Science

Meet the Band of TV Animals That’s Talking to Preschoolers About Climate

Published

2 years ago

October 4, 2022

Meet the Band of TV Animals That’s Talking to Preschoolers About Climate

4-year-old Francis Gaskin, who lives along with his household in Houston, has a favourite episode of his favourite new Netflix cartoon: When the Amazon rainforest cover dries up from an excessive amount of warmth, the manic howler monkeys should transfer into the decrease realms of the forest, creating havoc among the many different rainforest residents. “They needed to discover a new dwelling,” Francis defined throughout a video interview.

“I seen one thing else,” the preschooler added. “The frogs have been going to put their eggs within the water, however there was no water within the stream as a result of there was zero rain.”

“Typically the Earth warms up,” he mentioned.

Francis’ favourite present is “Octonauts: Above and Past,” the latest spinoff of a long-running BBC program, and one of many first tv exhibits directed at very younger youngsters to explicitly tackle local weather change. This system makes an attempt to strike a fragile steadiness: gently exhibiting three- and four-year-olds that their world is already altering, with out horrifying them with the results.

Local weather scientists say its depictions are largely correct, with one putting omission. This system says nothing about why the Earth is heating up: the burning of oil, gasoline and coal.

As an alternative, “Octonauts” is heavy on adventurous heroes. A pair of pirate cats journey the world to rescue animals from islands which are being swallowed by the rising seas. A macaque hydrologist delivers water to a herd of elephants on the Namibian coast as worsening drought dries up their ingesting water.

Because the thawing permafrost of Siberia thwarts a canine scientist from conducting her analysis, she observes; “Temperatures have been rising everywhere in the world. It could simply not be chilly sufficient for the bottom to remain frozen anymore” with out explaining the connection to greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

In a approach, the sequence is a part of an extended custom of youngsters’s packages that make use of animal characters to show concerning the pure world.

Nonetheless, “Octonauts” is treading unmapped floor.

“I don’t know of another present about local weather change for this age group,” mentioned Polly Conway, the senior tv editor at Widespread Sense Media, which evaluations over 900 tv packages for youngsters.

Some tv exhibits for preschoolers, like “Let’s Go, Luna,” “Dora the Explorer” and “Doc McStuffins” have aired single episodes about world warming. However few packages tackle the impacts of local weather change throughout a number of episodes. PBS, which for many years has been on the heart of academic tv for youngsters, has little preschool programming depicting local weather change.

“We really feel fairly strongly that we don’t need youngsters to really feel overwhelmed and depressed,” mentioned Sara DeWitt, the senior vp and normal supervisor of PBS Youngsters. Ms. DeWitt mentioned that, traditionally, PBS has constructed its academic youngsters’s exhibits round present faculty curriculums. However there is no such thing as a settlement on the easiest way to show the youngest youngsters concerning the extra highly effective storms, wildfires, rising seas and excessive warmth and drought that can form their lives.

“No person actually is aware of but at what age youngsters can perceive local weather change,” mentioned Gary Evans, an environmental and developmental psychologist at Cornell College who’s conducting a research of youngsters in kindergarten by means of third grade to search out out what they learn about local weather change and the way it makes them really feel. “Anybody who tells you that they know the easiest way to speak to younger youngsters about local weather change is doing so with out the steering of knowledge.”

Local weather scientists say that should change. Youngsters born inside the final decade, generally often known as “Technology Alpha,” will likely be first to stay their complete lives on a planet that has been irrevocably altered by human-caused world warming.

And youngsters are carrying specific burdens of local weather change. A 2014 research commissioned by UNICEF discovered that youngsters made up 80 % of the deaths attributed to local weather change in creating international locations.

“Increasingly more, there are children who’re residing by means of this disaster themselves,” mentioned Harriet Shugarman, director of ClimateMama, a company aimed toward serving to dad and mom talk with their youngsters about local weather change, pointing to the latest devastating floods in Pakistan, which scientists say have been worsened by local weather change. To date, round 1,500 individuals have died, practically half of whom are youngsters, and greater than 33 million have been displaced by the floods, which have been brought on by heavier-than-usual monsoon rains and glacial soften.

Youngsters on this planet’s richest nation are additionally feeling the impacts, Ms. Shugarman famous. “When you stay in Oregon or California and also you couldn’t go to high school due to wildfires — we are able to’t shield youngsters from these realities,” she mentioned.

