YCLOAK

This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.

To stand at the edge of an ocean is to face an eternity of waves and water, a shroud covering seven-tenths of the Earth.

Hidden below are mountain ranges and canyons that rival anything on land. There you will find the Earth’s largest habitat, home to billions of plants and animals — the vast majority of the living things on the planet.

In this little-seen world, swirling super-highway currents move warm water thousands of miles north and south from the tropics to cooler latitudes, while cold water pumps from the poles to warmer climes.

It is a system that we take for granted as much as we do the circulation of our own blood. It substantially regulates the Earth’s temperature, and it has been mitigating the recent spike in atmospheric temperatures, soaking up much of human-generated heat and carbon dioxide. Without these ocean gyres to moderate temperatures, the Earth would be uninhabitable.

In the last few decades, however, the oceans have undergone unprecedented warming. Currents have shifted. These changes are for the most part invisible from land, but this hidden climate change has had a disturbing impact on marine life — in effect, creating an epic underwater refugee crisis.

Reuters has discovered that from the waters off the East Coast of the United States to the coasts of West Africa, marine creatures are fleeing for their lives, and the communities that depend on them are facing disruption as a result.

As waters warm, fish and other sea life are migrating poleward, seeking to maintain the even temperatures they need to thrive and breed. The number of creatures involved in this massive diaspora may well dwarf any climate impacts yet seen on land.

In the U.S. North Atlantic, for example, fisheries data show that in recent years, at least 85 percent of the nearly 70 federally tracked species have shifted north or deeper, or both, when compared to the norm over the past half-century. And the most dramatic of species shifts have occurred in the last 10 or 15 years.

Fish have always followed changing conditions, sometimes with devastating effects for people, as the starvation that beset Norwegian fishing villages in past centuries when the herring failed to appear one season will attest. But what is happening today is different: The accelerating rise in sea temperatures, which scientists primarily attribute to the burning of fossil fuels, is causing a lasting shift in fisheries.

The changes below the surface are not an academic matter.

Globally, fishing is a $140 billion to $150 billion business annually, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, and in some parts of the world, seafood accounts for half of the average person’s diet. But the effects of this mass migration in the world’s oceans are also much more intimate than that.

From lobstermen in Maine to fishermen in North Carolina, livelihoods are at stake. For sardine-eating Portuguese and seafood-loving Japanese, cultural heritages are at risk. And a burgeoning aquaculture industry, fueled in part by the effects of climate change, is decimating traditional fishing in West Africa and destroying coastal mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia.

Reuters journalists have spent more than a year collecting their stories and little-reported data to bring you this series revealing the natural disaster unfolding beneath the whitecaps.

VOA will be featuring stories from the Ocean Shock series over the few months.
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Poking above the bright pink bougainvillea that spills into the street, the lone minaret of the Ta’la Al-Ali mosque towers over the Khalda neighborhood of Amman.

Aside from its colorful stain-glassed windows and ornate calligraphy, this mosque stands out for another reason: its roof is covered with shining solar panels that make the building’s carbon emissions close to zero.

The structure is part of a wider effort by mosques – and many other buildings in the city – to capitalize on Jordan’s plentiful sunshine and shift towards renewable energy, in a bid to achieve Amman’s goal of becoming a carbon neutral city by 2050.

“Almost all the mosques here in Jordan now cover 100 percent of their energy needs” with renewable power, said Yazan Ismail, an energy auditor at ETA-max Energy and Environmental Solutions, a green consultancy in Jordan.

Amman is one of more than 70 cities worldwide that are aiming to become “carbon neutral” by 2050, meaning they will produce no more climate-changing emissions than they can offset, such as by planting carbon-absorbing trees.

Each is going about achieving the goal in its own way. But because cities account for about three-quarters of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the United Nations, and consume more than two-thirds of the world’s energy, whether they succeed or fail will have a huge impact on if the world’s climate goals are met.

