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National Climate Report: 5 Trends for the Pacific Northwest

Following the release of the federal National Climate Assessment last week, experts in Washington state say that although the window for countering the negative impacts of climate change is narrowing, there’s still time.

The trend is clear: Earth is warming because of our longstanding reliance on fossil fuels.

As our cars, buildings, refineries, large industries and power plants burn fossil fuels, emitting harmful and noxious greenhouse gasses, the planet will continue to warm, according to the federal government’s latest National Climate Assessment, published last week. Like the rest of the world, the Northwest is at risk. Washington, Oregon and Idaho are home to some 14 million people and 43 Native American tribes. The region is already experiencing climate change and more will come in the decades ahead, the state’s climatologist and one of the report’s authors told The Seattle Times.

States like Washington are scrambling to cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and painlessly as possible, with mixed degrees of success and local opposition. Others resist the change or even lay the groundwork for the continued reliance on the fossil fuels that have brought us to this point.

The faster the U.S. and the rest of the world cuts emissions, the quicker the risks diminish, the report says. The immediate benefit — and the benefit to future generations — will “far outweigh” the costs those changes would impose.

We still have time to shape our future, for better or for worse.

“Although the window is narrowing, it’s still open,” said Deepti Singh, a climate scientist with Washington State University and one of the assessment’s many authors.

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Seattle Times
GovTech.com

New climate assessment shows stark reality of global warming

Our changing climate is affecting nearly every facet of life in every corner of the country, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, released by the Biden administration on Tuesday.

The expansive report details how carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, is warming the planet and causing more intense heat waves, wildfires and droughts.

“We have more evidence and more certainty that the changes that we’re seeing are because of human activities,” said Deepti Singh, an assistant professor at Washington State University’s School of the Environment and a contributing author of the report.

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to the report. That carbon acts like a blanket, trapping heat and intensifying extreme weather events.

“Many of the climate conditions and impacts people are experiencing today are unprecedented for thousands of years,” the report says.

Singh also pointed out that the Earth is seeing the “cascading and compounding” effect of multiple extreme weather events. In 2020, Oregon was rocked by unprecedented wildfires, followed by an ongoing drought, which was followed by the record-shattering heat dome of 2021.

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KGW8
KVUE
Seattle Times

Science Now: Foraging rabbits

When your task is trapping a rabbit, you gotta be on the hop. Sometimes that’s easier said than done. 

“[The eastern Idaho] Lemhi valley [is] a high desert valley that runs along the border with Montana and it’s the sagebrush steppe environment which means it’s a mix of shrub and grasslands and it is just a gorgeous gorgeous intact piece of sagebrush landscape.” With support for the National Science Foundation, mammalian ecologist Janet Ratcliffe with the University of Idaho and a team want to understand this critical habitat from the perspective of a small but important long term resident: the pygmy rabbit.

The rabbits live in burrows under raised clumps of sage called moema mounds so they have kind of a tough life. … Putting themselves in places where they’re close to burrows, where they can quickly escape from predators, that’s really important.”

Sheltering from the heat and cold is important, too, but so is food. Sometimes they risk a venture into the open to eat. Lisa Shipley is a foraging ecologist with Washington State University: “Especially in the winter, it might eat 99% of its diet in sagebrush. It’s very nutritious. It has a lot of protein in it but it also has a lot of toxic chemicals. It’s the only mammal that can eat sagebrush for virtually exclusively its diet.”

Using tracking data from the collars and imagery from where and when the rabbits spend their time in burrows under the sagebrush and out in the open. maps like these can tell them a lot about how the rabbits use and ultimately shape the landscape around them.

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Science Now (FOX 49)

“Unusually large” toxic algal bloom covers stretch of Lower Snake River

A frothy, green layer of muck recently coated a mileslong stretch of water on the Lower Snake River in southeast Washington, and scientists have warned people and their pets to stay away

Satellite images show the west-flowing river changed color from blue to a deep green over a short span of days. County workers posted signs along the contaminated stretch of river alerting the public to stay away from popular recreation spots for swimming, fishing and boating between Wawawai Landing and Central Ferry State Park, making a roughly 30-mile stretch of the river south and east of Pullman temporarily hazardous for humans, pets and livestock.

Algal blooms typically last days to weeks before dying off naturally and disappearing. Blooms are more common in stagnant bodies of water, such as lakes. In rivers, blooms happen more near dams or natural blockades that disrupt the current.

Alex Fremier, an environmental science professor at Washington State University, said the bloom on the Lower Snake is “unusually large” for a river. “The Snake River at that section has a bunch of dams on it,” Fremier said. “At this time of year, it functions more as a reservoir than a river.”

Algal blooms can harm water ecosystems when they die, because decomposing blooms absorb oxygen from the water. Low dissolved oxygen levels in water can kill fish and other river-dwelling animals and plants.

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The Seattle Times
The Spokesman-Review
The Lewiston Tribune
The Daily News
WildSalmon.org
Idaho State Journal
The Columbian

 

 

Dr. Universe: How did one comet kill all the dinosaurs?

It’s hard to imagine that one space rock wiped out the dinosaurs. But it did more than that. It killed 75% of the plants and animals on Earth. Me-OW.

I talked about that with my friend Barry Walker. He teaches geology classes about Earth’s history at Washington State University.

Walker told me that we call a space rock that hits Earth a meteorite. The meteorite that took out the dinosaurs set off changes on Earth. Those changes lasted for thousands of years. That’s how it killed so many things.

“We’re not saying everything got wiped out immediately,” Walker said. “Something happened, and within a geologically short amount of time—maybe 10,000 years or so—the damage was fully wrought.”

That something was a meteorite called Chicxulub. It crashed into Earth nearly 66 million years ago. It made a giant bowl-shaped hole in the ground called a crater. The crater is about 100 miles wide and around 12 miles deep. It’s near Mexico.

The meteorite killed everything near the crater. It caused fires for hundreds of miles. It set off earthquakes, huge waves called tsunamis and volcano eruptions.

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Ask Dr. Universe