With global average temperatures expected to continue to rise in the coming decades, scientists have projected that warming will significantly harm global agriculture as it weakens crop yields and disrupts food production. Now, new research finds that warming will disrupt many of Earth’s major crops and harm global crop diversity.
The study, conducted by researchers at Aalto University in Finland and published in the journal Nature Food, analyzed 30 of the world’s most important crops and modeled how climate change is likely to affect their safe climatic space under different potential global warming scenarios.
The researchers found that crops growing at lower latitudes, or closer to the equator, will be hardest hit as those areas continue to get hotter and more arid.
Nature Food
Speaking about global crop diversity, Matti Kummu, the senior author who oversaw the study, said diversity will only decline as temperatures rise.
“If we go beyond two degrees of warming,” he told EcoWatch on a video call, “there are really, really drastic impacts on both the diversity and the available crops, especially in the tropics and equatorial region, where it’s already very vulnerable.”
“The loss of diversity means that the range of food crops available for cultivation could decrease significantly in certain areas,” said Sara Heikonen, the study’s lead author, in a press release. “That would reduce food security and make it more difficult to get adequate calories and protein.”
For each of the 30 crops, the researchers established their “safe climatic space,” which can be likened to a Goldilocks zone of optimal growth, using average precipitation, aridity and temperature. Then, the researchers applied four different projected warming conditions for four scenarios: at 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average.
As warming increases, the researchers found, the safe climatic space for crops tends to move farther and farther away from the equator, and if warming goes beyond 1.5 degrees, it could threaten “up to half” of the world’s crops at lower latitudes, according to a press release.
The findings also beg environmental justice concerns. Because equatorial nations tend to be poorer than countries at higher latitudes, the countries and people least responsible for climate change would pay the highest price with fewer resources to adapt.
“The negative effects are mostly concentrated on the equatorial region,” Heikonen said, which is already at around 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming. “It depends on the region of course, but 25% of the current production might already be at risk even even at the lower warm levels, whereas up here in the North or in the southern parts of the Southern Hemisphere, the negative effects are not that pronounced.”
“In Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia,” she added, “this is a big threat for food security, because in these areas, the population is growing rapidly still, and food supply is already insufficient in some of these places.”
Nature Food
The researchers call for broad mitigation steps to avoid the worst of the consequences on food systems.
“Although climate change will be difficult to just adapt to, we also need to mitigate climate change, but there are things that can be done to support the current production even in the most severely impacted areas,” Heikonen said.
“For example, choosing these kind of under-utilized traditional local crops that might be more climate-resilient, or developing new plant varieties, and then we could develop the agriculture management practices such as irrigation and fertilization, and then there are these more regenerative agriculture practices such as agroforestry.”
Accelerating glacial melting is causing the world’s oceans to rise year after year and is causing a loss of regional freshwater, new research led by scientists at the University of Zürich shows.
The world’s glaciers have been losing 273 billion tonnes of ice mass annually, causing oceans to rise by nearly a millimeter per year, which has been accelerating in recent years, the study finds.
“To put this in perspective, the 273 billion tonnes of ice lost in one single year amounts to what the entire global population consumes in 30 years, assuming three litres per person and day,” lead author Michael Zemp said in a press release.
The researchers also found that the rate at which glaciers are melting is accelerating fairly rapidly. The second half of the period studied (from 2012 to 2023) saw a 36% increase in ice loss compared to the first half.
“For some regions, we’re finding a profound change in how quickly that sea ice is disappearing,” Brian Menounos, one of the study authors, a geography professor at the University of Northern British Columbia whose work focuses on the impacts of climate change in western Canada, told EcoWatch on a video call. “In the lower 48 and western Canada,” he added, “we’ve lost something like 23% of the (glacier) volume since 2000,” he said.
The research was a collaborative effort under the World Glacier Monitoring Service and led by researchers at the University of Zürich. The researchers used the Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE) to collect and analyze huge amounts of data from multiple sources to determine the rate of glacial melting and sea level rise since 2000.
The scientists used several methods to measure glacial ice loss, from the traditional method of manually comparing the amount of snow that accumulates on top of a glacier against the amount of water melting off of it, to much more advanced methods using satellites.
Tyler Sutterley, one of the study authors and senior research scientist at the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington, explained over email that one method the researchers used was photogrammetry, where they created 3D models of the glaciers over time from repeated satellite photos in a process called photogrammetry.
The researchers also used radar and laser ranging instruments from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellites (ICESat and ICESat-2) and the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 missions to “measure changes in surface topography,” in a process called altimetry, Sutterley wrote, the measurements from which were “combined with estimates of the snow density change to estimate the glacier’s total mass change.”
Glaciers in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska: This image, recorded by the Sentinel-2 satellite on 6 Oct. 6, 2017 shows the melting Scott (left), Sheridan (middle), and Childs (right) glaciers feeding lakes and rivers in their forefields. Copernicus Sentinel data 2017
The last technique the researchers used involved measuring changes in Earth’s gravitational field using data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and its successor, GRACE-FO, which allowed for the researchers to estimate glacial mass changes over wide areas.
Using each of these methods, the researchers created the “most comprehensive assessment of glacier change to date,” Sutterley wrote.
