Science
From killer heatwaves to floods, climate change worsened weather extremes in 2021
|
|
Extreme weather events in 2021 shattered records around the globe. Hundreds died in storms and heatwaves. Farmers struggled with drought, and in some cases with locust plagues. Wildfires set new records for carbon emissions, while swallowing forests, towns and homes.
Many of these events were exacerbated by climate change. Scientists say there are more to come – and worse – as the Earth’s atmosphere continues to warm through the next decade and beyond.
Here are some of the events Reuters witnessed over the past year: https://reut.rs/3m2pptL
February — A blistering cold spell hit normally warm Texas, killing 125 people in the state and leaving millions without power in freezing temperatures.
Scientists have not reached a conclusion on whether climate change caused the extreme weather, but the warming of the Arctic is causing more unpredictable weather around the globe.
February — Kenya and other parts of East Africa battled some of the worst locust plagues in decades, with the insects destroying crops and grazing grounds. Scientists say that unusual weather patterns exacerbated by climate change created ideal conditions for insects to thrive.
March — Beijing’s sky turned orange and flights were grounded during the Chinese capital’s worst sandstorm in a decade.
Busloads of volunteers arrive in the desert each year to plant trees, which can stabilize the soil and serve as a wind buffer. Scientists predict climate change will worsen desertification, as hotter summers and drier winters reduce moisture levels.
June — Nearly all of the western United States was gripped by a drought that emerged in early 2020. Farmers abandoned crops, officials announced emergency measures, and the Hoover Dam reservoir hit an all-time low.
By September, the U.S. government confirmed that over the prior 20 months, the Southwest experienced the lowest precipitation in over a century, and it linked the drought to climate change.
June — Hundreds died during a record-smashing heatwave in the U.S. and Canadian Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.
Over several days, power lines melted and roads buckled. Cities, struggling to cope with the heat, opened cooling centers to protect their residents. During the heatwave, Portland, Oregon, hit an all-time record high of 116 Fahrenheit (46.7 Celsius).
July — Catastrophic flooding killed more than 300 people in central China’s Henan province when a year’s worth of rain fell in just three days.
Meanwhile in Europe, nearly 200 people died as torrential rains soaked Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Scientists concluded that climate change had made the floods 20% more likely to occur.
July — A record heatwave and drought in the U.S. West gave rise to two massive wildfires that tore through California and Oregon and were among the largest in the history of both states.
Scientists say both the growing frequency and the intensity of wildfires are largely attributable to prolonged drought and increasing bouts of excessive heat from climate change.
July — Large parts of South America are suffering from a prolonged drought. While Chile is enduring a decade-long megadrought linked to global warming, this year Brazil saw one of its driest years in a century.
In Argentina, the Parana, South America’s second-longest river, fell to its lowest level since 1944.
Around the globe, heatwaves are becoming both more frequent and more severe.
August — In the Mediterranean, a hot and dry summer fanned intense blazes that forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes in Algeria, Greece and Turkey.
The fires, which killed two people in Greece and at least 65 in Algeria, struck amid an intense heatwave, with some places in Greece recording temperatures of over 46 Celsius (115 Fahrenheit).
Late August — Nearly all the world’s mountain glaciers are retreating due to global warming. In the Alps, Swiss resort employees laid protective blankets over one of Mount Titlis’s glaciers during the summer months to preserve what ice is left.
Switzerland already has lost 500 of its glaciers, and could lose 90% of the 1,500 that remain by the end of the century if global emissions continue to rise, the government said.
August/September — Hurricane Ida, which hit Louisiana as a Category 4 storm, killed nearly 100 people in the United States and caused an estimated $64 billion in damage, according to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.
As the remnants of Ida moved inland, the heavy rains created flash flooding across the densely populated Northeast, vastly increasing the storm’s death toll.
Climate change is strengthening hurricanes, while also causing them to linger longer over land – dumping more rain on an area before moving on. Studies also suggest these storms are becoming more frequent in the North Atlantic.
September — Infrastructure and homes in Russia are increasingly in peril as underground permafrost melts and deforms the land underneath them.
Permafrost was once a stable construction base, in some regions staying frozen as far back as the last Ice Age. But rising global temperatures threaten the layer of ice, soil, rocks, sand and organic matter.
November — The worst floods in 60 years in South Sudan have affected about 780,000 people, or one in every 14 residents, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Every year the county goes through a rainy season, but flooding has set records for three years in a row. The destruction will likely increase as temperatures rise, scientists say.
November — A massive storm dumped a month’s worth of rain over two days in the Canadian province of British Columbia, unleashing floods and mudslides that destroyed roads, railroads and bridges. It is likely the most expensive natural disaster in Canada‘s history, although officials are still assessing the damage.
