Gulf of Mexico

October 9, 2024

“Like steroids for hurricanes” – Scientists say Helene just a warning of what is to come

By Dana Drugmand

As the full extent of the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Helene in the southeastern United States becomes clear nearly two weeks after the monstrous storm made landfall, a new scientific analysis confirms what many have already surmised – climate change worsened the hurricane’s catastrophic impacts.

As Helene demonstrates, more destructive storms are likely in store as society continues to burn oil, gas and coal, driving a rapidly warming Earth, the analysis warns.

“Yet again, our study has shown that hurricanes will keep getting worse if humans keep burning fossil fuels and subsequently warming the planet,” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and lead of the World Weather Attribution initiative, which released the study on Wednesday.

In the aftermath of extreme weather events, World Weather Attribution scientists use observational data and climate models to conduct what are called rapid attribution analyses. Their analysis of Hurricane Helene revealed that climate change increased the intensity of the storm’s damaging rainfall and winds. It also found that elevated sea surface temperatures, which fueled Helene’s development, were made up to 500 times more likely by anthropogenic warming.

“It is clear that the rainfall, wind speeds and conditions leading to Hurricane Helene have all increased due to climate change,” the study states, noting that such conditions will intensify as the planet heats up.

Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane along the Florida panhandle late on September 26, generating heavy rains, winds, and record-breaking storm surge along the coast. The storm then tracked inland, bringing torrential rains and flooding to Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. With more than 230 reported fatalities, Helene is the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland US since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“Unfortunately, Helene is another warning that the effects of climate change are already here,” said Julie Arrighi, Director of Programmes at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

This warning and the new analysis come as Florida braces for a hit from another major hurricane. Hurricane Milton, projected to slam into Florida’s Gulf Coast late on Wednesday, briefly upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane on Monday as it moved across overheated waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Sea surface temperatures in the area where Milton is brewing are at record-breaking highs, and scientists say that climate change made those temperatures up to 400 to 800 times more likely over the past two weeks.

Climate scientists agree that planetary warming, which is primarily driven by fossil fuel combustion, results in more destructive hurricanes. Oceans absorb the vast majority of the heat added to the Earth’s climate, and hotter marine temperatures provide more energy to fuel tropical storm systems. With the atmosphere also warming, it can retain more moisture that subsequently releases in the form of heavier rainfall.

“The heat that human activities are adding to the atmosphere and oceans is like steroids for hurricanes,” Climate Central chief meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky explained.

April 15, 2024

“It’s getting worse” – US failing to stem tide of harmful farm pollutants

By Keith Schneider

VENICE, LA. Kindra Arnesen is a 46-year-old commercial fishing boat operator who has spent most of her life among the pelicans and bayous of southern Louisiana, near the juncture where the 2,350-mile-long Mississippi River ends at the Gulf of Mexico.

Clark Porter is a 62-year-old farmer who lives in north-central Iowa where he spends part of his day working as an environmental specialist for the state and the other part raising corn and soybeans on hundreds of acres that his family has owned for over a century.

Though they’ve never met, and live 1,100 miles apart, Arnesen and Porter share a troubling kinship – both of their communities are tied to a deepening water pollution crisis that is fouling the environment and putting public health in peril across multiple US states.

Arnesen’s home lies near an oxygen-depleted expanse of the northern Gulf known as the “dead zone,” where dying algae blooms triggered by contaminants flowing out of the Mississippi River choke off oxygen, suffocating shrimp and other marine life.

Porter’s farm is positioned at the center of the Upper Mississippi River Basin where streams and other surface waters saturated with farm wastes flood into the big river, and contaminated groundwater permeates drinking water wells. Cancer incidence in Iowa is among the nation’s highest, and is rising.

The culprit at the center of it all is a colossal tide of fertilizer and animal manure that runs off fields in Iowa and other farm states to find its way into the Mississippi River. The same agricultural pollution problems are plaguing other iconic US waterways, including Chesapeake Bay and Lake Erie.

US farmers use more fertilizer and spread more manure than in most other countries, accounting for roughly 10% of global fertilizer use, behind China and India. But while the nutrients contained in animal manure and fertilizer are known to nourish crop growth, the resulting nitrogen and phosphorous that end up in waterways are known to create severe health problems for people.

A grand government plan to address the problem has cost taxpayers billions of dollars with minimal results so far, and nowhere is the problem more pronounced than in the Mississippi River Basin.

The reasons for the persistent pollution problem are multi-fold, including strong industry opposition to regulations to control the farm contaminants, and a perverse system in which some government programs incentivize farming practices that add to the pollution even as other government programs try to induce farmers to reduce the pollution.