While the research didn’t delve into the causes behind ice loss, the biggest factors are almost certainly continued greenhouse gas emissions, along with a loss of ice and snow that reflects heat outward to space. With both of these factors increasing, we can expect both glacial melting and sea level rise to continue accelerating, Sutterley told EcoWatch on a video call.
“The Earth is tricky, but with our mountain glaciers, I think overall, they are expected to continue to shrink — in some regions, yes, shrink faster and faster — but overall, the going trend is that we are losing our glaciated regions, and it is happening faster and faster,” he said.
A 2021 study found that over 400 million people globally are vulnerable to sea level rise as sea level encroaches on the world’s coasts.
“Sea level rise affects all of us,” Sutterley said. “Most of the world’s population lives near water, whether it’s rivers or coasts, and so starting to lose coastline, as it moves further inland based on sea level rise, is going to affect a lot of people.”
“There’s regions in the South Pacific that live on low-lying islands, and it’s going to take a massive humanitarian effort to deal with what is going to be a humanitarian crisis as we start losing places that are habitable just due to sea level rise,” he said.
“Glaciers are one of the key metrics of climate change,” Sutterley said. “If you look at the big picture, you zoom out and you look at the tens of thousands of glaciers altogether, there you get a picture that is related to the energy balance of the planet, and where this energy is going. It’s going into the ocean. It’s melting ice, it’s heating our soils. And so having this broad view gives you this look on where this is going [and] what’s the cost.”
“We will directly notice the melting of these glaciers. Because they are located where many people live, it will affect drinking water supplies, in particular in South America and Asia. And the risk of flooding after the melt season also poses a danger,” Bert Wouters, one of the researchers and associate professor of geoscience and remote sensing at Delft University of Technology, wrote in a press release.
Menounos said that the research will likely continue in the future with a successor to the GLaMBIE project.
“The next steps are for the collaborators of GlaMBIE, 1.0, if you want to call it that, to reach out to the community and propose a follow-up study. And that will take several years for people to get together, to meet at conferences, have workshops, and really sort of dive into perhaps things or aspects that we didn’t have time or we didn’t have data to look at specific regions or look at try to reduce biases in some regions.”
The enormous wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles in January were both more likely to form and more devastating due to climate change, a rapid study from the World Weather Attribution has found.
The scorching and dry conditions that led to the fires were made about 35% more likely due to human-caused climate change, the researchers concluded. Combined with low rainfall — the conditions for which were found the be 2.4 times more likely due to climate change — and dry vegetation to fuel the fires, the risk of fire compounded.
“Using several methods and lines of evidence, this study confirms that climate change made the catastrophic LA wildfires more likely,” Theo Keeping, wildfire researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires at Imperial College London said, according to a press release.
“With every fraction of a degree of warming, the chance of extremely dry, easier-to-burn conditions around the city of LA gets higher and higher.”
A report by World Weather Attribution found that climate change made the conditions leading to the Palisades and Eaton fire in L.A. County 35% more likely.
https://eos.org/articles/how-much-did-climate-change-affect-the-los-angeles-wild…
The researchers used combined weather data with computer models to analyze how how much of a factor climate change played in the blazes, comparing the pre-industrial climate to a more modern climate at about 1.3°C above that baseline.
They also used the Fire Weather Index, which “considers the hot, dry and windy conditions that drive wildfires,” and further analyzed the total rainfall from October to December, which normally marks the tail-end of the fire season, and used the drought code to determine how the duration of the fire season is changing in the region.
They found that the conditions that fueled the fires are expected to happen about once every 17 years, which is an increase of 35% compared to a pre-industrial climate. The Fire Weather Index was also found to be 6% more intense compared to an environment without climate change, which has increased somewhat exponentially in recent years.
“Fall rains usually dampen fuel, hindering the spread of fire, but in contrast to the two years prior, 2024 didn’t see any fall rains,” John Abatzoglou, professor of climatology at the University of California Merced, told reporters at an online press conference. “We actually finally got the first real rainfall this past weekend… but if you look at the calendar, we’re in the middle of the wet season.”
While the fiercest fires usually occur during the dry summer months, the Santa Ana winds coming from the desert to the northeast, which are dry and warm, can help fuel destructive fires during other times of year. This year’s Santa Ana winds were especially fierce, the report found, fanning the fires by pushing sparks of fire to new areas, igniting more fires.
“It’s vital that we point out who is to blame for the fossil fuel pollution that is turbo-charging unnatural disasters like these,” Nadia Hasan, a communications advisor for nonprofit Global Witness, said in a statement. “Oil bosses have worked hand-in-glove with their friends in politics to bake dirty fossil fuels into our energy systems, block climate action, and spread lies about climate change to divide and distract us.”
“Instead of keeping communities safe, mega-rich oil firms are knowingly driving and profiting from the climate crisis. It’s high time we put them on the line for the costs of repair,” she added.
The fires have destroyed an estimated 16,000 structures and killed at least 28 people, with thousands being dropped from their home insurance mere months before the fires hit.
“Communities can’t build back the same because it will only be a matter of years before these burned areas are vegetated again and a high potential for fast-moving fire returns to these landscapes,” said Park Williams, professor of geography at the University of California.
The elderly, along with people with disabilities, low-income groups without access to personal vehicles, and groups who received late warnings were disproportionately impacted, the authors say. They also warned that fires exposed “critical weaknesses” in LA’s water infrastructure, which was designed for more routine fires than especially devastating ones.