Feeding the Grid

In Amman, the push to make mosques greener – which began in 2014, with backing from the Ministry of Religious Affairs – has been so successful that many are now selling excess energy back to the national grid, Ismail said.

For the Ta’la Al-Ali mosque’s imam, who speaks to the faithful in his Friday sermons about protecting the climate, the decision to adopt clean energy coincides with wider religious values.

“The main reason for the use of solar energy is religious duty,” said Ahmad Al Rawashdeh. Islam urges conservation of nature’s resources, he said, and “warns against extravagance.”

But the use of solar energy, and power-saving LED lightbulbs, also is helping the mosque financially, he admitted.

Amman, where temperatures already soar above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in the summer, has clear incentives to try to hold the line on global warming.

But renewables are far from the norm in most of the country.

Jordan still imports close to 96 percent of its energy, most of it polluting fossil fuels, from its Middle Eastern neighbors, according to the World Bank.

Government officials say they are going to change that.

“We are committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030,” Minister of Environment Nayef Hmeidi Al-Fayez told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The country aims to generate 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2022, Al-Fayez said. It’s a target he thinks will be met early, in part as solar panels go up on the city’s homes, businesses and government buildings.

Earlier this year the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (Masdar) put in place $188 million in financing to develop Jordan’s largest solar power plant for the state National Electric Power Company.

The project is scheduled to go online in the first half of 2020, and will supply power to about 110,000 homes while displacing 360,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, a statement from Masdar said.

Green Schools

On the other side of the city, the Al-Hoffaz international academy – one of the first schools to go solar in Amman, in 2013 – now gets almost 95 percent of its energy from renewable sources, said Khaled Al Salaymah, assistant general manager of the school.

At Al Hoffaz, children in orange and black uniforms chant their times-tables as they file down the stairs of the academy, one of about 100 schools in Amman seeking to lower carbon emissions.

“Based on our community and public responsibilities we want to reduce our emissions and carbon contribution urgently,” said Al Salaymah. “Also, there’s an economic dimension: we’ve reduced our energy consumption costs too,” he said.

Along with glimmering solar electrical panels covering the basketball court, the teachers’ car park and much of the roof, the school uses solar water heaters and recycles its waste while also prioritizing environmental education, he said.

“We hold awareness sessions for students, parents and teachers here to ensure they know the benefits of going green and using renewable energy,” Al Salaymah told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It’s not just installing solar panels. We want to be green in every way.”

He said he had noticed a rise in social awareness of the risks of climate change, particularly among young Jordanians.

“The mentality has changed,” he said.

Jordan is also trying to cut emissions from tourism. The country hopes to market itself as a haven for ecotourists keen to stay in zero-carbon resorts along the salty Dead Sea or near the UNESCO World Heritage site of Petra.

The Feynan Ecolodge sits on the edge of the Dana Biosphere Reserve, on the road to the ancient crimson carved city of Petra.

With solar appliances serving its 26 rooms and candle-lit corridors, the lodge is entirely off grid, and offers visitors the chance to feast on vegetarian food, stargaze or learn to bake bread beneath the hot sand.

Manager Nabil Tarazi said the lodge’s daily energy consumption was less than that of a two-bedroom apartment in Amman.

The lodge is part of a string of buildings backed by Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), including a similar resort north of Amman in the protected forest reserve of Ajloun.

Nestled among evergreen oaks, that lodge harvests rainwater and uses geothermal heating and cooling to keep its emissions at net zero.

Future Pressures

Despite Jordan’s efforts to cut carbon emissions, Amman faces big challenges, including a booming population, swollen by the arrival of more than half a million refugees fleeing conflict in neighboring Syria.

Arid Amman is also among the most water-stressed cities in the world – enough that Jordan is now looking into desalination plants to keep the taps running.

But the push for solar power may also help.

A May report by the World Resources Institute found that thirsty Middle Eastern and North African countries, including Jordan, could cut water demand by switching to solar power, which uses less water to produce than fossil fuel electricity generation.

