Millions of tiny mountain pine beetles are chewing through forests in Alberta and the Pacific Northwest. Similarly, spruce beetles and other insects are attacking the lumber supplies around of the world. These insects were normally kept at bay by winter chill but the rising temperature from the climate crisis are now giving them free reign to feed on wood needed to keep housing shortages at bay. 

The beetles have currently felled 730 million cubic meters of pine between 2000 and 2015 in British Columbia which is Canada’s largest exporter of timber to the U.S. housing market. That’s erased more than a decade of lumber supplies and and will reduce the allowable production in the B.C. Interior by a staggering 40%, said David Elstone, owner of Vancouver-based Spar Tree Group. Provincial modeling indicates about 55% of B.C.’s marketable pine trees will be dead by 2020.

Helicopters scour areas of Alberta’s northern timberland looking for signs a pine tree’s green needles have turned a ghastly red. The environmental team then look to see if the pines are oozing a creamy, reddish resin, which confirms that the beetles have bored into the bark and overwhelmed their host. Finally, infected trees are cut down with chainsaws before they are chopped into bits and burned with fuel to destroy any chance the larvae could spread. 

“You’ve got to utilize these dramatic, very effective techniques of cut and burn,” said Caroline Whitehouse, a forest health specialist for the province of Alberta, noting Alberta’s efforts have reduced the area that could have been impacted by the mountain pine beetle by 30%. Still, the pests have affected more than 5.4 million acres and the outbreak is unlikely to subside for another five or six years.

“Certainly it’s a difficult thing. When you have an outbreak you have millions and millions and millions upon millions of beetles in the forest.” 

Decades ago, the mountain pine beetle was part of the forest’s normal cycle of death and regrowth. The pests would feast on mature trees, providing fuel for forest fires that would then spur new growth. But by 1950, humans became very good at putting out forest fires, leaving a ‘smorgasbord’ of older trees for the insects to attack. As winters warmed, more of the beetles were able to survive and extend their reach into areas that used to be too cold to live.

A team of scientists from the Universities of Leeds and Edinburgh, and Imperial College London, studied the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland and made a disturbing discovery. Utilizing satellite data and other models to detail for the first time the extraordinary total impact of the climate crisis on various bodies of ice, they've determined that between 1994 and 2017 the Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice and the rate is accelerating rapidly. In total, 60% of the loss comes from the northern hemisphere. 

While the melting of floating sea ice does not directly contribute to sea level rise, the huge volumes of grounded ice in Antarctica and Greenland which have melted, as well as that from glaciers, have already contributed as much as 3.5cm to global sea levels between 1994 and 2017.

Dr Isobel Lawrence, a research fellow at the University of Leeds and a co-author of the study, “The thing which is most cause for concern is the [melt] rate we’ve calculated is accelerating. In the two decades since the 1990s, we’ve seen this estimate go up from 0.8 to 1.2 trillion tonnes of ice a year, so that’s a 57 per cent increase in one decade. 

“If that continues, which it’s expected to because emissions are continuing to rise, then all of this melt is going to continue to accelerate. 

“That has consequences for sea level rise. Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and glaciers are grounded ice, so their melt contributes to sea level rise. The melt of sea ice and ice shelves doesn’t contribute to sea level rise because they float on water, and about 54 per cent of ice is floating and 46 per cent is grounded, so it means roughly half of the losses we’ve estimated are directly adding to sea level rise.”

Alongside the rising sea levels, the melting of such extensive masses of ice pose other problems. All the ice stored in glaciers and in the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are composed of freshwater, and when they melt and drain into the oceans, the huge volumes of freshwater then change the salinity of the seas. 

Dr Lawrence said, “In the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Oceans we’ve seen changes in circulation as a result of freshwater impact. What we don’t know yet is the result of that on the rest of the world, because global ocean circulation is all linked up. 

“If this freshwater input causes a change in global ocean circulation – which some models have shown – then it could have consequences for the climate globally over a longer time scale.” 

The research has been published as a preprint in open access journal The Cryosphere and is yet to be peer-reviewed.

A coalition of environmental advocacy groups joined the Gwich'in Nation on Monday in filing a lawsuit to block the Trump administration's plan to open up the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to fossil fuel lease sales. 

"The Trump administration's complete and utter disregard for the human rights of the Gwich'in people is apparent as he continues the attack on the Arctic Refuge," said Jody Juneby Potts, Han Gwich'in leader in Eagle Village, Alaska, in a statement announcing the lawsuit. 

"Last week's record of decision for the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program in what my people know as 'the Sacred Place Where Life Begins' would have devastating impacts on the Porcupine Caribou Herd and the Gwich'in way of life," Potts added, referring to the Interior Department's announcement last week.

