Is the world being destroyed?

More than 5% of global emissions are linked to conflict or militaries but countries continue to hide the true scale

Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe

Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.

“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.

“We need to become mindful of the way we’re being manipulated,” says Merz, who is co-founder of the Merz Institute, an organisation that researches the systemic causes of the climate crisis and how to tackle them.

Merz and colleagues believe that most climate “solutions” proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three “levers” of overshoot: consumption, waste and population.

They claim that unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster. “We can deal with climate change and worsen overshoot,” says Merz. “The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously underdiscussed. These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades – they’re not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand.”

“Overshoot” refers to how many Earths human society is using up to sustain – or grow – itself. Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet’s biocapacity can regenerate.

Where discussion of climate often centres on carbon emissions, a focus on overshoot highlights the materials usage, waste output and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth’s biosphere.

“Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behaviour,” says Merz. “For decades we’ve been telling people to change their behaviour without saying: ‘Change your behaviour.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all of the things that drive behaviour have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction – and we’ve been wondering why nothing’s changing.”

The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signalling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviours which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategiesto create behaviours incompatible with a sustainable world.

“People are the victims – we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction,” says the evolutionary behavioural ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. “Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?”

Just one-quarter of the world population is responsible for nearly three-quarters of emissions. The authors suggest the best strategy to counter overshoot would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms.

“We’re talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they’re trying to say about themselves. Right now, our signals have a really high material footprint –our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials sourced from all over the world, shipped to south-east Asia most often and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season’s trends. The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint – or even better, have an ecologically positive one.”

The Merz Institute runs an overshoot behaviour lab where they work on interventions to address overshoot. One of these identifies “behavioural influencers” such as screenwriters, web developers and algorithm engineers, all of whom are promoting certain social norms and could be working to rewire society relatively quickly and harmlessly by promoting a new set of behaviours.

The paper discusses the enormous success of the work of the Population Media Center, an initiative that creates mainstream entertainment to drive behaviour change on population growth and even gender violence. Fertility rates have declined in the countries in which the centre’s telenovelas and radionovelas have aired.

Population growth is a difficult topic to broach given the not-too-distant history of eugenics and ethnic cleansing practised in many nations around the world. However, Merz and colleagues insist it is important to confront the issue as population growth has cancelled out most climate gains from renewables and efficiency over the past three decades.

“It’s a question of women’s liberation, frankly,” says Barnard. “Higher levels of education lead to lower fertility rates. Who could possibly claim to be against educating girls – and if they are, why?”

The team calls for more interdisciplinary research into what they have dubbed the “human behavioural crisis” and concerted efforts to redefine our social norms and desires that are driving overconsumption. When asked about the ethics of such a campaign, Merz and Barnard point out that corporations fight for consumers’ attention every second of every day.

“Is it ethical to exploit our psychology to benefit an economic system destroying the planet?” asks Barnard. “Creativity and innovation are driving overconsumption. The system is driving us to suicide. It’s conquest, entitlement, misogyny, arrogance and it comes in a fetid package driving us to the abyss.”

The team is adamant that solutions that do not tackle the underlying drivers of our growth-based economies will only exacerbate the overshoot crisis.

“Everything we know and love is at stake,” says Barnard. “A habitable planet and a peaceful civilisation both have value, and we need to be conscious about using tools in ethical and justice-based ways. This is not just about humanity. This is about every other species on this planet. This is about the future generations.”

“I do get frustrated that people sit in paralysis thinking, what do I do? Or what must we do? There are moral hazards everywhere. We have to choose how to intervene to keep us working on a path forward as humanity, because everything right now is set up to strip us of our humanity.”

“Groundwater declines have consequences,” said Scott Jasechko, an associate professor at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, and the study’s lead author. “Those consequences can include causing streams to leak, lands to sink, seawater to contaminate coastal aquifers, and wells to run dry.”

Past global studies have relied on satellite observations with much coarser resolution, and on models that calculate groundwater levels rather than directly measuring them.

Data from more than 1,000 aquifers reveal widespread decline, but improvement in some places shows the trend can be reversed.
[...]
The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, confirms widespread groundwater declines previously found with satellites and models, said Marc Bierkens, a professor of hydrology at Utrecht University who was not involved in the research. The paper also offers new findings about aquifers in recovery, he said.

The researchers compared water levels from 2000-20 with trends from 1980-2000 in about 500 aquifers. This comparison to an earlier era revealed a more hopeful picture than just looking at water levels since 2000. In 30 percent of the smaller group of aquifers, groundwater levels have fallen faster since 2000 than they did over the earlier two decades. But in 20 percent of them, groundwater declines have slowed down compared to earlier and in another 16 percent, trends have reversed entirely and groundwater levels are now rising.

The improvements are happening in aquifers around the globe, in places as diverse as Australia, China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Thailand and the United States. These aquifers provide reason for cautious optimism, said Debra Perrone, an associate professor at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Environmental Studies Program and co-author of the new research

“We can be optimistic in that our data reveal more than 100 aquifers where groundwater level declines have slowed, stopped or reversed. But cautious in that groundwater levels are rising at rates much smaller than they are declining,” she said. “It’s much easier to make things worse than to make things better.”

The study relies on data from about 170,000 monitoring wells that government agencies and researchers use to track the water table. Well data is not available or does not cover enough years everywhere, so the researchers were limited to studying aquifers in about 40 countries and territories.

A recent New York Times investigation analyzing more than 80,000 monitoring wells in the United States found broadly similar trends within the country.

From a climate perspective, 2024 is beginning in uncharted territory. Temperatures last year broke records not by small intervals but by big leaps; 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded, and each month in the second half of the year was the hottest—the hottest June, the hottest July, all the way through to December. July was in fact the hottest month in recorded history. Already, experts predict that 2024 is likely to be even hotter. But these heat records, although important milestones, won’t hold their title for long. “Getting too excited about any given year is a bit of a fool’s game, because we’re on an escalator that’s going up,” Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at the Columbia Climate School, told me. “We’re going to be doing this every year.”

Instead, the way to think about climate change now is through two interlinked concepts. The first is nonlinearity, the idea that change will happen by factors of multiplication, rather than addition. The second is the idea of “gray swan” events, which are both predictable and unprecedented. Together, these two ideas explain how we will face a rush of extremes, all scientifically imaginable but utterly new to human experience.

