Researchers say preliminary results suggest contrails can warm the atmosphere - maybe above and beyond airplane's carbon emissions.
(Photo courtesy of NOAA)
It’s the tail end of the holiday
air travel season, and, if you’re
flying, you might not be thinking
about your impact on climate
change. But Shawn Allee reports, some scientists are:
Transcript
It’s the tail end of the holiday
air travel season, and, if you’re
flying, you might not be thinking
about your impact on climate
change. But Shawn Allee reports, some scientists are:
Mark Jacobson studies atmospheric science at Stanford University.
He’s just finished research on airplane emissions, including contrails. Those’re the streaming vapor clouds you see coming out of high-flying airplanes.
Jacobson wants to see if contrails contribute to global warming.
“And we’re trying to find out what’s the relative contribution of aircraft to that warming.”
Jacobson says preliminary results suggest contrails can warm the atmosphere – maybe above and beyond airplane’s carbon emissions.
He says his upcoming paper will likely stir a lot of debate next year, since flying’s becoming more common and there hasn’t been much research on its impact yet.
17 year-old Malkolm Boothroyd rode a bicycle for 3 months across Canada. Here he is giving a speech at the end of his trip on Parliament Hill. (Photo by Karen Kelly)
All over North America, people
are becoming more concerned
about the dangers posed by
climate change. Karen Kelly
spoke to a teenager who comes
from the far north of Canada,
one of the areas of the continent
that’s already feeling the effects:
Transcript
All over North America, people
are becoming more concerned
about the dangers posed by
climate change. Karen Kelly
spoke to a teenager who comes
from the far north of Canada,
one of the areas of the continent
that’s already feeling the effects:
Malkolm Boothroyd is 17. He lives in Whitehorse in the Yukon, a province at the northern tip of Canada.
It’s a wild mountainous place, with huge caribou herds, moose, bear, and foxes. It’s also a place where climate change is already evident.
The winters are shorter. The permafrost and sea ice are melting. And for young people like Boothroyd, it’s a source of worry.
“Climate change is impacting wildlife patterns, tundra ponds are vanishing. We are one of first places that will feel the severe impacts of climate change. Growing up in the Yukon, you’re maybe more aware of that.”
Boothroyd says already the native Inuit tribes are having a harder time living off the land. And he felt frustrated by what he sees as the Canadian government’s lack of action.
The government has not kept international commitments it made to reduce the gases that cause climate change. So he decided to head to the capital city of Ottawa to lodge his complaint.
Ottawa is 3,700 miles away from the Yukon.
(sound of gears)
Boothroyd hopped on his bicycle.
“I think there are days when you question your sanity, when you’re sitting out in the rain with black flies all around your head and with a soaking wet tent and wondering, ‘why am I doing this?’ But I don’t think there was any time I wanted to go back or anything like that. I just wanted to see the project through and make sure we were here on Parliament Hill to give our message to the government.”
It took him just under three months to ride from the northwestern tip of Canada near Alaska to Ottawa, which is just north of New York State.
His mom rode with him for the first 1,200 miles.
Then he joined up with other young riders, arriving for a rally on Parliament Hill in late September.
“I’m 17-years-old, and that means I’m too young to vote. But I believe I should have a say in decisions that are made on this Hill because when Parliament makes decisions about climate and energy, its people my age – people who are too young to vote – who will live in the world determined by what decisions made.”
(applause)
About a dozen members of Parliament and maybe 50 cyclists showed up for the rally. Boothroyd talked to hundreds more as he rode across the country.
He says he wasn’t just doing it for a good cause, he was doing it to protect his home.
“You’re very protective over wherever you grew up, and the place you know very well and love, so if you see a threat to that, you want to do everything you can.”
Now, Boothroyd is a regular twelfth grader again.
But unlike most, he’ll be keeping a close eye on the climate change talks taking place in Copenhagen in December.
He’s hoping his effort convinced the Canadian government to do more.
Wen Baldwin, a volunteer with the National Park service,
pulls a non-stick teflon frying pan out of Lake Mead, the reservoir
of Hoover Dam. Quagga mussels smothered the pan in a matter of weeks. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Signs leading out of Lake Mead stress the importance of properly
cleaning any boat leaving the area. Quagga mussels can hitch rides from
one lake or river to the next by attaching to boats' hulls. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:
Transcript
A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:
n 2007, biologists declared that quagga mussels had infested infested Lake Mead just outside
Las Vegas.
