Climate change can seem like a massive, invisible, slow process.

At times, it can seem like something we won't be able to visualize until it's too late. 

A collection of images (from NASA, unless otherwise noted) proves otherwise. In these images, you can see the unmistakable mark that human-induced climate change is making on the planet. 

Rivers and lakes are shrinking, forests are being cut down, and as the Earth gets warmer snow and ice are melting far sooner than they should be.

Snow melt on Matterhorn Mountain, Switzerland, August 1960 vs. August 2005

Aral Sea shrinkage, Central Asia, 2000 vs. 2014

Melting Muir Glacier, Alaska, 1882 vs. August 2005

CIUDAD ACUNA, Mexico (AP) — A tornado raged through a city on the U.S.-Mexico border Monday, destroying homes, flinging cars like matchsticks and ripping an infant away from its mother. At least 13 people were killed, authorities said.

In Texas, 12 people were reported missing after the vacation home they were staying in was swept away by rushing floodwaters in a small town popular with tourists.

The baby was also missing after the twister that hit Ciudad Acuna, a city of 125,000 across from Del Rio, Texas, ripped the child's carrier from the mother's hands and sent it flying, said Victor Zamora, interior secretary of the northern state of Coahuila.

Rescue workers dug through the rubble of damaged homes in a race to find victims. The twister hit a seven-block area, which Zamora described as "devastated."

Mayor Evaristo Perez Rivera said 300 people were being treated at local hospitals, and up to 200 homes had been completely destroyed. Three people were unaccounted for.

"There's nothing standing, not walls, not roofs," said Edgar Gonzalez, a spokesman for the city government, describing some of the destroyed homes in a 3-square kilometer (1 square mile) stretch.

By midday, 13 people were confirmed dead — 10 adults and three infants.

Family members and neighbors gathered around a pickup truck where the bodies of a woman and two children were laid out in the truck's bed, covered with sheets. Two relatives reached down to touch the bodies, covered their eyes and wept.

Photos from the scene showed cars with their hoods torn off, resting upended against single-story houses. One car's frame was bent around the gate of a house. A bus was seen flipped and crumpled on a roadway.

The twister struck not long after daybreak, around the time buses were preparing to take children to school, Zamora said.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he planned to travel to Acuna later in the day with officials from government agencies.

In the U.S., a line of storms that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes dumped record rainfall on parts of the Plains and Midwest, spawning tornadoes and causing major flooding that forced at least 2,000 Texans from their homes.

Witnesses reported seeing the swollen Blanco River push the vacation house off its foundation and smash it into a bridge. Only pieces of the home have been found, according to Hays County Judge Bert Cobb.

One person who was rescued from the home told workers that the other 12 inside were all connected to two families, Cobb said.

The house was in Wimberley Valley, an area known for its bed-and-breakfast inns and weekend rental cottages.

Dana Campbell, a retired engineer who lives on a bluff above the river, said the floodwaters left behind damage that resembled the path of a tornado "as far as the eye can see."

The storms were blamed for five deaths Saturday and Sunday, including two in Oklahoma and three in Texas. A man's body was recovered from a flooded area along the Blanco River, which rose 26 feet in an hour and created huge piles of debris.

Elsewhere, the bodies of a 14-year-old and his dog were pulled from a storm drain in suburban Dallas after they apparently drowned, authorities said. And on Saturday, a high school senior from Devine, about 30 miles southwest of San Antonio, was killed after her car was caught in high water.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott flew over parts of the Blanco on Monday, a day after heavy rains pushed the river into surrounding neighborhoods.

Abbott said the storms had "relentless tsunami-type power." He urged communities downstream to monitor flood levels and take the threat seriously.

The governor added 24 counties to his disaster declaration, bringing the total to 37, most in the eastern half of the state.

Among the worst-affected communities were Wimberley and San Marcos, along the Blanco in the corridor between Austin and San Antonio.

About 1,000 homes were damaged throughout Hays County. Five police cars were washed away, and the firehouse was flooded, said Kristi Wyatt, a spokeswoman for San Marcos.

Rivers swelled so quickly that whole communities awoke Sunday surrounded by water. The Blanco crested above 40 feet — more than triple its flood stage of 13 feet. The river swamped Interstate 35 and forced parts of the busy north-south highway to close. Rescuers used pontoon boats and a helicopter to pull people out.

Hundreds of trees along the Blanco were uprooted or snapped, and they collected in piles of debris that soared 20 feet high.

"We've got trees in the rafters," said Cherri Maley, property manager of a house where the structure's entire rear portion collapsed with the flooding, carrying away furniture.

"We had the refrigerator in a tree," she said. "I think it's a total loss."

A tornado briefly touched down Sunday in Houston, damaging rooftops, toppling trees, blowing out windows and sending at least two people to a hospital. Fire officials said 10 apartments were heavily damaged and 40 others sustained lesser damage.

Dallas faced severe flooding from the Trinity River, which was expected to crest near 40 feet Monday and lap at the foundations of an industrial park. The Red and Wichita rivers also rose far above flood stage.

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NOW WATCH: Scientists have discovered more magma under Yellowstone's supervolcano

As global commerce grows, the movement of goods is occurring at ever-faster rates. And with increased global trade comes the spread of non-native species.

This includes invasive insects that are making life difficult for domestic bees.

Non-native species get introduced both intentionally and accidentally. However they migrate, though, their spread can lead to devastating results.

Non-native species can dramatically reshape their invaded habitats and disrupt the interactions between native species.

After direct habitat loss, invasive species are the second greatest threat to biodiversity. Biodiversity is crucial to a healthy ecosystem, providing us services such as food, the natural resources that sustain our current lifestyle, and the building blocks of medicines.

Invasive species come in all forms – plants, animals and microbes – but all share common traits: they are non-native, they are increasing in prevalence, and they negatively affect native species.

Native bees in North America are declining drastically. Habitat loss is the number one reason for bee decline, with pesticide use, invasive species, and climate change also playing a major role. With the growth of cities and farms, habitat suitable for our native bees shrinks. And with competition and habitat degradation from invasive species, suitable habitat becomes even less.

We depend on native bees, like our humble bumble bees (Bombus spp.), to pollinate native flowers and crops. Bumble bees pollinate tomatoes, peppers, blueberries and many more of our favorite food items. Honey bees, which are widely used in agriculture and are suffering from colony collapse disorder, are a non-native species, and can't replace the pollination services provided by native bees such as bumble bees.

But one invasive species in particular is threatening the livelihood of bumble bees.