Our climate world is now one of nonlinear relationships—which means we are now living in a time of accelerating change. Tiffany Shaw, a climate physicist at the University of Chicago, has studied how upper-level jet-stream winds will accelerate under climate change; each degree Celsius of warming will increase the speed of these winds by 2 percent, likely leading to a set of unpleasant impacts, including more turbulence on flights and more accelerated storm systems. Plus, the fastest winds will speed up more than 2.5 times faster than the average wind will. Slow winds won’t change nearly as much. In other words, the fastest winds will get faster, fastest.

Again and again, climate scientists are discovering these nonlinear relationships in the climate system. They recently found one for snow: Once warming hits a certain threshold, the snowpack in the Northern Hemisphere is set to diminish in nonlinear fashion with each additional degree of warming, disappearing faster and faster. Meanwhile, the already moist air in the tropics can hold more moisture because of warmer temperatures, and scientists have found that this relationship also responds nonlinearly to warming: With each additional degree of heat, wet places will get wetter in an accelerating fashion, leading to torrential downpours and flooding. In an offense to sensitive ears everywhere, scientists call this the “moist-gets-moister” response.

“As we push toward a warmer world, with this nonlinear multiplicative factor, we’re pushing into this realm of things we haven’t seen before,” Shaw told me. “It’s not just inching toward more breaking records, but shattering them. It’s something that we should expect.”

Among these new extremes will be gray-swan events. These are not like black-swan events, which Shaw described as completely “unpredictable or unforeseeable.” Instead, scientists will start to observe things that they can foresee based on physics, but that haven’t appeared in the historical record before. “As we reflect, as climate scientists, on events that we see emerging, there are these record-shattering, extreme events,” she said. “Events like that truly push the boundaries of what our models are capable of.”

The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave was one example. Though weather models did predict a heat wave, forecasts did not accurately foresee how extreme the high temperatures would get. It was an unprecedented situation; typically, when temperature records are broken, they are by a fraction of a degree. This time, temperatures soared more than five degrees Celsius higher than the all-time maximum temperatures in several places. The region—which had some of the lowest rates of air-conditioning in the country at the time—was woefully underprepared. Streets buckled. Cable lines melted. Hundreds of people died while people in prisons were trapped in sweltering cells. The area had never seen anything like it.

Later, analyses found that climate models could predict something like the Pacific Northwest heat wave, but that they would be labeled as extremely rare—one in 100,000 years. It’s physically possible, but we hadn’t ever seen it.

“That’s ultimately the thing that we are concerned about; when you start to see very extreme behavior in places that haven’t seen it before, this can compound vulnerabilities,” Shaw said. In places without the infrastructure to handle it, any given disaster will be that much more deadly and damaging. And gray-swan events are likely to become part of our climatic landscape. “Unfortunately, we are seeing the signal emerge.”

As more and more events shatter records by unprecedented margins, trying to predict future scenarios blurs the line between fact and science fiction. Instead of being able to rely on statistical models or machine learning, which simply extrapolate based on what has already been observed, scientists need to incorporate the possibility of more gray-swan events. “Events like that truly push the boundaries of what our models are capable of,” Shaw said.

But, Jason Smerdon told me, we shouldn’t be taken by surprise. We’ve entered a new realm of the climatically possible. Smerdon studies droughts—specifically long-lasting mega-droughts, such as the one gripping the American Southwest. “We estimated it to be the most severe 23-year period of drought over the last 1,200 years,” he said. About 40 percent of its severity can be attributed to warming brought on by burning fossil fuels. Without it, this drought would not have been nearly as bad.

The Southwest’s mega-drought will end at some point—but, he said, the question is how long a reprieve between droughts will last: “We’re making the baseline drier.” The long-term trend will be toward more droughts, with shorter wet periods between them. “It’s harder to predict when a particular really bad drought year is going to happen,” he said—because of random fluctuation in the system, the year-to-year changes can be jumpy, and may make the average person forget we’re on that “escalator going up.” But, he said, “the likelihood of getting a drought is increasing as things aridify.”

The Canadian wildfires last summer are another example. The fire season blew away records; not only did fires burn the largest area in the country’s recorded history, but that record beat the previous one, set in 1995, by two and a half times. Smerdon told me we shouldn’t treat those fires as flukes. Fire seasons like that won’t happen every year—just as with the droughts he studies, wetter, less fiery years will happen now and again. “The climate will come in and out and create different scenarios where we might have years that are a reprieve,” he said. But there’s no doubt now: “These kinds of fire seasons are with us.”

Smerdon sees a future of “compound events,” such as a drought followed by severe downpours, a combination that could cause extensive damage. (Drought-hardened ground is much less able to absorb rainfall, leading to flash floods.) Or severe storms that knock out power during a heat wave, exposing people to harmful high temperatures. But he was quick to remind me that humanity does have control over how much worse things get. “We are all participants in a massive system that is built on fossil fuels,” Smerdon said. It will take systemic change to stave off the worst climatic outcomes. “The degree to which we face hardship is how willing all of us are to make a difference on this problem. If you were on a ship taking on water, you wouldn’t ask the captain if we’re screwed; you’d pick up a bucket and start bailing out water.”

We all have to live in the world that results, one way or another. “This is really uncharted territory, collectively, in the context of thousands of years,” Smerdon said. How much we do now determines how much of that territory we will have to traverse. atlantic

The global extraction of raw materials is expected to increase by 60% by 2060, with calamitous consequences for the climate and the environment, according an unpublished UN analysis seen by the Guardian.

Natural resource extraction has soared by almost 400% since 1970 due to industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth, according to a presentation of the five-yearly UN Global Resource Outlook made to EU ministers last week.

The stripping of Earth’s natural materials is already responsible for 60% of global heating impacts, including land use change, 40% of air pollution impact, and more than 90% of global water stress and land-related biodiversity loss, says the report, due to be released in February.

Janez Potočnik, a former European commissioner and a co-chair of the UN panel that produced the analysis, said a gouging of raw materials on the scale predicted would almost certainly trigger more frequent and more severe storms, droughts and other climate disasters.

“Higher figures mean higher impacts,” he said. “In essence, there are no more safe spaces on Earth. We are already out of our safe operating space and if these trends continue, things will get worse. Extreme weather events will simply become much more frequent and that will have ever more serious financial and human costs.”

The report prioritises equity and human wellbeing measurements over GDP growth alone and proposes action to reduce overall demand rather than simply increasing “green” production.