The report warns that if global warming reaches an average of 2.6° C, which is the “lowest warming expected under current policies by 2100,” we can expect the Fire Weather Index to be 3% more intense, with similar fires 35% more probable.
As CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, capturing and storing carbon is essential to keeping global warming below 1.5°C. However, not all carbon capture methods are created equal, with some perhaps doing more harm than good for biodiversity.
A new study published Thursday which modeled three prominent land-based carbon capture and storage (CCS) strategies found that reforestation is the only option that, along with effectively sequestering carbon, actively boosts biodiversity rather than potentially harms it.
The three CCS strategies analyzed were reforestation, the practice of restoring native trees on previously deforested or damaged land to sequester carbon; afforestation, adding trees where there were previously none; and bioenergy cropping, raising fast-growing crops — which sequester carbon as they grow — to burn for energy while collecting any emissions released in the process.
“Of the strategies we modeled… we found that all three strategies have the potential to benefit biodiversity by helping to mitigate climate change,” Jeffrey Smith, lead author and researcher at Princeton University told EcoWatch on a video call.
However, he added, “In the case of afforestation and bioenergy cropping, we found that even if we account for the benefits they provide to biodiversity by helping to mitigate climate change, that wasn’t enough to outweigh the harms that they caused biodiversity by driving the loss of habitat.”
Reforestation efforts on the Dillenberg in Taunus, Germany on March 9, 2023. Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance via Getty Images
Bioenergy cropping requires razing land for crop growth which destroys part of an ecosystem. And it’s the transformation from natural ecosystems to agricultural plots that’s been the single largest driving factor of biodiversity worldwide, he said.
For afforestation, which may be feasible in savannahs, for example, Smith says that artificially placing trees could hinder the ecosystem by interfering with certain interactions, like those between shrub and herbivore species and frequent fires that burn across the landscape in an open ecosystem. “If you convert one of these savannas to, say, a forest, you’re actually taking away habitat from lions and ostriches and things like that,” Smith said.
On the other hand, the authors found that reforestation provided a win-win by both capturing carbon and restoring vital parts of ecosystems that many species rely on.
The researchers, using data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), created statistical computer models tracking the species distribution and habitat affinities of more than 14,000 vertebrate species across different parts of the globe across potential climate conditions.
They then paired that model with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, an enormous collaborative global project that models Earth’s climate conditions, for the research.
“To me, it seems like a fairly intensive amount of computational and data power that goes into this,” Smith said. “And so for example, the model takes a day to run, but it runs on one hundred computers simultaneously.”
“Addressing climate change is going to have to start with large-scale transformations to the energy production system. There’s sort of no way around that, and no way are these land-based mitigation strategies going to fix climate change. It’s going to require us to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, increase energy efficiency, and fundamentally transition the energy system,” he added. “That said, the thing that’s interesting about these strategies is they actually allow us to sort of reverse past emissions.”
However, we may not have the luxury of always choosing climate mitigation practices that maximize biodiversity. “People are dying from climate change because of flooding in Pakistan and all of these different places around the world, and so there might be reasonable expectations that maybe we should be addressing climate change more aggressively, even if that is not the optimal thing to do from a biodiversity perspective,” Smith said.
An earlier study published in the journal Nature Climate Change from September 2024 found that an enormous investment in CCS is required to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming under 2°C, and that even with such an investment, meeting the 1.5°C goal is unlikely.
Smith said he and his colleagues hope to continue this research, citing questions on how different taxonomic groups might respond to different scenarios and “expanding out to other potentially significant ways humans might change the landscape to address climate change… We didn’t model wind and solar panels, but those are two things that we’re going to have to use to help address climate change, and they’re likely going to affect biodiversity in a fairly meaningful way,” he added.
Recent policies from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would lower emissions and force an early retirement of most U.S. coal plants, speeding up the transition away from fossil fuels with limited cost, a new study shows. However, whether those rules will stay intact during an upcoming Trump administration is doubtful.
The power plant rules, targeting coal-fired power plants specifically, were finalized in May 2024 as supplementary policy supporting the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act’s agenda to reduce carbon emissions.
The study, published in the journal science,used nine computer models to simulate “hypothetical future scenarios to understand impacts of the finalized power plant rules,” lead author John Bistline told EcoWatch in a video call.
“Specifically, we see 73 to 86% reductions by 2040 relative to 2005 levels, and that’s compared to something like 60 to 83% without the rules,” Bistline said.
He added that with and without the rules, the models also showed a future decrease in non-CO2 emissions, including sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx).
In a blow to these policies, however, President-elect Donald Trump has previously promised to undo the new policies, calling them an “anti-American-energy crusade,” Cronkite News reported.
“Each of the nine models is independent, and some of the models are just looking at the power sector only, whereas others have broader scopes, where they look at the entire energy system and linkages with the power sector, or even broader, looking at the economy as a whole in the U.S.,” Bistline said.
“If there are areas that [the] models all seem to agree, that gives more confidence that what they’re saying is fairly robust, at least across models,” he added.
The modeling was conducted by multiple institutions, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Resources for the Future, a press release said.
