An unlucky turtle caught a break last month when a team of biologists saved it from certain death.

The team was researching turtles off the pacific coast of Costa Rica but got more than it bargained for when it brought a grown male olive ridley sea turtle on board.

If you look closely, you can see that the turtle had something lodged in its left nostril:

At first, the team thought it was a worm of some kind that had burrowed its way deep into the turtle's skull and had possibly attached itself to the brain stem.

But after a few minutes, the team quickly discovered that it was something entirely different.

"We — just out of biological curiosity — started pulling on it to see what it was," Christine Figgener, a graduate student at Texas A&M who is studying marine biology, told The Battalion, the Texas A&M student newspaper. "And what we noticed was that it was not some sort of animal but actually something that was made out of plastic."

After nearly 10 minutes of careful tugging, one of the team members pulled out a 10- to 12-inch-long plastic drinking straw from the turtle's bleeding nostril.

Figgener recorded the struggle and uploaded it to YouTube shortly after. It quickly went viral, accruing more than 200,000 views in under 48 hours, and it has since passed 4.9 million views.

"For the turtle, the wound would have been fatal had we left the plastic inside its nostril," Figgener told The Battalion.

Figgener said the straw had lodged itself inside of the nasal cavity, making it incredibly difficult for the turtle to breathe or smell. The team suspects that the turtle had first swallowed the straw and then later tried to regurgitate it.

But instead of traveling up through the turtle's esophagus and out its mouth, the straw slid into the turtle's nasal cavity, which connects to sea turtles' mouths through their palate the way humans' do. (This is why, when we laugh too hard after taking a drink, the liquid sometimes comes shooting out of our nostrils.)

"This is the reason why we do not need plastic straws," Figgener said in the video.

A tough decision

It's not clear how long the straw had been stuck inside the turtle's nose. What is clear is that if the team had not intervened, the straw would most likely have remained with the turtle until the turtle died.

The footage of the procedure (provided at the end of this post) is not for the faint of heart — the turtle is clearly in pain during the removal of the straw, but there was little the team could do about that.

When the biologists first came upon the turtle, they faced a tough decision: Their research permit — which included collecting skin biopsies for genetic studies — did not allow them to transport any turtles they caught away from their natural habitat. The team had to release the turtles back into the wild after getting what it needed.

So, if the team had brought the suffering turtle ashore for an X-ray and expert help, it would have suffered a penalty that, as it described on YouTube, could have included "up to time in jail."

After some debate, the biologists said, they decided to use the only tool on board — a Swiss army knife — to first investigate what the obstruction was, and then — after discovering it was man-made — were set on removing it, despite the turtle's hissing and bleeding nostril.

"We disinfected the air passageway with iodine and kept the turtle for observation before releasing him back into the wild," the team reported on YouTube. "The bleeding stopped pretty much immediately after the removal of the straw."

Check out the full video on YouTube (at your own risk):

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NOW WATCH: Marine biologist explains why the pro surfer attacked by a shark didn't actually get bit

Call it a temporary fix.

In the two weeks leading up to a much-anticipated military parade on Thursday — a spectacle celebrating 70 years since Japan's surrender in World War II — Beijing's notoriously polluted skies were clear and blue.

Less than a day after the event, however, the smog was back in force, and residents on Friday awoke to the familiar sight and smell of gray smog in the Chinese capital.

The sudden shift has left residents "less than thrilled" by the idea that authorities will only clean up the city during big events, the Los Angeles Times reported. It also highlights the challenges Beijing faces in achieving and maintaining its goals to significantly reduce carbon usage ahead of a December international climate change conference in Paris.

"The 'parade blue' was gone in an instant, like a piece of magic," posted a user on Chinese social media site Weibo, according to the South China Morning Post. "I've got used to the beautiful blue skies and suddenly feel a sense of insecurity."

Ahead of the parade, officials suspended or restricted operations in about 10,000 factories and 40,000 construction sites in Beijing and neighboring provinces, and restricted the city's 5 million vehicles to driving every other day, according to Chinese news agency Caixin. The measures took effect in late August and ushered in a 15-day stretch of relatively clear air.

The result: Beijing residents and visitors were treated to "parade blue" skies on Sept. 3, during which the city's air quality index— a widely accepted gauge for measuring the health risks in air — clocked in at a healthy 17 out of 500, according to the LA Times. Levels of PM2.5, particulate matter considered extremely dangerous to human health, dropped to record low concentrations for eight straight days.

"For 15 days, residents have experienced good air quality," said Zhang Dawei, director of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center, to China Daily. "It was as good as the annual index in some metropolises in developed countries, such as Paris, London, Moscow and Singapore."

The government eased the restrictions at midnight following the parade. By Friday, the air quality index was up to nearly 160 in parts of the city, and the smog had returned.

The world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China's coal use has escalated as its economy has boomed. In 2013, the country was responsible for 29 percent of the world's carbon emissions, The Christian Science Monitor reported in July.

"But public concern about air pollution has pushed China to cut its use of coal, which fell nearly 3 percent in 2014, the first drop in more than a decade.

The sudden decline has led some analysts to speculate that China's carbon emissions could peak sooner than 2030. Many argue the proposed steps still fall short of what the country could and should achieve.