Electric vehicles, for example, use almost 10 times more “critical raw materials” than conventional cars, and reaching net zero transport emissions by 2050 would require increasing critical mineral extraction for them sixfold within 15 years.

More remote working, better local services and low-carbon transport options such as bikes and trains could be as effective as ramped up vehicle production in meeting people’s mobility needs, with less harmful environmental impacts, the report says.

“Decarbonisation without decoupling economic growth and wellbeing from resource use and environmental impacts is not a convincing answer and the currently prevailing focus on cleaning the supply side needs to be complemented with demand-side measures,” Potočnik said.

Much of Europe’s housing crisis could be resolved by making better use of empty homes, under-utilised space and more community-focused living, rather than building more houses on virgin land, the paper argues.

This sort of “systemic resource efficiency” could increase equity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80% by 2060, compared with current levels. Material and energy needs for mobility could be cut by more than 40% and for construction by about 30%, according to the report.

Our relationship with nature “will be resolved either with collective wisdom and effort or in a hard and very painful way [with] conflicts, pandemics, migration,” it says. “The future will be green or there will be no future.”

Zakia Khattabi, the climate and environment minister for Belgium, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, told the Guardian: “Resource use is a main driver of the triple crisis of climate, biodiversity and pollution. Reducing our resource consumption is essential to minimise those interconnected environmental pressures. Future EU policies on the circular economy need a stronger focus on demand-side measures as well as on a just transition in order to address this.”

Under the European Green Deal, EU countries’ material and waste footprints are monitored and logged online. The bloc has not so far moved to legislate for use reduction targets but the issue is expected to be discussed at a meeting of EU environment ministers in June.

One EU presidency official said: “Over the years, indicators were elaborated to monitor progress on the circular economy in the EU, including on the footprint of our material consumption. What we lack in addition, however, is a common European understanding of what our aim is in terms of reducing this footprint.”

Insiders say privately the EU is the most likely grouping of developed countries to support such a policy, with the US, Japan, Australia and Canada all opposed to a target.

On average, Europeans have an annual material footprint of 15 tonnes per person, with Finland topping the list at 46 tonnes per capita, and the Netherlands at the bottom on 7 tonnes per capita.

Finland also generates the most waste per person in the EU (20,993kg), while Croatia produces the least (1,483kg). The average EU citizen’s waste footprint in 2020 was 4,815kg.

In a warming climate, meltwater from Antarctica is expected to contribute significantly to rising seas. For the most part, though, research has been focused on West Antarctica, in places like the Thwaites Glacier, which has seen significant melt in recent decades.

In a paper published Jan. 19 in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers at Stanford have shown that the Wilkes Subglacial Basin in East Antarctica, which holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than 10 feet, could be closer to runaway melting than anyone realized.

"There hasn't been much analysis in this region—there's huge volume of ice there, but it has been relatively stable," said Eliza Dawson, a Ph.D. student in geophysics at Stanford and first author on the paper. "We're looking at the temperature at the base of the ice sheet for the first time and how close it is to potentially melting."

The Wilkes Subglacial Basin is about the size of California and empties into the Southern Ocean through a relatively small section of the coastline. Dawson and her colleagues found evidence that the base of the ice sheet is close to thawing. This raises the possibility that this coastal region, which holds back the ice within the entire Wilkes Subglacial Basin, could be sensitive to even small changes in temperature.

A mix of frozen and thawed

Previous research has shown that because the ground in this region is below sea level and slopes downward away from the ocean, the Wilkes Subglacial Basin could be particularly vulnerable to irreversible melting if warming seawater were to get under the ice sheet. Dawson and her colleagues are the first to look at how the current temperature at the base of the ice sheet in the region could add to this vulnerability.

The researchers collected data from existing radar surveys conducted by planes flying over the glacier. The planes record reflections of electromagnetic signals that have traveled through the ice sheet and bounced off the ground beneath it. Dawson and her colleagues developed a new technique to analyze this data, turning cross-sectional images of ice and bedrock into information about the temperature conditions at the base of the ice sheet.

"The temperature of the ice affects how much the radar is reflected in multiple ways, so a single measurement is ambiguous," said Dustin Schroeder, associate professor of geophysics and of electrical engineering. "This statistical approach involved essentially picking regions that you could assume were either frozen or thawed and comparing other radar signatures to them. It allowed us to say whether other areas of the ice sheet were definitely frozen, definitely thawed, or tough to call."

The researchers found large areas of frozen and thawed ground interspersed across the region, but the majority of the area couldn't be definitively classified as one or the other. In some cases, this may be because of changes in the geometry of the ice sheet or other complications in the data, but it could also mean that large sections of ground under the ice sheet are either close to thawing or made up of closely intermixed frozen and thawed areas. If the latter is true, the glaciers in the Wilkes Subglacial Basin could reach a tipping point with only a small increase in temperature at the base of the ice sheet.

Different models have predicted very different futures for the Wilkes Subglacial Basin and its impact on sea level rise because there simply hasn't been enough data about the region. The researchers are planning to integrate their radar-based temperature observations into an ice sheet model to improve predictions about how the region will evolve under various climate scenarios.

They hope their work will highlight the importance of examining this and other areas of East Antarctica that have seemed stable, but could play a significant role in our future.

"This area has conditions that we could imagine changing," Schroeder said. "And if warm ocean water gets there, it's going to 'turn on' a whole sector of Antarctica we don't normally think about as a contributor to sea level rise."

The circulation of the Atlantic Ocean is heading towards a tipping point that is “bad news for the climate system and humanity”, a study has found.

The scientists behind the research said they were shocked at the forecast speed of collapse once the point is reached, although they said it was not yet possible to predict how soon that would happen.

Using computer models and past data, the researchers developed an early warning indicator for the breakdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a vast system of ocean currents that is a key component in global climate regulation.

They found Amoc is already on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.

Amoc, which encompasses part of the Gulf Stream and other powerful currents, is a marine conveyer belt that carries heat, carbon and nutrients from the tropics towards the Arctic Circle, where it cools and sinks into the deep ocean. This churning helps to distribute energy around the Earth and modulates the impact of human-caused global heating.

But the system is being eroded by the faster-than-expected melt-off of Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets, which pours freshwater into the sea and obstructs the sinking of saltier, warmer water from the south.

Amoc has declined 15% since 1950 and is in its weakest state in more than a millennium, according to previous research that prompted speculation about an approaching collapse.