New bee on the block

The European wool-carder bee was first discovered in North America in 1963 near Ithaca, New York, and since then, its impact has been felt from coast to coast. Wool-carder bees get their name from the nest building behavior of the female bees. Females collect plant hairs, called trichomes, by cutting them with their mandibles. The up-and-down motion they use during trichome collection to cut the hair-like fibers and ball them up is reminiscent of carding wool.

My research has shown that carding behavior induces chemical changes in the plant similar to what occurs when insects eat plants. These chemical changes signal other wool-carder bees, attracting them to the plant, which causes further damage.

In addition to damaging plants, female wool-carder bees compete with our native bees for flowers. Bees depend on nectar and pollen from flowers for food, and increased competition from invasive species raises concerns over the future of our native bees.

But the behavior of male wool-carder bees appears even more sinister. Males aggressively defend flower patches in order to attract mates. Males use evolved weapons on the base of their abdomen to attack any interloper who isn't a potential mate, often causing severe injury or even death to the attacked bee. By decreasing competition for flowers, the male wool-carder bee hopes to entice more female wool-carder bees to visit his patch, thus increasing his chances of mating.

Of all our native bees, bumble bees (Bombus spp.) receive the brunt of attacks from male wool-carder bees. Therefore, my research focuses on the impact of these attacks on bumble bee well-being. My preliminary research shows that bumble bees avoid foraging for nectar and pollen in areas with wool-carder bees - likely to avoid attack. Because they stay away from areas defended by wool-carder bees, the number of flowers available to bumble bees decreases.

As bumble bees are already facing a shortage of flowers due to habitat loss, this additional restriction on flower availability is causing serious concern about the sustainability of local bumble bee populations. Because the population of wool-carder bees is growing, my current research is trying to determine the extent of the negative impact they are having on our precious native pollinators.

Native pollinators, such as bumble bees, cannot easily be replaced by other species. This is because our native bees perform a special form of pollination, buzz pollination, where they use a unique vibration pattern to shake loose pollen from flowers. Many of our native crops, such as tomatoes and blueberries, need buzz pollination for efficient pollen transfer. So for the health and well-being of our native plants, we must care for our native bees.

So what can we do?

There are a number of pollinator-friendly actions each of us can take.

1. Plant native wildflowers– Ornamental non-native plants are often easy choices for the garden, but they promote the spread of invasive species such as the wool-carder bee, and often go unvisited by our native bees. So while you may think you are helping the bees by planting flowers, make sure that you are planting flowers that our native bees will actually visit. Native wildflowers help mitigate the effects of urbanization on our native bees by increasing the availability of food in an otherwise challenging urban environment.

2. Opt for a more natural yard– Treating our yards with herbicides and cutting the grass very short can lead to a perfectly manicured lawn, but at what cost? Lawns with no flowers are food deserts to our bees. Allowing wildflowers such as clover to blossom in your yard provides much-needed resources for our native bees. If you absolutely can't give up the manicured look of your lawn, opt for a wildflower garden at the perimeter of the yard instead. The bees will thank you!

3. Buy organic– Pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids, have devastating effects on bees, and are linked to the decline of both bumble bees and other bee species worldwide. Lessen your pesticide footprint by buying organic produce when you can.

To read more about bees and pollinators, see:

• Flower pharmacies help bees fight parasites
• Bee crisis: global warming will cause onward march of exotic gut parasite

Kelsey K Graham is PhD Candidate in Behavioral Ecology at Tufts University .

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

UP NEXT: The US is finally doing something to slow a catastrophic honey bee decline

SEE ALSO: A popular pesticide seems to be harming wild bees

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NOW WATCH: This Rare Baby Pygmy Hippo Is Latest Hope For An Endangered Species

You might have heard of smart bugs — viruses that have mutated and become resistant to ordinary antibiotics. But there is another, less well-known microscopic substance that is dangerous to human health — "smart" dirt. So what is smart dirt and what is being done to protect the world from these potentially toxic germs?

What is smart dirt?

Smart dirt is made up of those germs clinging to the surfaces around us that have become resistant to the chemicals normally used to get rid of them.

A massive dose of chemicals could kill these bugs, but this poses a risk to the environment – most are toxic.

The accumulation of surface-adhering micro-organisms such as bacteria and algae is known as biofouling. The available chemical cleaners no longer have an effective impact on almost all areas fundamental to human existence, including the water treatment industry, food industry and energy sectors.

Human survival is threatened

Biofouling has become the biggest hindrance to the development of membrane water treatment plants in South Africa and globally. In the water industry, the filters in water treatment plants can become fouled. This decreases the quality of water and increases operation costs.

Food security is threatened when irrigation systems get worn out and production lines in industrial settings become plagued by biofouling.

The energy sector, including South Africa's power utility Eskom, is also victim to this plague. Cooling water towers are constantly down due to heavy fouling, which reduces heat exchanger efficiency. The costs of repair run into millions and cooling tower lifetimes are severely shortened.

Why there is hope

Fortunately, nature has also provided a solution to smart dirt. Researchers have discovered that on heavily fouled surfaces, the marine red algae delisea pulchra remained untouched by ocean bacteria and barnacles. A closer look revealed that this marine plant contains substances, "furanones", that repel bacteria and all other forms of microorganisms from their surface.

In a research project, these furanones were prepared and tested on laboratory-scale water filters. The furanone-modified water filters not only demonstrated self-cleaning behaviour (bacteria repelling), but also the ability to destroy the bacteria which attempted to stick to the filter surfaces.

And since the furanone compound is chemically bound to the material, there is no risk of it leaking into the environment.

Research has shown that the secret to this compound's effectiveness is that the bugs live together in small communities, referred to as biofilms. They are also in constant communication. Their survival and resistance to certain bug-killing measures relies heavily on this communication.

The presence of furanone compounds stops communication between the bugs. As a result, their destruction is inevitable. Without a "community feel", these bugs cannot colonize surfaces. Without attachment, they cannot survive.

This technology opens a lot of possibilities in the fight against surface biofouling. It can eliminate the use of chemical cleaners, which are dangerous for the environment and lead to antimicrobial resistance. Smart dirt may be ahead, but the war against biofouling has only just begun.

Nonjabulo P. Gule is NRF-DST Research Fellow; Researcher, Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science at Stellenbosch University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

NEXT: China Beaches Are Green With Smelly 'Sea Lettuce' Algae Due To Record-Breaking Bloom

SEE ALSO: We're Nearing An 'Apocalyptic Scenario' With Antibiotics — Here's How To Fix It

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NOW WATCH: The real 'Jurassic World' is in China — 17,000 dinosaur eggs have been found in the same city

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) plans to inject $100 million in funding to get more ethanol at the gas pump, according to two industry sources, the latest push to get beyond a "blend wall" that has capped demand for the biofuel.