But years before that, park staff and volunteers like Wen Baldwin told folks how to avoid the
problem.
Baldwin says some people helped – most people told him to just drop it.
“Oh, it won’t happen to us. That’s the American theory – fire, cancer, whatever. Oh, it
won’t happen to me.”
But it did happen, and here’s how it went down.
Baldwin went to this conference out East where biologists explained how quaggas clog pipes at
water treatment centers and power plants.
“There was a presentation about them and I realized, hey, they could get in here and they
could cost me money, you money, everybody money. They could raise havoc as they have in
the Great Lakes.”
Baldwin got worried.
Quagga mussles hitchhike on boats, and Lake Mead is a boating hot spot.
Baldwin warned people – wash down your boat before you put it in the lake!
“I put on a lot of programs trying to get people on board. Just didn’t work that well.”
Now, quagga mussels are making a mess of Lake Mead – and Web Baldwin can show how.
Baldwin tests how well quagga stick to different material.
We’re on this dock one morning, and he pulls a rope out of the water.
The rope’s covered with shells that look like fingernail-sized clams.
Allee: “I reckon you have to be pretty careful with your hands, there.”
Baldwin: “Boy, they’ll cut you to ribbons. I go home looking like my hands went through a
meat grinder.”
At the end of the rope – he’s tied a skillet.
Baldwin: “They’ll stick to teflon.”
Allee: “They’ll stick to teflon. Your eggs won’t stick to teflon all that well, but quagga
mussels will.”
Baldwin: “They will. And anywhere they attach the glue they use will hasten the
deterioration of the surface they attach to.”
A quagga-coated teflon pan is a shocker – but what does a quagga invasion mean?
Well, for one, if you dock your boat at Lake Mead – you’ve gotta scrape it all the time.
Swimmers wear shoes to protect their feet from quagga-coated rocks.
And quagga are getting costly.
Zegers: “We’ve been monitoring water quality in the lake pretty extensively.”
Roefer: “These are the six locations we collect samples at.”
I’m with Ron Zegers and Peggy Roefer. They’re with the Southern Nevada Water System. It
provides water to Las Vegas and other cities.
They walk me through slides divers took near water intake pipes – deep in Lake Mead.
Roefer: “And this is where our intake is, on Saddle Island. This is actually the inside of the
rock structure you can see the quaggas on the inside of that. Quagga mussels were
approximately two inches thick.”
Zegers and Roefer say they’re trying plenty of things to keep quagga out of the water supply.
The first is the old stand-by: chlorine.
But too much chlorine can make people sick.
Zegers: “More of those disenfection byproducts form, which puts us closer to our
regulatory compliance issues, so we also have to be concerned about that also.”
Roefer: “You know we’re watching the alternative control strategies, the bio-bullets and
pseudo-flourence and those kinds of things.”
Allee: “Sounds like an arms race.”
Roefer: “Yeah, who can get there first. The annual for this is one to four million dollars.”
Allee: “One to four million dollars. You know, you could clean a lot of water if you didn’t
have to deal with these critters.”
Zegers: “That’s correct. Now it’s just an anticipated expenditure that certainly wasn’t
budgeted for when they first appeared, and now it’s just gonna be a way of life.”
And it could become a a way of life for more lakes if we don’t stop quaggas from spreading
around.
than the kind of food you buy. Lester Graham reports on a
new study that looks at the connections between food and
greenhouse gasses:
Transcript
How far your food travels might be less important than the kind of food you buy. Lester Graham reports on a new study that looks at the connections between food and greenhouse gasses:
One of the reasons more people have been buying local food is because it doesn’t travel as far, use more energy and create as much greenhouse gas emissions.
But a study from Carnegie Mellon suggests the kind of food you buy is more important. The study indicates emissions from animals such as methane and nitrous oxides can be as much as twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide from transportation.
Christopher Weber is the lead author of the study.
“Because of smaller amounts of emissions, but more potent emissions of these gasses, it turns out that the CO2 associated with energy to move food around is not as important as these non-energy related greenhouse gasses.”
Weber acknowledges there are more good reasons to buy local food than just greenhouse gas emissions. But cutting down on meat in your diet might reduce greenhouses gasses more.