Until now there has been no consensus about how severe this will be. One study last year, based on changes in sea surface temperatures, suggested the tipping point could happen between 2025 and 2095. However, the UK Met Office said large, rapid changes in Amoc were “very unlikely” in the 21st century.

The new paper, published in Science Advances, has broken new ground by looking for warning signs in the salinity levels at the southern extent of the Atlantic Ocean between Cape Town and Buenos Aires. Simulating changes over a period of 2,000 years on computer models of the global climate, it found a slow decline can lead to a sudden collapse over less than 100 years, with calamitous consequences.

The paper said the results provided a “clear answer” about whether such an abrupt shift was possible: “This is bad news for the climate system and humanity as up till now one could think that Amoc tipping was only a theoretical concept and tipping would disappear as soon as the full climate system, with all its additional feedbacks, was considered.”

It also mapped some of the consequences of Amoc collapse. Sea levels in the Atlantic would rise by a metre in some regions, inundating many coastal cities. The wet and dry seasons in the Amazon would flip, potentially pushing the already weakened rainforest past its own tipping point. Temperatures around the world would fluctuate far more erratically. The southern hemisphere would become warmer. Europe would cool dramatically and have less rainfall. While this might sound appealing compared with the current heating trend, the changes would hit 10 times faster than now, making adaptation almost impossible.

“What surprised us was the rate at which tipping occurs,” said the paper’s lead author, René van Westen, of Utrecht University. “It will be devastating.”

He said there was not yet enough data to say whether this would occur in the next year or in the coming century, but when it happens, the changes are irreversible on human timescales.

In the meantime, the direction of travel is undoubtedly in an alarming direction.

“We are moving towards it. That is kind of scary,” van Westen said. “We need to take climate change much more seriously.”

A choking layer of pollution-laced fog settled over Minneapolis last month, blanketing the city in its worst air quality since 2005. A temperature inversion acted like a ceiling, trapping small particles emitted from sluggish engines and overworked heaters in a gauze that shrouded the skyline. That haze arrived amid the hottest winter on record for the Midwest. Warmer temperatures melted what little snow had fallen, releasing moisture that helped further trap pollution.

Though summertime pollution from wildfire smoke and ozone receives more attention, climate change is making these kinds of winter inversions increasingly common — with troubling results. One in four Americans are now exposed to unhealthy air, according to a report by First Street Foundation.

Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at the nonprofit climate research firm, calls this increase in air pollution a “climate penalty,” rolling back improvements made over four decades. On the West Coast, this inflection point was passed about 10 years ago; air quality across the region has consistently worsened since 2010. Now, a broader swath of the country is starting to see deteriorating conditions. During Canada’s boreal wildfires last summer, for example, millions of people from Chicago to New York experienced some of the worst air pollution in the world. It was a precedent-breaking spate that saw the average person exposed to more small particulate matter than at any time since tracking began in 2006.

It’s a preview of more to come.

Since Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, federal law has regulated all sources of emissions, successfully reducing pollution. Between 1990 and 2017, the number of particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers, known as PM2.5, fell 41 percent. These particulates pose a significant threat because they can burrow into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Exposure can cause heart disease, strokes, respiratory diseases like lung cancer, and premature death. Such concerns prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to toughen pollution limits for the first time in a decade, lowering the limit from 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 9 earlier this month.

But a stricter standard isn’t likely to resolve the problem, said Marissa Childs, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. That’s because the agency considers wildfires an “exceptional event,” and therefore exempt from the regulation. Yet about one-third of all particulate matter pollution in the United States now comes from wildfire smoke. “The Clean Air Act is challenged by smoke,” she said, both because wildfires defy the EPA’s traditional enforcement mechanisms, and because of its capacity to travel long distances. “Are we going to start saying that New York is out of compliance because California had a fire burning?”

To get a better sense of how a growing exposure to air pollution might impact the public, First Street used wildfire and climate models to estimate what the skies might look like in the future. (Though its researchers relied on Childs’ national database of PM2.5 concentrations, she was not otherwise involved with First Street’s report.) They found that by 2054, 50 percent more people, or 125 million in all, will experience at least one day of “red” air quality with an Air Quality Index from 151-200, a level considered risky enough that everyone should minimize their exposure. “We’re essentially adding back additional premature deaths, adding back additional heart attacks,” Porter said at a meeting about the report. “We’re losing productivity in the economic markets by additionally losing outdoor job work days.”

First Street has now added its air quality predictions to an online tool that allows anyone to search for climate risks by home address. As extreme heat increases ozone and changing conditions intensify wildfires, it shows just how unequal the impacts will be. While New York City is projected to see eight days a year with the Air Quality Index at an unhealthy orange, meaning an in the range of 101 to 150, an increase of two days, the Seattle metropolitan area is expected to see almost two additional weeks of poor air. “That’s two more weeks out of only 52,” said Ed Kearns, First Street’s chief science officer. “Twelve more days of being trapped in your house, not being able to go outside — worrying about the health consequences.”

Just as the sources of pollution are unevenly distributed, so too is people’s ability to respond. “People across the board are seeking information about air quality,” Childs said, for example, searching online about pollution levels on particularly smoky days. But not everyone has the same ability to make choices to protect themselves. Childs cowrote a 2022 Nature Human Behavior paper that found behavioral responses to smoke — staying indoors, for example, or driving to work rather than waiting for the bus — are strongly correlated with income. If left to individuals, she says, “the people who have the most resources are going to be the most protected, and we’re going to leave a lot of people behind.”

In a collaboration with real estate company Redfin, First Street found early signals that suggest people are already leaving areas with poor air quality. Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, quibbles with those conclusions, however, saying many variables influence both air quality and residential mobility, like income and housing prices. Air pollution is a notoriously complex subject — difficult to predict even a week out, much less speculate on what might happen in three decades. “I think the most critical problem is a total absence of any discussion of uncertainty,” he said.

He also worries that First Street’s risk index could unintentionally magnify these distinctions of privilege. If potential homeowners use the database to avoid areas based on the report’s predictions, property values in those regions could fall accordingly, reducing tax bases and decreasing the ability to provide services like community clean air rooms during smoke events. “It may act like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Benmarhnia notes that traditional sources of air pollution, like factory emissions, show a very consistent relationship between socio-economic status, race, and higher pollution levels, a pattern that repeats across the country. Smoke and ozone don’t tend to follow these social gradients because they disperse so widely. “But wildfire smoke doesn’t come on top of nothing, it’s on top of existing inequities” like access to health care, or jobs that increase outdoor exposures, he said. “Not everybody is starting from the same place.” Benmarhnia recently published a paper finding that wildfires, in concert with extreme heat, compound the risk to cardiovascular systems. But the people most likely to be harmed by these synergies live in low-income communities of color.