That would mark a big push for an overhaul of fuel-blending pumps and related infrastructure to generate higher demand for the biofuel. The USDA is expected to announce the funding on Friday, the sources said.

A USDA spokesman declined to comment on the plans.

Ethanol groups have asked the USDA to continue to offer this funding amid rising calls for policy reform from policymakers, oil companies, and environmentalists. The USDA launched a program in 2011 designed to get 10,000 flex-fuel options at gas pumps nationwide that would allow use of blends as high as E85, which is 85 percent ethanol.

The United States sets use requirements for biofuels, including ethanol, through the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program, but has delayed setting targets for the current year and 2014 amid concern from oil companies that ethanol use has hit a saturation point without major infrastructure changes.

The plans come as oil companies and biofuels producers await a proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on biofuels use requirements for 2014, 2015, and 2016, widely expected to be announced on Friday.

(Editing by Diane Craft)

SEE ALSO: A much-hyped study about a diet that lets you eat chocolate daily was an elaborate hoax

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NOW WATCH: 70 people were injured while filming this movie with 100 untamed lions

The worst drought in recorded history just got worse.

California's main source of surface water during the state's dry summer months is the remaining snow on its highest mountains. But it has officially melted. The snowpack levels, which hovered at around 7% to 15% of normal for this date in 2009, before the four-year drought began, are currently at 0%.

What does that look like?

Here's a map of the California snowpack on May 29, 2009:

And here's a map of the California snowpack on May 29, 2015:

There is still some snow left from stations that haven't yet reported and in the state's already-low reservoirs, as Eric Holthaus notes over at Slate, but still, this doesn't look good. 

"This is essentially a worst-case scenario when it comes to California’s fragile water supply," writes Holthaus.

SEE ALSO: Devastating photos of California show how bad the drought really is

DON'T MISS: 13 things Californians are doing that waste more water than eating almonds

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NOW WATCH: California could learn a few things about water conservation from this college dorm in Florida

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even for a world getting used to wild weather, May seems stuck on strange.

Torrential downpours in Texas that have whiplashed the region from drought to flooding.

A heat wave that has killed more than 1,800 people in India. Record 91-degree readings in Alaska, of all places.

A pair of top-of-the-scale typhoons in the Northwest Pacific. And a drought taking hold in the East.

"Mother Nature keeps throwing us crazy stuff," Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis says. "It's just been one thing after another."

Jerry Meehl, an extreme-weather expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that May is usually a pretty extreme month, with lots of tornadoes and downpours. Even so, he says, this has been "kind of unusually intense."

The word "stuck" provides one possible explanation.

Francis, Meehl and some other meteorologists say the jet stream is in a rut, not moving nasty weather along. The high-speed, constantly shifting river of air 30,000 feet above Earth normally guides storms around the globe, but sometimes splits and comes back together somewhere else.

A stuck jet stream, with a bit of a split, explains the extremes in Texas, India, Alaska and the U.S. East, but not the typhoons, Francis says.

Other possible factors contributing to May's wild weather: the periodic warming of the central Pacific known as El Nino, climate change and natural variability, scientists say.

Texas this month has received a record statewide average of 8 inches of rain and counting. Some parts of the Lone Star State and Oklahoma have gotten more than a foot and a half since May 1. The two states have gone from exceptional drought to flooding in just four weeks.

Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon attributes the heavy rainfall to an unusually southern fork in the jet stream, a stuck stationary front and El Nino, and says the downpours have probably been made slightly worse by climate change.

For every degree Celsius the air is warmer, it can hold 7 percent more moisture. That, Nielsen-Gammon says, "is supplying more juice to the event."

While it is too early to connect one single event to man-made warming, scientific literature shows "that when it rains hard, it rains harder than it did 20 to 30 years ago," says University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd.

As bad as the Texas flooding has been, the heat wave in India has been far worse — in fact, the world's fifth-deadliest since 1900, with reports of the 100-degree-plus heat even buckling roads. And it's a consequence of the stuck jet stream, according to Francis and Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters.

When climate scientists look at what caused extreme events — a complex and time-consuming process that hasn't been done yet — heat waves are the ones most definitely connected to global warming, Shepherd says.

The stuck jet stream has kept Alaska on bake, with the town of Eagle hitting 91, the earliest Alaska has had a temperature pushing past 90, Masters says.

And on the other end of the country, New York; Boston; Hartford, Connecticut; Albany, New York; Providence, Rhode Island; and Concord, New Hampshire, all have received less than an inch of rain this month and are flirting with setting monthly records for drought, he says.

El Nino is known to change the weather worldwide, often making things more extreme. This El Nino is itself weird. It was long predicted but came far later and weaker than expected. So experts dialed back their forecasts. Then El Nino got stronger quickly.

Some scientists have theorized that the jet stream has been changing in recent years because of shrinking Arctic sea ice, an idea that has not totally been accepted but is gaining ground, Shepherd says.

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, likens what's happening to a stewpot: Natural climate fluctuations such as El Nino go into it. So do jet stream meanderings, random chance, May being a transition month, and local variability. Then throw in the direct and indirect effects of climate change.

"We know that the stew has an extra ingredient," Hayhoe says, referring to climate change. "That ingredient is very strong. Sometimes you add one teaspoon of the wrong ingredient and boy, it can take your head off."

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NOW WATCH: 5 things in New York City that will disappear as sea levels rise and weather patterns change

LOS ANGELES (AP) — On the afternoon of the largest coastal oil spill in California in 25 years, graduate student Natalie Phares quickly organized a volunteer bucket brigade to clean a beach north of Santa Barbara.

Seven hours after the discovery of the spill, she was surprised to find her small crew alone on the sand a half-mile east of Refugio State Beach, where the spill occurred.

Aside from a couple boats skimming oil from the surface, she didn't see any other cleanup effort.

"It was disheartening," she said. Using headlamps, the 10 volunteers filled 91 buckets in three-and-a-half hours.

"As impressive as those 91 buckets looked, it didn't make a dent," she said.

Phares' experience was echoed by others who witnessed the early aftermath of the May 19 spill that sent up to 101,000 gallons of crude oil down a culvert and onto the beach. An estimated 21,000 gallons went into the Pacific and quickly spread.

California's U.S. senators issued a statement Thursday calling the response insufficient and demanding Plains All American Pipeline explain what it did, and when, after firefighters discovered the leak from the company's underground, 24-inch pipe.