While the study showed a significant decline in carbon emissions and overall power generation from the power plants, other energy sources including natural gas, renewables and nuclear either showed an increase in output or stayed roughly even, relative to models without the rules.
Even in scenarios with higher electricity usage like an increase in data center usage, the percentage of emissions reduced largely stays the same, but building the infrastructure to support such an increased load could be a challenge, Bistline said.
However, the authors found that in a range of scenarios both with and without the rules, the U.S. would still fall short of two of its critical goals: its 2030 goal to reduce net greenhouse gases 50-52 percent below 2005 levels and its 2050 net-zero goal.
“The implications of the rules for different technologies vary a lot by region and by scenario. There’s no one size fits all approach to decarbonization,” Bistline said. But even in the absence of EPA guidelines, we could still see evolving trends, he added.
While the fate of these policies is unclear, Bistline said that he and the other researchers intend on continuing collaborating with other organizations to analyze energy trends through their models.
Global sea temperatures reached an all-time high in 2024, according to a new study published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
The 54 researchers from seven countries deployed thousands of instruments to collect ocean data both at the surface and up to 2,000 meters below the surface — the latter called ocean heat content — covering all the world’s oceans.
“The broken records in the ocean have become a broken record,” professor Lijing Cheng with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a press release.
The researchers found that all three major metrics they analyzed broke records this year: global sea surface temperature, average global sea surface temperature and the temperature of water up to 2,000 meters below the surface.
From 2023 to 2024, the researchers recorded an enormous increase of the upper 2,000 meters of ocean heat content of 16 zettajoules. That increase represents about 140 times the world’s total energy production in 2023.
Kevin Trenberth, a co-author and researcher at the University of Auckland, said it’s unusual for all three metrics to break records in a single year.
“The biggest years on record globally are the year following an El Niño event,” Trenberth told EcoWatch in a video interview. “The last major one was 2016. That’s the last time that the global mean surface temperature and the sea temperatures and the ocean heat content were all at record levels.”
2024, like 2016, was a year marked by the tail-end of an El Niño event, which, as lead author Lijing Cheng explained on a video call, leads to higher-than average sea temperatures. “During El Niño,” he said, “global surface temperature is very high. La Niña is cold… so year-to-year fluctuations are dominated by El Niño-La Niña cycles.”
Cheng explained that although the El Niño phenomenon has an enormous impact on sea surface temperatures, it only has a minor role on ocean heat content — or ocean temperature below sea level — which also broke record highs last year.
Ocean temperatures are a critical indicator of human-caused climate change. The vast majority — about 90% — of the Earth’s excess heat from global warming is stored in the oceans.
The researchers used multiple instruments to record ocean data, John Abraham, a co-author and researcher at the University of St. Thomas, told EcoWatch in an email. “Most importanly, we use devices called Argo floats which are robotic sensors that move up and down in the oceans 2000 meters and send temperature data to laboratories through satellites.”
Abraham also explained that the researchers used instruments called expendable bathythermographs with long wires going up to the surface that dropped from ships passing the ocean to record data. “Other instruments,” he added, “are buoys that have sensors, and we also attach sensors to animals so they gather data as they swim.”
The authors estimate in the study’s concluding remarks that the recorded 16 zettajoule increase in ocean heat content in the upper 2,000 meters of the oceans led to a sea level rise of 1.0 millimeters, with a total rise of 54 millimeters since 1960. “Sea level rise, in turn, increases the risk of coastal infrastructure and habitats being impacted by saltwater intrusion, coastal erosion and flooding in low-lying regions,” the study says.
Warming oceans also tend to lead to more and more intense storms, Trenberth explained.
“The warmer ocean temperatures, in general, means that there’s capacity for greater evaporation over the ocean, and so that puts more moisture into the atmosphere, which gets gathered up by weather systems, and where it’s raining, then it rains harder,” he said.
This is especially true for hurricanes, which are fueled by warm waters.
Cheng said that even if we were to stay under the Paris Climate Agreement’s goal of 1.5° C of warming, ocean heating will still continue to rise. “Even if we meet the Paris target, the surface warming can be controlled by two degrees Celsius [but] ocean warming will continue, because ocean warming is delayed response.”
“Climate change mitigation and adaptation need to continue even if we meet can meet [the] Paris Agreement,” she said. “It’s a long-time preparation for the future of climate change.”
The team plans to continue keeping track of ocean warming going forward. “They’ve been putting out these reports in January for the last five years, or something like that. Now the group in China seems to be committed to continuing this, and I think they like the publicity they’ve received in the past,” Trenberth said.
“It indicates that their work is important, and for the funding that they get within China to continue. And as you may know, there are some stresses between the U.S. and China,” he said.
“Congress has been prevented from interacting with Chinese scientists for the most part now, which is rather unfortunate. I think they still can, to some extent, in the area of climate, but [for] areas that involve sophisticated technology of certain kinds then there are restrictions as to how much people can interact on the climate. It’s very much a global phenomenon. It’s very important that everyone who has information share that data, and then we can get a more complete picture of what is going on, and so that’s what our paper is about.”
In 1979, when President Jimmy Carter famously unveiled 32 solar panels on the White House roof, he remarked, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”
Despite his reputation as an often ineffective president, he had an enormous effect on the environment as an advocate for clean energy, protecting lands and regulating toxic chemicals.