Jordan’s Environment Minister Al-Fayez said he has confidence Amman – and the country – will continue pushing to meet their ambitious carbon-cutting goals.

“We’re always optimistic in Jordan. That’s the way that we survive,” he said.
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NASA’s elite planet-hunting spacecraft has been declared dead, just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary. 

Officials announced the Kepler Space Telescope’s demise Tuesday. 

Already well past its expected lifetime, the 9½-year-old Kepler had been running low on fuel for months. Its ability to point at distant stars and identify possible alien worlds worsened dramatically at the beginning of October, but flight controllers still managed to retrieve its latest observations. The telescope has now gone silent, its fuel tank empty. 

“Kepler opened the gate for mankind’s exploration of the cosmos,” said retired NASA scientist William Borucki, who led the original Kepler science team. 

Super Earths found

Kepler discovered 2,681 planets outside our solar system and even more potential candidates. It showed us rocky worlds the size of Earth that, like Earth, might harbor life. It also unveiled incredible super Earths: planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. 

NASA astrophysics director Paul Hertz estimated that anywhere from two to a dozen of the planets discovered by Kepler are rocky and Earth-sized in the so-called Goldilocks zone — the habitable area around a star where the temperature would permit existence of liquid water. But Kepler’s overall planet census showed that 20 percent to 50 percent of the stars visible in the night sky could have planets like ours in such a habitable zone for life, he said. 

The $700 million mission even helped to uncover last year a solar system with eight planets, just like ours. 

“It has revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos,” Hertz said. “Now we know because of the Kepler Space Telescope and its science mission that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy.” 

Almost lost in 2013 because of equipment failure, Kepler was salvaged by engineers and kept peering into the cosmos, thick with stars and galaxies, ever on the lookout for dips in in the brightness of stars that could indicate an orbiting planet. 

“It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,” said Borucki said. 

The resurrected mission became known as K2 and yielded 350 confirmed exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, on top of what the telescope had already uncovered since its March 7, 2009, launch from Cape Canaveral. 

In all, close to 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed over the past two decades, two-thirds of them thanks to Kepler. 

Kepler focused on stars thousands of light-years away and, according to NASA, showed that statistically there’s at least one planet around every star in our Milky Way galaxy. 

Borucki, who dreamed up the mission decades ago, said one of his favorite discoveries was Kepler 22b, a water planet bigger than Earth but in an area where it is not too warm and not too cold — the type “that could lead to life.” 

Successor spacecraft

A successor to Kepler launched in April, NASA’s Tess spacecraft, has its sights on stars closer to home. It’s already identified some possible planets. 

Tess project scientist Padi Boyd called Kepler’s mission “stunningly successful.” 

Kepler showed us that “we live in a galaxy that’s teeming with planets, and we’re ready to take the next step to explore those planets,” she said. 

Another longtime spacecraft chasing strange worlds in our own solar system, meanwhile, is also close to death. 

NASA’s 11-year-old Dawn spacecraft is pretty much out of fuel after orbiting the asteroid Vesta as well as the dwarf planet Ceres. It remains in orbit around Ceres, which, like Vesta, is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

Two of NASA’s older telescopes have been hit with equipment trouble recently, but have recovered. The 28-year-old Hubble Space Telescope resumed science observations last weekend, following a three-week shutdown. The 19-year-old Chandra X-ray Telescope’s pointing system also ran into trouble briefly in October. Both cases involved critical gyroscopes, needed to point the telescopes. 

Hertz said all the spacecraft problems were “completely independent” and coincidental in timing. 

Now 94 million miles from Earth, Kepler should remain in a safe, stable orbit around the sun. Flight controllers will disable the spacecraft’s transmitters, before bidding it a final “goodnight.” 
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Asia could reap massive benefits in health, environment, agriculture and economic growth if governments implement 25 policies such as banning the burning of household waste and cutting industrial emissions, according to a U.N. report.

