February 16, 2021 - SYSKA (Stuff You Should Know About)

 

Tom Murphy - Yellowstone National Park

The Coldest Place on Earth Right Now - 

The Central United States

Climate change is making the planet warmer, but it can also lead to extreme weather events that allow frigid polar air to chill areas that usually have moderate winter weather.

The cold weather is coming directly from the North Pole, via Siberia, following a disruption in the circulation of the polar vortex that occurred in January. It’s helping to spark two major storm systems, the first of which dumped snow and ice on Sunday night and Monday morning, with the second on the way for Wednesday.

There is also some evidence showing that rapid climate change in the Arctic, which is melting sea ice, is helping to disrupt larger-scale weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, which may make incursions of polar air more likely and lead to extreme heat waves during the summer. This is still an area of active scientific research, however.

Global Warming Impacts the Jet Stream -

Leading to Extreme Cold Weather

It's not just the US where warming in the Arctic can result in extreme cold weather.  Europe faces the same conditions.

This is where the disproportionate warming of the Arctic comes into play, said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of the Earth System Analysis research department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Temperatures in the Arctic have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past 40 years. "These changes are affecting the weather in Europe."

The jet stream usually determines the winter weather in Europe: if it is strong and flows from west to east, it brings mild, windy and rainy weather from the Atlantic, and holds the cold air from the Arctic.

But if the jet stream is weak and wavy, the polar vortex also weakens, and sometimes breaks down completely. The cold snap across Europe is the result of a weak jet stream — more precisely a dip — that has caused a strong and long-lasting collapse of the polar vortex.

So, don't let some Republican member of Congress use extreme cold weather as a rebuttal to the reality of climate change. 

Fish Are Feeding in Plastic Contaminated Seas

The earliest document discover of plastics in sea animals came in 1972.  Now, we know that plastics can be found in hundreds of fish species globally.  And, that doesn't include emerging data on the prevalence of micro-plastics in marine species.

Our research revealed that marine fish are ingesting plastic around the globe. According to the 129 scientific papers in our database, researchers have studied this problem in 555 fish species worldwide. We were alarmed to find that more than two-thirds of those species had ingested plastic.

One important caveat is that not all of these studies looked for microplastics. This is likely because finding microplastics requires specialized equipment, like microscopes, or use of more complex techniques. But when researchers did look for microplastics, they found five times more plastic per individual fish than when they only looked for larger pieces. Studies that were able to detect this previously invisible threat revealed that plastic ingestion was higher than we had originally anticipated.

Habitat Loss Causes Stress

In a new study, researchers discovered higher levels of stress hormones in rodents and marsupials living in deforested parts of the Atlantic Forest in South America compared to those living in more intact forests. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Studies from across the globe have found that when species undergo habitat loss and fragmentation, some species may go extinct locally, lead author Sarah Boyle, an associate professor of biology and chair of the Environmental Studies and Sciences Program at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, tells Treehugger.

“However, for those animals that may live in a habitat that has been heavily degraded or diminished from the typical habitat of that species, there may be changes in the animal’s diet, amount of space it uses, increased competition for food, and greater risk of disease transmission,” Boyle says.

“Not all species respond in the same way to environmental pressures, and not all habitats have been impacted to the same degree as all other habitats, so we wanted to study this topic with small mammals.”