A crowdfunded 100km-long boom to clean up a vast expanse of plastic rubbish in the Pacific is one step closer to reality after successful tests of a scaled-down prototype in the Netherlands last week.

Further trials off the Dutch and Japanese coasts are now slated to begin in the new year.

If they are successful, the world’s largest ever ocean cleanup operation will go live in 2020, using a gigantic V-shaped array, the like of which has never been seen before.

The so-called ‘Great Pacific garbage patch’, made up largely of tiny bits of plastic trapped by ocean currents, is estimated to be bigger than Texas and reaching anything up to 5.8m sq miles (15 sq km).

It is growing so fast that, like the Great Wall of China, it is beginning to be seen from outer space, according to Jacqueline McGlade, the chief scientist of the UN environmental programme (Unep).

“We have to admit that there has been a market failure,” she told the Guardian. “Nevertheless, we have to create a market success that brings in new forms of chemistry and technology.”

The Ocean Cleanup project aims to do the technology part with a floating barrier as long as the Karman line that reaches from the sea to outer space.

Sea currents and winds will be used to passively funnel plastic debris into an elbow made of vulcanised rubber where it can be concentrated for periodic collection by vessels.

Sub-sea buoys at depths of up to 30 meters would anchor the contraption in depths of up to 4.5km. Sea currents flowing beneath its booms would allow fish to escape, while hoovering up 42% of the Pacific’s plastic soup. At least, that is the plan.

“Everything is unknown so everything is a potential problem,” said Lourens Boot, the programme’s chief engineer, who has previously worked on offshore oil and gas rigs. “The risk matrix is big, but one by one we are tackling those risks.” One of the biggest has been finance.

Charles Moore, the racing boat captain who discovered the floating vortex in 1997, once said that the cost of a cleaning operation would “bankrupt any country”.

But around half the scheme’s initial €30m (£20m) budget has now been raised through online donations and wealthy sponsors. In the long term, the project plans to finance itself with a major retail line of ocean plastic fashion wear.

“We’ve analyzed the quality of the plastic which was surprisingly good,” said Boyan Slat, the 21-year-old founder of the project. “We did some tests and the material is very recyclable. Tens of companies – large corporations – have shown an interest in buying up the plastic and that is our holy grail; funding the clean-up using revenues created by the plastic we extract.”

Boyan wears jeans made from ocean plastic but he is an unlikely green hero. A college drop-out and self-described “super geek,” he won a Guinness Book of World Records entry when he was 13 for simultaneously launching 213 highly-pressurized rockets. Last year he received the UN’s highest environmental award from Ban Ki-moon and was voted one of the most promising entrepreneurs worldwide.

“It is a classic David and Goliath project that couldn’t have happened 20 years ago,” he says. “Without social media it wouldn’t have gone viral. Without crowdfunding, it wouldn’t have had any money and without Skype, hundreds of volunteers spread out across the globe wouldn’t have come together.”

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) says it is encouraged by the attention being given to the Pacific’s pollution problem but cautions the technology is at an early stage. “There are a lot of feasibility issues with new technology and with open ocean cleanups,” Asma Mahdi, a Noaa spokeswoman told the Guardian.

Mahdi singled out the distribution of ocean debris way below the visible garbage patch, and the potential for harming sealife caught in the project’s cleanup barrier.

“By skimming floating debris off the surface, we may be doing more harm than good for marine surface-dwellers,” she said. “This includes the microscopic plankton that are the base of the marine food web and responsible for nearly half of the oxygen production that occurs on our planet.”

The project says that by focusing on the ocean’s crest they can remove a layer of trash that would otherwise sink, without disturbing sea life.

“The current flows underneath the barriers, taking away everything with neutral buoyancy - like plankton and other fish - while the positively buoyant plastic, up to a certain threshold, remains in front of it,” Slat said.

Its transboundary coalition of online ocean activists has already notched some impressive research achievements.

Early results from a research expedition to the Pacific earlier this year show plastic concentrations in the Pacific at least 10 times greater than expected, according to Slat.