Air pollution is a health risk for 4 billion people in Asia, killing about 4 million of them annually, and efforts to tackle the problem are already on track to ensure air pollution is no worse in 2030, but huge advances could be made, the report said.

The report’s 25 recommendations would cost an estimated $300 billion to $600 billion annually, a big investment but loose change compared with a projected $12 trillion economic growth increase.

The publication of the report, “Air Pollution in Asia and the Pacific: Science based solutions,” on Tuesday coincides with the World Health Organization holding its first global air pollution conference in Geneva this week

The recommendations also included post-combustion controls to cut emissions from power stations, higher standards for shipping fuels, ending routine flaring of gas from oil wells, and energy efficiency standards for industry and households.

The biggest gains would come from clean cooking, reducing emissions from industry, using renewable fuels for power generation and more efficient use of fertilizers.

Huge improvements in post-combustion controls and emission standards for road vehicles were already anticipated because of recent legislation, although both could be improved further.

Indeed, India may halt the use of private vehicles in the capital New Delhi if air pollution, which has reached severe levels in recent days, gets worse, a senior environmental official said Tuesday.

Authorities in the capital have already advised residents to keep outdoor activity to a minimum from the beginning of next month until at least the end of the Hindu festival of Diwali on Nov. 7, when firecrackers typically further taint air choked by the burning of crop stubble in neighboring states.

Helena Molin Valdes, head of Climate and Clean Air Coalition Secretariat at U.N. Environment, said there was increasing political openness to taking action on air pollution and the report reflected three years of discussions with governments.

“What the governments were saying in the region was: ‘Don’t tell us we have a problem, we know there is a problem, how can we deal with it and what will it take to do it?'” she said.

The report estimates its recommendations would cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent compared to a baseline scenario, potentially decreasing global warming by one-third of a degree Celsius by 2050, which would also be a contribution in the fight against climate change.

One billion people would enjoy high air quality, while the number exposed to the worst pollution would be cut by 80 percent to 430 million. Premature deaths would fall by a third.

Crop yields would benefit because of a reduction in ozone, which is estimated to have cut 2015 harvests by 10 percent for maize, 4 percent for rice, 22 percent for soy and 9 percent across Asia, a total of 51 million tons.
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Wealthy space buffs will have the chance to own three small particles of lunar matter when what Sotheby’s describes as the only known documented “moon rocks” to be legally available for private ownership hit the auction block in November.

Sotheby’s said on Tuesday it expects the fragments, retrieved from the moon by a Soviet space mission in 1970, could fetch between $700,000 to $1 million at the Nov. 29 auction in New York.

The pieces — a basalt fragment, similar to most of the Earth’s volcanic rock, and bits of surface debris known as regolith — are being sold by an unidentified private American collector who purchased them in 1993.

Sotheby’s said in a statement they were first sold in 1993 by Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, the widow of former Soviet space program director Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.

The fragments, ranging in size from about .079 inch x .079 inch (2 x 2mm) to .039 inch x .039 inch (1 x 1mm), were presented to her as a gift on behalf of the Soviet Union in recognition of her late husband’s contributions to the program.

Sotheby’s said that the particles, encased under glass with a Russian plaque, are both the only known lunar sample to have ever been officially gifted to a private party, and with documented provenance to be available for private ownership.

Collectors pay huge sums for space exploration artifacts.

Last year, Sotheby’s sold a zippered bag stamped with the words “Lunar Sample Return” laced with moon dust which was used by Neil Armstrong for the first manned mission to the moon in 1969, for $1.8 million.

That sale took place after NASA lost a court battle to retrieve the artifact from a private collection.

Most other known samples taken from the moon remain with the two entities that collected them: the United States during the Apollo 11-17 missions and the Soviet Union via the unmanned Luna-16, Luna-20, and Luna-24 missions.

A number of other countries were gifted with Apollo 11 samples and Apollo 17 goodwill moon rocks on behalf on the Nixon administration, and in most places the law bars transferring such gifts to individuals.