“Our youngsters are going to develop up and stay by means of this transformational interval in human historical past,” Ms. Shugarman mentioned. “And fogeys don’t but have sufficient information or training to have these conversations with their youngsters, particularly little youngsters. Mother and father need assistance.”

Ms. Shugarman and others mentioned that’s the place “Octonauts: Above and Past” is available in.

The unique “Octonauts” sequence, which debuted in 2010 on the BBC, incorporates a crew of eight preternaturally lovely marine adventurers, together with Captain Barnacles, a stalwart polar bear, Kwazii, a swashbuckling pirate cat, and Peso the penguin, a mild medic. Collectively, they journey the seas in an octopus-shaped submarine, discovering and rescuing imperiled sea creatures — a assemble that’s meant to evoke Jacques-Cousteau-meets-Star-Trek, however executed with excessive cuteness, mentioned the present’s govt producer, Kurt Mueller.

From the start Mr. Mueller and his crew consulted with scientists at Moss Touchdown Marine Laboratories at San Jose State College in California to make sure the scientific accuracy of every episode (aside from speaking animals who pilot submarines and drink sizzling cocoa).

In 2019, Mr. Mueller approached Neflix about increasing the present. “Octonauts: Above and Past,” which launched its first season in September 2021, doubles the solid of characters and takes them on land to rescue animals and vegetation. The preliminary thought, Mr. Mueller mentioned, was merely to broaden the world by which the Octonauts discover journey.

However because the crew develops new story strains, mentioned Lacy Stanton, one other govt producer, “It simply so occurs that loads of the conditions that creatures are in at present are because of the altering and warming local weather.”

“We collect loads of our story concepts straight from the information, and are vetted by science,” Ms. Stanton mentioned.

For the brand new sequence, Mr. Mueller and Ms. Stanton consulted with Susannah Sandrin, a professor of environmental science on the College of Arizona, and Natascha Crandall, an academic media marketing consultant, to make sure that the episodes have been each scientifically sound and emotionally acceptable for preschoolers.

“We’re intentional,” Ms. Stanton mentioned. “We’re contemplating how a lot is an excessive amount of, how advanced is simply too advanced? But it surely all goes again to the creatures. They’re cute, they’re happening a curler coaster experience of journey, and it all the time ends with the decision of the creature in peril, and all is true with the characters.”

This system additionally exhibits preschoolers how local weather change may have an effect on their very own lives. In a single episode, the Octonauts expertise a scarcity of their important beverage, sizzling cocoa, as a result of warmth is making the cocoa vegetation wither. The crew sings, “Altering local weather makes the temperature excessive, and within the warmth the timber are thirsty and dry.”

Netfilx has launched the present in 19 languages and in 190 international locations. Whereas the corporate declined to supply numbers, executives mentioned that its viewership was among the many high 10 youngsters’s packages in 44 international locations, together with america, Britain, Australia, France, Spain, South Korea, Colombia and the United Arab Emirates.

Francis’s mom, Stephanie Gaskin, mentioned she was grateful to the present for introducing a tough topic that she won’t in any other case have mentioned together with her son.

Her household resides in a area of Texas that has already skilled the impacts of a altering local weather. “With Harvey, the Memorial Day flood, and the massive freeze — we’ve seen issues that the world actually hasn’t ever seen earlier than,” she mentioned, referring to a 2017 hurricane, 2015 flood and a 2021 winter storm.

Ms. Gaskin, a former first-grade instructor who hopes to return to the classroom when her youngsters are older, mentioned the sequence had given her concepts about how you can focus on local weather change with younger college students.

“Youngsters are lots smarter than we generally suppose,” she mentioned. “If I have been to carry this up on this approach in my classroom, I do know youngsters would decide it up.”

She additionally mentioned she thought this system had averted horrifying her son. When requested concerning the frogs who can’t lay their eggs within the stream or creatures dropping their houses to rising seas as depicted in “The Octonauts,” Francis mentioned, “It makes me really feel unhappy.”

However he then fortunately described how the Octonauts swooped in to avoid wasting the day, as they do on the finish of each episode: airdropping water into the parched rainforest, creating shade for the withered cocoa timber, shifting animals imperiled by sea stage rise to increased floor.

“A number of the science is spot on,” mentioned Heather Goldstone, chief spokeswoman for the Woodwell Local weather Analysis Middle, pointing to the episode by which the pink fox strays into territory of the arctic fox. “We’re already seeing that shift — the brand new interplay between species, animals and vegetation, which have traditionally not interacted.”