“The previous studies estimated 10 kilos of plastic per square kilometer but we found it was in the hundreds of kilos per square kilometer,” he said.

The full study results will be released next year, but the scale of the threat posed to wildlife – and humans – is already known.

At least 100,000 sea mammals and millions of seabirds and fish and are thought to die each year from entanglement in the plastic muck or ingestion of its microplastics.

One recent study estimated that around 90% of the world’s sea birds had eaten colorful plastic items that they mistook for food.

In this way, decades of discarded plastic bottles, bags and Styrofoam cups are disintegrating at sea under the sun’s UV rays, releasing toxic chemicals such as PCBs and DDT into the food chain.

A Unep report to be published next year estimates plastic debris volumes at around 10-100 items per square km in the English channel, compared to four per square metre in Indonesia and nearly a million per square km in the north Pacific subtropical gyre.

“The concentrations are getting a bit scary,” McGlade said. “From the surface to the sea floor there is a hundred-fold increase [in plastics] accumulating and it has a smothering effect. It is hidden and has a tremendous impact on oxygenation and a huge number of marine ecosystems.”

This hidden cache of seafloor trash will not be touched by the ocean clean-up project – and neither will microplastics smaller than 5mm in diameter. McGlade calls it “the biggest issue” with the project.

Slat counters that, by mass, these microplastics represent less than 1% of the Pacific’s plastic pollution. Without rapid action at the sea’s surface, it will grow exponentially.

The floating garbage dump in the north pacific subtropical gyre circulates between eastern Japan and the seas north of Hawaii and west of California. There, debris congregates in the space where warmer waters from the south Pacific meet cooler waters from the Arctic, creating a spinning vortex of plastic.

It is a surreal and lonely place, says Boyan, who travelled there on the research expedition, a world away from the Marin maritime research institute in Wageningen, in the Netherlands, where waves ripple, swirl and crash into one another around a mocked-up boom.

Every time a foghorn sounds, wave formations roll out of a mechanical line under floodlights, in a test designed to mimic natural conditions.

“For sure, the tests have been successful,” Slat said. “The goal was to simulate what would happen if we had a very long barrier and we didn’t see any weird behavior.”

“The real trick will happen once we go deeper,” Boot added.

According to McGlade: “The problem is that it is still a relatively small-scale test but it did withstand wind and wave conditions such that we would be confident – maybe not out in the widest open ocean – but certainly in conditions around Europe that it would be effective.”

Slat argues that wave conditions in the mid-Pacific ocean are actually less challenging than in shallower coastal waters such as the English Channel, where a lower wave steepness may, counter-intuitively, be more likely to spill water over the barrier.

But he also backs proposals to prevent plastic pollution at source. Floating barriers at the mouth of river outlets to the world’s oceans have been mooted, particularly in the developing world where the problem is growing fastest.

Unep wants to see a market mechanism that can set industrial standards for use of biodegradable plastics, because of the way that polyethylene, a metal-based additive found in plastic bags, rapidly disintegrates in sea water.

While the UN group is an enthusiastic supporter of Slat’s Pacific cleanup plans, McGlade stressed that it should be seen as a beginning and not an end for ocean remediation projects.

“This example is one we want to encourage, but I’m hoping that across the world more and more innovative ideas will come about,” she said.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk.

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I’ve never piloted a submarine through human effluent. Sitting inside a glass sphere built for two, I receive my instructions on how to surface, in case the driver suffers an adverse medical event.

At the helm, Robert Carmichael wants to make sure I don’t freak out in the benthic zone—that I can manage rear buoyancy and have a basic Zaxxon-ian grasp of how to operate a joystick.

Our destination is the mouth of an active sewer pipe entrenched two miles from Hollywood Beach, Florida, south of Fort Lauderdale.

Carmichael wants to film the toxic outfall for his Project Baseline initiative, a conservation nonprofit working with volunteer cave mappers, divers, marine biologists, hydro-geologists, and people who don’t want their seafood marinating in medical bio-waste. The pipe is referred to as the “poop cannon.” The sub’s dispatcher, a 145-foot research vessel called the Baseline Explorer, is anchored nearby and has confirmed the bearings of the pipe’s business end.