A diverse range of government agencies, from the Coast Guard to state emergency workers to the Santa Barbara County Fire Department converged on the site after the spill was discovered, but it took some time to get ramped up.

The first wave of workers deployed booms in the water to corral the oil slick and placed them along the shoreline to protect ecologically sensitive habitats. Others vacuumed up oil from the site of the pipeline break.

As more crews arrived the next day, they began cleaning the oily sand and rocks on the beach.

"We had people on the ground on day zero — people who were actually physically doing things to prevent the worsening of the spill," said Coast Guard Capt. Jennifer Williams.

Williams said agencies had a playbook to follow including having a cultural monitor on site so workers don't accidentally trample on artifacts.

"You can't simply go to Home Depot and get some buckets. If you do that, you're not doing it the right way," she said.

Rancher Mark Tautrim headed to the beach about 1 mile east of the pipeline break after learning of the spill and was relieved to encounter an unspoiled stretch of surf and sand. But that would soon turn to disappointment — several hours later he returned to the same spot to find what he called "globs and globs of oil."

The following day, Tautrim saw people trying to mop up the beach without protective gear — some were in shorts and flip-flops. He didn't see professional cleanup crews until two to three days after the spill.

"I believe it could have been quicker, but that is me from the outside looking in," he said.

Steve Calanog, deputy on-scene coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the early response.

"It's easy to say it didn't happen fast enough if you don't realize what it takes to respond to an oil spill," he said.

On Friday, about 600 workers were cleaning the beach, the pipeline company said.

There is extensive preparation and planning for potential oil spills along the California coast, where a 1969 oil platform blowout and spill on the same stretch of shoreline helped spawn the modern environmental movement. Plains response plan alone is over 1,000 pages of detailed information on how to quickly and methodically react.

Plains officials and emergency workers had gathered at a fire station near the site on the day of the spill to train for that very emergency.

Plains said in a statement that after the release was confirmed, the company immediately activated its emergency response plan and moved "critical resources" to the scene.

"We train regularly for situations such as this, hoping that they will never happen. However, in a real event, no one is fully satisfied with the speed of response," the company said.

Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats, have called on federal regulators to determine if Plains detected and reported the spill as quickly as possible. "These delays could have exacerbated the extent of the damage to the environment," the senators wrote.

Santa Barbara County Supervisor Salud Carbajal was on the site the morning after the spill, where oil-slicked waves were crashing onshore and rocks were coated with black muck. Looking along a long stretch of beach, he saw a few clusters of workers, numbering about a dozen or so in each group.

"When you consider the gravity of the situation, I did think of whether that was an adequate response or not," Carbajal said.

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NOW WATCH: The oil boom in North Dakota now has a serious sex-trafficking problem

DALLAS (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama signed a disaster declaration late on Friday for areas in Texas hammered by severe weather that killed at least 21 people, caused massive flooding and prompted evacuations this week.

Storms that battered North Texas on Thursday and Friday added more runoff to swollen rivers and prompted hundreds of calls for help in Dallas, where some areas saw up to seven inches (17.8 cm) of rain.

"Communities across the State of Texas have experienced devastating destruction, injury and – most tragically – loss of life due to the major and unceasing severe weather system that has been impacting our state for weeks," said Governor Greg Abbott, who has declared 70 counties disaster areas.

The presidential declaration frees up federal funds to help rebuild. No estimate has been given for the damage in Texas, which has a $1.4 trillion-a-year economy and is the biggest domestic energy provider.

Near Dallas on Friday, thousands of cars were trapped for about six hours on a suburban freeway blocked by floodwaters. The Red Cross distributed Girl Scout cookies and water to stranded motorists.

"I feel like I am on an island and nobody cares," Vanessa Paterson, who was on the highway with her 6-month-old son, told TV station WFAA.

The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch from Central Texas into Missouri, with the additional rain tipping off a new round of flooding.

Dallas officials advised people to go home early and stay off streets that have seen more water than they can handle.

"This would be a great night to stay home, watch a movie and cook some popcorn," Dallas Police Deputy Chief Scott Walton told a news conference.

The mayor of Wharton, about 60 miles (100 km) southwest of Houston, issued a mandatory evacuation order for about 900 people living near the Colorado River, which began flooding into the city on Thursday and has been rising steadily since.

The nearby city of Rosenberg also ordered about 150 residents living near the Brazos River to evacuate by Friday night.

Hundreds of Texans are set to spend the night in shelters after this week's floods turned streets into rivers, ripped homes off their foundations and swept over thousands of vehicles.

The rushing water trapped people in cars and houses. One Dallas-area police officer had to be plucked to safety by a helicopter.

The rainfall for May across the state has already set a new record and more storms were forecast for Texas over the weekend.

The Brazos River, which began overflowing its banks on Wednesday in Parker County about 30 miles (50 km) west of Fort Worth, is expected to see another surge due to recent rains.

"This situation will get worse before it gets better," said Parker County Emergency Management Coordinator George Teague.

(Editing by Sandra Maler and Pravin Char)

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NOW WATCH: The real 'Jurassic World' is in China — 17,000 dinosaur eggs have been found in the same city

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says a new federal rule regulating small streams and wetlands will protect the drinking water of more than 117 million people in the country.

Not so, insist Republicans. They say the rule is a massive government overreach that could even subject puddles and ditches to regulation.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., is promising to "rein in" the government through legislation or other means.

It's a threat with a familiar ring.

What else are Capito and other Republicans pledging to try to block?

— the administration's plan to curb carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants.

— its proposal for stricter limits on smog-forming pollution linked to asthma and respiratory illness

— a separate rule setting the first national standards for waste generated from coal burned for electricity.

The rules are among a host of regulations that majority Republicans have targeted for repeal or delay as they confront President Barack Obama on a second-term priority: his environmental legacy, especially his efforts to reduce the pollution linked to global warming.

WHAT HAS OBAMA PROPOSED?

Last June, Obama rolled out a plan to cut earth-warming pollution from power plants by 30 percent by 2030, setting in motion one of the most significant U.S. actions ever to address global warming. Once completed this summer, the rule will set the first national limits on carbon dioxide from existing power plants, the largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S.

The administration says the rule is expected to raise electricity prices by about 4.9 percent by 2020 and spur a wave of retirements of coal-fired power plants.

The administration also has moved forward on other rules, including the water plan announced last Wednesday. Officials say it will provide much-needed clarity for landowners about which small waterways and tributaries must be protected against pollution and development.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy, said the rule only would affect waters with a "direct and significant" connection to larger bodies of water downstream that already are protected.