However Ms. Goldstone and a number of other local weather scientists, requested to view episodes of the present, have been crucial of what they known as “band-aid” options and the actual fact the present by no means mentions that human exercise is inflicting the disaster.

“The episodes don’t clarify the broader context of why there may be drought within the Amazon or melting glaciers,” Ms. Goldstone mentioned. “There’s a missed alternative to show the actual fundamentals of local weather change: that burning fossil fuels are warming the planet. After which you may say, meaning human beings can cease warming the planet.”

Heather Tilert, head of preschool programming at Netflix, mentioned she noticed that as a step too far for preschoolers. “Youngsters have to know what to anticipate from the construction of the episodes,” she mentioned. “That’s an issue that our characters can’t resolve over the course of an episode. To have them tackle one thing that they’ll’t reliably resolve places it in a scary state of affairs.”

Nonetheless, Ms. Goldstone known as this system a valiant first effort at assembly a brand new problem. “The one approach we get higher is to try to experiment,” she mentioned. “We have to get higher at speaking to different adults about local weather change and we have to get higher to speaking to youngsters about it.

“Kudos to anybody who’s attempting,” she mentioned.

Science

Far From the Fires, the Deadly Risks of Smoke Are Intensifying

Published

16 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Far From the Fires, the Deadly Risks of Smoke Are Intensifying

It kills more people each year than car crashes, war or drugs do. This invisible killer is the air pollution from sources like cars and trucks or factory smokestacks.

But as wildfires intensify and grow more frequent in a warming world, the smoke from these fires is emerging as a new and deadly pollution source, health experts say. By some estimates, wildfire smoke — which contains a mixture of hazardous air pollutants like particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and lead — already causes as many as 675,000 premature deaths a year worldwide, as well as a range of respiratory, heart and other diseases.

Research shows that wildfire smoke is starting to erode the world’s progress in cleaning up pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, as climate change supercharges fires.

“It’s heartbreaking, it really is,” said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician who specializes in asthma care at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California and a board director of the American Lung Association. Wildfires “are putting our homes in danger, but they’re also putting our health in danger,” Dr. El-Hasan said, “and it’s only going to get worse.”

Those health concerns were coming to the fore this week as wildfires ravaged the Los Angeles area. Residents began to return to their neighborhoods, many strewed with smoldering ash and rubble, to survey the damage. Air pollution levels remained high in many parts of the city, including in northwest coastal Los Angeles, where the air quality index climbed to “dangerous” levels.

Los Angeles, in particular, has seen air pollution at levels that could be raising daily mortality by between 5 to 15 percent, said Carlos F. Gold, an expert in the health effects of air pollution at the University of California, San Diego.

That means current death counts, “while tragic, are likely large underestimates,” he said. People with underlying health issues, as well as older people and children, are particularly vulnerable.

The rapid spread of this week’s fires into dense neighborhoods, where they burned homes, furniture, cars, electronics and materials like paint and plastic, made the smoke more dangerous, said Dr. Lisa Patel, a pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay Area and the executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.

A recent study found that even for homes that are spared destruction, smoke and ash blown inside could adhere to rugs, sofas and drywall, creating health hazards that can linger for months. “We’re breathing in this toxic brew of volatile organic compounds and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and hexavalent chromium,” Dr. Patel said. “All of it is noxious.”

Intensifying and more frequent fires, meanwhile, are upending experts’ understanding of smoke’s health effects. “Wildfire season is no longer a season,” said Colleen Reid, who researches the effects of air pollution from wildfires on heath at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We have fires all year round that affect the same population repeatedly.”

“The health impacts are not the same as if you were exposed once, and then not again for 10 years,” she said. “The effects of that is something that we still don’t really know.”

A United Nations report from 2022 concluded that the risk of devastating wildfires around the world would surge in coming decades. Heating and drying caused by climate change, along with development in places vulnerable to fire, was expected to intensify a “global wildfire crisis,” the report said. Both the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires have more than doubled in the past two decades. In the United States, the average acreage burned a year has surged since the 1990s.

Now, pollution from wildfires is reversing what had been a decades-long improvement in air quality brought about by cleaner cars and power generation. Since at least 2016, in nearly three-quarters of states in the U.S. mainland, wildfire smoke has eroded about 25 percent of progress in reducing concentrations of a type of particulate matter called PM 2.5, a Nature study in 2023 found.

