(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Overnight News Digest: Oceans hit their warmest levels on record for the fourth consecutive year [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2023-01-12
Oceans Break Heat Record for Fourth Year in a Row
E&E News
Oceans hit their warmest levels on record for the fourth consecutive year in 2022, according to a new report by two dozen scientists. Previous heat records were broken in 2021, 2020 and 2019, and all of the top six hottest levels have occurred in the last six years. It’s an ominous sign of the speed at which the world is warming. The world’s oceans are massive heat sinks—they absorb as much as 90 percent of the excess heat in the atmosphere. And because the air is swiftly warming, driven by greenhouse gas emissions, the oceans are soaking up more and more heat as time goes on. The new record was published Wednesday, just days after scientists from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that 2022 was the planet’s fifth hottest year on record. The years 2016, 2020, 2019 and 2017 all rank in the top five as well, according to the agency.
Mongabay
[…] Fires have consumed huge swaths of Triunfo do Xingu, which stretches some 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) across the municipalities of São Félix do Xingu and Altamira, in Brazil’s cattle-ranching heartland. Between early July and late September, during the dry season when most fires typically take place in the Amazon, satellite data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) analyzed by Synergia Consultoria Socioambiental showed 3,214 hotspots across 78,000 hectares (193,000 acres) of the reserve. Deforestation is advancing at a dizzying pace too. Landowners in Triunfo do Xingu are legally required to keep 80% of the rainforest intact, but the reserve has already lost a third of its forest cover since 2006, according to data from the University of Maryland (UMD) visualized on Global Forest Watch. Satellites detected nearly 2.2 million highest-confidence deforestation alerts in 2022, with even the largest, most remote remnants of old-growth rainforest whittled away last year.
The oil giant Exxon privately “predicted global warming correctly and skillfully” only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business, new research has found. A trove of internal documents and research papers has previously established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating from at least the 1970s, with other oil industry bodies knowing of the risk even earlier, from around the 1950s. They forcefully and successfully mobilized against the science to stymie any action to reduce fossil fuel use. A new study, however, has made clear that Exxon’s scientists were uncannily accurate in their projections from the 1970s onwards, predicting an upward curve of global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions that is close to matching what actually occurred as the world heated up at a pace not seen in millions of years. Exxon scientists predicted there would be global heating of about 0.2C a decade due to the emissions of planet-heating gases from the burning of oil, coal and other fossil fuels. The new analysis, published in Science, finds that Exxon’s science was highly adept and the “projections were also consistent with, and at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models”.
Climate change: UAE names oil chief to lead COP28 talks BBC News The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has been named to lead the COP28 global climate talks in Dubai, later this year. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is currently the chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. He is also the minister for industry and advanced technology for the COP28 hosts, the United Arab Emirates. Campaigners say he must stand down from his oil business role while president as it is a clear conflict of interest. They believe someone steeped in the oil industry may not push countries to rapidly reduce their production and use of fossil fuel, which scientists say is critical to avoiding dangerous climate change. How climate change will make atmospheric rivers even worse
The Washington Post
In recent weeks, a slew of storms has slammed California, bringing torrential rains and deadly flooding. Storms are typical in the winter, including those associated with atmospheric rivers, or long and wide plumes of water vapor flowing from the tropics. But as Earth warms, climate scientists warn these atmospheric river events may be amplified, bringing even more destruction. In other words, the recent events could be just a modest preview of what’s to come in warmer years ahead. The impact of these storms is a paradox. Atmospheric rivers generally provide precipitation critical to a region’s water cycle. These massive rivers, which sometimes carry 15 times the water volume of the Mississippi River, deliver half of the western United States’ total precipitation in less than 15 total days.
Los Angeles Times
[…] While the storms have delivered chaos, they have also helped to make a dent in drought conditions. The state’s snow water equivalent — or the amount of water contained in the snow — was 226% of normal on Wednesday, marking a high for the date not seen in at least two decades. The last time snowpack neared such a high on Jan. 11 was in 2005, when it was 206% of normal, according to state data. […] DWR water operations manager Molly White said reservoirs were also seeing boosts from the storms, with some smaller reservoirs recovering fully from drought-driven deficits. But the state’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville, remain far from full, topping out at 42% and 47% of capacity, respectively, on Wednesday. “Storage right now is still less than where they were back in 2021, but better than where they were in 2022,” White said. “We’ve had quite a deficit because of the drought, so we’re seeing steep inclines right now in storage, and hope that continues as we see these storms and that we can get back to above average.”
Science
Like most bees, bumble bees are having a tough time. Pesticides, habitat loss, light pollution, and parasites have caused steep declines in their populations, upward of 75% in the few places researchers have tracked the insects for long periods of time. Now, scientists have identified a new way global warming may be taking a toll on some of these key pollinators. Rising temperatures are forcing some bees to take shallow, rapid breaths—essentially hyperventilating—which burns more energy and makes them less likely to survive, according to research presented here last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. The study “showed pretty nicely that different [bumble bee] species have different vulnerabilities to climate change,” says John Hranitz, an ecological geneticist who studies bees at Bloomsburg University but who was not involved with the work.