The administration has proposed stricter emissions limits on smog-forming pollution linked to asthma and respiratory illness. Rather than settling on a firm new ozone limit, the EPA is proposing a range of allowable ozone levels that cut the existing level but do not go as far as environmental and public health groups want. The rule is expected to be completed later this year.

In December, the administration set the first national standards for waste generated from coal burned for electricity, treating it more like household garbage than a hazardous material. Environmentalists had pushed for the hazardous classification, citing hundreds of cases nationwide in which coal ash waste has tainted waterways or underground aquifers, in many cases legally.

The coal industry wanted the less stringent classification, arguing that coal ash is not dangerous, and that a hazardous label would hinder recycling. About 40 percent of coal ash is reused.

WHAT DO REPUBLICANS SAY ABOUT THE RULES?

GOP lawmakers criticize the rules as anti-business job killers that go further than needed to protect the nation's air and water supplies and other natural resources.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the new water rule will send "landowners, small businesses, farmers and manufacturers on the road to a regulatory and economic hell."

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said Obama and the EPA are "aggressively pushing an extreme and costly regulatory agenda" that will harm the U.S. economy and everyday life of Americans. His committee "continues to pursue legislation to take aim at EPA's costly and harmful regulations," Inhofe said.

WHAT OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE TO CONGRESSIONAL OPPONENTS?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has led the charge against the power plant rule, which he says amounts to a declaration of war against his home state, a longtime leader in coal production.

McConnell wrote the 50 governors in March urging them not to comply with the rule, which requires implementation by the states. McConnell has encouraged legal challenges to the rule and recently announced a new wrinkle, telling the EPA's McCarthy that Congress could block the plan by using an obscure section of the Clean Air Act requiring congressional consent for agreements among states.

"The law reads: 'No such agreement or compact shall be binding or obligatory upon any state ... unless and until it has been approved by Congress,'" McConnell told McCarthy at an April hearing. "Doesn't seem ambivalent to me. I can assure you that as long as I am majority leader of the Senate, this body will not sign off on any backdoor national energy tax."

WHAT'S NEXT?

Obama, McCarthy and officials are not backing down. At the April hearing, McCarthy told McConnell that the EPA guidelines are reasonable and give states "tremendous flexibility."

The EPA will produce a rule "that will withstand the test of time in the courts," McCarthy said.

"You're going to have to prove it in court," McConnell said.

"As we most often do," McCarthy replied.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate will continue to hold hearings on the administration's plans and push bills to block the rules or curb spending on them. The GOP-controlled House passed a bill blocking the EPA water rule on May 12 — two weeks before it was officially announced. Bills to block the power plant rule, ozone limits and coal ash regulation have been filed in both chambers.

"We are going to pursue all avenues," McConnell told The Associated Press. "The solution is not right here (in Congress), it's out there — either in the courts or the governors refusing to file plans."

This week, the EPA is expected to propose regulations to cut greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-duty trucks, cutting millions of tons of carbon dioxide pollution while saving millions of barrels of oil.

EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia said in all its actions, the agency is merely fulfilling its mission to protect the environment.

"Clean air and clean water should not be a political issue," she said. "All sides of the aisle want a clean and safe planet for their children and future generations. We are just doing our jobs — as Congress has directed us, and as courts have affirmed for us — to protect public health and the environment."

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Severe storms in Texas this month have caused at least $27 million in infrastructure damage. Texas transportation officials Sunday said the figure is expected to rise as the state continues to tally damages caused by extreme weather during the past week, the Associated Press reported.

Roadways in 167 of the state's 254 counties suffered some level of storm damage in May, Veronica Beyer, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Transportation, told the AP.

At least 155 roads in Texas were still underwater or closed due to damages Sunday following the series of storms that began Memorial Day weekend, she said.

At least 24 people have died in Texas this week after what National Weather Service forecasters estimate is a 150- to 200-year flood event. Seven others died in Oklahoma, and 13 people were killed in a Mexico-Texas border town.

The tragic deaths and widespread damages come as society grows increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events. In 2014, the world saw 189 natural catastrophes, the highest number ever recorded by Swiss Re, a global reinsurance company. The storms caused more than $100 billion in damage worldwide, particularly in the Asia Pacific region, where Typhoon Haiyan and other disasters devastated broad swaths of the region.

One reason for the increased death tolls and property damage is that more people are moving into hazardous areas, putting more lives and properties squarely in harm's way. In Central Texas -- a region known as "Flash Flood Alley" for its susceptibility to such storms -- cities are growing at a faster clip than in other parts of the country.

A second reason is climate change. As global temperatures rise and weather patterns shift, heavy rains and flash flood events are expected to become more frequent and severe. In coastal cities, rising sea levels are exacerbating the effects of hurricanes and rainstorms, meaning that even weaker storms can cause devastating destruction. 

Given the growing threats, cities and states “have to plan for the potential for more emergency types of events,” Dave Schwartz, a meteorologist with The Weather Channel told International Business Times earlier this week

SEE ALSO: Photos of the devastation caused by massive floods in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico

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NOW WATCH: Mesmerizing chemical reactions are like nothing you've ever seen before

The warming of the earth’s climate has already changed life on its surface in substantial ways. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been monitoring the planet’s cryosphere — water frozen in the forms of ice, snow, glaciers, permafrost, etc. — for the last several decades.

Since their study began in 1979, this frozen water has been steadily melting — especially sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets — and running into the world’s oceans, causing them to rise.

According to the IPCC’s most recent predictions, if the current trajectory continues, as many scientists fear it will, the world’s sea level will rise dramatically, submerging many of world’s current coastlines under more than 200 feet of water.

That future may still be centuries off, but cartographer Jeffrey Linn has already begun to fathom what the world will look like when it arrives. His maps of Seattle (his hometown), Los Angeles and San Diego, Portland, and Vancouver plot the new coastlines that will emerge from the rising waters.

ChinaFile asked Linn to apply the same techniques to China’s coast, where some 43% of its population currently lives. In the maps below, see the shift between the coastal cities’ current coastlines and their contours as the planet’s temperature continues to warm over the course of the 21st century and into the next century.

* * *

Qingdao, the hometown of the ubiquitous Tsingtao Brewery, is a city of more than three and a half million people over 300 miles southeast of Beijing, in Shandong province. A complete melting of the cryosphere would turn nearby mountains into islands and submerge the cities of Jimo (population 70,733) and Chengyang (population 66,588).

Shanghai, with its current population of more than 20 million, would be completely underwater if all of the ice melts, and ocean water would reach miles up the Yangtze river.