Fuqiang Yang, a senior adviser on climate change and energy policy in Beijing for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says it's "highly possible" for emissions to stop rising as early as 2025."

Beijing's switch from smoggy to clear and back again, however, is not new: Authorities achieved a similar transformation last autumn, when China hosted the high-profile Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Residents described the sky then as "APEC blue"— a phrase some now associate, in jest, with short-lived relationships, CNN reported.

Others took a more serious approach, weighing the costs of economic development against damage to the environment.

"Military Parade Blue is gone; in its place is our 'Normal Status Gray,' " one Weibo user wrote, according to The New York Times. "Residents in Beijing will start cursing again. Do we want development? Or do we want the environment? This all shows that the pollution is caused by human activities, and that it's possible to control."

RELATED: China's air is so bad breathing it is like smoking 40 cigarettes a day in some areas

NEXT: Slimy green algae is taking over China's beaches for an alarming reason

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NOW WATCH: 4,000 people in China die every day from air pollution

About 97% of scientists agree not only that climate change is real, but also that human activity, like driving a fossil fuel-burning car, is making it worse.

That agreement stems from nearly 4,000 studies that suggest humans are culpable, compared to only about 80 that say we have nothing to do with the problem.

Those numbers should leave us pretty confident that humans are indeed fueling climate change. However, you could argue there's a (really) small chance those 2% of studies actually have it right.

So, a team of seven climate scientists and meteorologists decided to give climate contrarians the benefit of the doubt, picked half of their more popular studies, and tried to redo them. (The hallmark of a good scientific paper is that it's reproducible, meaning another scientist can do the same experiment and get the same or similar results.)

What happened? Beyond being unable to replicate most of the results, the team discovered major flaws in the papers. In fact, many papers left out essential data, and some even ignored basic physics.

Dana Nuccitelli, one of the scientists who helped analyze the climate denier papers for the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, summed up what his team found in a blog post for The Guardian.

Below are the three biggest, most common problems Nuccitelli and the team found with the small minority of studies that dispute human involvement in climate change.

Climate change deniers cherry-pick the data

Nuccitelli and his colleagues examined 38 widely referenced papers that dispute human involvement in climate change. The team learned that these papers often ignored critical background information or left out big sets of climate data.

In one example, the authors of a 2011 paper tried to show the lunar and solar cycle are responsible for climate change, but they ignored 6,000 years' worth of data that didn't jibe with their idea. Nuccitelli summed up the issues well in his post for The Guardian:

When we tried to reproduce their model of the lunar and solar influence on the climate, we found that the model only simulated their temperature data reasonably accurately for the 4,000-year period they considered. However, for the 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data they threw out, their model couldn’t reproduce the temperature changes. The authors argued that their model could be used to forecast future climate changes, but there’s no reason to trust a model forecast if it can’t accurately reproduce the past.

That 2011 study wasn't alone. Cherry-picking or downright manipulating data to get a desired result — no evidence of human-caused climate change — was the most common flaw among the climate denier papers examined by the team.

Climate change deniers ignore basic scientific facts

While most papers misconstrued or left out data, some simply ignored core scientific facts.

A handful of papers blamed climate change on the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, but the researchers didn't offer any explanation for how that would be possible in the first place.

Other studies argued the greenhouse gases that fuel climate change, including carbon dioxide, don't drive global warming much beyond a particular saturation point — which would let humans off the hook for adding more and more to the atmosphere. However, that idea was disproved as far back as the early 1900s.

Climate change deniers can't agree on an alternative theory

While 97% of experts agree that humans are worsening climate change, the other 3% couldn't settle on an alternative explanation. Here's Nuccitelli again:

[T]he 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.

The researchers say science is constantly evolving and changing, so no area of research is ever really "finished." However, science is based on evidence. Enough evidence leads to a theory, and a theory survives when it is tested over and over again and the evidence continues to support it. Then the scientific community comes to a consensus on that theory.

That's how 97% of experts came to agree on the theory that climate change is fueled by human activity, a conclusion that's been over a century in the making.

And right now there is no compelling evidence and no clear theory for an alternative to human-caused climate change, Nuccitelli concludes in his blog post.

Join the conversation about this story »

About 97% of scientists agree not only that climate change is real, but also that human activity, like driving a fossil fuel-burning car, is making it worse.

That agreement stems from nearly 4,000 studies that suggest humans are culpable, compared to only about 80 that say we have nothing to do with the problem.

Those numbers should leave us pretty confident that humans are indeed fueling climate change. However, you could argue there's a (really) small chance those 2% of studies actually have it right.

So, a team of seven climate scientists and meteorologists decided to give climate contrarians the benefit of the doubt, picked half of their more popular studies, and tried to redo them. (The hallmark of a good scientific paper is that it's reproducible, meaning another scientist can do the same experiment and get the same or similar results.)

What happened? Beyond being unable to replicate most of the results, the team discovered major flaws in the papers. In fact, many papers left out essential data, and some even ignored basic physics.

Dana Nuccitelli, one of the scientists who helped analyze the climate denier papers for the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, summed up what his team found in a blog post for The Guardian.

Below are the three biggest, most common problems Nuccitelli and the team found with the small minority of studies that dispute human involvement in climate change.