Jimmy Carter was an early adopter of clean energy in an effort to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil following the oil crisis that preceded his presidency. Four years before Carter took office, the member nations of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries placed an oil embargo on the U.S. and several other western nations in response to their support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. As a result, the price of oil rose by more than 300%, while American dependence on foreign oil was simultaneously rising.
After Carter took office, he responded by creating the U.S. Department of Energy. One of Carter’s major goals for the agency was to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels by pushing for the domestic production of energy. While this push wasn’t perfect — part of his solution for the complex crisis included propping up domestic coal power — it was also a first-of-its-kind endorsement for clean energy, championing sustainable sources like solar and nuclear. “No one can embargo the sun,” Carter once said. “No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute our air or poison our waters. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored and used.”
In 1979, a second oil crisis hit, this time spurred by the decline in oil trade in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Carter responded by laying out plans to expand renewable energy sources and made a pledge that 20% of American energy would be produced by renewable sources by 2000, but was voted out of office before many of these plans could come to fruition.
Carter also protected far more land than any U.S. president in history. In 1978, he advocated for the National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA,) which aimed to protect vast amounts of Alaskan wilderness from commercial use and destruction. After the bill failed due to a last-minute filibuster, Carter used executive authority to protect more than 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness, designating those lands as National Monuments. This action alone would more than double the size of the National Park system.
Snowcapped mountains in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. In 1978, President Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act into law, creating 10 new national parks and preserves including this one, the largest U.S. national park. National Park Service
In December of 1980, roughly six weeks before Carter left office, ANILCA was debated again in Congress, and passed. Upon Carter’s signature, the law became the most expansive federal protection of American lands in history, granting protection to more than 157 million acres of Alaskan wilderness, which included further protections for much of the land Carter had protected two years prior. Of those 157 million acres, it also designated nearly ten million acres to the National Wildlife Refuge System, more than nine million acres to the Wilderness Preservation System, and more than three million acres to the National Forest System.
He was the first president to take notable action against federal water projects, arguing that building dams in the American West would harm river health. This stance was an extension of his conservation efforts as governor of Georgia, when, according to Stuart E. Eizenstat, his own domestic affairs advisor, he became “the first governor to block a Corps of Engineers dam,” and during his presidency was “the most consistently pro-environmental president since Theodore Roosevelt.”
Today, many rivers throughout the American West suffer from major droughts.
While it’s difficult to directly measure the impact his stance on these federal water projects had, these rivers would have surely been even worse off if it weren’t for Carter.
After Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring brought pesticides to the forefront of the public eye a little more than a decade earlier, Carter took broad steps to regulate pesticides. He passed major amendments to the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIRFA) in 1978, requiring stricter registration of pesticides, and in 1976, he passed the Toxic Substances Control Act, giving the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the authority to require reporting, testing and record-keeping of toxic chemicals.
Of course, Jimmy Carter is nearly as famous for his exceptional post-presidency as his actual presidency. Likewise, his impact on the world outlives his time in the Oval Office. He and his wife, Rosalynn, famously worked with Habitat for Humanity, personally helping to build, repair or renovate about 4,400 homes, according to the organization’s website, for instance.
Carter strolls the worksite at the Habitat For Humanity Work Project in San Pedro, California on Oct. 29, 2007. Charley Gallay / Getty Images
The Carter Center, his own nonprofit, has also had a significant impact globally. When the organization assumed leadership in the global fight against Guinea Worm in 1986, there were 3.5 million cases in Africa and Asia, according to the Carter Center. By 2022, that number had dropped to thirteen. It is currently on track to become the second human disease to be eradicated in history, following only smallpox.
Some of the Carter Center’s other achievements include:
Rallying against other diseases, like trachoma, river blindness, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis and malaria;
Increasing healthcare access in thousands of impoverished global communities;
Pioneering “new public health approaches to preventing or controlling devastating neglected diseases in Africa and Latin America;”
Observing elections in dozens of countries in an effort to strengthen democracies; and
“Furthering avenues to peace in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, the Korean Peninsula, Haiti, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Middle East.”
Jimmy Carter has had a profound impact back in his hometown too. In 2017, nearly four decades after he had solar panels installed on the White House roof, Carter leased ten acres on the land he used to farm peanuts to build a 1.3-megawatt solar farm that’s been powering half of his hometown of Plains, Georgia ever since. Rather than a road not taken, it represents the life of a man who has perhaps paved too many roads to count.
Beginning in late fall 2014 and lasting into 2016, an anomalous, massive marine heatwave nicknamed “the Blob” developed off the western coast of the U.S., covering all of Alaska’s coastwater and extending as far south as Southern California, raising ocean temperatures by several degrees Celsius.
The Blob had an extreme effect on Alaska in particular. According to a study released Thursday, it resulted in the deaths of roughly four million common murres — one of Alaska’s most prominent seabirds — representing a decline of more than half of the state’s entire population.
“We’ve never seen a bird die-off nearly this big — or really any non-fish vertebrate,” Heather Renner, a Fish and Wildlife Service supervisory wildlife biologist at Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and first study author, said in a video interview.
The team kept track of murre populations across 13 breeding colonies and over three distinct periods: pre-heatwave (2008-2014), heatwave (2014-2016) and post-heatwave (2017-2022), to measure population trends.