It’s 98 degrees inside our tiny bubble. The extreme heat is a by-product of a scrubbing system that recycles our exhaled CO₂ into a breathable mix of nitrogen and oxygen. (No helium, alas.) “It’s an exothermic reaction but allows us to breathe and think clearly,” says Carmichael, a cave diver who holds patents in re-breathers and recreational diving hookahs.

I’m gripping the sub’s emergency instructions, a placard laminated against sweat, which I’m contributing in volume. Until now, the most time I’ve spent underwater was when a hurricane bearing my father’s name (Charley) stole my trunks while trying to drown me in its eye when I was 15. My experience in crisis management at depth is lacking.

“Do me a favor,” says Carmichael. “Tell me if you see anything big and weird.” We’re cruising through what is essentially a coral ossuary. What’s big and weird is the absence of visibility and color—rather than a thriving reef of hermaphroditic coral, we’re navigating a lunar rubble dusted with dredge silt.

Scuba divers from the Baseline Explorer appear vague in the grainy water outside our window. If—as Joy Williams once wrote—a diver “is what he sees,” they may not even exist. Our mission isn’t exotic. We’re a plumber’s Cousteau.

A sea turtle blows by with purpose. Carmichael turns a buoyancy valve, releasing pressure with a hydraulic hiss, as if a bus had knelt in my ear. Another sub dispatched from the Baseline Explorer gently alights on the seabed next to us, sitting on large cylindrical batteries. For some reason, I wave to them in slow motion like an astronaut, confusing 90 feet below sea level for deep space. Sense of abyss is relative.

Ten feet before us, a sewer pipe made out of limestone spews yellow-brownish insults into the reef ecosystem. The pipe’s mouth is barely visible through the cluster of baitfish and foragers, a silver mass of twitch and glide binging on nutrients long processed and evacuated by Broward County taxpayers.

A goliath grouper bullies its way through and enters the pipe to feed. I’m told to watch out for fishing lines—an entanglement hazard for the sub’s thrusters. The Hollywood outfall pipe serves as a popular fishing spot, toilet to table.

The grouper emerges from the pipe and lies on its side on the ocean floor, as if for a post-gorge nap. Apparently, nature isn’t easily grossed out. The algae are symbiotically thrilled. The overload of nitrogen and phosphorous from the outfall has resulted in an explosion of phytoplankton.

Overfed from eutrophication, the blooms suffocate the corals, draining the reefs of oxygen and color. With a kudzu instinct for hyper-competitiveness, algae are outgrowing all other species. Todd Kincaid, a hydro-geologist working with Project Baseline, says it’s like dumping loads of Miracle-Gro and used cat litter into the water—47.5 million gallons of partially treated sewage daily.

“There’s a lot of other stuff in sewage, other than nitrogen and phosphorous,” says Brian LaPointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. “There’s viruses, heavy metals, bacteria, personal care products. Pharmaceuticals, hormones, plasticizers, house care products—thousands of chemicals that don’t even get monitored.”

Traces of high blood pressure medicines and Viagra have been especially prevalent in local effluent.* LaPointe says it’s disrupting the reproductive cycles of marine life. It’s also been shown that corals can be susceptible to disease transmitted by human pathogens found in sewage.

In 2005, LaPointe published a study revealing a “wastewater fingerprint” in macroalgae, research that would contribute to the closing of sewage outfalls in Delray Beach in 2009. (LaPointe has also been waging war on septic tanks throughout the state of Florida.) In 2008, Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection began legislation forcing Dade and Broward counties to shut down the pipes. Municipalities fought back, complaining about costs, and they received an extension until 2025.

Meanwhile, the EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits have been in limbo amid arguments as to whether the outfalls are the responsibility of state or federal water managers. In 2007, Carl Hiaasen called attention the outfalls in the Miami Herald. “It’s pretty appalling,” he says, on the phone from his home in Florida. “Gives new meaning to ‘It’s the same ol’ shit.’ ”

The new treatment system will involve injecting sewage 3,000 feet underground. Doug Yoder, deputy director of Miami’s central plant at Virginia Key, believes the energy required for this project could ultimately cause more long-term environmental harm.