The particles being sold in November were retrieved in September 1970 by Luna-16 which drilled a hole in the surface to a depth of 13.8 inches (35 cm) and extracted a core sample.

They are encased under glass below an adjustable lens and labeled “ЧАСТИЦЫ ГРУНТА ЛУНЫ-16″ [SOIL PARTICLES FROM LUNA-16].”

Tests on similar samples have dated the bits as being as much as 3.4 billion years old.
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It is the time of the year when Indians hit the roads to distribute gifts and sweets to friends and family, visit colorful “Diwali bazars” and party as they gear up to celebrate the main Hindu festival of Diwali on November 7. But in the Indian capital, there is a party spoiler: a deadly haze of pollution that has prompted calls to minimize exposure to the dirty air and is making some pack up and leave the city during the festival.

Grey smog shrouds New Delhi and satellite towns as winter approaches and authorities have advised citizens to avoid strenuous outdoor activity, take only short walks, shut windows, reduce use of private vehicles and wear masks as a precaution.

A range of emergency measures has also been announced to reduce air pollution, such as a temporary ban on construction activity and coal and biomass based industries starting Thursday.

The measures kick in as the level of PM2, the tiny particulate matter that can dangerously clog lungs exceeded by more than six times the safe limit set by the World Health Organization. Earlier this year, WHO named Delhi as the world’s most polluted megacity — the city and its surrounding towns are home to 19 million people.

“There are pollution hotspots in the city where we have seen levels that are hitting serious levels,” says Anumita Roy Chowdhury, Executive Director, Research and Advocacy at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. “But at least the action has started and we are hoping the emergency response will help.”

The pollution in the city and surrounding towns is a toxic mix of of dust, fumes from vehicles, burning of waste and polluting industries, and has been exacerbated with explosive growth. It worsens at this time of the year as farmers set fire to thousands of hectares of farmland in neighboring states, Diwali revelers set off firecrackers and still winter air keeps pollutants hovering over the city.

Authorities have launched a campaign to prevent farmers from burning crop residue, which helps them prepare the fields for the next harvest without incurring heavy labor costs. The acrid smoke from the fields billows towards Delhi, becoming one of the major triggers for the city’s deadly smog.

State authorities are optimistic the number of fires has been reduced as the government offers subsidies on equipment that enables farmers to plant the new crop with the stubble still in the fields and imposes fines on those who still light up the residue on their fields. But thousands of resentful farmers continue to burn the stubble, saying it is easier to pick up a matchstick and pay the penalty rather than invest in the equipment.

Others grumble the additional expense is cutting into already slim farm profits and leaving their crop more vulnerable to pests like rats.

“We don’t like scorching mother earth, but only when you work at the ground level you know the challenges you face,” said Vinod Kumar, who has a 16-hectare farm in Karnal in neighboring Haryana state. He does not find it viable to plant the new crop with the stubble still standing in the fields. “The taller stubble has to be set on fire.”

Even as crop fires rage, an ease on a ban on firecrackers by the Supreme Court has intensified New Delhi’s pollution worries. The top court rejected calls for an outright ban and said “green crackers” would be allowed for a two-hour window on Diwali.

But many in the country, including shops selling firecrackers, appeared clueless about what is an environmentally safe firework. They are doing brisk business — many in the city are loath to give up the age-old custom, which they see as an intrinsic part of Diwali celebrations despite several campaigns urging people to stay away from firecrackers.

Doctors are already advising people suffering from respiratory problems to leave the city and those who can afford to heed the warning are taking it seriously.

New Delhi resident, Pradeep Bhargava, who has suffered bouts of asthma, is taking no chances after last year when pollution spiked to its worst-ever level around Diwali and prompted doctors to declare a “medical emergency” and authorities to shut schools. “The pollution is the major factor that we are heading to the hills, but five days out of the city won’t really help,” he said. “We have to breathe the dirty air through the winter.”