Comparison of common murre colony on a census plot, South Island, Semidi Islands, Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, before and after the 2015-2016 marine heatwave. The top image shows the colony in 2014, and the bottom image shows the colony in 2021. USFWS
During the murre’s annual breeding season, Renner explained, the researchers — equipped with binoculars or spotting scopes and a tally counter — spent long days, often in the cold and fog, observing the birds’ populations in dense breeding colonies from afar, whether they watched while perched on an adjacent cliffside or wading in a small boat.
“During and immediately after the heatwave,” Renner wrote in an email, “many murres didn’t nest as they normally do. They would show up on the cliffs one day and another day nobody would be there.” She added, “In 2015 and 2016, there were a number of colonies that had complete reproductive failure.”
“Immediately after the heatwave, we knew there had been a tremendous loss, but we weren’t sure how much was due to birds dying or alternatively whether they were just skipping breeding because conditions were tough,” she added. “We had to wait several years for the birds to come back and resume breeding before we could be sure of the extent of the die-off.”
A common murre adult feeds a small forage fish to a common murre chick in the Buldir Islands of Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge on July 27, 2007. Cornelius Nelo Schlawe / USFWS
The study authors wrote that the heatwave had an enormous effect on key habitat-forming species, like corals and kelps, which triggered cascading bottom-up harm toward the top of the food chain.
Common murres rely on fish as a food source, but the fish they normally prey on were largely absent due to the cascading effects of the heatwave, making the most likely cause of the die-off a mass-starvation event.
Most of the birds died during the winter months, Renner said, and although we don’t know exactly what the murres eat in the winter, it’s likely a combination of forage fish, juvenile pollock and krill.
“We know that many of the forage fish populations also collapsed at the time, and not just the numbers. They they were smaller at the same age, they [had] lower fat contents, their distributions changed,” she said. “Another important part of it is that fish are cold blooded, and when the waters warm, their metabolism increases. And so a lot of the bigger fish that are competitors with seabirds had higher metabolisms and needed to eat more. So there’s extra pressure on prey.”
At the same time, the prey fish themselves, with their high metabolisms, struggled to find enough food, which reduced energy flow to predators. With increased competition and less total food, the murres’ beaching rate — the rate at which their carcasses washed up on beaches — was “one to three orders of magnitude above baseline for nine consecutive months,” which all appear to be major contributing factors to what the authors believe to be the “largest mortality event of any wildlife species reported during the modern era.”
Despite having plenty of time, the murres’ population has not begun to recover, but the cause is unclear, Renner said. One hypothesis is that with severely smaller colonies, it’s harder to defend against predators, like apex predator eagles or seagulls that take their eggs.
A common murre with an egg on Oct. 21, 2021. NOAA
Renner said that on top of long-term monitoring data that shows which species are vulnerable, conservation measures like removing predators introduced to their colonies could be a huge boon to their reproduction rates.
The study authors also warn that marine heatwaves are “increasing in frequency, duration, and magnitude in lockstep with global warming and at a pace that threatens the response rates of seabird communities.”
“We suggest that the rapid and long-lasting decline of an abundant and widespread upper trophic predator, to less than half of its former population size in Alaska, may signal a new threshold of response to global warming,” the authors concluded.
A common murre perched on a ledge at Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge on July 27, 2019. Brie Drummond / USFWS
An abnormally active typhoon season that hit the Philippines this year was “supercharged” by climate change, according to a new attribution study published Thursday by the World Weather Attribution (WWA).
The report found that climate change exacerbated the conditions that led to the typhoon season and made the formation of typhoons nearly twice as likely.
The team noted that six major storms hit the country in less than a month, including five typhoons and one major tropical cyclone — an anomaly compared to the three average typhoons the country experiences in an entire year.
The storms, which killed more than 170 people, formed in a span of 23 days from late October to mid-November, each hitting Luzon, the country’s largest and most populated island, and impacted more than 13 million people, the study says.
Flooding in Dela Paz village from Tropical Storm Trami, in Binan, Laguna province, Philippines on Nov. 20, 2024. Ezra Acayan / Getty Images
Ben Clarke, a researcher at the WWA and the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, wrote in a press release, “While it is unusual to see so many typhoons hit the Philippines in less than a month, the conditions that gave rise to these storms are increasing as the climate warms.
The researchers used their standard parameter of “potential intensity,” or their evaluation of the maximum wind speed possible under certain conditions, to evaluate the extent to which climate change affected the storms.
“It was therefore appropriate to study an area over the ocean just to the east of the Philippines, in which all of the storms that affected the Philippines developed,” Clarke told EcoWatch in an email.
The potential intensity is calculated using both real-world observations and large-scale computer models of storms.
A truck overturned by Super Typhoon Man-yi in Bambang, Philippines on Nov. 18, 2024. Ezra Acayan / Getty Images
Clarke told reporters in a video conference that the researchers also calculated the storms’ wind speeds using their IRIS storm model and combined that with their “understanding of of the physics and the factors that are really important for cyclone intensity.”
“So from these 2 analyses,” Clarke said, “we find that the conditions in which the storms developed in 2024 have become about 70% more likely due to warming of 1.3 degrees. That means that the storms were more likely to develop more strongly and reach the Philippines at a higher intensity than they otherwise would have.”