“The thing about air pollution is there’s only so much you can do at individual or civil society level,” said Christa Hasenkopf, the director of the Clean Air Program at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “It’s a political and social issue that has to be tackled at a national level.” The university’s Air Quality Life Index measures how air pollution is contributing to early deaths around the world, aiming to provide a clearer image of the health gaps. “The size of the impact on life expectancy in two relatively geographically nearby areas can be surprising,” she says, like between eastern and western Europe.

For her part, Hasenkopf is enthusiastic about First Street’s air quality report, hoping it will help highlight some of these inequities. Though 13 people die every minute from air pollution, funding for cleaner air solutions remains limited. “That disconnect between the size of the air pollution issue, and what resources we are devoting to it is quite startling,” Hasenkopf said.

At a glance, the male western tanager looks like a little flame, its ruby head blending seamlessly into its bright, lemon-colored body. Females are less showy, a dusty yellow. The birds spend their winters in Central America and can be found in a variety of habitats, from central Costa Rica to the deserts of southeastern Sonora, in western Mexico. In the spring, they prepare to migrate thousands of miles to the conifer forests of the Mountain West, flying through grasslands, deserts, and occasionally, suburban yards.

To fuel them on their lengthy journey, western tanagers fill up on insects and berries. Like most migrating birds, they eat enormous amounts of food. But as global climate change causes spring to start earlier, birds such as western tanagers are arriving at their destination after what’s known as “green-up,” when flowers begin blooming and insects emerge. According to a study published in early March in the journal PNAS, this kind of timing mismatch between migrants and their food sources, which is happening across North America, could have dire consequences for migratory birds’ survival. “In discussing climate change, we often focus on warming,” says Scott Loss, a professor at Oklahoma State University and a co-author of the study. “But the length and timing of seasons—like when winter ends and spring begins—are some of the most dramatic effects of climate change.”

Loss and his colleagues used satellite imagery from 2002 to 2021 to calculate the average start of spring green-up along the typical migration routes of 150 North American bird species, then compared that timing with the current green-up. They found that spring is indeed beginning earlier along birds’ migration routes. The trend continued this year, when, following an unusually mild February, leaves and blooms emerged well ahead of schedule along the West Coast, making this year’s green-up the earliest on record in some areas.

The authors then turned to a trove of citizen birders’ observations from eBird to track bird migration. The analysis showed that, as spring shifted earlier, roughly 110 of 150 bird species failed to keep up by migrating in time. “A lot of these birds were tracking long-term averages of green-up more closely than they were current green-up,” says Ellen Robertson, a co-author of the study who was a postdoctoral researcher at Oklahoma State when conducting this research. Other studies have found that many bird species are adapting to climate change by migrating earlier, but this study shows that it might not be early enough to keep up with the pace of climate change.

“The paper continues to build this picture of the extent and pervasiveness of an inability of birds to track the changing seasons caused by climate change,” says Morgan Tingley, an ornithologist and associate professor at UCLA. Timing mismatches between birds and their food could affect whether birds survive the migration and how many chicks they have. A recent study from Tingley’s lab showed that songbirds that reach their spring breeding grounds either earlier or later than plants emerge have fewer young than the ones that arrive on time with the start of spring, for example.

Previous studies have mainly focused on songbirds in Eastern North America, Tingley says, but this new investigation shows that bird species in the West and at different levels of the food web might be just as vulnerable. However, Tingley notes, some questions remain unanswered. For example, he says that although previous studies show that a timing mismatch could have grave consequences for herbivorous songbirds, it’s unclear if the same is true for birds that feed on other animals, such as insects.

The awe-inspiring feat of migration has captivated humans for millennia, yet scientists have limited knowledge of how birds manage to fly as far as they do, up to tens of thousands of miles a trip, or why exactly they leave when they do. The migratory cues that birds rely on are myriad: temperature, day length, landforms, the stars, even the Earth’s magnetic field, as well as the instructions coded in their genetics. Some of the environmental cues, such as temperature, are likely affected by climate change. But others, such as day length, are not. “That might be one reason some [migratory] birds are more affected by climate change” than others, Robertson says.

Birds that migrate longer distances had a greater mismatch between green-up and migration, the study found. The researchers suspect that’s because even if birds are tracking temperature or other migration cues at their winter home, they can’t know what conditions are like farther away—whether spring is arriving earlier along their migration route or at their destination than it did at their winter headquarters. Long-distance migrants also tend to rely more on their genetic encoding to tell them when to begin their journey.

Worldwide, bird populations are in decline. The number of birds in North America has dropped by roughly 30 percent since 1970. Even abundant species, such as crows, have suffered a population dip. Scott Loss says that the migration research could inform conservation efforts in the future. “Part of it is knowing which species are vulnerable to various threats,” Loss says. “This adds to the knowledge about vulnerability of a wide range of bird species.” And he hopes that the information will serve to highlight the urgent need to lower greenhouse-gas emissions as fast as possible: “It’s really important, if we can’t address climate change immediately, to try to stop habitat loss as much as we can.”

Abstract

The exponential increase in plastic production coupled with variable global waste management system efficiencies has resulted in large amounts of plastic waste entering the ocean every year. Although we know millions of tonnes of plastic have entered the oceans, we do not yet understand the patterns of its accumulation across space nor the drivers of these patterns. The deep ocean is expected to be a resting place, or reservoir, for most plastic pollution. Here, we conducted a rigorous, systematic review of previously published datasets to synthesize our understanding of macroplastic pollution (>5 mm) on the ocean floor. Using extracted data, we built predictive additive models to estimate the amount and distribution of plastic on the ocean floor. We built two models: one using data from remote operated vehicles (ROVs) and another using data from bottom trawls. Using the model built with ROV data, which was better-constrained, we estimate that 3 to 11 million metric tonnes (MMT) of plastic pollution resides on the ocean floor as of 2020. This is of similar magnitude to annual inputs from land and one to two orders of magnitude greater than what is predicted to be floating on the ocean surface. To improve future estimates and our understanding of global patterns, we provide recommendations for ocean floor monitoring of plastic pollution.