Meteorologists said the rain had come from an atmospheric river, or a stream of water vapor stretching hundreds of miles long from the tropics. Atmospheric rivers are expected to become larger — and possibly more destructive — with climate change, scientists say.
(Reporting by Andrea Januta in New York and Lisa Shumaker in Chicago; Editing by Katy Daigle and Rosalba O’Brien)
In the new work, scientists looked at a set of trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, which is the technical term for those objects that sit out at the edge of the solar system, beyond Neptune
The new work looked at those objects that have their movement made unstable because they interact with the orbit of Neptune. That instability meant they were harder to understand, so typically astronomers looking at a possible Planet Nine have avoided using them in their analysis.
Researchers instead looked towards those objects and tried to understand their movements. And, Dr Bogytin claimed, the best explanation is that they result from another, undiscovered planet.
The team carried out a host of simulations to understand how those objects’ orbits were affected by a variety of things, including the giant planets around them such as Neptune, the “Galactic tide” that comes from the Milky Way, and passing stars.
The best explanation was from the model that included Planet 9, however, Dr Bogytin said. They noted that there were other explanations for the behaviour of those objects – including the suggestion that other planets once influenced their orbit, but have since been removed – but claim that the theory of Planet 9 remains the best explanation.
A better understanding of the existence or not of Planet 9 will come when the Vera C Rubin Observatory is turned on, the authors note. The observatory is currently being built in Chile, and when it is turned on it will be able to scan the sky to understand the behaviour of those distant objects.
Planet Nine is theorised to have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than Neptune. It may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the Sun.
You may be tempted to ask how an entire planet could ‘hide’ in our solar system when we have zooming capabilities such as the new iPhone 15 has, but consider this: If Earth was the size of a marble, the edge of our solar system would be 11 kilometres away. That’s a lot of space to hide a planet.
[source:independent]
NASA has confirmed that its exciting Dragonfly mission, which will fly a drone-like craft around Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, will cost $3.35 billion and launch in July 2028.
Titan is the only other world in the solar system other than Earth that has weather and liquid on the surface. It has an atmosphere, rain, lakes, oceans, shorelines, valleys, mountain ridges, mesas and dunes—and possibly the building blocks of life itself. It’s been described as both a utopia and as deranged because of its weird chemistry.
Set to reach Titan in 2034, the Dragonfly mission will last for two years once its lander arrives on the surface. During the mission, a rotorcraft will fly to a new location every Titan day (16 Earth days) to take samples of the giant moon’s prebiotic chemistry. Here’s what else it will do:
- Search for chemical biosignatures, past or present, from water-based life to that which might use liquid hydrocarbons.
- Investigate the moon’s active methane cycle.
- Explore the prebiotic chemistry in the atmosphere and on the surface.
Spectacular Mission
“Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth.”
It comes in the wake of the Mars Helicopter, nicknamed Ingenuity, which flew 72 times between April 2021 and its final flight in January 2023 despite only being expected to make up to five experimental test flights over 30 days. It just made its final downlink of data this week.
Dense Atmosphere
However, Titan is a completely different environment to Mars. Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan, which will make buoyancy simple. Gravity on Titan is just 14% of the Earth’s. It sees just 1% of the sunlight received by Earth.
function loadConnatixScript(document)
if (!window.cnxel)
window.cnxel = ;
window.cnxel.cmd = [];
var iframe = document.createElement(‘iframe’);
iframe.style.display = ‘none’;
iframe.onload = function()
var iframeDoc = iframe.contentWindow.document;
var script = iframeDoc.createElement(‘script’);
script.src = ‘//cd.elements.video/player.js’ + ‘?cid=’ + ’62cec241-7d09-4462-afc2-f72f8d8ef40a’;
script.setAttribute(‘defer’, ‘1’);
script.setAttribute(‘type’, ‘text/javascript’);
iframeDoc.body.appendChild(script);
;
document.head.appendChild(iframe);
loadConnatixScript(document);
(function()
function createUniqueId()
return ‘xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx’.replace(/[xy]/g, function(c) 0x8);
return v.toString(16);
);
const randId = createUniqueId();
document.getElementsByClassName(‘fbs-cnx’)[0].setAttribute(‘id’, randId);
document.getElementById(randId).removeAttribute(‘class’);
(new Image()).src = ‘https://capi.elements.video/tr/si?token=’ + ’44f947fb-a5ce-41f1-a4fc-78dcf31c262a’ + ‘&cid=’ + ’62cec241-7d09-4462-afc2-f72f8d8ef40a’;
cnxel.cmd.push(function ()
cnxel(
playerId: ’44f947fb-a5ce-41f1-a4fc-78dcf31c262a’,
playlistId: ‘aff7f449-8e5d-4c43-8dca-16dfb7dc05b9’,
).render(randId);
);
)();
The atmosphere is 98% nitrogen and 2% methane. Its seas and lakes are not water but liquid ethane and methane. The latter is gas in Titan’s atmosphere, but on its surface, it exists as a liquid in rain, snow, lakes, and ice on its surface.