 

Many environmentalists agree and point out that emergency measures taken during the smog season will not fix Delhi’s pollution crisis. “Focus now will really have to shift more towards round-the year plan so that those systemic reforms take place so that by next winter we begin to see more substantial changes,” said Chowdhury from the Center of Science and Environment.

 
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New research strengthens the case that people used the chocolate ingredient cacao in South America 5,400 years ago, underscoring the seed’s radical transformation into today’s Twix bars and M&M candies.

 

Tests indicate traces of cacao on artifacts from an archaeological site in Ecuador, according to a study published Monday. That’s about 1,500 years older than cacao’s known domestication in Central America.

 

“It’s the earliest site now with domesticated cacao,” said Cameron McNeil of Lehman College in New York, who was not involved in the research.

 

The ancient South American civilization likely didn’t use cacao to make chocolate since there’s no established history of indigenous populations in the region using it that way, researchers led by the University of British Columbia in Canada said.

 

But the tests indicate the civilization used the cacao seed, not just the fruity pulp. The seeds are the part of the cacao pod used to make chocolate.

 

Indigenous populations in the upper Amazon region today use cacao for fermented drinks and juices, and it’s probably how it was used thousands of years ago as well, researchers said.

Scientists mostly agree that cacao was first domesticated in South America instead of Central America as previously believed. The study in Nature Ecology & Evolution provides fresh evidence.

 

Three types of tests were conducted using artifacts from the Santa Ana-La Florida site in Ecuador. One tested for the presence of theobromine, a key compound in cacao; another tested for preserved particles that help archeologists identify ancient plant use; a third used DNA testing to identify cacao.

 

Residue from one ceramic artifact estimated to be 5,310 to 5,440 years old tested positive for cacao by all three methods. Others tested positive for cacao traces as well, but were not as old.

 

How cacao’s use spread between South America and Central America is not clear. But by the time Spanish explorers arrived in Central America in the late 1400s, they found people were using it to make hot and cold chocolate drinks with spices, often with a foamy top.

 

“For most of the modern period, it was a beverage,” said Marcy Norton, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World.”

 

The chocolate drinks in Central America often contained maize and differ from the hot chocolate sold in the U.S. They did not contain milk, Norton said, and when they were sweetened, it was with honey.

 

By the 1580s, cacao was being regularly imported into Spain and spread to other European countries with milk being added along the way. It wasn’t until the 1800s that manufacturing advances in the Netherlands transformed chocolate into a solid product, Norton said.

Michael Laiskonis, who teaches chocolate classes the Institute of Culinary Education, said he’s seeing a growing interest in cacao flavors, indicating a return to a time when chocolate wasn’t just an ingredient buried in a candy bar.

He said he tries to incorporate chocolate’s past into his classes, including a 1644 recipe that combines Mayan and Aztec versions of drinks with European influences.

 

“It’s something that’s always been transforming,” he said.
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A meticulous re-creation of a three-decade-old study of birds on a mountainside in Peru has given scientists a rare chance to prove how the changing climate is pushing species out of the places they are best adapted to. 

Surveys of more than 400 species of birds in 1985 and then in 2017 have found that populations of almost all had declined, as many as eight had disappeared completely, and nearly all had moved to higher elevations in what scientists call “an escalator to extinction.” 

“Once you move up as far as you can go, there’s nowhere else left,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, a study author and director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. “On this particular mountain, some ridgetop bird populations were literally wiped out.”

It’s not certain whether the birds shifted ranges because of temperature changes, or indirect impacts, such as shifts in the ranges of insects or seeds that they feed on. 

These findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirm what biologists had long suspected, but had few opportunities to confirm. The existence of a 1985 survey of birds on the same mountain gave scientists a rare and useful baseline. 

Past research has documented habitats of birds and other species moving up in elevation or latitude in response to warming temperatures. But Mark Urban, director of the Center of Biological Risk at the University of Connecticut, who was not involved in the study said it was the first to prove what climate change models predicted: that rising temperatures will lead to local extinctions.