Climate change deniers cherry-pick the data

Nuccitelli and his colleagues examined 38 widely referenced papers that dispute human involvement in climate change. The team learned that these papers often ignored critical background information or left out big sets of climate data.

In one example, the authors of a 2011 paper tried to show the lunar and solar cycle are responsible for climate change, but they ignored 6,000 years' worth of data that didn't jibe with their idea. Nuccitelli summed up the issues well in his post for The Guardian:

When we tried to reproduce their model of the lunar and solar influence on the climate, we found that the model only simulated their temperature data reasonably accurately for the 4,000-year period they considered. However, for the 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data they threw out, their model couldn’t reproduce the temperature changes. The authors argued that their model could be used to forecast future climate changes, but there’s no reason to trust a model forecast if it can’t accurately reproduce the past.

That 2011 study wasn't alone. Cherry-picking or downright manipulating data to get a desired result — no evidence of human-caused climate change — was the most common flaw among the climate denier papers examined by the team.

Climate change deniers ignore basic scientific facts

While most papers misconstrued or left out data, some simply ignored core scientific facts.

A handful of papers blamed climate change on the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, but the researchers didn't offer any explanation for how that would be possible in the first place.

Other studies argued the greenhouse gases that fuel climate change, including carbon dioxide, don't drive global warming much beyond a particular saturation point — which would let humans off the hook for adding more and more to the atmosphere. However, that idea was disproved as far back as the early 1900s.

Climate change deniers can't agree on an alternative theory

While 97% of experts agree that humans are worsening climate change, the other 3% couldn't settle on an alternative explanation. Here's Nuccitelli again:

[T]he 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.

The researchers say science is constantly evolving and changing, so no area of research is ever really "finished." However, science is based on evidence. Enough evidence leads to a theory, and a theory survives when it is tested over and over again and the evidence continues to support it. Then the scientific community comes to a consensus on that theory.

That's how 97% of experts came to agree on the theory that climate change is fueled by human activity, a conclusion that's been over a century in the making.

And right now there is no compelling evidence and no clear theory for an alternative to human-caused climate change, Nuccitelli concludes in his blog post.

Join the conversation about this story »

The air we breathe is not as clean as it once was — and in many cases, it is getting worse.

According to a recent study by researchers at UC Berkeley, smog kills about 4,000 people every day in China. And in the US about 4 in 10 people live in counties that have unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution, according to the American Lung Association. 

To help clean up our air and make it breathable again, Danish designer Daan Roosegaarde created a 23-foot tall air purifier called the Smog Free Tower. The tower-like device essentially sucks up smog like a vacuum from the top and then releases the filtered air through its six-sided vents. It can clean more than 30,000 cubic meters of air per hour and runs on 1,400 watts of green energy.

The project, which was funded on Kickstarter, took Roosegaarde about three years of research and development, but he is finally showing off the prototype of his giant air purifier this week at in Rotterdam. According to Roosegaarde’s website, the air purifier was specifically created to be used in public parks.

Roosegaarde describes how the tower works on its Kickstarter page:

“By charging the Smog Free Tower with a small positive current, an electrode will send positive ions into the air. These ions will attach themselves to fine dust particles. A negatively charged surface — the counter electrode — will then draw the positive ions in, together with the fine dust particles. The fine dust that would normally harm us, is collected together with the ions and stored inside of the tower. This technology manages to capture ultra-fine smog particles which regular filter systems fail to do.”

But the well-designed air purifier doesn’t just clean up smog, it can also be used to make fine jewelry.

The fine carbon particles that the tower collects can be condensed to create tiny “gem stones” that can be embedded in jewelry pieces like rings and cufflinks. Each of the tiny stones is the equivalent of 1,000 cubic meters of air.

While the prototype is currently in Rotterdam, Roosegaarde aims to eventually roll out other models in Beijing, Mexico City, Paris and Los Angeles.

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U.S. shark researchers caught and tagged 2,835 sharks along the East Coast this spring, a record number which they say reflects a growing population thanks to federal protections.

It surpassed the 1,831 sharks captured and tagged in 2012 during the survey which is conducted every three years by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The numbers have increased in each survey since 2001, and point to steady population gains, NOAA spokeswoman Shelley Dawicki said.

The increased shark count comes in the wake of a spate of shark attacks on swimmers this summer off the coast of Florida and the Carolinas, though researchers say the annual trend is about normal.

Sharks were on the decline in 1986 when the first survey took place during a worldwide boom in commercial sharkfin fisheries to feed Asian markets.

U.S. protections for sharks in a fishery management plan went into effect in 1993. The plan banned fishing for certain sharks and limited fishing seasons for others, among other rules.

"I think that's what turned it around - effective management. Just the decrease in fishing pressure on these species has helped quite a bit," said Lisa Natanson, a scientist who leads the survey at the Narragansett Laboratory of NOAA Fisheries' Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

The survey, which takes place in April and May, begins off the coast of Florida where sharks spend the winter and spring and follows their migration route to Delaware as waters warm. This year and last, bad weather ended the survey in North Carolina.

Since 1996, each survey has been conducted in same manner, including use of the same bait and gear, Natanson said. The researchers note the age, sex, size and location of the sharks they encounter during tagging.