Nature
New year, new variant. Just as scientists were getting to grips with the alphabet soup of SARS-CoV-2 variants circulating globally — your BQ.1.1, CH.1.1 and BF.7 — one lineage seems to be rising to the top, thanks to a peculiar new mutation. The XBB.1.5 subvariant now makes up around 28% of US COVID-19 cases, according to projections from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, and its prevalence is on the rise globally. In the Northeastern United States, it seems to have rapidly out-competed the menagerie of other immunity-dodging variants that were expected to circulate alongside one another this winter. “It’s almost certainly going to dominate in the world. I cannot find a single competitor now. Everything else is incomparable,” says Yunlong Cao, an immunologist at Peking University in Beijing whose team is studying the properties of XBB.1.5 in the laboratory.
'This is alarming': Childhood vaccination rates drop as measles and polio outbreaks emerge
USA Today
Immunization rates for measles, polio and other diseases once again dropped among kindergartners last school year, a trend public health officials warn puts kids at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases. About 93% of kindergartners during the 2021-22 school year completed vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella; diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis; polio; and chickenpox. The coverage dropped nearly 1% from 2020-21 and about 2% from the year before the COVID-19 pandemic started, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released Thursday. The study did not track the number of kids who received COVID-19 vaccines or boosters.
Battle for Soledar: 'First Russia sends Wagner mercenaries, then highly trained paratroopers'
Euronews
The fate of a devastated salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine hangs in the balance this week in one of the bloodiest battles of Russia's invasion. Russian forces used jets, mortars and rockets to bombard Soledar in an unrelenting assault. Soledar's fall, while unlikely a turning point in the nearly 11-month war, would be a prize for a Kremlin starved of good battlefield news in recent months. It would also offer Russian troops a springboard to conquer other areas of Donetsk province that remain under Ukrainian control, such as the nearby strategic city of Bakhmut. On the battlefield, … the Russians send one or two waves of soldiers, many from the private Russian military contractor Wagner Group, who take heavy casualties as they probe the Ukrainian defences.
McCarthy says Santos will remain in office as N.Y. Republicans call for his ouster
NPR News
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Thursday that Rep. George Santos is a member in good standing of the Republican conference, despite a growing scandal linked to widespread deceptions. "The voters have elected George Santos," McCarthy said in a news conference. "He is seated." After calls from GOP leaders in New York that Santos step down, McCarthy acknowledged Santos "has a long way to go to build trust." […] "He will go before [the House Ethics committee]. If anything is found to be wrong, he will be held accountable exactly as anybody else in this body would be," McCarthy said.
More than half nation's school districts face teacher shortages, data show
UPI
More than half of school districts across the country have reported shortages in teachers, according to researchers who attended an event hosted Thursday by the U.S. Department of Education that focused on addressing these shortages. "We know that the single most powerful predictor of [student] achievement is the presence of very experienced teachers, especially for students of color," Linda Darling-Hammond, president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, told those assembled. "Our investments in teachers are really an investment in children for our collective future." The shortfall of teachers across the country has become so serious that it has become a crisis, according to multiple state education leaders. Despite efforts to fill vacancies, the shortage persists.
Garland appoints special counsel to investigate Biden docs
AP News
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed a special counsel to investigate the presence of classified documents found at President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at an unsecured office in Washington dating from his time as vice president. Robert Hur, a onetime U.S. attorney appointed by … Donald Trump, will lead the investigation and plans to begin his work soon. His appointment marks the second time in a few months that Garland has appointed a special counsel, an extraordinary fact that reflects the Justice Department’s efforts to independently conduct high-profile probes in an exceedingly heated political environment. Both of those investigations, including one involving Trump, relate to the handling of classified information, though there are notable differences between those cases.
Biden slams House Republicans' plans on taxes, says they will make inflation worse
Reuters
President Biden criticized House Republicans who have taken control of Congress for backing tax measures that he said would benefit the wealthy at the expense of middle class taxpayers, and make inflation worse. The Republican-controlled House passed a bill Monday night that would slash tens of billions of funding dollars for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The measure is not expected to pass the Senate, where Democrats are the majority, and Biden vowed to veto it even if it did. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, passed on party lines last year, Democrats provided money to hire 87,000 new IRS agents who would focus on wealthy taxpayers with complicated returns. The new agents are expected to bring in additional revenue as they scrutinize the returns. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which analyzes bills for lawmakers, reported in an analysis on Monday that the Republicans' IRS measure would raise the deficit by $114 billion.
How Biden’s microchip ban is curbing China’s AI weapons efforts
Defense News
[…] Mounting tensions with China have spurred a new push in Washington to lessen U.S. reliance on East Asia — the global epicenter of semiconductor production — for the vital microelectronics needed to create both conventional arms and the artificial intelligence algorithms integral to building the weapons of the future. […] In October, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced a sweeping range of export controls that severely curtail China’s ability to obtain some of the world’s most cutting-edge microchips. The bureau had argued that Beijing could use them to “produce advanced military systems” — although these semiconductors are also used in civilian technology. Alan Estevez, the undersecretary of commerce for industry and security, said in December that the export controls will “slow China’s ability to produce the highest-end semiconductors, for a period of time.” “They will figure this out,” he added. “But what we’ve done is pretty comprehensive.”
FAA outage that grounded flights blamed on old tech and damaged database file
Ars Technica
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/12/2146928/-Overnight-News-Digest-Oceans-hit-their-warmest-levels-on-record-for-the-fourth-consecutive-year
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