For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.
Hawaii's Superferry was met with initial excitement, but it quickly turned to environmental concern (Photo courtesy of Hawaii Superferry)
For decades, people who wanted to get from
one Hawaiian island to another have had one main
option: flying. So when plans were unveiled for
a high-speed ferry between the islands, Hawaiians
and tourists were initially thrilled. But growing
concern about the Superferry’s potential environmental
impact has turned the issue into one of the state’s
biggest legal battles in years. Ann Dornfeld reports:
Transcript
For decades, people who wanted to get from
one Hawaiian island to another have had one main
option: flying. So when plans were unveiled for
a high-speed ferry between the islands, Hawaiians
and tourists were initially thrilled. But growing
concern about the Superferry’s potential environmental
impact has turned the issue into one of the state’s
biggest legal battles in years. Ann Dornfeld reports:
David Dinner is board president of the environmental group 1000 Friends
of Kaua’i. He lives near this small beach on the island’s north shore.
Dinner says when endangered humpback whales come to Hawaii in the
winter to give birth, you can whale-watch right from this beach. Even
when he lived far from the ocean, he once witnessed a huge migration
from his window.
“I could see that the ocean was filled with whales. And I later found out that there were 6,000 whales around Kaua’i at that
time. So it was like wall-to-wall whales out there.”
When Dinner first heard about plans for a high-speed inter-island
catamaran, he was excited. But the more he and others learned about the
Hawaii Superferry, the more they worried about its effect on those whales.
Mother whales spend a lot of time just below the surface, pushing their
calves up for air. The concern is that the ferry’s twin hulls would strike the
whales at a speed of up to 45 miles per hour. That’s a lot faster than other
boats like cruise ships and tankers.
“The other boats that travel in this area generally go in the area of 13 to 15
miles an hour. So the Superferry is way beyond the speed of the other boats.”
Another big worry was that the car ferry could bring invasive species from
one island to another. For instance, mongooses decimated the Big
Island’s bird population. But Kaua’i doesn’t have mongooses yet.
Rich Hoeppner is founder of the Superferry Impact Group.
“We have an incredible selection of birds here. We have shearwaters,
albatross, the state bird – the Nene, is a land-dweller and endangered
species. So one pregnant mongoose gets on our island, our bird
population will be history.”
When activists learned that the state government had given Hawaii
Superferry the green light without an environmental impact statement,
they filed suit. Last August, the state Supreme Court ruled that the state
should have required an environmental impact statement.
Despite that, just two days later, Superferry made its maiden voyage to
Kaua’i.
Rich Hoeppner says two dozen surfers and kayakers blocked the
boat’s path to Nawiliwili Harbor for hours.
The next night, protesters crowded the harbor, and dozens more people
took to the water – some in traditional Hawaiian canoes. Protesters
filmed the action.
(sound of protest chants)
“After 3 hours, the ferry, which was at the mouth of the harbor, turned
around and went back to Oahu. It didn’t get to its dock. And it hasn’t been
back since!”
Hawaii Superferry says it takes the environment seriously.
Terry O’Halloran is Director of Business Development. He points to the
company’s efforts to keep invasive species from hitching
a ride on vehicles.
“We look under the hood, we look in the trunk, we look in the wheel wells,
we look inside the vehicles, and then a certain number of vehicles that go
through our security screening get a much more thorough screening and
inspection.”
O’Halloran says vehicles with muddy tires aren’t allowed on board in case
bugs or seeds are in the dirt. There are boot scrubbers for passengers,
too. On-board videos warn travelers about the dangers of invasive
species.
O’Halloran says Superferry also has a Whale Avoidance Policy that
includes avoiding the main calving areas during whale season, and
slowing down in whale zones.
“We have been able to spot and avoid the whales. We also have two dedicated
whale lookouts and their only job is to help the captain spot whales.”
Superferry is still making its Oahu-to-Maui trips. In a special session,
Hawaii legislators passed a law allowing the Superferry to keep
running while the state conducts an Environmental Impact Statement.
Protestors say that’s a terrible idea – and illegal. They’re pursuing
lawsuits in the state Supreme Court to dock the ferry until it’s clear the
boat is safe.
For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld on Kaua’i.
Researchers say preliminary results suggest contrails can warm the atmosphere - maybe above and beyond airplane's carbon emissions. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)
