped with solar, wind and nuclear power as ways to replace fossil fuels and drastically reduce the world’s carbon emissions.
It’s much better, they say, to keep carbon sequestered in trees than to burn them for fuel. Read more.
More stories in the series:
Sunday: In West Alabama, Life Is Hard. Warmer Weather Forecasts Worse Problems
Monday:Audubon Study Finds Warming Climate May Be Inhospitable to Alabama State Bird
Thursday: Cattle, Catfish, and Cover Crops. Alabama Farms Play Role in Slowing Climate Change