“A study like this where you have historical data you can go back to and compare is very rare,” said Urban. “As long as the species can disperse, you will see species marching up the mountain, until that escalator becomes a stairway to heaven.”

In 1985, Fitzpatrick established a basecamp alongside a river running down a mountain slope in southeastern Peru, aiming to catalog the habitat ranges of tropical bird species that lived there. His team spent several weeks trekking up and down the Cerro de Pantiacolla, using fine nets called mist nets to catch and release birds, and keeping detailed journals of birds they caught, spotted or heard chirping in the forests.

Two years ago, Fitzpatrick passed his journals, photos and other records to Benjamin Freeman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Freeman, who has been researching tropical birds for more than a decade, set out to recreate the journey in August and September of 2017. Using old photos of mountain views, his team located the same basecamp. 

Freeman largely recreated Fitzpatrick’s path and methodology to see what had happened in the intervening years, a period when average mean temperatures on the mountain rose 0.76 degrees Fahrenheit (0.42 degrees Celsius). Because the mountain lies at the edge of a national park, the area hadn’t been disturbed. 

In addition to unfurling 40-foot (12-meter) mist nets on the slopes, Freeman’s team placed 20 microphone boxes on the mountain to record the chirps of birds that might not easily be seen.

“We found that the bird communities were moving up the slope to reach the climate conditions to which they were originally adapted,” said Freeman, the lead author of the study. Near the top of the mountain the bird species moved higher by 321 feet (98 meters), on average.

“We think temperature is the master-switch in explaining why species live where they do on mountain slopes,” said Freeman. “A huge majority of species in our study were doing the same thing.”

Birds adapted to live within narrow temperature bands — in regions without wide seasonal variations — may be particularly vulnerable to climate change, Fitzpatrick said.

“We should expect that what’s happening on this mountaintop is happening more generally in the Andes, and other tropical mountain ranges,” he said. 

 

 
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Demand for bitcoin could single-handedly derail efforts to limit global warming because the increasingly popular digital currency takes huge amounts of energy to produce, scientists said on Monday.

Producing bitcoin at a pace with growing demand could by 2033 defeat the aim of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, according to U.S. research published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Almost 200 nations agreed in Paris in 2015 on the goal to keep warming to “well below” a rise of 2°C above pre-industrial times.

But mining, the process of producing bitcoins by solving mathematical equations, uses high-powered computers and alto of electricity, the researchers said.

“Currently, the emissions from transportation, housing and food are considered the main contributors to ongoing climate change,” said study co-author Katie Taladay in a statement. “This research illustrates that bitcoin should be added to this list.”

Mining is a lucrative business, with one bitcoin currently selling for about $6,300 (4,900 British pounds).

In 2017, bitcoin production and usage emitted an estimated 69 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, the researchers said.

That year, bitcoin was involved in less than half of 1 percent of the world’s cashless transactions, they said.

As the currency becomes more common, researchers said it could use enough electricity to emit about 230 gigatons of carbon within a decade and a half. One gigaton is equal to one billion metric tons of carbon.

“No matter how you slice it, that thing is using a lot of electricity. That means bad business for the environment,” Camilo Mora, another co-author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Bitcoin mining, however, is becoming more energy efficient, said Katrina Kelly-Pitou, research associate at the University of Pittsburgh.

She said bitcoin miners are moving away from sites such as China, with coal-generated electricity, to more environmentally friendly utilities in Iceland and the United States.
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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is now closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever gotten.

 

Parker on Monday surpassed the record of 26.6 million miles (43 million kilometers) set by Helios-2 back in 1976. And it will keep getting closer to the sun until it flies through the corona, or outer atmosphere, for the first time next week, passing within 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) of the solar surface.

 

Parker will make 24 close approaches to the sun over the next seven years, ultimately coming within just 3.8 million miles (6 million kilometers).

 

Launched in August, Parker is on track to set another record late Monday night. It will surpass Helios-2’s speed record of 153,454 miles per hour (247,000 kilometers per hour), relative to the sun.
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