The survey allows researchers to collect data immediately, as well as years later when a tagged shark is inadvertently caught in fishing gear.

The NOAA survey is the longest running coastal shark research survey along the East Coast, but many other shark tagging programs add to research data, Natanson said.

NOAA's Cooperative Shark Tagging Program involves 7,000 volunteer commercial and recreational anglers who tag sharks on the Gulf and Atlantic in North America and Europe.

A tagging and tracking project for mako sharks at the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University since 2009 has been following the sharks migratory behavior.

(Editing by David Adams and Sandra Maler)

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Typhoon Etau has hit Japan, bringing with it torrential downpours and severe flooding across vast parts of the country.

Over the past two days, more than 100,000 people have been ordered to evacuate their homes after up 60 centimeters (2 feet) of rain fell in under 48 hours, AFP reports.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a meeting of ministers the rain was "unprecedented,"according to Reuters, which said it was a 50-year flood, or a flood that has a 2% chance of happening in any given year.

Towns and villages are being destroyed as houses are ripped out of their foundations and carried away. But that's not the only danger. Drainage pumps at the Fukushima nuclear plant have been unable to handle hundreds of tons of contaminated water, which is flowing into the ocean.

Reuters has documented the disaster with these devastating images of the scenes.

The floods have devastated parts of Japan. More than 100,000 people across the country have been told to leave their homes, but the prefecture of Tochigi has been one of the worst hit areas, with more than 60,000 people being evacuated.

One of the biggest dangers is the displacement of water contaminated by the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011, the largest nuclear disaster since the one at Chernobyl in 1986.

Hundreds of tons of radiation-rich waters are flowing toward the ocean as the site's drainage pumps have become overwhelmed by the downpour. The water was used to cool the nuclear reactors when they went into nuclear meltdown after the tsunami in 2011, which damaged the plant and similarly devastated large areas of the country.

Three years ago, Boyan Slat was a precocious 18-year-old on a TEDx stage in the Netherlands, eloquently introducing people to his radical idea to clean up the ocean. He would build a network of floating walls that would work with the oceans' currents to catch the millions — maybe even trillions— of tons of plastic waste. The motion of the ocean would essentially make it self-cleaning.

Coming from a kid not even in his 20s, the idea was impressive, and the video of his talk quickly went viral. But his idea was just that: an idea.

Now 20, Slat is the founder and CEO of the organization The Ocean Cleanup, and his "idea" just earned him a $152,700 Index Award, given to entrepreneurs with bold solutions to the world's toughest problems. Together with his team of researchers and engineers, Slat is planning to build a 62-mile-long trash-catching system in the Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and California. The apparatus will be deployed in 2020, The Huffington Post reports, and will be the world's longest floating structure in the ocean, with barriers spanning more than 6,500 feet.

"It will be one of the largest environmental operations yet, but we created this mess," Slat said in his TEDx talk back in 2012.

Shaped like a V to funnel plastic waste toward the center, the barriers would sit along the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a "vortex" of trash bounded together by circular ocean currents known as gyres. The walls will be attached to the seabed 3 miles beneath the surface. The current will flow underneath the wall, letting sea life through. Lighter-than-water plastics will get trapped, then collected and recycled.

The organization recently completed a month-long "mega expedition" studying the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it hopes to pilot testing a 1-mile barrier off the coast of Japan next year.​ The 62-mile wall could potentially clean up half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 10 years.

While Slat's initial talk garnered a lot interest — enough to eventually raise $2 million for his project — it also attracted critics who say the idea isn't feasible. It would be challenging to anchor something that large, oceanographer Kim Martini wrote, adding that she wasn't convinced the system would avoid any bycatch of sea life. Stiv Wilson, then the policy director of the nonprofit 5 Gyres, called Slat's idea a "fool's errand," saying gyre cleanup was not a realistic strategy, given the sheer size of the oceans. Plastic, Wilson wrote, isn't just contained within the gyres' borders.

In fact, many experts agree that the solution to ocean pollution starts on land. Nonprofits have been trying to prevent more trash from entering the ocean by working with businesses and individuals. The Ocean Conservancy, for example, started a "Trash Free Sea" alliance, where companies including Coca-Cola and Nestle commit to making their products ocean-friendly. The organization has also mobilized the world's largest volunteer effort to clean up trash along different coasts around the globe.

Plus, there is already technology in use that has shown promise. Last year, Baltimore quietly installed a solar-powered water wheel in the popular Inner Harbor. The wheel lifts garbage out of the water and into a dumpster barge via a conveyor belt.

The industrial designer James Dyson has suggested his company’s vacuuming technology can also play a role. In 2014, he revealed his concept for the M.V. Recyclone, a vessel that will vacuum up debris from waterways.

None of this deterred Slat from moving his project forward, however. He wrote off the criticism — in a 530-page feasibility study he conducted with a hundred colleagues addressing his critics’ concerns. It took more than a year, and results showed that his plan actually could work (though some, like Martini, remain unconvinced).

In a June 2014 talk detailing the results, Slat said his team hadn't found "a single reason" it couldn't be done.

"We can only conclude," he said, "that it could be done; it's feasible."

SEE ALSO: Here's what would happen if we burned all the fossil fuels on Earth

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It rains a lot in Singapore — approximately 94 inches a year.