“You’re talking about systemic dysfunction,” said Matt Liebman, professor emeritus of agronomy and sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University.

February 9, 2024

A new bid to safeguard Mississippi River amid growing environmental concerns

By Madeline Heim, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A proposal to create a federal funding program to protect the Mississippi River is back in front of Congress.

Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin announced Wednesday that she plans to introduce the Mississippi River Restoration and Resilience Initiative in the Senate. Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota will bring the same bill forward in the House.

The proposal is nearly the same as one introduced by McCollum in 2021. It’s modeled after programs that protect other major bodies of waters across the U.S., like the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Advocates for the Mississippi River argue that the river is long overdue to have its own such program. Millions of Americans rely on it for drinking water, commerce and recreation, and its floodplains provide food and habitat for hundreds of fish and wildlife species. But it’s facing a multitude of challenges, from extreme weather to habitat loss to persistent agricultural and industrial pollution. That pollution contributes to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which last year was almost as big as Yellowstone Park.

Even in the past few years, the river has experienced the impacts of a changing climate, said Kelly McGinnis, executive director of the Mississippi River Network. Last spring, communities along the upper river saw near-record floodwaters, bookended by severe droughts that slowed shipping traffic to a crawl.

“If anything, since (this legislation) was first introduced, the conditions of the world we live in just keep showing us that there is an urgent need to address these problems, and they’re not solving themselves,” McGinnis said.

April 3, 2023

Harmful emissions from Gulf oil and gas production far higher than EPA reports, study finds

By Shannon Kelleher

Offshore oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico are releasing far higher quantities of a potent greenhouse gas than regulators have estimated, according to a new study published Monday.

The analysis reveals that the climate change impact of these activities is more than double what official estimates suggest.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that 2021 calculations by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – using data from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) – correctly estimated carbon dioxide emissions but underestimated methane emissions.

The data, which is based on engineering information, rather than on-site observations, failed to capture methane emissions because an older type of shallow-water platform used in offshore drilling often behaves like a “super-emitter,” leaking large amounts of the greenhouse gas, said Alan Gorchov Negron, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan and first author of the study. These platforms are central hub gathering and processing facilities, which collect oil and gas through pipelines that extend from smaller nearby platforms.

“They’re a fraction of the platforms in the Gulf of Mexico but they contribute disproportionately to the total methane emissions and total greenhouse gas emissions,” said Negron.

“We don’t know exactly why the methane emissions are higher than what the inventory expects,” he added. “It’s either because of unknown emissions or unreported emissions.

August 31, 2022

NOAA is damaging marine life by bottom trawling Gulf of Mexico

By Shannon Kelleher

A U.S. government agency that is supposed to protect ocean resources is instead endangering coral reefs, fish, and other marine life as it collects data from the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental watchdog group alleged this week.

In an Aug. 29 letter, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) called on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to stop scraping the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico with heavy nets for fishery studies. PEER is a Washington, DC-based group that works to expose improper government actions related to the environment.

Peer said it received concerning information from a NOAA scientist about the practice, and a review of NOAA’s own data demonstrates that the “bottom trawling” may inflict irreparable damage on sea floor habitats that can last for years.

“Ironically, NOAA’s own marine protection policies are designed to minimize the very type of damage these research trawls cause,” PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse said in a press release. “We believe that that the damage caused outweighs the marginal research value of these trawls.”

PEER said the trawls involve dragging heavy nets, large metal doors, and chains over the sea floor to catch fish, similar to industrial fishing. The trawls sometimes result in nets abandoned in the ocean, where they can entangle sea turtles and other marine animals, PEER said.

July 21, 2022

As “red tides” bloom, citizen scientists help map ocean danger zones

Nearly every day, Florida resident Pradeepa Siva goes paddle boarding through Doctors Pass in Naples. The thin passageway between Moorings Bay and the Florida Gulf of Mexico is home to a couple of friendly dolphins, which Siva often sees on her outings.

But the journey is about more than exercise and wildlife sightings, because when Siva paddle boards she is also participating in a government-funded science project aimed at protecting public health as climate change brings warming ocean waters that contribute to rising incidences of a dangerous phenomenon known as the “red tide.”

Red tides occur when warming water and other factors spur the growth of a type of rust-colored algae known as Karenia brevis. The algae produces toxic compounds that can be harmful to humans as well as marine mammals and other sea life. Exposure to the algae can cause respiratory illnesses and other problems for people who are exposed, and, in rare occasions, be debilitating or even fatal.