“When the legislation was being considered, we pointed out that a much more significant threat to the reef systems are sea level rise and global warming—all of which are arguably going to be made worse as a result of all the extra energy and fossil fuels required for us to manage the wastewater flows.”

In the meantime, South Florida’s resident tourists could be swimming in dilute sewage. “The fish aren’t there for the dissolved nitrogen,” says Todd Kincaid. “There’s other stuff coming out of that pipe and you can see it. It’s brown—if you look close there’s little particles.”

Yoder suggests the earth tones could be due to tannins in the groundwater from the canal systems. The fresh water effluent loses its disturbing color once it reaches the surface and becomes invisible when carried north along the currents, toward Spring Break.

Florida’s economy is largely dependent on a thriving reef ecosystem that’s now in danger of being mobbed by algae blooms. Project Baseline is currently raising money to inject florescein dye into the Hollywood pipe on St. Patrick’s Day, for downstream color, and watch the beaches go green.

The Hollywood Beach pipe is just one of six sewer lines along Florida’s coast. Virginia Key has been receiving the chud of the wealthy since another pipe was extended south from Miami Beach in 1971. Designated as a “black-only” beach in 1945, this small barrier island lies in Biscayne Bay, a half-mile southwest from Fisher Island and the noses of residents like Julia Roberts and Mel Brooks.

In the mid-1980s, the Virginia Key treatment plant began dosing Fisher Island with a lemon-fresh Big D (or Sewer D), a countereactant dispersed from misting nozzles. In addition to the sewage plant, neighbors of the stinking rich include an oil depot, the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the beach where Notorious B.I.G. sweated, profusely, through his first Miami Bass party, Death Star dredge barges, and whatever else happens to be floating through the Port of Miami. It’s quite an ecosystem.

In 1987, geologists in a submarine could hear the geyser roar of effluents while conducting a “quick and dirty” study of the Virginia Key pipe and shipwreck reefs. In addition to the rich biodiversity, they discovered that corals and other “community encrusters” were living on the pipe as a substratum. In Florida, corals have been known to make homes out of discarded German grenades, so a sewage pipe seems like a relatively low habitat risk assessment, at least until the algae started stealing all the sunlight.

“I knew they would be on that pipe,” says Colin Foord, a marine biologist based in Miami. Foord runs Coral Morphologic, a coral cloning lab and video art studio he co-founded with childhood friend Jared McKay inside a Pentecostal church in Overtown. Foord has been diving in Biscayne sewage for the past eight years, documenting coral’s adaptive properties in Miami’s polluted urban watereways. He recently boated me out to an underwater meteor crater near Virginia Key.

It was Foord who first suggested I do a submarine dive, a conversation that was initiated by his wish to install a giant “pyramid blaster” subwoofer in the crater. Both ideas presented challenges. To name just one, keeping humans alive underwater is a cost-prohibitive venture. We’d originally approached a private submersible company in Miami, but they relocated their operations—and sub—to Seattle, where the rapper Macklemore was allowed to splashdown for free.

That’s when we were able to tag along with Project Baseline, which is funded by Global Underwater Explorers, with headquarters in High Springs in Central Florida, a cave-diving haven that provided the crash set for Airport ’77.* Foord joined me aboard the Baseline Explorer when I did the sub drop near the outfall pipe. “We’re going to be exploring the asshole of Miami,” Foord smiled. “What could be better?” As you may have gathered, Caddyshack sense of turd humor is needed to distract one from the possible eco-horror at hand, especially in a state where water-borne flesh-eating bacteria is a reality.

My late brother was a watercolorist named after a treatment plant in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He once joked about a desire to be reincarnated as sewage legislation—using transmigration to shut down his namesake. Maybe that’s why I’m on the Baseline Explorer.

