Earthweek: a Diary of the planet

A three-year decline in the amount of carbon dioxide being spewed into the atmosphere by the U.S. ended in 2018 with a surge that saw emissions rise by 3.4 percent. Data collected by an independent economic research firm found it was the largest rise in carbon emissions in the country in eight years. Prolonged cold spells in many areas and a hot summer increased demand for air conditioning and heating, fueling the surge. The end of an eruption that began in 1983 at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano has left the Big Island with its first sparkling days of clean air in decades. The island had been plagued with unrelenting plumes of volcanic fog, or vog, which was sometimes so thick that it looked like wildfire smoke. With no more volcanic gases, vog-related health problems have eased, and Ross Birch of the Island of Hawaii Visitors Bureau now brags that the ocean looks bluer and the mountains greener. A giant U-shaped floating barrier designed to corral debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been broken apart by the constant wind and waves of the North Pacific winter. The prototype was towed to the patch between Hawaii and California in September, and early reports said it was moving slower than the plastic, allowing the trash to escape. The Ocean Cleanup project will tow the broken device to Hawaii for examination, and it may need to be brought back to the project’s headquarters in the Bay Area for full repairs. About 2 billion birds cross the Gulf of Mexico during the spring migration season, according to a study that combined data from 11 radar stations and observations from citizen scientists. Researcher Kyle Horton of Cornell University said that before he and his colleagues looked at the data from 1995 to 2015, “we could only guess at the overall numbers from surveys done along small portions of the shoreline.”