The tourist destination island of Hainan is known for its sunny, tropical weather and fine beaches. Its provincial capital faces out across the Qiongzhou Strait to Hai’an Bay. However, most of the city lies below the 200 foot elevation mark. When the ice melts, tourists would need to look for beaches somewhere else.

Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world, due in large part to it being a mountainous island. In 2013, some 36 million visitors came to the island. On China’s southeast coast, Shenzhen is one of the world’s greatest factory cities. A rising sea level will have disastrous effects that we can only imagine when looking at the map below.

The Special Economic Zone that includes Shenzhen has an estimated population of 15 million and is growing fast, while Hong Kong’s population at the end of 2014 was more than 7 million.

The sea rise would dramatically alter the entire Pearl River Delta, where more than 30 million people live.

Sliding between the two maps of Taiwan below, it looks like very little will change. But like many places around the world, most of the population lives near the coast — which means at low elevation.

SEE ALSO: New York is facing its biggest threat ever as waters rise

DON'T MISS: Stunning maps show what major cities would look like under hundreds of feet of water

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NOW WATCH: 5 things in New York City that will disappear as sea levels rise and weather patterns change

While few were looking, California made it a lot easier for water hogs to cover up their excessive use.

A tiny provision tucked into a package of conservation laws allows groundwater pumpers to hide how much they are taking from the ground, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) points out.

The laws are part of the state's attempt to preserve groundwater, an essential resource for farmers in dry years.

Signed into law last year by Gov. Jerry Brown (D), the laws are designed to restrict the amount of groundwater that pumpers can draw so that the water gets a chance to naturally replenish itself. But a small provision called a "confidentiality provision" means that the public will never see exactly how much these pumpers are taking from the ground.

Some advocates, who say the provision decreases the state's accountability and could lead to abuse, are furious.

Yet many farmers and other landowners with access to groundwater were supportive of the provision and, according to CIR, may have helped quietly lobby for it to be included in the law. The bill's authors said that the provision was a compromise designed to keep these constituents happy, CIR reports.

"In essence, this was a battle we didn’t think we could take on," the bill's author, California assemblyman Roger Dickinson (D) told CIR. "So we agreed to keep the confidentiality."

The law keeps in place California's fairly relaxed standards for transparency about water use. Many cities in the state do not disclose individual water use. As City Lab points out, some properties with long-time rights permits to draw water from streams and rivers are also not required to disclose how much water they are drawing and storing.

California's groundwater supply has been severely strained in recent years. Since the drought began in 2012, some California growers have begun to use groundwater for almost half of their crop watering, a percentage that the LA Times notes is far above average. Unlike surface water, which is mostly melted snowpack, groundwater is drawn from aquifers and other naturally-occurring water sources underground. Groundwater can take much longer to replenish than surface water.

Lack of responsibility and transparency for excessive water users has angered some Californians, who have taken to social media to "drought-shame" their neighbors.

According to a recent study by the Public Policy Institute for California, 66% of Californians think their neighbors are using too much water. Many of them might be right: the average Palm Springs resident, for example, uses a whopping 201 gallons of water, more than twice the state average.

Some California cities are also engaging in public drought-shaming. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently released the zip codes with the highest complaints of water abuse.

Some conservationists have argued that making personal water use data available to the public could help decrease personal water use. Over the historic 12-year drought in Australia, for example, Australians reduced their personal water use by 40%, partially due to a government campaign to use public water data to encourage citizens to conserve.

UP NEXT: Devastating photos of California show how bad the drought really is

SEE ALSO: 13 things Californians are doing that waste more water than eating almonds

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NOW WATCH: California could learn a few things about water conservation from this college dorm in Florida

"The Summit," a documenatry that chronicles the deadliest day in K2's history, is now available to stream on Netflix. 

The film, directed by Nick Ryan, attempts to piece together what happend on a single day in 2008, when 11 climbers perished on the second-highest mountain in the world. 

The incident became a major news story that summer, although the details of what happened on that day — and why so many people lost their lives — are still murky.

The movie relies on interviews from survivors and uses footage from the actual climb as well as reenactments filmed in the Alps.

We've compiled a shortened version of the story, told using screenshots from the trailer, but recommend checking out the full documentary. 

Located on the western edge of the Himalayas, K2 is found at the center of the Karakoram Mountain range in northern Pakistan.

K2 is slightly shorter than Everest, but more dangerous to mountaineers because it is more difficult to climb and has notoriously bad weather since it is farther north.

Of the roughly 300 climbers who have reached the top of K2, more than one-quarter of them died on the way down.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A pipeline rupture that spilled an estimated 101,000 gallons of crude oil near Santa Barbara last month occurred along a badly corroded section that had worn away to a fraction of an inch in thickness, federal regulators said Wednesday.

The preliminary findings released by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration point to a possible cause of the May 19 spill that blackened popular beaches with crude oil and created a 9-mile slick in the Pacific Ocean.

The agency said investigators found that corrosion at the break site had degraded the pipe wall thickness to 1/16 of an inch. Additionally, the report noted that the area that failed was close to three repairs that had been made to the pipeline because of corrosion after 2012 inspections.

The findings indicate that over 80 percent of the metal pipe wall had worn away over time because of corrosion, said Richard Kuprewicz, president of Accufacts Inc., which investigates pipeline incidents.

"There is pipe that can survive 80 percent wall loss. When you're over 80 percent, there isn't room for error at that level," Kuprewicz said.

The line where the break occurred is shut down indefinitely.

California's U.S. senators issued a statement last week calling the response insufficient and demanding operator Plains All American Pipeline explain what it did, and when, after firefighters discovered the leak from the company's underground 24-inch pipe.

SEE ALSO: The one thing you need to know to pass a polygraph test

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BRUSSELS/LONDON (Reuters) - The European Union may have to offer its heaviest polluting industries another ten years of free carbon credits to prevent them from leaving the region to do business elsewhere, EU regulators have suggested in a report seen by Reuters.

Ten years ago the EU launched a plan to tackle climate change by asking heavy industry and utilities to pay for every ton of carbon dioxide they produced. After fierce lobbying, it conceded that the heaviest polluters could have free permits.

The so-called Emissions Trading System (ETS) runs until 2020 and it was hoped by environmental campaigners that the next version of it would substantially reduce free allocations to encourage firms to invest in new technology to lower their carbon emissions.

However a document seen by Reuters shows regulators are drafting a new law that will offer free credits covering between 30 and 100 percent of companies' carbon emissions, depending on how likely they are to relocate abroad.

