In honor of Earth Day, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists thought it worth taking the pulse of the current climate and environmental crises facing the planet, and what is being done about them. Below is a roundup on the “State of the Earth,” if you will.
Audubon: A Printmaker Dives Into the Aquatic Domain of a Regal Duck
In high school, Meg T. Justice spent countless hours sketching ducks along the Tennessee River in Scottsboro, Alabama, capturing their glorious quirks. These days her primary medium is printmaking, but she still delights in waterbirds. She chose the Hooded Merganser for this print because of the male’s striking plumage.
“I do some color printmaking,” she says, “but I’m really more drawn to the black and white and creating texture and contrast with the ink.”
Bulletin: Texas wildfires force major nuclear weapons facility to briefly pause operations
With François Diaz-Maurin.
A wildland fire in the Texas Panhandle forced the Pantex plant, a nuclear facility northeast of Amarillo, to temporarily cease operations on Tuesday and to evacuate nonessential workers. Plant workers also started construction on a fire barrier to protect the plant’s facilities.
The plant resumed normal operations on Wednesday, officials said.
“Thanks to the responsive actions of all Pantexans and the NNSA Production Office in cooperation with the women and men of the Pantex Fire Department and our mutual aid partners from neighboring communities, the fire did not reach or breach the plant’s boundary,” Pantex said in a social media post on Wednesday afternoon.
At a press conference Tuesday evening, Laef Pendergraft, a nuclear safety engineer with the National Nuclear Security Administration production office at Pantex, said the evacuations were out of an “abundance of caution.”
“Currently we are responding to the plant, but there is no fire on our site or on our boundary,” Pendergraft told reporters.
The 90,000-acre Windy Deuce fire burning four to five miles to the north of the Pantex plant was 25 percent contained as of late Wednesday afternoon.
Until the fire is fully contained, it will continue to pose a threat to the nearby Pantex plant, says Nickolas Roth, the senior director of nuclear materials security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. “I think the sign that the coast is clear is that the fire is no longer burning,” he told the Bulletin. “One can imagine many reasons operations would resume.”
Audubon: A Surreal Spin on An Abundant Sparrow
In “Spotted Towhee” artist Phyllis Shafer depicts a widespread bird of the West in a rapidly changing landscape.
Bulletin: ‘Mass delusion and wishful thinking’: Why everything you think you know about methane is probably wrong
Have you heard about the miracle quick-fix for our climate ills?
The greenhouse gas methane is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the increase in global temperature since the industrial revolution and is often described as 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Sometimes news outlets remember to qualify that with “over 20 years,” and sometimes they don’t.
In a press call during the 28th Conference of Parties, the annual United Nations climate conference, US Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said methane was his “number one” priority at the conference. Shortly after, the Biden administration announced a new EPA rule targeting methane emissions. The press release announcing the rule stated, “Sharp cuts in methane emissions are among the most critical actions the United States can take in the short term to slow the rate of climate change.”
“[T]he U.S. is turbocharging the speed and scale of climate action, at home and abroad, including our collective efforts to tackle super-pollutants like methane,” said US National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi.
The popular narrative suggests that tackling methane emissions is the “low-hanging fruit” in the climate-solutions toolbox. The belief that turning off the taps on this “super-pollutant” could “buy us time” to address the climate crisis is widespread, shared by politicians, journalists, and even some scientists.
But this is a dangerous fallacy, according to Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board.
In an in-depth interview with Bulletin climate editor Jessica McKenzie, Pierrehumbert dissects the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter—the voluntary pledge made at COP28 by some oil and gas companies to slash operational emissions of greenhouse gases, including bringing methane emissions to “near-zero.” He goes on to explain why describing methane as “80 times as potent as carbon dioxide” is inaccurate and misleading and why the widespread hope that sharp cuts to methane emissions will bring about immediate and significant reductions of global temperatures is both wrong and distressing.
Jessica S. McKenzie 