COVID-Affected
Dragonfly was a victim of the pandemic. Slated to cost $1 billion when it was selected in 2019, it was meant to launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034 after an eight-year cruise phase. However, after delays due to COVID, NASA decided to compensate for the inevitable delayed launch by funding a heavy-lift launch vehicle to massively shorten the mission’s cruise phase.
The end result is that Dragonfly will take off two years later but arrive on schedule.
Previous Visit
Dragonfly won’t be the first time a robotic probe has visited Titan. As part of NASA’s landmark Cassini mission to Saturn between 2004 and 2017, a small probe called Huygens was despatched into Titan’s clouds on January 14, 2005. The resulting timelapse movie of its 2.5 hours descent—which heralded humanity’s first-ever (and only) views of Titan’s surface—is a must-see for space fans. It landed in an area of rounded blocks of ice, but on the way down, it saw ancient dry shorelines reminiscent of Earth as well as rivers of methane.
The announcement by NASA makes July 2028 a month worth circling for space fans, with a long-duration total solar eclipse set for July 22, 2028, in Australia and New Zealand.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
A team of scientists claims to have evidence that there is another hidden planet – nicknamed ‘Planet 9’ – lurking in our solar system.
Of course, there have been changes to the number of planets in our solar system over recent – in space terms, anyway – years, as Pluto is no longer considered a proper planet.
Seems a bit harsh, doesn’t it?
However, a team of astronomers now believe that they have the strongest evidence yet that there is another mysterious planet hovering around our sun.
READ MORE! James Webb Telescope observes light on Earth-like planet for the first time in history
The theory that there could be other planets orbiting our star has been around for years, as scientists have noticed some unusual phenomena on the edge of the solar system that suggest the existence of another celestial body.
The theory that another planet is responsible would also explain the orbit of other objects that are outliers in our system, sitting more than 250 times Earth’s distance from the sun.
Scientist Konstantin Bogytin and his team have long been proponents of this ‘Planet 9’ theory, and now they believe they have ‘the strongest statistical evidence yet that Planet 9 is really out there’.
As we know, it wouldn’t be the only strange thing in our solar system.
Perhaps they just need to point a massive space telescope at it and they’ll find evidence of alien life out there.
This new study by Bogytin and his team focused on a number of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) that lie outside the orbit of Neptune towards the outer reaches of our solar system.
In analyzing the movements of these objects – which can be affected by the orbit of Neptune, as well as passing stars and the ‘galactic tide’ – the scientists concluded that there could be another unseen planet out there.
Dr Bogytin pointed out that there are other potential explanations for the behavior of these objects, but – he believes – Planet 9 is the best bet.
Once the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile becomes active, we might get the best look we’ve had yet.
In a paper, the team wrote: “This upcoming phase of exploration promises to provide critical insights into the mysteries of our solar system’s outer reaches.”
That paper, entitled ‘Generation of Low-Inclination, Neptune-Crossing TNOs by Planet Nine’ is available to read here.
Images in this article were generated using AI
Scientists Say They Have Found New Evidence Of An Unknown Planet… – 2oceansvibe News
Opinion: Higher capital gains taxes won't work as claimed, but will harm the economy – The Globe and Mail
Canada Child Benefit payment on Friday | CTV News – CTV News Toronto
Silver investment demand jumped 12% in 2019
12 Bizarre Things People Did Just To Make Social Media Content
Global Media Markets, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F – TV and Radio Broadcasting, Film and Music, Information Services, Web Content, Search Portals And Social Media, Print Media, & Cable – GlobeNewswire
-
Investment23 hours agoUK Mulls New Curbs on Outbound Investment Over Security Risks – BNN Bloomberg
-
Sports21 hours ago
Auston Matthews denied 70th goal as depleted Leafs lose last regular-season game – Toronto Sun
-
Media2 hours ago
DJT Stock Rises. Trump Media CEO Alleges Potential Market Manipulation. – Barron's
-
Business20 hours ago
BC short-term rental rules take effect May 1 – CityNews Vancouver
-
Media4 hours ago
Trump Media alerts Nasdaq to potential market manipulation from 'naked' short selling of DJT stock – CNBC
-
Art19 hours ago
Collection of First Nations art stolen from Gordon Head home – Times Colonist
-
Investment20 hours ago
Benjamin Bergen: Why would anyone invest in Canada now? – National Post
-
Tech22 hours ago
Save $700 Off This 4K Projector at Amazon While You Still Can – CNET