“On the hazard side,” Clarke wrote in an email, “the biggest takeaways are that the conditions in which these storms all developed are more likely due to climate change (mostly but probably not entirely because of ocean heating) and that the Philippines should expect more years in which more than three major typhoons make landfall.”
Rice fields flooded by Super Typhoon Man-yi in Bambang, Philippines on Nov. 18, 2024. Ezra Acayan / Getty Images
Afrhill Rances, a regional communications manager for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in the Philippines, said in the press briefing that this year’s typhoon season revealed significant vulnerabilities and heightened exposure to climate impact in the Philippines, especially in Luzon.
Rances cited urban sprawl, deforestation and river silting as factors leading to “compounding risks” for rural communities and cities in Luzon.
The report also looked into what future typhoon seasons might look like under warmer conditions, Clarke said. “At 2.6 degrees of global warming — which is kind of the optimistic side of what we’re currently on track for given implemented national policies — we would find that these conditions will increase by about 40% again, compared to now. And that’s in likelihood. So we’ll see them 40% more often, and this is likely a relatively conservative estimate.”
The 2024 presidential election is widely projected to be one of the closest in American history, and each candidate says the stakes have never been higher. There are many issues on the ballot, from abortion rights to foreign policy. But where do the candidates stand on the climate crisis facing the planet?
Kamala Harris
When she ran for president in 2020, then-Senator Kamala Harris campaigned as a climate champion. She embraced a Green New Deal, called for a ban on fracking, and released a $10 trillion climate plan that had provisions to invest in renewable energy, hold major polluters accountable and emphasize environmental justice reforms.
Since she was named President Joe Biden’s vice president, however, climate policies Harris once supported went to the back burner as she publicly embraced Biden’s climate policy, which was largely to her right.
So where does she stand now?
On Climate Science
While Harris has long been an advocate for climate action, the Harris campaign has not yet released a comprehensive climate plan, and Harris has been fairly silent on climate change and energy as a whole on the campaign trail. That silence could be a strategic move, though, so as not to alienate certain voters, especially Pennsylvanians — the voters in a crucial swing state with a significant fossil fuel industry — and young voters. Harris’ commenting on green energy and a need to move away from fossil fuels would risk the ire of the former. And remarks on the record oil production under the Inflation Reduction Act, which she’s said has helped lower energy costs in the U.S., would risk alienating the latter.
“It looks like a deliberate decision to forgo both pro-climate and pro-drilling messaging,” Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, told The Washington Post. “The campaign may have concluded that it has more to lose by alienating voters on either side than to gain by drawing in undecideds.”
However, a comment made by one of Harris’ advisors at a DNC event could shine more light on her climate stance. Ike Irby, a senior advisor to Harris, said that Harris and her VP pick Tim Walz are “committed to bold action to build a clean energy economy, create good jobs, ensure America’s energy security, reduce emissions, protect public health, support communities in the face of climate disasters and hold polluters accountable.”
Fracking
Harris, in a U-turn on her views on fracking, said she would not support a ban on fracking, citing the need to “invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”
This, too, could be a strategic move, as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speculated. Sanders said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he views Harris’ reversal on fracking and Medicare for all as a “pragmatic” decision to do “what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”
However, it’s worth noting that Harris was the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which, along with major subsidies for renewable energy, did open up new leases for fracking, a point she made in her debate with former President Trump.
Energy Policy
Harris has defended the record oil and gas production in the U.S. under Biden by saying that it helps keep energy prices low as the country shifts toward renewable energy sources.
Her official policy page lays out how she plans to tackle the climate crisis. She says she will “unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all.”
Inflation Reduction Act
Among its many provisions, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) featured an historic amount of of legislation to curb the climate crisis.
The IRA included generous tax credits for renewable energy sources, corporate tax credits for companies that produce renewable energy components, a tax credit for energy companies to produce renewable energy, funding for climate change resilience and drought mitigation, electric vehicle tax credits and production credits, a clean fuel standard, and provisions to promote carbon capture and storage, as well as climate research.
After casting the tie-breaking vote for the IRA, Harris said she plans to build on it as president.
Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s views on climate change and energy are more primitive as he does not support renewable energy, and sides with fossil fuels.
His previous administration also aggressively rolled back nearly 100 climate regulations.
On Climate Science
Former President Trump has a long history of climate denialism. He has called climate change a “hoax.” Recently on the campaign trail, he said that nuclear warming, not climate change, is “the warming that you’re going to have to be very careful with.”
Fracking
Donald Trump supports fracking. At a recent Pennsylvania rally, Trump said, “With me, one thing you know, I will never be stopping fracking,” and has repeatedly said he will “Drill, baby, drill.”
Energy Policy
Trump favors fossil fuel and coal energy. On his official Agenda 47 policy plan, Trump says that he will “rescind” what he sweepingly describes as “every one of Joe Biden’s industry-killing, jobs-killing, pro-China and anti-American electricity regulations.” He has also promised to massively escalate domestic oil and natural gas production.
Paris Climate Agreement
Trump’s Agenda 47 policy says he will leave the “horrendously unfair Paris Climate Accords.” This promise isn’t surprising, as Trump previously took the U.S. out of the agreement, which aims to curb greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming.