On 18 March, 2022, scientists at the Concordia research station on the east Antarctic plateau documented a remarkable event. They recorded the largest jump in temperature ever measured at a meteorological centre on Earth. According to their instruments, the region that day experienced a rise of 38.5C above its seasonal average: a world record.

This startling leap – in the coldest place on the planet – left polar researchers struggling for words to describe it. “It is simply mind-boggling,” said Prof Michael Meredith, science leader at the British Antarctic Survey. “In sub-zero temperatures such a massive leap is tolerable but if we had a 40C rise in the UK now that would take temperatures for a spring day to over 50C – and that would be deadly for the population.”

This amazement was shared by glaciologist Prof Martin Siegert, of the University of Exeter. “No one in our community thought that anything like this could ever happen. It is extraordinary and a real concern,” he told the Observer. “We are now having to wrestle with something that is completely unprecedented.”

Poleward winds, which previously made few inroads into the atmosphere above Antarctica, are now carrying more and more warm, moist air from lower latitudes – including Australia – deep into the continent, say scientists, and these have been blamed for the dramatic polar “heatwave” that hit Concordia. Exactly why these currents are now able to plunge so deep into the continent’s air space is not yet clear, however.

Nor has this huge temperature hike turned out to be an isolated event, scientists have discovered. For the past two years they have been inundated with rising numbers of reports of disturbing meteorological anomalies on the continent. Glaciers bordering the west Antarctic ice-sheet are losing mass to the ocean at an increasing rate, while levels of sea ice, which float on the oceans around the continent, have plunged dramatically, having remained stable for more than a century.

These events have raised fears that the Antarctic, once thought to be too cold to experience the early impacts of global warming, is now succumbing dramatically and rapidly to the swelling levels of greenhouse gases that humans continue to pump into the atmosphere.

These dangers were highlighted by a team of scientists, led by Will Hobbs of the University of Tasmania, in a paper that was published last week in the Journal of Climate. After examining recent changes in sea ice coverage in Antarctica, the group concluded there had been an “abrupt critical transition” in the continent’s climate that could have repercussions for both local Antarctic ecosystems and the global climate system.

“The extreme lows in Antarctic sea ice have led researchers to suggest that a regime shift is under way in the Southern Ocean, and we found multiple lines of evidence that support such a shift to a new sea ice state,” said Hobbs.
Antarctic sea ice and global temperatures compared with 1981-2010 averages

The dramatic nature of this transformation was emphasised by Meredith. “Antarctic sea ice coverage actually increased slightly in the late 20th and early 21st century. However, in the middle of the last decade it fell off a cliff. It is a harbinger of the new ground with the Antarctic climate system, and that could be very troubling for the region and for the rest of the planet.”

The continent is now catching up with the Arctic, where the impacts of global warming have, until now, been the most intense experienced across the planet, added Siegert. “The Arctic is currently warming at four times the rate experienced by the rest of the planet. But the Antarctic has started to catch up, so that it is already warming twice as quickly as the planet overall.”

A key reason for the Arctic and Antarctic to be taking disproportionate hits from global warming is because the Earth’s oceans – warmed by fossil-fuel burning – are losing their sea ice at their polar extremities. The dark waters that used to lie below the ice are being exposed and solar radiation is no longer reflected back into space. Instead, it is being absorbed by the sea, further heating the oceans there.

“Essentially, it is a vicious circle of warming oceans and melting of sea ice, though the root cause is humanity and its continuing burning of fossil fuels and its production of greenhouse gases,” said Meredith. “This whole business has to be laid at our door.”

As to the consequences of this meteorological metamorphosis, these could be devastating, researchers warn. If all the ice on Antarctica were to melt, this would raise sea levels around the globe by more than 60 metres. Islands and coastal zones where much of the world’s population now have homes would be inundated.

Such an apocalypse is unlikely to occur for some time, however. Antarctica’s ice sheet covers 14m square kilometres (about 5.4m square miles), roughly the area of the United States and Mexico combined, and contains about 30m cubic kilometres (7.2m cubic miles) of ice – about 60% of the world’s fresh water. This vast covering hides a mountain range that is nearly as high as the Alps, so it will take a very long time for that to melt completely, say scientists.

Nevertheless, there is now a real danger that some significant sea level rises will occur in the next few decades as the ice sheets and glaciers of west Antarctica continue to shrink. These are being eroded at their bases by warming ocean water and could disintegrate in a few decades. If they disappear entirely, that would raise sea levels by 5m – sufficient to cause damage to coastal populations around the world. How quickly that will happen is difficult to assess. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that sea levels are likely to rise between 0.3m to 1.1m by the end of the century. Many experts now fear this is a dangerous underestimate. In the past, climate change deniers accused scientists of exaggerating the threat of global warming. However, the evidence that is now emerging from Antarctica and other parts of the world makes it very clear that scientists did not exaggerate. Indeed, they very probably underrated by a considerable degree the threat that now faces humanity.

“The picture is further confused in Antarctica because, historically, we have had problems getting data,” added Meredith. “We have never had the information about weather and ecosystem, compared with the data we get from the rest of the world, because the continent is so remote and so hostile. Our records are comparatively short and that means that the climate models we have created, although very capable, are based on sparse data. They cannot capture all of the physics, chemistry and biology. They can make predictions that are coherent but they cannot capture the sort of extremes that we’re now beginning to observe.”

The woes facing Antarctica are not merely of human concern, however. “We are already seeing serious ecological impacts that threaten to spread through the food chain,” said Prof Kate Hendry, a chemical oceanographer based at the British Antarctic Survey.

A critical example is provided by the algae which grow under and around sea ice in west Antarctica. This is starting to disappear, with very serious implications, added Hendry. Algae is eaten by krill, the tiny marine crustaceans that are one of the most abundant animals on Earth and which provide food for predators that include fish, penguins, seals and whales. “If krill starts to disappear in the wake of algae, then all sorts of disruption to the food chain will occur,” said Hendry.

The threat posed by the disappearance of krill goes deeper, however. They play a key role in limiting global warming. Algae absorb carbon dioxide. Krill then eat them and excrete it, the faeces sinking to the seabed and staying there. Decreased levels of algae and krill would then mean less carbon from the atmosphere would be deposited on the ocean floor and would instead remain near the sea surface, where it would return to the atmosphere.

