Climate Point: Sea levels rising faster, California court overturns Berkeley's no new natural gas rule
Snow, fire, rain and tornadoes claimed headlines across the country this week as western states prepare for potential spring floods after record snowpack and Eastern states grapple with forest fires and tornadoes.
I’m Dinah Voyles Pulver, one of Paste BN’s climate and environment reporters and this is your weekly Climate Point newsletter.
As record rain and snow pummeled parts of the country, climate scientists said the nation can expect to see more of the same in the future as heat-trapping emissions raise average temperatures higher, especially in the oceans. Local officials are seeing the difference.
Sea level rise, rain and snow
Researchers at Tulane University reported sea levels along the U.S. East and Gulf coasts are rising five times faster in some cases than they did for much of the last century. The coasts are seeing sea level rise at a rate of about a half inch a year, said Sönke Dangendorf, an assistant professor. "The science is very clear."
Warming temperatures, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, also are blamed for ramping up the moisture in storms in the eastern half of the United States. In Fort Lauderdale, more than 2 feet of rain fell in less than 24 hours, swamping cars and streets and shutting down the city's airport for more than two hours.
Phenomenal, record-breaking snow buried vast swaths of the mountain west in snow over the winter and now as spring heats up, the melting snow is poised to cause massive flooding, Doyle Rice and Trevor Hughes with Paste BN report.
Disruptive floods already are occurring in the Rockies, prompting Utah's Governor Spencer Cox to declare an emergency, but some of the biggest concern for snowmelt flooding is in California, which has yet to see the extreme warmth this spring that other areas have experienced.
Meanwhile in New Jersey, local and state officials have seen wildfires and tornadoes in a tumultuous spring season so far, writes the Asbury Park Press' Amanda Oglesby. One official told the newspaper that their warm seasons "are being extended by about a month on average." "We're seeing spring arrive earlier, and summer and warm temperatures linger longer," said John Cecil, assistant commissioner for state parks.
Climate change and property rights are colliding in Narragansett, Rhode Island as a group of neighbors fight a local zoning board's decision to allow a property owner to build a house on 13-foot pilings on a waterfront lot in the community, the Providence Journal reported.
Greenhouse gas emissions
In an effort to rein in some of those heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions that are causing many of the problems, the city of Berkeley, California in 2020 led a wave of more than 90 cities that adopted ordinances or building codes that ban natural gas lines to new buildings and homes. But a court has overturned the city's efforts, writes Elizabeth Weise with Paste BN.
Meanwhile efforts are under way to expand and improve carbon capture, which filters air and absorbs the carbon dioxide. This visual explains how it works. The Biden administration is spending heavily on the technology earmarked to help reverse the impacts being felt around the world.
One person's soil amendment is another's stench
A team of reporters at the Augusta Chronicle, a Paste BN network newspaper in Georgia, did a deep dive on the controversial use of industrial waste as soil amendments and produced a series of stories.
Read on for more:
A company in Florida wants to reuse phosphogypsum in road construction, to the objection of environmentalists. And Paste BN graphic artists have a how to guide on viewing the Lyrid meteor showers.
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