But rather than let that water evaporate wastefully on the streets and sidewalks, Singapore sets a standard the rest of the world would be smart to adopt: The city-state soaks up water like a giant sponge.

By recycling the rainwater through built-in runoff capture systems, Singapore can reduce both the costs of water purification and its environmental impact.

Scientists believe our global water crisis is only getting worse. By 2025, two-thirds of the world population will struggle to find water and 1.8 billion people won't have any at all.

Using recycled water could be a solution.

In China, roughly a dozen cities have started brainstorming what that might look like — turning so-called "grey infrastructure" into green infrastructure by adding the ability to store rainwater. Mostly, these plans address rampant flooding that could quickly clear small towns and villages.

But no country has such a robust system already in place as Singapore, where half the land area is equipped to capture rainwater in gutters, barrels, tanks, and reservoirs.

The most sophisticated of those systems is at the Changi Airport. Between 28 and 33% of all water used in the airport comes from captured rainwater, which is stored in two reservoirs.

One reservoir balances the flow of water when tides are high, while the other collects runoffs from runways and green areas.

Each year, the infrastructure saves the airport more than $275,000 for non-potable uses, like flushing toilets and performing firefighting drills.

Scattered elsewhere around Singapore are capture systems on top of high-rise apartment buildings, in which 86% of citizens call home.

Rooftop harvesting equipment saves roughly 14 cents per cubic meter of water over relying on nearby rivers and streams or purifying water that flows through soil.

When the rainwater isn't collecting on roofs, it's soaking into the urban environment at-large.

There's a fascinating backstory to Singapore's urban sponge scheme.

In the mid 1980s, Singapore's crisis of clean water got so bad that the country had no choice but to get creative. While it had plenty of rainwater, it had no way of capturing it. Water would mix with soil and other contaminants making it unfit for use. So, in 1986 Singapore took the first step in water conservation, creating the the Sungei Seletar-Bedok water scheme.

The existing Seletar Reservoir was dammed to divide it in half. The separation essentially allowed polluted runoff water to collect elsewhere, in the Bedok reservoir, which was designed for treatment, while the cleaner part of the storm water collected in newly created Lower Seletar Reservoir.

In the decades since, Singapore has transformed its culture into one that prizes its ability to reuse rainwater. Even residents in the outskirts have transformed their homes into capture systems as a means of watering their lawns or, with the right treatment, staying hydrated.

If other countries want to have any hope of avoiding a water crisis, they'll need to get as creative as Singapore. 

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The evidence of a warming planet is all around us.

One place that makes this startlingly clear is California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, where the current snowpack is at the lowest it has been for 500 years, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The shrinking snow levels, linked to the state's devastating drought, will likely take a toll on the water supplies of farms and cities, reduce the amount of hydroelectric power available, and make wildfires more likely, according to the study's researchers.

Here are some photos that reveal the extent of the problem in stark but stunning beauty.

CHECK OUT: Remarkable before-and-after photos make it undeniably clear we're ruining our planet

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California is in the midst of a record drought that started in 2012, causing authorities to restrict water use across the state for the first time. The drought's severity is especially clear in the Sierra Nevada (pictured here), where the snowpack April 1 was just 5% of its historical average.

California gets 80% of its precipitation during winter, and the Sierra Nevada snowpack plays a vital role, providing 30% of the state's water supply.

In the new study, scientists pieced together the April 1 snowpack conditions over the entire 400-mile Sierra Nevada range for the past 500 years. They chose April because that's when snow in the Sierra starts to melt due to increased rain and higher temperatures.

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Now you see them, soon you won't.

Almost half of all populations of marine animals with a backbone have declined in just 40 years, according to a report released Tuesday by the World Wildlife Fund.

Not only that, but nearly a third of the world's fish stocks are being overfished, and three-quarters of the world's reefs are threatened by global warming and ocean acidification.

If these trends continue, all coral reefs could be gone by 2050, the researchers said.

A disturbing trend

A report last year on trends in worldwide animal populations, known as the Living Planet Index, saw a 52% decline in the world's vertebrates from 1970 to 2010.

Now, scientists have compiled a similar report for marine species and found a picture that's similarly bleak. We've lost 49% of these populations — just about half of all the animals with backbones in our oceans — from 1970 to 2012.

The sharpest decline occurred between 1970 and the mid-1980s, then marine vertebrate populations were stable for a while. But more recently, these populations have been falling again, largely due to human activities, as the chart below shows:

But ocean vertebrates have fared better in some parts of the world than others. Their populations have been increasing from previously low levels in northern latitudes such as the Arctic, but falling in tropical and subtropical regions, such as Fiji.

Fish are among some of the hardest-hit species, the report found. A group of fish that includes tuna, mackerel, and bonito has declined by nearly 75% over the past 40 years.

In addition, about one in four species of sharks, rays, and skates are currently threatened with extinction, primarily as a result of overfishing.

Time to act

According to the report, the decline in ocean life is primarily driven by human activities, including overfishing, habitat destruction, and climate change. This is bad news for the 3 billion people who depend on fish as a major source of protein.

More than a quarter of all marine species live in coral reefs, and yet they cover less than 0.1% of the ocean — an area about half the size of France. About 850 million people benefit economically, socially, and culturally from these reefs.