“They act like a conveyor belt that takes carbon out of the atmosphere and carries it down to the deep ocean floor where it can be locked away. So if we start messing with that system, there could be all sorts of other knock-on effects for our attempts to cope with the impact of global warming,” added Hendry. “It is a scary scenario. Nevertheless that, unfortunately, is what we are now facing.”

Another victim of the sudden, catastrophic warming that has gripped the continent is its most famous resident: the emperor penguin. Last year the species, which is found only in Antarctica, suffered a catastrophic breeding failure because the platforms of sea ice on which they are born started to break up long before the young penguins could grow waterproof feathers.

“We have never seen emperor penguins fail to breed, at this scale, in a single season,” said Peter Fretwell, of the British Antarctic Survey. “The loss of sea ice in this region during the Antarctic summer made it very unlikely that displaced chicks would survive.”

Researchers say that the discovery of the loss of emperor penguins suggests that more than 90% of colonies will be wiped out by the end of the century, if global warming trends continue at their current disastrous rate. “The chicks cannot live on sea ice until they have fledged,” said Meredith. “After that, they can look after themselves. But the sea ice is breaking up before they reach that stage and mass drowning events are now happening. Colonies of penguins are being wiped out. And that’s a tragedy. This is an iconic species, one that is emblematic of Antarctica and the new vulnerability of its ecosystems.”

The crisis facing the continent has widespread implications. More than 40 nations are signatories of the Antarctic Treaty’s environmental protocol, which is supposed to shield it from a host of different threats, with habitat degradation being one of the most important. The fact that the continent is now undergoing alarming shifts in its ice covering, eco-systems and climate is a clear sign that this protection is no longer being provided.

“The cause of this ecological and meteorological change lies outside the continent,” added Siegert. “It is being caused because the rest of the world is continuing to emit vast amounts carbon dioxide.

“Nevertheless, there is a good case for arguing that if countries are knowingly polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and Antarctica is being affected as a consequence, then the treaty protocol is being breached by its signatories and their behaviour could be challenged on legal and political grounds. It should certainly make for some challenging meetings at the UN in the coming years.”

It’s not the first study on microplastics in Antarctica that researchers from the University of Basel and the Alfred-Wegener Institute (AWI) have conducted. However, data analysis from a spring 2021 expedition reveals that environmental pollution from these tiny plastic particles is a bigger problem in the remote Weddell Sea than was previously known.

The total of 17 seawater samples all indicated higher concentrations of microplastics than in previous studies. “The reason for this is the type of sampling we conducted,” says Clara Leistenschneider, doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel and lead author of the study.

The current study focused on particles measuring between 11 and 500 micrometers in size. The researchers collected them by pumping water into tanks, filtering it, and then analyzing it using infrared spectroscopy. Previous studies in the region had mostly collected microplastic particles out of the ocean using fine nets with a mesh size of around 300 micrometers. Smaller particles would simply pass through these plankton nets.

The results of the new study indicate that 98.3 percent of the plastic particles present in the water were smaller than 300 micrometers, meaning that they were not collected in previous samples. “Pollution in the Antarctic Ocean goes far beyond what was reported in past studies,” Leistenschneider notes. The study appears in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

What role do ocean currents play?

The individual samples were polluted to different extents. The offshore samples, which were collected north of the continental slope and the Antarctic Slope Current, contained the highest concentrations of microplastics. The reasons for this are not conclusively known. It may be that the ice that tends to form near the coast retains the tiny plastic particles, and they are only released back into the water when the ice melts. It could also be the case that ocean currents play a role. “They might work like a barrier, reducing water exchange between the north and south,” suggests Gunnar Gerdts from the AWI in Heligoland, Germany.

What is certainly true is that ocean currents are an important factor and the subject of many open questions in the field. So far the researchers have only examined water samples from the ocean surface, but not from lower depths. This is primarily due to limited time on the ship expeditions for taking samples and to equipment with insufficient pumping capacity. “It would nonetheless be revealing to analyze such data, since the deep currents differ greatly from the surface currents and thermohaline circulation leads to exchange with water masses from northern regions,” Leistenschneider says.

It is also still unclear how the microplastics make their way to the Weddell Sea in the first place and whether they ever leave the region. The strong Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which flows all the way around the Antarctic Ocean at a latitude of about 60° south, might prevent their departure. The researchers are also not yet able to say conclusively where the microplastics originate. Possible sources include regional ship traffic from the tourism, fishing, and research industries, as well as research stations on land. However, the microplastics might also make their way to Antarctica from other regions via ocean currents or atmospheric transport.

Research leads to awareness

Clara Leistenschneider plans to focus next on analyzing the sediment samples she collected during the same expedition. This should provide information about how microplastics are accumulating on the sea floor, which is home to unique and sensitive organisms and is a breeding ground for Antarctic icefish (Bovichtidae).

With the increase in tourism in the Antarctic Ocean, pollution may increase even more in the future, further impacting the environment and the food chain.

Nonetheless, Leistenschneider remains cautiously optimistic: “Research on the topic has dramatically increased awareness in recent years of the problems that microplastics cause for the environment and all living organisms.” Although there is no all-encompassing solution, she notes that a variety of stakeholders all over the world are working intensively to better understand the problem and develop innovative ideas to reduce plastic pollution. And, of course, “every individual who engages in environmentally-conscious behavior can bring about positive change.”

Reference: “Unveiling high concentrations of small microplastics (11–500 μm) in surface water samples from the southern Weddell Sea off Antarctica” by Clara Leistenschneider, Fangzhu Wu, Sebastian Primpke, Gunnar Gerdts and Patricia Burkhardt-Holm, 31 March 2024, Science of The Total Environment.

Sounds of the natural world are rapidly falling silent and will become “acoustic fossils” without urgent action to halt environmental destruction, international experts have warned.

As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.

Today, tuning into some ecosystems reveals a “deathly silence”, said Prof Steve Simpson from the University of Bristol. “It is that race against time – we’ve only just discovered that they make such sounds, and yet we hear the sound disappearing.”

“The changes are profound. And they are happening everywhere,” said US soundscape recordist Bernie Krause, who has taken more than 5,000 hours of recordings from seven continents over the past 55 years. He estimates that 70% of his archive is from habitats that no longer exist.

Prof Bryan Pijanowski from Purdue University in the US has been listening to natural sounds for 40 years and taken recordings from virtually all of the world’s main types of ecosystems.