In California, wildfire smoke’s effect on air quality is offsetting public health gains brought about by a decline in air pollution from automobiles and factories, state health officials have found. (By releasing carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases into the atmosphere, wildfires are themselves a big contributor to climate change: The wildfires that ravaged Canada’s boreal forests in 2023 produced more greenhouse gases than the burning of fossil fuels in all but three countries.)

”It’s not a pretty picture,” said Dr. Gold of U.C. San Diego, who took part in the Nature study. If planet-warming gas emissions continue at current levels, “we’ve got some work that suggests that mortality from wildfire smoke in the U.S. could go up by 50 percent,” he said.

One silver lining is that the Santa Ana winds that so ferociously fueled the flames in recent days have been blowing some of the smoke toward the ocean. That stands in contrast to the smoke from the 2023 Canadian wildfires that drifted to New York and other American states hundreds of miles away, causing spikes in emergency room visits for asthma.

At one point that year, more than a third of Americans, from the East Coast to the Midwest, were under air quality alerts from Canadian wildfire smoke. “We’re seeing new and worsening threats in places that are not used to them,” Dr. Patel, the pediatrician, said.

The new normal is bringing about changes to health care, Dr. Patel said. More health systems are sending out air quality alerts to vulnerable patients. In the small community hospital where she works, “every child that comes in with wheezing or asthma, I talk to them about how air pollution is getting worse because of wildfires and climate change,” she said.

“I teach them how to look up air quality, and say they should ask for an air purifier,” Dr. Patel added. She also cautions that children should not participate in cleanup after a wildfire.

Scientists are still trying to understand the full range of wildfire smoke’s health effects. One big question is how much of what researchers know about vehicle exhaust and other forms of air pollution apply to wildfire smoke, said Mark R. Miller, a researcher at the Center for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Edinburgh who led a recent global survey of climate change, air pollution and wildfires.

For example, exhaust particles “are so small that when we breathe them in, they go deep down into our lungs and are actually small enough that they can pass from our lungs into our blood,” he said. “And once they’re in our blood, they can be carried around our body and start to build up.”

That means air pollution affects our entire body, he said. “It has effects on people who have diabetes, has effects on the liver and the kidney, it has effects on the brain, on pregnancy,” he said. What’s still not clear is whether pollution from wildfires has all of those same effects. “But it’s likely,” he said.

Experts have a range of advice for people living in areas with smoke. Keep an eye on air quality alerts, and follow evacuation orders. Stay indoors as much as possible, and use air purifiers. When venturing outside, wear N95 masks. Don’t do strenuous exercise in bad air. Keep children, older people and other vulnerable groups away from the worst smoke.

Ultimately, tackling climate change and cutting back on all kinds of air pollution is the way to reduce the overall burden on health, said Dr. El-Hasan of the American Lung Association. “Can you imagine how much worse things would be if we hadn’t started cleaning up emissions from our cars?” he said. “I’m trying to think, glass half full, but it does break my heart and it does worry me.”

Science

Metro will offer free rides in L.A. through Sunday due to fires

Published

17 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Metro will offer free rides in L.A. through Sunday due to fires

L.A. Metro has suspended fare collection on its trains and buses through Sunday as wildfires continue to ravage parts of the county, officials said Saturday.

The agency said earlier this week that L.A. County Supervisor and Metro Board Chair Janice Hahn had authorized the agency to stop collecting fares across its system. The agency extended the free rides through the weekend to help residents travel, including to shelters.

Metro also created a map showing evacuation and resource centers near its bus and rail routes.

Officials said riders should allow for extra time because the wildfires and wind have impacted service on some bus and rail lines.

Here are the current service alerts:

A LINE: Bus shuttles replace trains in both directions between the Southwest Museum and Fillmore stations due to wind damage to overhead wires. This work will continue into Saturday. Allow extra time if riding to or from the San Gabriel Valley.

LINE 134: Canceled due to the fire in the Palisades area.

LINES 180 and 217: Buses detouring between Los Feliz Boulevard/San Fernando and Vermont/Prospect due to downed power lines. Buses using Sunset, Alvarado, Glendale, Rowena, Hyperion, Glendale and San Fernando.

LINES 660 and 662: No service north of Washington Boulevard in the Pasadena and Altadena areas due to wildfires.

LINE 296: Buses detour to 5 Freeway between Los Feliz Boulevard and Western Avenue.