Many marine ecosystems are interconnected, so what happens to one group of species also affects many others, the researchers said.

Fortunately, there's still time to act.

"The good news is there are abundant opportunities to reverse these trends," Brad Ack, senior vice president for oceans at WWF, said in a statement.

The report outlined several solutions to the problems, such as protecting marine habitats, managing and improving fishing practices, and directing more funding to these efforts.

There may be an opportunity to act later this month, when world leaders converge on New York to discuss the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

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Even for a nation known for eye-popping rates of urbanization, what has happened along China’s Pearl River Delta (Zhu San Jiao) over the past few decades is extraordinary.

In 1988, an interlacing network of rivers and streams flowed through fertile alluvial soils full of rice paddies, wheat fields, mulberry orchards, and fish ponds.

At that time, the region was mostly rural, with a population of roughly 10 million people scattered between several medium-sized cities, including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Foshan, and Dongguan.

Nearly three decades later, these cities have grown so rapidly that they have merged into an interconnected megalopolis with a population (42 million) greater than that of Australia, Argentina, or Canada.

The satellite images above illustrate the dramatic growth. The bottom image was acquired by the Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 on November 24, 1988; the top image was acquired by the Operational Land Imager onLandsat 8 on November 16, 2014.

Rural areas—mainly farmland and forest—appear green. Urban areas are gray and white. Turn on the comparison tool to slide between the two images, and download the large images to observe the changes on a much finer scale.

If taken as one entity, the Pearl River Delta region has overtaken Tokyo as the world’s largest urban area—by size and population—according to an analysis of satellite and demographic data published by the World Bank.

Between 2000 and 2010, the Pearl River Delta’s urban spaces—defined as areas where the built environment covered more than 50 percent of the landscape in a given pixel—had expanded from 4,500 square kilometers to 7,000 square kilometers. (In 2010, Tokyo had a population of about 32 million people and covered about 5,600 square kilometers.)

In the study, researchers used satellite data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and land cover data from the Landsat program. They also used demographic data prepared by the AsiaPop project.

The Pearl River Delta region has a very different pattern of growth compared to other fast-growing cities in China.

“Vast and multinucleate with no clear center, its form arose from its unique economic origins in the 1980s and 1990s, as the geographic center of the market reforms that subsequently transformed the Chinese economy, particularly the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone,” the World Bank authors noted.

“This region thus has a very different, and more recent, urban growth trajectory than those of Beijing and Shanghai, which, despite their explosive recent growth, have grown around well-defined historic urban centers.”

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LONDON (Reuters) - Air contaminated with pollutants such as ozone and tiny particles could cause the premature death of about 6.6 million people a year by 2050 if nothing is done to improve air quality, scientists warned on Wednesday.

In a study published in the journal Nature, they found that outdoor air pollution already kills about 3.3 million people a year worldwide. The majority of those deaths are in Asia where residential energy emissions, such as those from heating and cooking, have a major impact.

And that toll could double over the next 35 years, the researchers warned, unless clean-up measures are taken.

"This is an astounding number," said Jos Lelieveld of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, who led the research. "In some counties air pollution is actually a leading cause of death, and in many countries it is a major issue."

Air pollution deaths are most commonly from heart disease, strokes or a lung disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). It is also linked to deaths from lung cancer and acute respiratory infections.

Calculating the health and mortality effects of outdoor air pollution on a global scale is not easy, partly because air quality is not monitored in every region and the toxicity of particles varies depending on their source.

So for this study, Lelieveld's team combined a global atmospheric chemistry model with population data and health statistics to estimate the relative contribution of different kinds of outdoor air pollution, mainly from so-called fine particulate matter, to premature deaths.

Their results show that in India and China, for example, emissions from heating and cooking, have the largest death toll, while in much of the United States and a few other countries, emissions from traffic and power generation are crucial.

In the eastern United States and in Europe, Russia and East Asia, agricultural emissions are the biggest source of the kind of fine particulate matter that gets into people's lungs, causing illness, disability and death.

Oliver Wild, an atmospheric scientist at Britain's Lancaster University, said the study "really brings home the need for air quality controls", particularly in heavily populated parts of Asia.

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China's air is notoriously polluted, full of gray smog that covers the sky. 

The health problems associated with that pollution are the reason for 1.6 million deaths a year, or about 4,000 people a day.

But for a couple of weeks, the sky was bright blue. 

In honor of a military parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, Beijing managed to clean up its air. They've done this before, notably in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Here's how they pulled it off.

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Here's how Beijing looked on a particularly high pollution day in August, exactly a month before the parade.

... And here's how the skies looked on the day of the parade, September 3. Residents nicknamed the color of the sky "parade blue."

China's had a pollution problem for years, as a result of rapid industrialization that started in the 1950s. In some areas, it's gotten so bad that its impact on your health is equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes a day.

(Source)

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At some point humans are going to run out of the fossil fuels that power their lives.

There is no other end point to the current era — either because we've used them all up or because the Earth's climate cannot bear any further destruction.

If you use data from oil and gas giant BP, as the data cataloguers at Knoema did, at present rates of extraction we'll be out of oil by 2067, natural gas by 2069, and coal by 2121.

