Equilibrium & Sustainability — Extreme cyclists face the changing climate

Cyclists on one of the country’s longest and most grueling races are having to adapt to conditions made newly dangerous by extreme weather, The New York Times reported. 

Riders on this year’s nearly 2,700-mile Tour Divide bikepacking race faced harmful smoke from wildfires, floodwaters from torrential rainstorms and drought that dried up much-needed water sources, contestants told the Times. 

“I feel like anything can happen,” winning cyclist Sofiane Sehili said. “So yes, definitely climate change. You can see it on this race.” 

Eleven cyclists — airlifted out of the mountains of British Columbia following an unseasonal snowstorm — were treated for hypothermia after trying to push their bikes through the snow, the Times reported. 

“We’re happy that nobody died,” a local head of search and rescue told the Times.

Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Send tips and feedback: Saul Elbein. A friend forward this newsletter to you? Subscribe here.

Today we’ll look at why an avalanche in Italy shows the newly treacherous world of mountain glaciers, as well as how scientists could use undersea internet cables to head off collisions between whales and Arctic-bound cargo ships.

Glacier collapse highlights climate threat

Helicopters, drones and canine units are traversing the Italian Alps, looking for 19 climbers still missing after a glacier collapsed amid an early-summer heat wave. 

The mountains wake: On Sunday the glacier at the peak of Marmlada collapsed in an avalanche as the multinational climbing team attempted to summit it, Reuters reported.

• At 10,000 feet, the peak is the highest in the Dolomite range of the Italian Alps, Reuters reported. 
  
• Glaciers in such mountains are becoming increasingly unstable in the age of rising temperatures — countering expectations that they would peacefully retreat amid the heat, Reuters reported. 

The collapse followed sizzling record temperatures across much of Europe — including 104-degree temperatures across much of Italy, the Post reported.

• At least seven are dead in the disaster that comes as a sobering warning to the world of high-altitude sports about the higher risk of avalanches, Reuters reported. 
  
• It is also a reminder of how climate change is destabilizing icy mountain landscapes and the communities — and watersheds — that depend on them, The Washington Post noted.

FOUR BIG PICTURE TAKEAWAYS

The Marmolada collapse sits as the confluence of large and unsettling climatic trends affecting mountain landscapes, global tourism and the prevalence of regional heat waves. 

Glaciers are getting harder to predict: “Nobody could have expected a glacier like the Marmolada to react like this. It is a kind of climatic fossil,” Italian glaciologist Giovanni Bacollo, of Milan-Bicocca University told Reuters.  

“Glaciers like the Marmolada are considered ‘placid’, they are expected to just retreat,” Bacollo added. 

Warning for the US: Italian glaciologist Bacollo told Reuters that a lack of winter snow and hot summer means that 2022 “risks being the perfect storm for glaciers.”  

The current heat wave comes as most of the western United States have experienced drops in snowfall over the past half century, according to the EPA. 

Heat awaits American tourists: While no Americans were on the expedition, the collapse happened at the front end of a tourist season in which Europe is cheaper for Americans than anytime in 20 years, CNN reported.  

While relatively few will attempt to hike glaciers, visitors to Rome, for example, would have experienced 105-degree temperatures over the weekend, according to the Post. 

Europe is getting hotter: Changes in the atmospheric currents known as jet streams has driven Europe to warm three to four times faster than other northern regions, according to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

Undersea ‘satellites’ track whales in warming Arctic

Researchers have figured out how to track the movements of whales using the global network of undersea fiber optic cables, a new study has found. 

This could provide an invaluable windows into an Arctic undergoing a rapid and disruptive transformation owing to climate change, according to the study published on Tuesday in Frontiers in Marine Science. 

• “The Arctic is changing very fast. And both animal and human use of the area is changing as fast as the ice melts,” Léa Bouffaut of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) said in a statement. 
  
• The network would allow scientists to track whether whales are changing their use of a region that rising temperatures are opening up to ever more traffic, Bouffat said. 

“This system could become like satellites in the ocean,” she added. 

How it works: The scientists tracked whales in the north of Norway by eavesdropping as the vibrations from their songs caused waves in the cables, according to the study published on Tuesday in Frontiers in Marine Science. 

• “If anything is moving close to or making an acoustic noise close to that fibre, which is buried in the seabed, we can measure that,” Martin Landrø of NTNU said in a statement. 
  
• “So what we saw was a lot of ship traffic, of course, a lot of earthquakes, and we could also detect distant storms. And last but not least, whales,” Landrø added. 

Reducing accidents: The scientists envisioned their system being used to enable a kind of marine traffic control. 

• “We could potentially reduce the risk of ship strikes with whales. That would be a very big deal,” Hannah Joy Kriesell of NTNU added.  
  
