EARTHWEEK
Climate emergency
More than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries warn that “untold human
we make large and lasting lifestyle changes to curb global warming.
The call to halt greenhouse gas emissions and other activities that contribute to climate
a warming world are worsening more quickly than predicted. Writing in the journal BioScience, the researchers declared a “climate emergency,” listing several paths toward
warming world.
They warn that accelerating climate change will cause large disruptions to the environment, society and the world economy, “potentially making large areas of the Earth uninhabitable.”
Tropical cyclones
Western India’s Gujarat and Maharashtra states received locally heavy rainfall from weakening
Cyclone Maha, which churned the northern Arabian Sea for nearly a week.
• Category-5 Typhoon Halong passed over the open waters of the central Pacific, well to the northeast of Guam.
• Central Vietnam was doused by weakening Tropical Storm Matmo.
Megaflashes
Two of America’s newest weather satellites have measured the longest lightning discharge ever observed — a 300-mile bolt that flashed across northern Texas, Oklahoma and southwestern Kansas.
The announcement of the epic discharge at 1:13 a.m. local time on Oct. 22, 2017, was just published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
But unpublished data from the same lightning mappers on the GOES-16 and GOES-17 satellites shows an even longer “megaflash” streaked 418 miles over Brazil earlier this year. Neither lightning bolt has yet been verified by the World Meteorological Organization.
Relentless rise
A new study warns that rises in sea level will continue for centuries to come even if greenhouse gas emissions are curbed to levels agreed to in the U.N. Paris climate accord.
A quarter of the predicted minimum 40-inch rise in ocean levels by 2300 will be due to emissions from China, the United States, the European Union, Russia and India over the past 40 years.
A significant rise will still occur even if greenhouse gas emissions are somehow reduced to zero within the next 11 years, the report warns.
Expanding oil spill
The mysterious oil spill that has fouled Brazil’s northeastern coast since the end of August has now reached the country’s Abrolhos Marine National Park, home to the greatest biodiversity in the
South Atlantic.
Located 400 miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro, the reserve is also where humpback whales migrate to breed and home to coral found nowhere else on Earth.
The spill has already killed sea turtles and other marine life despite a massive cleanup
4,000 tons of the oil.
Chemical analysis shows that it came from Venezuela and may have wound up polluting a vast coastal stretch after an oil transfer between ships at sea went bad.
Earthquakes
The most powerful quake to strike Bosnia in years damaged numerous
buildings.
• Earth movements were also felt in the German-Swiss border region, southern Iran and central Chile.
Swine deaths
A quarter of the world’s domestic pigs have died or been put down this year due to outbreaks of African swine fever, with China losing nearly half of its pigs.
The virus responsible originated in East Africa and has spread in recent years to as far away as Belgium, the Caucasus nation of Georgia and eastward into Asia.
While the disease can be eradicated by killing infected domestic pigs, it persists in wild boar and feral hogs.
There is no vaccine, making it hard to prevent.