Project 2025
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 would have enormous consequences for climate policy if enacted. It calls for an extreme restructuring of virtually every facet of the executive branch, including the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA.
Although Trump has tried to publicly distance himself from the project, many people associated with him are behind the document.
Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the Heritage Foundation has been extremely influential in every Republican presidential administration. It has done so through detailed documents called Mandates for Leadership, a guide for right-wing domestic and foreign policy.
Just weeks after Reagan won reelection in 1984, The Washington Post reported that the first Mandate for Leadership, which was “designed to force the federal government to the right” was so influential in the Reagan Administration that it “became a bible of sorts for many in the Reagan White House.” The Heritage Foundation boasts that about 60% of their entire policy guide was implemented by the end of Reagan’s first term.
The foundation and its mandates were similarly influential in the administrations of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump.
In Trump’s 2017-2021 administration, the Heritage Foundation had enormous influence. It had a say in who would be part of the White House staff, including at least 66 Heritage employees and alumni, according to The New York Times. Trump also bragged about his success with instituting the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations faster than Reagan did.
The Heritage Foundation has just stated that 64% of the Trump Agenda is already done, faster than even Ronald Reagan. “We’re blown away,” said Thomas Binion of Heritage, President Trump “is very active, very conservative and very effective. Huge volume & spectrum of issues.”
In all but name, Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership. Its main architects are Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and Russ Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who is the former head of the office of management and budget in the Trump White House and is the current policy director for the Republican National Committee.
Project 2025 has been labeled as extremely authoritarian and far-right on both social and economic issues. It opposes abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights and racial equity, according to the ACLU.
Mandy Gunasekara, the previous chief of staff to Trump’s EPA, and who wrote the chapter on the EPA for Project 2025, shows she is at odds with the scientific consensus on climate change, denouncing what she describes as the EPA’s “fear-based rhetoric” around the “perceived threat of climate change.”
Chris Sellers, the head of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative’s (EDGI’s) Policy Monitoring and Interviewing Initiative, told EcoWatch that Gunasekara is now being “being talked about as the leading candidate for EPA Administrator.”
Concerning broad restructuring for executive branch departments, Sellers said, “They want to basically do away with a lot of the civil service requirements… [for] the EPA, they want to put a political appointee in charge of research and development. And that’s kind of emblematic, I mean, that kind of politicization.”
The EPA chapter also advocates for “open-source science,” which according to the EDGI’s annotation of Project 2025, is “code language for conservative efforts to undermine the work of scientists and the role of science in the regulatory process.” The authors of the annotation say that it’s a variation on the controversial “sound science” idea pushed by Scott Pruitt, Trump’s head of the EPA, as a right-wing talking point used to further fossil fuel interests.
The annotation authors write, “This ‘open-source science’ agenda would exclude from regulatory considerations practically all the burgeoning science done over the past two decades centering on actual people who are exposed to toxic pollutants.”
As for energy policy, Robert Lifset, associate professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and researcher for EDGI, told EcoWatch, “This was basically written by oil and gas lobbyists, or it was written by people who sat down with oil and gas lobbyists and asked them what they wanted, or what what they wanted to see done.”
Bernard L. McNamee, commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Trump, wrote the chapter on the Department of Energy, which pushes, among many changes, energy dominance through liquefied natural gas and fossil fuels.
William Perry Pendley, who was acting director of the Bureau of Land Management under Trump, wrote the chapter on the Department of the Interior, which in part pushes domestic oil and fossil fuels.
Additionally, Project 2025 would see the U.S. completely back out of the Paris Climate Agreement, break up NOAA, end all subsidies for renewable energy and eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances.
Some of these proposed sweeping changes could be difficult to enact in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, a landmark ruling surrounding how the federal government should deal with unclear or ambiguous language in laws concerning the executive branch. Laws giving authority to departments in the executive branch have often been written intentionally vague to allow for experts in those departments to have large sway over how to approach their duties, which the Chevron doctrine allowed for — a boon to Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
Now, any ambiguous language would be the responsibility of the judicial system to clarify, which could make a second Trump administration’s role in instituting Project 2025 more difficult. A cold comfort, perhaps, as there are hundreds of conservative federal judges, along with six conservative Supreme Court justices, who, given the opportunity, now have the authority to essentially rewrite any ambiguous administrative regulations almost as they see fit.
In addition, in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court also granted the president complete immunity over any “official acts” made while in office — a massive win for the former president, the implications for which are still largely unknown.
While Trump has publicly renounced Project 2025 with claims to blacklist anyone involved with it, that may be easier said than done. Project 2025’s long list of credits includes more than 150 former Trump officials and staffers. Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance also has ties to the Heritage Foundation, and he even wrote the foreword to Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book.
“[Trump] has lied so many times. I mean, my sense is that he’s also doesn’t know much about the environment, and he blurts out these things when they ask about it,” Sellers said. “So he’s going to really delegate, and because he doesn’t know really what he’s doing there, other than broad symbolic gestures. So I think he’s going to delegate, there’s a stable of people there to whom he can delegate now… I think that’s that’s a signal to me that Project 25, at least on the environmental front, [has] kind of a green light should Trump get in there.”
To that point, Lifset concurred. “I agree with that. And I’d add that Republican administrations for the last two or three decades have largely outsourced energy environmental policy to the oil and gas industry.”
