1. ADEQ Solid Waste Programs Asking For Your Input.
Solid Waste Programs
Five Year Rule Review
ADEQ invites interested community members and business and government personnel to participate in a review of ADEQ’s Solid Waste Rules. Tell us your experience, comments, or feedback on these rules through the survey below.
Go to Survey >
Responses are due no later than Nov. 29, 2019
Read the Chapter 13 Rules at www.aac/R18-13
For questions, please contact: Mark Lewandowski
Waste Programs Division
Lewandowski.Mark@azdeq.gov
2. Oak Creek Watershed Council Celebrates 2,686 Pounds of Trash Removed From Oak Creek. On Tuesday, November 12th, members of the Oak Creek Watershed Council and friends celebrated the removal of 1.3 tons of trash from Oak Creek at the Dark Sky Brewery, located in Flagstaff.
We all have to thank the Council members and friends for being such great stewards of Oak Creek year in and year out.
3. Climate Crisis Declared: ‘Untold Suffering’ 11,000 Scientists Agree, ‘The fate of humanity’ is Threatened. Crisis More Severe Than Expected. An alliance of more than 11,000 scientists have signed their names to a research statement declaring a global climate emergency that could one day make it impossible to live in many parts of the world.
“The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected,” reads the statement, published Tuesday in the journal BioScience. “It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity. Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks (atmospheric, marine and terrestrial) that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”
The paper lays out 14 “vital signs” that track the impacts of climate change over the past four decades, including carbon dioxide levels, sea ice mass, sea levels, ocean water temperatures and extreme weather events.
“Globally, ice has been rapidly disappearing, evidenced by declining trends in minimum summer Arctic sea ice, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and glacier thickness worldwide. Ocean heat content, ocean acidity, sea level, area burned in the United States and extreme weather and associated damage costs have all been trending upward,” the paper says. “Climate change is predicted to greatly affect marine, freshwater and terrestrial life, from plankton and corals to fishes and forests. These issues highlight the urgent need for action.”
It also lists six specific areas that should be targeted for change in order to curb the effects of global warming and climate change, including energy, pollution, food consumption, habitat loss and other impacts on nature, economic policies and population growth.
The paper was published on the 40th anniversary of the first world climate conference, which was held in Geneva in 1979. It is the first time such a large group of scientists have labeled climate change an “emergency,” according to the Washington Post.
“This is a document that establishes a clear record of the broad consensus among most scientists active at this point in history that the climate crisis is real, and is a major, even existential, threat to human societies, human well-being and biodiversity,” Jesse Bellemare, an associate professor of biology at Smith College and one of the scientists who signed the document, told the Post.
The scientists called on world leaders to come together to create policies that address climate change.
“Like other organisms, we are not adapted to recognize far-reaching environmental threats beyond our immediate surroundings,” Maria Abate, a biology professor at Simmons College in Boston who signed the statement, told the Post. “The reported vital signs of our global activity and climate responses give us a tangible, evidence-based report card that I hope will help our culture to develop a broader awareness more quickly to slow this climate crisis.”
4. Will Antarctic Ice Doom Us All? A new study arrives at some disturbing numbers For years, scientists have struggled to figure out exactly how much methane is trapped under the ice at the north and south poles and what it would mean for global temperatures if climate change melted enough ice to release that methane into the atmosphere. A new study published in Nature Communications provides the most comprehensive estimate to date: a staggering 80 to 480 gigatons. That’s a wide range, but even at the low end, it’s astonishing. For context, all the cattle and other domestic animals around the world produce an estimated .08 gigatons of methane annually. Eighty gigatons is 1,000 times that amount.
The study, led by Jemma Wadham, a professor at the University of Bristol School of Geographical Sciences and Cabot Institute for the Environment, synthesized prior scientific research on the ice sheets. The study found that ice sheets, while seemingly inert, are intimately connected to the global carbon cycle in ways that both store and release carbon.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NASA: GRACE TEAM
In Antarctica, blinding-white ice stretches as far as the eye can see and air temperatures usually stay well below freezing. But scientists have concluded it’s likely that under the ice lies vast stores of organic carbon and methane, created by the slow decomposition of ancient vegetation and marine life that thrived during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period 55 million years ago, when Antarctica was teeming with greenery and wildlife (and much of the rest of the earth was uninhabitable). As the climate cooled, the remains of soils, plant and animal life—or marine life, in the case of marine-based ice sheets—became sediment trapped far below the ice. There, microorganisms converted some of it to methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
“This methane is preserved because it is cold and there is enough pressure from the weight of the ice above it,” says Lev Tarasov, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography at Memorial University and one of the study’s authors. But, says Tarasov, climate change is starting to shift the conditions that have held methane deposits for millions of years.
Scientists are particularly worried about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Where it is located, warm water imported by shifting wind patterns is washing up against the ice shelves, causing melting even in areas where the air remains cold. As the the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—and all the ice shelves—grow thinner, the possibility arises that large stores of methane will escape, taking greenhouse gas levels past the global levels that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) agreed are the maximum levels to limit warming to 2°C (3.6°F) by 2100.
But as they melt, ice sheets could also help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by drawing it into the ocean. When glaciers grind against the bedrock below them, they create a fine, nutrient rich “rock flour.” As ice sheets melt, some of these nutrients are absorbed by surrounding marine ecosystems, adding vital nutrients that increase microorganism populations, which then suck up dissolved carbon dioxide from the surface level of the ocean. When the microorganisms die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon dioxide with them, where it forms a carbon-rich sediment.
Tarasov hesitated to quantify how much carbon these microorganisms could take out of the atmosphere—and how much that could mitigate the climate damage caused by the escaped methane. A question like this is one of the hardest to answer, says Tarasov, because relatively small changes in the carbon cycle can lead to huge impacts.
“The problem with understanding the carbon cycle is it depends on the small difference between really big numbers. There is lots of carbon going from the oceans to the atmosphere, or from the atmosphere to the oceans. It just takes small little changes to shift everything around.”
5. AZ Dept of Environmental Quality Needs Your Comments On Hazardous Waste Rules.
Hazardous Waste Chapter 8
Five Year Rule Review ADEQ invites interested community members and business and government personnel to participate in a review of ADEQ’s Hazardous Waste Rules. Tell us your experience,
comments, or feedback on these rules through the survey below. Go to Survey >
Responses are due no later than Nov. 29, 2019
Read the Chapter 8 Rules at https://apps.azsos.gov/public_services/Title_18-08.pdf
For questions, please contact: Mark Lewandowski
Waste Programs Division
Lewandowski.Mark@azdeq.gov
6. The Black Canyon City Water Fair November 14, 2019, at Canon School 5 to 7, is part of the Smithsonian Waterways Program. Water, Black Canyon City and Me presents Marshall Shore November 16, 2019, 3 to 4:30 pm telling the story of “Cool Water, Cool History at Pioneer Masonic Lodge. Upper Agua Fria Watershed Partnership will meet next on DECEMBER 13, 2019 AT THE CANON SCHOOL FOR THE VIP OPENING OF WATER/WAYS EXHIBIT, 5 pm. and later at BCHP