• “If we have a means to inform ships about the location of whales in real time, we could stop or at least reduce the risk for ship strikes,” Kriesell added.

Canceled flights shake consumer confidence

Thousands of flights were canceled across the U.S. over the weekend amid a perfect storm of technical glitches, bad weather and what some say is bad planning by airline companies — a wave of continued disruptions that is contributing to declining confidence in air travel among passengers. 
 

Cancellations taking off: Airlines canceled about 2,200 flights between Thursday and Monday evening amid the busiest travel weekend since the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic, The Associated Press reported. 

That is in addition to 25,000 delayed flights, according to the AP. 

The wave of flight disruption is “not just in North America, it’s everywhere,” U.K.-based analyst John Grant told the AP. 

Cancellations are up 59 percent over the equivalent weekend in 2019, the AP reported. 

Thunderstorms and staff shortages: A wave of thunderstorms in key Eastern hub airports broke against long-running understaffing by the airline industry, The Wall Street Journal reported.  

• “This industry has just stretched itself to the brink,” airline industry consultant Henry Harteveldt told the Journal. 
  
• “They’re all eager to sell every seat on every flight to generate as much revenue, and hopefully earn a profit this quarter and make up for the massive financial losses they suffered in the past two years,” Harteveldt added.

Harteveldt told Newsweek that the months of heightened delays and cancellations represented “self inflicted wounds.” 

Collapsing confidence: Three-quarters of passengers “regretted” flying this summer in a survey of U.S. travelers cited in Newsweek — which also reported that passengers filed three times more complaints to the U.S. Department of Transportation this April as compared to April 2019.

Inexpensive ways to prevent record deforestation

The first half of 2022 brought record deforestation to the Brazilian Amazon, a landscape that is a keystone of the global atmospheric and climate system. 

The 1,448 square miles lost between January and June represented the largest losses since 2007, per the country’s Space Research Institute. 

• Loss of the forest — which covers much of the South American continent — would mean big decreases in the rainfall that irrigates major growing regions in the US, according to a 2014 study in Nature Climate Change. 
  
• Its staggering biodiversity — full of plants and subterranean microbes and fungi that build their bodies out of carbon from the atmosphere — make the landscape a vital global “sink,” or repository, of carbon dioxide that would otherwise warm the planet. 

But protecting the landscape could be far cheaper on a per-acre basis than comparable initiatives in the U.S. or European Union. 

Impending threat: Scientists warn that the ecosystem is heading towards a period of runaway collapse as thick forests burn off and give way to savannah, Mongabay reported. 

The 51 percent of the region currently under official protection is not enough to keep that from happening, according to Mongabay. 

Fixes are comparatively cheap: But protecting sufficient amounts of the landscape would cost between $1.7 and $2.8 billion per year, a May study in Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation found. 

 
That would pay to conserve about 80 percent of the Amazon, or 533 million acres, Mongabay reported. 

Putting in perspective: That’s less than either the European Union or U.S. spends on protecting their (comparatively smaller) natural reserves. 

• The EU spends about $5.3 billion a year to protect 2.5 million acres, Mongabay reported — a total of $2,120 per acre. 
  
• The U.S. National Park Service requested $3.5 billion to protect its 85 million acres for 2022, according to the Department of the Interior — a total of $42 per acre.

Protecting enough land to safeguard the Amazon, by contrast, would cost about $5 per acre, the study found.

Monday Miscellanies

World edition: Finland stores renewable energy in a sand battery, a major German city prepares to ration hot water and the U.K. hits back against the “deception” of greenwashing. 

Storing power in sand 

• A “sand battery” will help warm homes in Finland’s cold winter — a green innovation that helps blunt the effects of a Russian energy blockade now that the northern European country has decided to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the BBC reported. Excess energy from windmills is used to warm the sand to just under 1000 Fahrenheit, creating reserves of stored heat that can be tapped for months, developers told the BBC.  

Hamburg faces prospect of hot water shortages

• Germany’s second-largest city could soon be forced to restrict hot water usage to certain times of day in the face of gas shortages, Germany’s Welt am Sonntagreported. Hamburg — the largest non-capital city in Europe — is “in a much worse crisis than most people realize,” a local senator told the paper Hamburger Abendblatt.  

Hiding climate risk behind marketing 

• False statements from businesses about how they’re combating climate change is sowing risk throughout the financial system — and complicating efforts to prepare for onrushing threats, a leading U.K. financial regulator said Monday, according to the Guardian. Investors who believe they are taking adequate action “won’t realize this deception until it is too late,” Emma Howard Boyd of the Environment Agency said.
  

Please visit The Hill’s Sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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