It's possible that we'll discover more oil trapped in tar sands or deep under the ocean, but it just gets more expensive and riskier to extract.

And we'll still run out.

Plus — we don't even want to use all the fossil fuels we have. Burning nonrenewable fuels makes the atmosphere warmer, and burning coal (which will be what's left if we run out of oil and gas) is worse than using other energy sources.

If we get to that point, the limiting factor won't be how many years of fossil fuels we have left, it will be how much more atmospheric change the planet can take. Some researchers already think we've reached the point where there's enough carbon in the atmosphere to cause catastrophic impacts to humanity.

That's why video game designer/Iron Man-protagonist Elon Musk tells Wait But Why's Tim Urban that the "indefinite extension of the Fossil Fuels Era" is "the dumbest experiment in history."

As Musk further explains it:

"The greater the change to the chemical composition of the physical, chemical makeup of the oceans and atmosphere [due to increased carbon emissions], the greater the long-term effect will be. Given that at some point they'll run out anyway, why run this crazy experiment to see how bad it'll be? We know it's at least some bad, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it'll be really bad."

This feeling is what led Musk to get involved with the electric car company that became Tesla, as he tells Urban in one part of a wide-ranging conversation.

Tesla's official mission is "to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible."

If Tesla can convince the world that cars can run without oil, that would make a huge difference — burning oil is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions, and getting electricity from a power plant through an electrical grid is more efficient than burning gas.

Even in places in the US where coal provides a good proportion of electrical power, electric vehicles are still cleaner than gas-powered cars. But for true sustainability, electricity production needs to change too. In particular, countries need to stop using coal, as soon as possible.

Sustainable alternatives include renewables like hydroelectric power, wind power, solar power, and geothermal power. Nuclear power is also far cleaner than any sort of fossil fuel energy source.

Musk's idea is to convince the world that moving away from fossil fuels is possible, because this will have to happen no matter what, and the sooner it happens the better shape the world will be in.

Here's a Wait But Why chart that explains where we're at:

Right now, we're just going along using fossil fuels, despite the fact that we know this is a bad idea and it has an endpoint. The sooner we get past that point and move to the next era in energy, the better.

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Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson says he hasn't seen the evidence that climate change is a thing. 

To prove him wrong, California Gov. Jerry Brown sent Carson a letter and a flash drive containing the UN's Synthesis Report on climate change.

Climate change is hard to deny from a scientific standpoint: scientists have tried to replicate climate denying studies without much success, and organizations have even pinned down who the worst greenhouse gas emitters are.

Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who has some rather questionableviews on some scientific topics, has been catching up to front-runner Donald Trump in recent polls.

Here's the letter, which Brown's press office tweeted out:

In the letter, Brown quotes Carson saying:

"I know there are a lot of people who say 'overwhelming science,' but then when you ask them to show the overwhelming science, they never can show it... There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused. Gimme a break."

Carson had said this in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle just a couple of days before Brown penned the letter.

Brown's response to Carson's missing "overwhelming science" proof? A report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which Brown writes is an assessment of more than 30,000 scientific papers "written by more than 800 scientists, representing 80 countries."

He went on to quote the forward to the report, which comes to the conclusion "that human influence on the climate system is clear and growing, with impacts observed across all continents and oceans."

Brown then asked Carson to review the material, because "climate change is much bigger than partisan politics," Brown wrote.

The California governor has been a champion of the environment throughout his career, pushing for climate change initiatives during his fourth term as governor like a recent collaboration between California and China to reduce greenhouse emissions by 80-95% by 2050.

Carson first responded to the letter through his campaign communications director Doug Watts, who told CNN that Carson is a "climate questioner" rather than a "climate denier."

Before Wednesday's debate, Carson told reporters that the flash drive "doesn't change [his] opinion." That opinion being, "as responsible human beings, we should look out for the environment."

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Air pollution already kills 3.3 million people a year.

And that number could double by 2050.

The most harmful pollutant to human health is called PM 2.5, short for particle matter that's less than 2.5 microns in diameter. It's found in soot, smoke, and dust and lodges in the lungs causing long-term health problems like asthma and chronic lung disease.

PM 2.5 starts to become a health problem when there is more than 35.5 micrograms of PM 2.5 per cubic meter (written like 35.5 µg/m3) of air, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But the World Health Organizations recommends that PM 2.5 shouldn't even exceed 10 µg/m3.

The most polluted cities on Earth have anywhere from 9 to 15 times that amount – based on information from the WHO – and you might be surprised which make the top 10 list. Check them out:

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10. Lucknow, India - 96 µg/m3 of PM 2.5

Lucknow, a city in northern India, starts off the top 10 cities with the worst air pollution levels list. It still significantly has a high average air pollution level that falls into the "unhealthy" category. Vehicle emissions are a major factor in Lucknow's air pollution problem.

9. Ahmedabad, India - 100 µg/m3 of PM 2.5

India's western city Ahmedabad gets its air pollution in part from the major construction happening in the city.

8. Khorramabad, Iran - 102 µg/m3 of PM 2.5

Khorramabad, a city in western Iran, had the country's highest air pollution levels. One of the most populous cities in Iran, Khorramabad is an agriculture hub, which likely contributes to its air pollution problems.  