The list of companies entitled to free permits covers sectors including steel and chemicals producers that have been threatening to relocate to areas like the Middle East, which has less stringent emission limits.

"It's almost an insurance policy for the Commission to show it has considered all the options," said Marcus Ferdinand, analyst at Thomson Reuters Point Carbon.

Government officials are meeting in Bonn, Germany, from June 1-11 to work on a global climate deal that countries hope to agreed within six months.

But EU heavy industry argues that any deal is unlikely to make significant requirements of other countries to cut their emissions, and that any change to the EU's existing arrangement would thus disadvantage them.

The document seen by Reuters explores a wide range of factors to assess how to hand out ETS allowances to sectors such as cement, glass and oil refining.

One option breaks emissions intensity down into very high, high, medium and low-carbon, so that industries be entitled to respectively 100 percent, 80 percent, 60 percent and 30 percent free allocation.

Another option is to give all sectors 30 percent of emissions free.

The Commission had hoped to publish draft legislation on reforming the ETS before its summer break that starts in August, but Energy and Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said last week it might not be ready until later.

The assessment will likely go through several revisions as it goes through a number of steps before it can become law. This process could take around two years.

SEE ALSO: Stunning maps show what coastal cities in China would look like under hundreds of feet of water

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NOW WATCH: Bill Nye Reveals Why Climate Change Is So Hard To Stop

It's been almost 10 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast. But the Crescent City, a cultural treasure that’s home to almost 400,000 people, faces even greater risks in the future.

Most of the city is already below sea level, protected by an unreliable system of levees.

Flood risk will grow more severe as rising sea levels and sinking coastal land produce a local increase of at least four feet by the end of the century. And then there's the inevitable increase in major storm surges caused by extreme weather events.

We've created a guide to the crises ahead and the city's best hope for survival.

More than 50% of New Orleans is already below sea level. The only things keeping the city safe are levees and flood walls.

But sea levels are projected to rise by around 4.5 feet this century as global warming causes water to expand and land ice to melt.

Sea levels are rising faster in Louisiana than almost anywhere else due to rapid sinking of marshy coastal land (orange shows land that disappeared between 1937 and 2000).

Renowned physicist and Star Trek screenwriter Leonard Mlodinow has some pretty awe ome predictions about the future, which we got to hear when we caught up with him recently here in New York.

For one, Mlodinow (who, by the way, has co-written a book with Stephen Hawking, written for popular TV shows such as MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation, and currently teaches physics at Cal Tech) thinks we'll all be part of one giant social network in the next 20 years. 

"You’ll probably just have something embedded in you," he told Business Insider , "a microchip of sorts or some interface...and it’s just easier to talk to anyone in the world immediately."

He has some insights on the state of the world now, too, especially on people who say they don't believe in climate change.

"I think they’re totally ignorant. They have no idea how to approach the problem or what the evidence is and probably haven’t read the literature," Mlodinow said. "If they deny the science the science in that area, they should not trust MRI machines or X-rays and they shouldn’t use a cell phone."

Here's a transcript of our whole conversation with Mlodinow, edited lightly for clarity and length.

BUSINESS INSIDER: To the casual observer, you have an incredibly varied history.

LEONARD MLODINOW: I became a physicist, worked in academic physics as faculty at Cal tech, and went into writing for Hollywood, went into computer games, and went into writing books and teaching at Caltech again.

BI: How did you end up as a screenwriter for "Star Trek: The Next Generation?"

LM: Well, I got that job because they’d read something I’d written for MacGyver and they liked it and they hired me. When I was as Caltech I started writing screenplays. I used to write short stories just for fun. And when I got the job at Caltech, having come from Northern California — where people are rather prejudiced against Southern California — I was too. And I’m thinking, ‘What will I do in Southern California? If I go there I’m gonna write screenplays to see what happens. And I started knocking on doors and I quit doing physics and got an apartment in Hollywood and started writing and got a really crappy job for a really crappy show, but I lived off writing for that show for a while, and it got better and I got an agent and a better show and just climbed my way up. 

BI: You’ve cowritten a book with Stephen Hawking. He says in the next 100 years computers will be smarter than humans and surpass us in artificial intelligence. What do you think?

LM: It’s possible — I wouldn’t say it’s outrageous. I wouldn’t think that neither he nor I knows, and neither of us will be around in the next 100 years to be disproved.

I guess I should remind you that he said in the 1980’s that by the end of the century, we would solve all of physics. We would have the unified theory of everything. And in 2005 I was talking to him and I brought that up and I said, ‘What do you think now?’ And he said, ‘I still think by the end of the century we’re gonna have everything solved.’ So, he seems to think that by the end of the century, whatever century you’re in, everything will be done. And if it isn’t, then he says the same thing again when the next century starts. Knowing him, he might be around next century.

But I think that the kind of computers we’ve built today are in general nothing like how the brain works. The brain is a massively paralleled processor and we are starting to use parallel processing and they used that in the LHC [Large Hadron Collider) to analyze the data. But, I don’t know. There’s a long way to go, it’s a long time, and people are working on the problem.

Who will ever know? How do you even judge? A computer is much different from a brain. Are we going to have something with like 86 billion transistors that are each connected to a thousand or ten thousand other ones? Probably not quite like that. How will we know? I don’t think the Turing test is a really good way of answering that question. It’ll be a different kind of intelligence.

BI: In your mind, what will society look like in the next 20 years? The next 100 years?

LM: In the next 100 years, I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone does, so if they tell you, they’re just making it up. In the next 20 years, I can look back to 1995 and I can take that difference and then move it forward. I feel like the explosion of mass communication will continue and we will be even more connected and easily connected to other people than we are today without having to carry around these devices. Information is very fluid and easy to access — what we’ll do with that, I don’t know. I think that’s the next step, because you can drown in that information and also a lot of the information floating about is false — it’s wrong information so I think those are the challenges to be able to do something constructive with it and be able to tell what’s right from wrong.

Our social networking is exploding. We can be in contact with so many more people than years ago. In 20 years, you’ll probably just have something embedded in you  — a microchip of sorts or some interface and it’s just easier to talk to anyone in the world immediately. I think we’re all going to be one giant network.

 BI: In your new book The Upright Thinkers you examine how humans have evolved to where they are today. What drives us as human beings to continue exploring the world around us?

LM: That, I think, is a fundamental part of our nature. It’s a kind of curiosity about where we fit in. What is the world? How does it work and how do we fit in? It’s something that you can see in very young infants, and you can see it in all cultures and it’s a fundamental quality of being human.