BREAKING: Today @OurArcticRefuge launched a lawsuit to protect sacred lands and stop @SecBernhardt, @BLMNational, and @RealDonaldTrump from selling the Arctic Refuge to big oil. Spread the word to #ProtectTheArctic and #StandWithTheGwichin pic.twitter.com/4EyiHm93wM

— Trustees for Alaska (@TrusteesForAK) August 24, 2020

The Porcupine Caribou Herd—upon whom the Gwich'in have relied for thousands of years—uses the Coastal Plain as their calving grounds. The likely impacts of oil and gas drilling on the herds—and thus the Gwich'in—are massive, the groups say. To boot, the lease sales threaten the area with a "spider web of industrialization" and the planet with more planet-heating emissions.

The plaintiffs in the suit, which include Environment America, Alaska Wilderness League, Alaska Wildlife Alliance, and Northern Alaska Environmental Center, say the administration's decision was "illegal," accusing it of violations of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Wilderness Act, and the Endangered Species Act. 

"Oil drilling and wildlife simply do not mix," said Steve Blackledge, senior director for Environment America's Conservation Program.

"Not only will the Trump administration's slapdash and tragic plan threaten one of the world's most untamed wildlife areas, but it is also completely blind to the reality that, in 2020, dangerously extracting more fossil fuels from the ground is a fool's errand when clean renewable energy options are rapidly on the rise," he added. 

For Bernadette Demienteiff, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, there's nothing less than "the survival of future generations... at risk." 

"As our ancestors before us, we will stand and fight for our future generations, for the Porcupine caribou herd, and the Gwich'in way of life," she said. 

"We will stand up to anyone who seeks to destroy the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd," said Demienteiff.

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Humanity was born in a fertile river valley in northern Botswana. A new study published in the journal Nature reveals that the earliest anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) arose 200,000 years ago in a vast wetland south of the Zambezi river. It has been called by the team working on the project the "cradle of mankind." 

The region – which also covered parts of Namibia and Zimbabwe – was home to an enormous lake which sustained our ancestors for 70,000 years. 

“It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. What has been long debated is the exact location of this emergence and subsequent dispersal of our earliest ancestors,” said Professor Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia and the lead researcher on this project.

To determine the precise location, Professor Hayes and her colleagues collected blood samples from study participants in Namibia and South Africa and looked at their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). mtDNA is passed almost exclusively from mother to child through the egg cell and its sequence stays the same over generations, making it a useful tool for looking at ancestrial roots.

The team focused their research on the L0 lineage – modern human’s earliest known population – and compared the complete DNA code (mitogenome) from different individuals. The researchers then combined genetics with studies of geology and climate predictions to help create a picture of what the world looked like 200,000 years ago. Geological evidence suggests the region once housed Africa’s largest ever lake system, ideal for early survival. Eventually climate change made travel easier for early humans to trek farther away. Professor Axel Timmermann, a climate scientist at Pusan National University in South Korea, said: “These shifts in climate would have opened green, vegetated corridors, first 130,000 years ago to the northeast, and then around 110,000 years ago to the southwest, allowing our earliest ancestors to migrate away from the homeland for the first time.”

Professor Hayes said: “We observed significant genetic divergence in the modern humans’ earliest maternal sub-lineages that indicates our ancestors migrated out of the homeland between 130,000 and 110,000 years ago. 

“The first migrants ventured northeast, followed by a second wave of migrants who travelled southwest. A third population remained in the homeland until today.”

“It makes no sense that consumers can purchase bottled water that is less safe than tap water," says James Dickerson, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Consumer Reports.

One expects to find arsenic in the brandy of the rich uncle you're trying to bump off for their wealth. One does NOT expect to find it in the bottled water you buy from your friendly local mega-retailer. 

In a report published on June 18th, 2019 by the Center for Environmental Health, it was announced that the water brands Peñafiel and Starkey, which are sold in Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods, contained a higher than legal amount of arsenic. Peñafiel is owned by Keurig Dr. Pepper. It is sold at stores like Walmart and Target. Starkey is owned by and sold at Whole Foods.

“Consumers are being needlessly exposed to arsenic without their knowledge or consent,” said Michael Green, Chief Executive Officer of CEH. “Customers typically purchase bottled water at exorbitantly high costs with the assumption that it is safer and healthier to drink than tap water, unaware that they are ingesting an extremely toxic metal linked to birth defects and cancer.” 

On 21 June 2019, Keurig Dr Pepper announced a voluntary withdrawal of their Peñafiel brand unflavored mineral spring water.