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When you bite into a hamburger or slice into some salmon, do you think about the impact it had on the environment on its way to you?

Well, maybe you should. Climate change is getting real, and agriculture is one of the largest sources of heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide.

But when it comes to their "carbon footprint," not all foods are created equal.

The Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy organization, and CleanMetrics Corp., a Portland, Ore.-based environmental firm, put out a 2011 report called the "Meat Eater's Guide to climate change + health."

Here are the foods that produce the most greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food, based on that report. 

(For comparison, the average car today emits about 0.41 kilograms of CO2 per mile driven.)

We explain the reason behind each number below:

1. Lamb: 39.2 kg CO2

Sorry, lamb lovers — eating a kilo of lamb is equivalent to driving about 90 miles! A whopping 50% of lamb in the US is imported, according to the EWG/CleanMetrics report, so some of its carbon footprint comes from shipping. But most of it is produced by the animals' digestion (aka lamb farts), their feed, manure management and other farm operations.

2. Beef: 27 kg CO2

Though not as bad as lamb, beef still has a pretty hefty carbon footprint. Cows produce a lot of methane (a potent greenhouse gas), and also require a lot of water and land, as this Business Insider analysis found.

3. Cheese: 13.5 kg CO2

And it's not just meat. Cheese is also a major CO2 contributor. Only a small fraction of cheese is imported, but that accounts for half of all the carbon emissions from cheese, according to the report. 

4. Pork: 12.1 kg CO2

Bacon and ham are next on the environmental chopping block. More than half of the emissions from pork come from raising the animals, but a good portion comes from processing, transport, and cooking the meat at home.

5. Farmed Salmon: 11.9 kg CO2

When it comes to farmed salmon, the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions are feed production, electricity generation and onfarm fuel combustion, according to the report. The report didn't mention emissions from wild caught salmon, however.

This graphic from the report shows each food broken down by greenhouse gas emissions:

6. Turkey: 10.9 kg CO2

Thanksgiving may not be the greenest holiday, though it's probably better than a Christmas roast. Most of the greenhouse gases from turkey come from feed production (especially corn), followed by processing and home cooking.

7. Chicken: 6.9 kg CO2

If you like eating meat but want to minimize your carbon footprint, chicken's the way to go. It produces the least greenhouse gas emissions of most popular types of meat. While main sources of CO2 are the same as for turkey, chicken produces less overall emissions during each phase of production, processing, and cooking.

8. Canned Tuna: 6.1 kg CO2

The production of tuna (caught in the ocean and canned) produces most of its greenhouse gas emissions (68%) during diesel combustion on fishing boats. The rest mainly comes from processing and packaging the fish, as well as transporting it.

9. Eggs: 4.8 kg CO2

Eggs are probably your best choice of protein, if you're trying to minimize your carbon footprint. The figure above is based on the average of a Canadian large-scale freerange farming operation and a New Jersey large-scale confined operation. Most of the emissions come from feed production, on-farm energy use, nitrous oxide gas from the poultry litter and fuel combustion.

10. Potatoes: 2.9 kg CO2

Potatoes produce the most emissions of all protein-rich plants. Most of the footprint comes from cooking, but it varies depending on how they're cooked and for how long. For example, a baked potato produces many more emissions than French fries, because French fries taken much less time to cook.

Of course, there are many other factors at play in deciding which foods you should eat, such as nutrition, ethical farming/production practices, and, of course, personal preference.

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This striking green-blue image isn't a lost work of Van Gogh — it's a giant, growing bloom of microscopic plants and animals in the Baltic Sea, which NASA photographed from space on August 11.

But don't let its beauty fool you.

NASA suggests the bloom might contain cyanobacteria. The marine bacteria are big oxygen producers but can threaten wildlife if they grow out of control. Some species can also be toxic and threaten the food supply. What's more, cruise ships full of summer tourists might be inadvertently feeding the blooms.

Keep scrolling to see some incredible views of the bloom, including ships cutting through the biological "carpet" that's coating a popular vacation spot.

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NASA's Landsat 8 satellite constantly photographs the Earth. On August 11, 2015, it captured this section of the Baltic Sea.

Researchers saw what they think is a beautiful bloom of phytoplankton, made mostly of microscopic plants. Some of the colors are false because Landsat 8 can see infrared light — but we can't.

It stretches for hundreds of miles across the sea.

California's water-starved landscape gave way to a series of wildfires earlier this summer that continue to ravage the state. So far, the fires have scorched about 350 square miles, an area which is slightly larger than New York City.

Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes. Resorts and lodges that were once a burgeoning vacation escape are now a pile of debris. And an unknown number of farm animals have been left behind.

The following photos reveal how these wildfires are transforming California into what looks like something out of an apocalyptic horror film, and some of them are very disturbing.

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The once elegant decor of the former Harbin Hot Springs Resort in Midtown, California is now covered in ashes after being attacked earlier this month by the Valley Fire.

So far, that conflagration has been the most destructive western wildfire of 2015. But it couldn't erase the eerie smiles on these stone statue's faces.

Deeper inside the resort, the inside of a bathhouse has been destroyed on the inside, but the "SILENCE" sign outside remains almost entirely untouched.

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