Ocean News

What does she think will happen in the next 80 years?

 

Scientists find way to make mineral which can remove CO2 from atmosphere | PHYS.org

Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2.

A tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite can remove around half a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere.

 

Climate Change Is Cooking the Oceans | Gizmodo

The number of marine heat wave days doubled between 1982 and 2016, and have also increased in extent and intensity.

87 percent of marine heat waves can be attributed to climate change, meaning they would not have occurred without it.

The research shows that if we allow the world to warm two degrees Celsius marine heat waves will increase 23 fold.

At 3.5 degrees Celsius marine heat waves would become 41 more times likely, and the portion that would be attributed solely to humans would be upwards of 97 percent.

The research was published in Nature.

 

New Jersey man who contracted flesh-eating bacteria while crabbing has forearms, hands amputated, family says
New Jersey man who contracted flesh-eating bacteria while crabbing has forearms, hands amputated, family says http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/08/16/new-jersey-man-who-contracted-flesh-eating-bacteria-while-crabbing-has-forearms-hands-amputated-family-says.html

I got to thinking it seems like I was hearing about this more often so I googled it. I guess there's no telling what sort of surprises are in store with the system changing like it is.

The Link Between Climate Change and 'Flesh-Eating' Bacteria
By Kimberly Hickok, Staff Writer | August 3, 2018 01:48pm ET
The Link Between Climate Change and 'Flesh-Eating' Bacteria https://www.livescience.com/63252-climate-change-increases-vibrio-bacteria.html

 

Climate change-driven droughts are getting hotter | Science Daily

Available soil moisture can remove surface heat through evaporation, but if the land is dry less heat is transported away, which increases the local temperature.

Regions undergoing droughts warmed more than four times faster than areas with average weather conditions.

These changes point to a greater number of droughts and heat waves co-occurring. This can lead to increases in wildfires and reduced crop yields.

The study was published in Science Advances.

 

'Abrupt thaw' of permafrost beneath lakes could significantly affect climate change models | Science Daily

Methane released by thawing permafrost from some Arctic lakes could significantly accelerate climate change, according to a new study. Unlike shallow, gradual thawing of terrestrial permafrost, the abrupt thaw beneath thermokarst lakes is irreversible this century. Even climate models that project only moderate warming this century will have to factor in their emissions, according to the researchers.

Existing models currently attribute about 20 percent of the permafrost carbon feedback this century to methane, with the rest due to carbon dioxide from terrestrial soils. By including thermokarst lakes, methane becomes the dominant driver, responsible for 70 to 80 percent of permafrost carbon-caused warming this century. Adding thermokarst methane to the models makes the feedback's effect similar to that of land-use change, which is the second-largest source of human-made warming.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

 

"Our work shows two things. Firstly, we have explained how and how fast magnesite forms naturally. This is a process which takes hundreds to thousands of years in nature at Earth's surface. The second thing we have done is to demonstrate a pathway which speeds this process up dramatically"

The researchers were able to show that by using polystyrene microspheres as a catalyst,"

Now, how much Polystyrene is already in the Ocean

 

Even worse, some people are flushing their disposable contact lenses down the toilet, where some make it through the sewage disposal process and into the ocean.

Before You Flush Your Contact Lenses, You Might Want to Know This | New York Times

Research presented at the American Chemical Society’s meeting in Boston this past week showed that 20 percent of more than 400 contact wearers who were randomly recruited in an online survey flushed used contacts down the toilet or washed them down the sink, rather than putting them in the garbage.

When the lenses make their way to a wastewater treatment facility, they do not biodegrade easily, the researchers report, and they may fragment and make their way into surface water. There, they can cause environmental damage and may add to the growing problem of microplastic pollution.

 

Nitrogen pollution is a problem as big as climate change. Science might have a fix. | Grist

The Stockholm Resilience Center considers our overuse of nitrogen a more extreme risk to life on Earth than climate change.

Farmers spread tons of the nitrogen — in the form of manure, compost, and synthetic fertilizer — on their fields.

Only half of this nitrogen makes it into plants. The rest gets chewed up by hungry soil bacteria and turned into a greenhouse gas 300 times worse than carbon dioxide, or gets washed into waterways where it fuels an explosion of algae growth that turns into lakes and oceans into gloopy, oxygen-starved dead zones.

Humans accelerated the nitrogen disaster during the “green revolution” of the 1960s with the worldwide adoption of fertilizer-hungry crops.

New research suggests that crops can be nitrogen-hoarding and high-yielding at the same time.

The paper was published in the journal Nature

 

Plants may absorb less carbon under climate change | Physics World

Current assessments of climate change could overestimate the amount of carbon that plants remove from the atmosphere by 9 gigatonnes by 2100.

A study suggests that TPU [triose phosphate utilisation] currently limits photosynthesis, and TPU limitation may become even more limiting to photosynthesis in the future.

When the Calvin cycle cannot produce triose phosphates quickly enough, plants are forced to absorb less carbon dioxide – an outcome known as ‘triose phosphate utilisation (TPU)-limited’ photosynthesis. The effect becomes more pronounced at cold temperatures, high light levels, and – importantly for climate scientists – higher concentrations of carbon dioxide.

The study was published in Environmental Research Letters.

 

Kroger to ban plastic checkout bags by 2025. CEO Rodney McMullen says 'The plastic shopping bag's days are numbered.' | The Enquirer

America's largest supermarket chain said it will transition from single-use to reusable bags and ultimately eliminate 123 million pounds of garbage annually sent to landfills. That would quadruple the amount of plastic the retailer currently recycles.

Kroger currently sells reusable bags starting at $1 each. Kroger will ramp up the availability of those bags. Shoppers for the foreseeable future will still have the option of asking for paper bags.

 

It will take them 6 years? This just sounds like PR BS. The same with banning plastic straws. Exploiting problems for cheap publicity.

 

Obviously the moneyed are suffering from climate change and another large tax cut along with treasury backed subsidies are the only solution.

 

She thinks the world quits turning when she's asleep? It's an example of the fundamental ignorance of a large part of the population. Watch interviews of the people entering a Spanky rally for more.