LINE 602: Canceled due to the fire in the Palisades area.

LINE 690: Buses in both directions are using the 210 Freeway between Foothill/Arroyo and Paxton/McLay.

METRO MICRO: In Pasadena, Altadena, and Sierra Madre, service north of Woodbury Road, New York Drive and Sierra Madre Boulevard is suspended. Service has been restored in the following areas:
*Rose Bowl area
*Lincoln Boulevard south of Montana Street
*Montana Street and south between the 210 Freeway and Los Robles Avenue
*Elizabeth Street and south between Los Robles Avenue and Hill Avenue
*New York Drive and south between Hill Avenue and Altadena Drive

All service alerts can be found at https://alerts.metro.net/

Science

2024 was the hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA confirm

Published

1 day ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

2024 was the hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA confirm

Amid a week of horrifying wildfires in Los Angeles, government agencies in the U.S. and around the world confirmed Friday that 2024 was the planet’s hottest year since recordkeeping began in 1880.

It’s the 11th consecutive year in which a new heat record has been set, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.

“Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet,” Nelson said.

Firefighters on Friday were battling to protect NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge from the Eaton fire, which has burned 13,690 acres and roughly 5,000 buildings thus far.

Research has shown that global warming is contributing significantly to larger and more intense wildfires in the western U.S. in recent years, and to longer fire seasons.

The devastating fires in Southern California erupted after an abrupt shift from wet weather to extremely dry weather, a bout of climate “whiplash” that scientists say increased wildfire risks. Research has shown that these rapid wet-to-dry and dry-to-wet swings, which can worsen wildfires, flooding and other hazards, are growing more frequent and intense because of rising global temperatures.

Extreme weather events in 2024 included Hurricane Helene in the southeastern U.S., devastating floods in Valencia, Spain, and a deadly heat wave in Mexico so intense that monkeys dropped dead from the trees, noted Russell Vose, chief of the monitoring and assessment branch of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

“We aren’t saying any of these things were caused by changes in Earth’s climate,” Vose said. But since warmer air holds more moisture, the higher temperatures “could have exacerbated some events this year.”

Last year’s data also notes a step toward a major climate threshold. Keeping the average global surface temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels has long been seen as necessary to avoid many of the most harrowing climate impacts.

NOAA pegged 2024’s global average surface temperature at 1.46 degrees C above its preindustrial baseline, and NASA’s measurements put the increase at 1.47 degrees C. In 2023, NASA said the temperature was 1.36 degrees C higher than the baseline.

Considering the margin of error in their measurements, “that puts the NOAA and NASA models comfortably within the possibility that the real number is 1.5 degrees,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Calculations from other organizations passed the 1.5-degree mark more clearly.

Berkeley Earth and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service both said the planet warmed to slightly more than 1.6 degrees C above pre-industrial times in 2024. The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization said the increase was 1.55 degrees C and the U.K. Met Office, the country’s weather service, measured an increase of 1.53 degrees C.

Although 2024 probably marks the first calendar year in which the average temperature exceeded the 1.5-degree threshold, it doesn’t mean Earth has passed the crucial target set in the Paris Agreement, Vose said.

That describes “a sustained, multi-decade increase of 1.5 degrees,” something that’s not expected to occur until the 2030s or 2040s, the scientists noted.

“For a long time, the global mean temperature changes were a bit of an esoteric thing — nobody lives in the global mean,” Schmidt said. “But the signal is now so large that you’re not only seeing it at the global scale … you’re seeing it at the local level.”

“This is now quite personal,” he said.

The oceans, which store 90% of the planet’s excess heat, also recorded their highest average temperature since records began in 1955.

The Arctic has seen the most warming, which is concerning because the region is home to vast quantities of ice that stands to melt and raise sea levels, Schmidt said.

Temperatures there are rising 3 to 3.5 times faster than the overall global average, he added.

The only place where average surface temperatures have cooled is the area immediately around Antarctica, and that’s probably due to meltwater from shrinking ice sheets, Schmidt said.

A year ago, NOAA predicted there was only a 1 in 3 chance that 2024 would break the record set in 2023, Vose said. Then every month from January to July set a new high, and August was a tie. As a result, Friday’s declaration came as little surprise.

The longer-term trends are no better.

“We anticipate future global warming as long as we are emitting greenhouse gases,” Schmidt said. “That’s something that brings us no joy to tell people, but unfortunately that’s the case.”

Times staff writer Ian James contributed to this report.