BI: Can science and religion — or spirituality, as some would call it, be reconciled?

LM: I think that this dichotomy is something that is fairly recent. First of all, when the brain evolved to have the capacity to ask such questions, to understand abstractions, and to be curious, one of the first things we started doing was asking these spiritual questions. Humans used to live as nomads wandering around and leaving their sick behind to die and leaving the bodies behind, because they couldn’t carry them with. 

And then the first human settlements in the Agricultural Revolution, where we domesticated plants and animals and started living in one place, was really driven by these spiritual questions and the desire to be near our departed loved ones. And that’s where we really started to ask questions about the world around us. In fact, chemistry came from embalming people trying to preserve the bodies, and so science grew out of those spiritual questions. The first scientists were doing science to try to get closer to God.

The first scientists were doing science to try to get closer to God.

Robert Boyle — the chemist, Newton — the physicist, Darwin. People misunderstand them. They started making their investigations as a way of understanding God’s plan for the world, so that was all part of it until very recently.

Certainly since Darwin, there have been people who have opposed ideas based on religious fundamentalism, but Darwin for instance was able to reconcile. He was a religious man, and he was able to reconcile evolution with religion. He didn’t have a problem with that. He just said, ‘Well, God put everything on the Earth in a certain habitat with a plan that would evolve and that’s what’s happening.’ He eventually became an atheist — it’s when his daughter died at age 10 that he lost his faith in God.

BI: You’ve explored the concept of randomness in the past. In your opinion, are humans in control of their own destinies or are they puppets in a play, so to speak?

LM: Well, puppets implies that something else is controlling you, and I think it’s neither. We certainly have the experience or feeling of controlling our own behavior.

Whether some being with infinite or extreme intelligence or data on the state of our bodies could predict what we are going to do beforehand because it’s predetermined by the laws of nature — maybe that’s true. I don’t believe in free will, literally. 

I don’t believe in free will, literally. 

I believe that the laws of nature govern your actions. On some level, what you’re doing is not your choice but it’s governed by the state of your body right now. But we have no way of knowing that. It’s far too complex. 

BI: What are your thoughts on the fact that a lot of people in this country do not believe in evolution?

LM: They’re misguided. I think it’s destructive. It’s not only evolution — it’s people who don’t accept or respect science, and make uninformed judgments about a lot of political and medical issues. These are important issues, and I feel it’s unfortunate that we have people like that in this country. 

BI: There are people that argue that climate change is part of the natural cycle, as opposed to it being man-made, what are your thoughts on that?

LM: I think they’re totally ignorant. They have no idea how to approach the problem or what the evidence is and probably haven’t read the literature and that there are thousands of scientists who have been studying this for years and are experts and devote their lives to it.

To dismiss them because you happen to have a different opinion as if one could look at the weather report and understand global climate change is arrogant and ignorant. Among climate scientists, a fraction don’t accept it, so I think it’s been definitively proven using methods of modern science — the same methods that bring us airplanes and GPS systems and lasers and MRI machines that these people all use. If they deny the science the science in that area, they should not trust MRI machines or X-rays and they shouldn’t use a cell phone. They don’t get vaccinated either, I assume.

BI: Are there other forms of life out there in the universe?

LM: We have no evidence that there is, and we can’t even theoretically say what the chances are, because we found a lot of stars that are like the sun, and a lot of planets that exist in the habitable zone.

So there’s certainly the raw materials for aliens and for intelligent life.

We know that once you have some form of life, like a bacteria, that it can evolve to intelligent life, but we still don’t know how to explain the first creation of DNA, RNA, or the macromolecules of basic life — how they came into being. People are getting closer and closer to understanding that, but we don’t really know. This is one thing I have faith in, that I have intuition that there is, but from the scientific point of view you can’t say.

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Since it's World Environment Day, billionaire entrepreneur and explorer Sir Richard Branson shared some incredible photos from his adventures in the ocean. 

One of the photos shows Branson swimming with a massive whale shark. Another shows him bravely kneeling next to a tiger shark. They're pretty incredible. 

Check them out! 

SEE ALSO: The 25 most absurd photos of eccentric billionaire Richard Branson

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NOW WATCH: Forget the Apple Watch — here's the new watch everyone on Wall Street wants

You can squeeze and compress water all you want, and under normal conditions its volume won’t budge.

But if you heat up water, its volume expands — and it's precisely this effect, which is playing out in Earth’s oceans, that's helping flood coastal cities like New Orleans.

Water is weird. It’s one of the only liquids that expands as it freezes, at 0 degrees Celsius, yet contracts as you warm it up to 4 C. (This is why water ice floats while most other types of ice sink.)

But if you warm up water beyond 4 C, the molecules violently push on one another, expanding the total volume of liquid and making it take up more space.

Earth’s surface has warmed by about 0.8 degrees C on average since 1880, soon after the industrial revolution kicked off.

This increase doesn’t sound like much, explains NASA Earth Observatory, but it has major consequences:

A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all the oceans, atmosphere, and land by that much. In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age. A five-degree drop was enough to bury a large part of North America under a towering mass of ice 20,000 years ago.

And our world is under going some extensive warming, especially in the northern pole:

The Earth’s oceans are especially at risk — they have responded to this increase by soaking up more and more heat as global temperatures climb:

And since water expands when heated, this excess heat absorption has expanded the volume of Earth’s oceans.

As of right now, this volume increase by only a mere fraction of a percent of the ocean's original volume.

Yet applied to even part of the planet's 335 million cubic miles of water, e.g. surface waters, this increase adds up to significant sea level rise — on top of increased water runoff from the world's melting ice reserves. 

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, sea levels rose about 8 inches from 1880 to 2009, with thermal expansion as the predominant cause.

Again, this doesn’t sound like much — but any increase gives storm surges that much of a leg up to overwhelm coastal marshes, topple levees, and cause damage deeper and deeper inland.

This is a simplistic illustration of what that looks like for coastal cities, but it's a dangerous scenario:

What’s more, the rate of sea level rise is only accelerating as oceans soak up more heat, expand, and icebergs and glaciers continue to melt.

Earth is maddeningly dynamic— especially the oceans. That’s partly why it takes so long to reveal these trends in the first place; you have to take measurements over long periods of time to see the trends.

To that end, researchers are still uncertain about the interplay of surface water and deep-ocean warming. But it’s a given that if the planet keeps warming, as it’s on track to, and oceans continue to soak up heat, vulnerable coastal cities like New Orleans are in a heap of trouble.

SEE ALSO: New Orleans could be wiped off the map later this century

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows what would happen to China if all the Earth's ice melted