He said: “The sounds of the past that have been recorded and saved represent the sounds of species that might no longer be here – so that’s all we’ve got. The recordings that many of us have [are] of places that no longer exist, and we don’t even know what those species are. In that sense they are already acoustic fossils.”

Numerous studies are now documenting how natural soundscapes are changing, being disrupted and falling silent. A 2021 study in the journal Nature of 200,000 sites across North America and Europe found “pervasive loss of acoustic diversity and intensity of soundscapes across both continents over the past 25 years, driven by changes in species richness and abundance”. The authors added: “One of the fundamental pathways through which humans engage with nature is in chronic decline with potentially widespread implications for human health and wellbeing.”

The shift in ecosystem sound is happening in the air, the forests, the soil, and even under the water. During the cold war, the US navy used underwater surveillance systems to track Soviet submarines – and found they struggled to do so near coral reefs due to all the sounds reefs produced. It wasn’t until 1990 that civilian scientists could listen to this classified data.

“Whenever we went to a healthy reef it blew our minds – the cacophony of sounds we heard,” said Simpson, who has been monitoring coral reefs using hydrophones for more than 20 years. “A healthy reef was a carnival of sound.”

At the outset of his research, noise pollution from motorboats was his main concern, but 2015 and 2016 brought significant bleaching events, which resulted in 80% mortality of corals. “They cooked the reef,” he said. More than half of the world’s coral reef cover has now been lost since 1950. If global heating reaches 2C, more than 99% of coral reefs are expected to start dying.

The result of these bleaching events is a “deathly silence”, said Simpson. “We swam around those reefs crying into our masks.”

“These sounds and silences speak back to us like in a mirror,” said Hildegard Westerkamp, a Canadian sound ecologist who has been recording soundscapes for half a century, during which time wildlife populations have experienced average declines of almost 70%.

She started working on the World Soundscape Project in 1973 with the intention of documenting disappearing ecosystems. “We proposed to start to listen to the soundscape, to everything, no matter how uncomfortable it may be – how uncomfortable the message.”

She said: “The act of listening itself can be both comforting and highly unsettling. But most importantly it tends to connect us to the reality of what we are facing.”

As the sophistication of microphones has increased, scientists are using them to monitor life that would not usually be audible to human ears. Marcus Maeder, an acoustic ecologist and sound artist from Switzerland, has been investigating the noises trees make under stress, pushing a microphone into the bark of a tree to listen to the living tissue. Stress sounds like pulses come from within the cavity, he said.

When he first pushed a microphone into the soil of a mountain meadow he discovered it was also alive with noise, “a completely new kingdom of sounds”.

Intensively managed agricultural land, often doused with pesticides, sounds very different, Maeder said: “The soil becomes quiet.”

For many researchers, disappearing soundscapes are a source of grief as well as of scientific interest. “It’s a sad thing to be doing, but it’s also helping me tell a story about the beauty of nature,” said Pijanowski. “As a scientist I have trouble explaining what biodiversity is, but if I play a recording and say what I’m talking about – these are the voices of this place. We can either work to preserve it or not.

“Sound is the most powerful trigger of emotions for humans. Acoustic memories are very strong too. I’m thinking about it as a scientist, but it’s hard not to be emotional.

Electric shortages have become more acute; brownouts and blackouts have become common. Look deeper and it becomes clear that the nation’s power grid has not only become less reliable but also more fragile. This fact is especially troubling because it confronts the country just when Washington and several states are pushing electric cars and an increase in the use of electric appliances. In part the power problem reflects the increased use of wind and solar sources. There can be no dispute that these are less reliable than power from fossil fuels and nuclear. But this straightforward fact of life is only part of the story. Problems in America’s power grid are a lot more complicated.

Evidence of failure fills the headlines, often with considerable drama. A 2021 cold snap in Texas led to widespread blackouts and the death of 250 people. California for years and on a regular basis has asked utility customers to tolerate rolling brownouts and blackouts. Just this past Christmas season unusually cold weather across the country prompted utilities from Massachusetts and New York to the Midwest and the south to beg their customers to turn down their thermostats and delay their use of appliances. Millions lost power in North Carolina and Tennessee. Downed power lines caused some of the more severe problems, but in many cases power utilities simply had to cut off some customers to avoid worse problems. A Wall Street Journal study indicates that incidences of prolonged blackouts have doubled since 2013.

The green lobby, predictably, blames the problem on how climate change has created more severe weather. The fossil fuel industry and its allies in Congress blame the problem on the unreliability of wind and solar. No doubt there is truth on both sides, though many of these points are debatable. One point, however, is not subject to cavil — that the wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine. Even in the face of this reality, these problems would seem to be something for which engineers could find solutions and investments could implement. But there is a further complication because most of the country uses regional transmission organizations (RTOs) to buy and sell power.

RTOs are a relatively new entrant in American’s electric power equation. Before they were authorized by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 1999, huge regional utilities managed the nation’s electric grid. These companies owned all the parts of the process from the generating equipment to the fuels used to power them to the transmission lines and the wires that led into the people’s homes. Regulators priced electric power to allow these monopolies enough to maintain sufficient facilities and return a reasonable profit to their shareholders. The RTOs changed things radically.

These regional bodies buy power from anywhere they can get it at the lowest price they can get. When the wind blows and the sun shines, wind and solar charge the lowest prices, not the least because the federal government and several state governments subsidize wind and solar operations. During times when wind and solar can deliver, they crowd other sources – fossil fuel and nuclear – out of the competition. But when the wind is not so strong and cloud cover obscures the sun’s rays, the RTOs look to other fuels. The necessary scaling up, however, is not so easy. Fossil fuel and nuclear produce best and at the best price when they supply on a steady basis. What is more, the on-again-off-again nature of demand puts an added strain on the generating and transmission infrastructure.

During the last 20-some years of these arrangements, a lot of fossil fuel and nuclear has closed, not because of green preferences but because they simply could no longer operate profitably. The electric grid’s infrastructure has deteriorated under the on-again-off-again strains and because providers lack the surplus to upgrade the equipment. At the same time, because natural gas can respond more flexibly to variations in demand than can other fuels, the reliance of natural gas has grown in tandem with wind and solar preferences.

The upshot is an increasingly inadequate electric power grid, one that is less flexible, less resilient, and more prone to break downs than it once was. Worse yet, the political class in Washington and the state capital seems to have little interest in the problem even as they make plans to place still more strains on this weakening grid.