Global Warming

Undoing Trump

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee became the 13 U.S. mayor to use public resources to repost Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) web pages on global warming that were deleted by the Trump administration earlier this year.

Lee said the “American people are entitled to the publicly-funded EPA research on climate change” in announcing his office would post the deleted pages on the city’s Open Gov website.

Drinking Water Along The US-Mexico Border Threatened By Global Warming

Global warming looms large in the Southwest as rising temperatures threaten to diminish already scarce water supplies. A 2014 United Nations report suggests that globally, the burden of climate change will impact the poor the most. Some of the most marginalized communities in the United States are found along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Some people living along the border already live without access to running water. In New Mexico, 90 percent of the population gets their drinking water from the ground — fed by melting snow packs from mountains, rivers and streams. But with rising temperatures and warmer and shorter snow seasons, less of that water is making it into the aquifer.

To keep up with plummeting water levels, municipal and private wells are being drilled deeper into the earth. But for people living in low-income communities along the border known as colonias, that is not a viable option.

Many residents depend on shallow wells dug by hand. Water is struck 25 feet below peoples’ homes, the families cannot not drink it because it is not safe. Instead, they used it to shower and do their laundry, until they realized that was a problem too. The clothes was like turning yellow and rotten.

A 2015 NASA climate study projects Southwest water supplies will only be diminished further with an even harsher drought projected in the next 30 years.

Florida reef rescuers race to keep pace with climate change

Ten years ago, when scientists in South Florida began a massive rescue effort to rebuild the nation’s only inshore reef, replanting nursery-grown staghorn coral with a gardening technique perfected in the Pacific seemed like an easy solution.

From Key West to Fort Lauderdale, volunteers and scientists planted thousands of staghorns in reef rescues. More than 90 percent of Lirman’s corals survived — about 10 percent more than expected —signaling a rousing success. The work helped shift reef restoration from uglier, more costly engineered artificial reefs created with scuttled ships, which are also more susceptible to invasive species and vulnerable to sea rise. Labs expanded to meet the growing demand, added more kinds and perfected techniques.

Then came back-to-back bleaching events that started in 2014. In 2015, more than half of Lirman’s transplanted staghorns died. Suddenly, the reef gardeners were faced with a daunting new obstacle: climate change.

So he began intentionally stressing the coral — exposing them to heat and light — in his lab. Those that recover are more hardened to future stresses.

If his field trial works, Baker said it’s possible to replicate the hardening elsewhere in the world, like the Great Barrier reef, where an ongoing bleaching has ravaged an area larger than Italy and covering two-thirds of the reef.