When I first step on board, I skip the hyperbaric decompression chamber and go straight for the subs. “We have two submersibles,” Carmichael tells me. “So we can rescue ourselves.” I’m so excited I forget to be terrified. I want to do all kinds of rookie moves, like operate the robot manipulator arm while the sub’s strobe light is flashing.

Carmichael tells me the sub cruises at “half the speed of you,” drifting somewhere between Hydra and flotsam. Before our descent, he’s in the cockpit, running through crosschecks. I carefully lower a tray of CO₂ scrubber granules so we’ll be able to breathe. Carmichael asks me to hand him a 55-pound lead bag. “That’s to make sure we sink.” A diver walks by, all nitro swagger. “This ain’t Disneyland!” Another expert in mixing breathable gases.

It’s finally spashdown time. We are in the sub, suspended from a giant hook above the ocean like a nerdy piece of leviathan bait. The sun has baked the bubble and my t-shirt is already soaked, leeching at my back. The crew takes pictures. The captain, who told me he was an escaped convict from Louisiana, waves.

We’re now half submerged. Green water slaps at the glass, briefly magnifying and dispersing the figures on board. It feels like I’m looking out of a paperweight.

We’re going under.

Don’t panic.

Don’t think about all the times you napped through the flight attendant’s emergency instructions before take-off. Don’t think, for a moment, that you’re still on a plane dreaming about piloting a submarine.

Don’t think about the German U-boat that was sunk by its own “high pressure toilet” in April 1945. Don’t forget the U-boatmen’s collective nightmare of being buried alive. Don’t choose this time to decide you are claustrophobic. Don’t hyperventilate, for there’s no room to breathe.

Continuing not panicking.

Don’t order the grouper.

In memory of Ross Severan von Burg, who originally encouraged us to do the sub drop but passed while the story was being written.

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Boyan Slat is not your typical 21-year-old.

At an age when most people are still trying to figure out what they're going to do with their lives, the Dutch innovator is the head of The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that's raised millions of dollars to put into action a plan that Slat devised.

His goal is to help clean up the Pacific garbage gyre — an enormous area of the ocean where swirling currents cause plastic from around the world to converge in huge patches.

This plastic isn't just ugly. Animals like sea turtles, seals, and birds eat it, which poisons them. And as it breaks down into little particles called microplastics, the debris ends up in fish that often enter our own food supply.

Here's the story of why Slat thinks he has a plan that could clean up much of this floating trash, despite some serious questions from scientists. 

Slat tells Tech Insider a diving trip he took when he was 16 years old inspired him to fight plastic in the ocean.

"I was diving in Greece, and I realized there were more plastic bags than fish, and I wondered why we couldn't clean it up," he says.

Back at school, Slat saw a presentation showing how currents take litter from all over the world and build it up in massive patches.

For famed science educator, comedian, and author Bill Nye (the science guy) watching a NASCAR race with his family is bittersweet.

The super-fast cars zipping around the track is "exciting," Nye explains in his latest book, "Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World."

But the technology is "depressing," Nye writes because:

"Here I am trying to envision the smart, efficient transportation technology of tomorrow, and there is NASCAR celebrating a very old transportation technology of yesterday. You might call NASCAR the anti-NASA."

In his book, Nye explores the many pitfalls of climate change and the numerous available technologies that could turn things around. He dedicates an entire chapter to the multi-million dollar business NASCAR, asking: "What if NASCAR became more like NASA?"

It's not an absurd comparison. Both NASCAR and NASA hold competitions where they present a money award to the winner. The only difference is that NASCAR awards the fastest, whereas NASA awards the smartest.

"There's no reason why NASCAR couldn't be like [NASA]: a race with rules designed to reward the coolest, most advanced vehicle technologies," Nye writes.

There's no reason why NASCAR couldn't be like [NASA]: a race with rules designed to reward the coolest, most advanced vehicle technologies

To spur this kind of change, Nye says it would only take a single change to NASCAR's rule book:

Place a limit on how much fuel teams can use during a race. Nye suggests no more than 21 gallons — about half a tank for most modern cars.

Right now, NASCAR racing vehicles get around 3 miles to the gallon.

Even if racers were allotted 50 gallons for a race, you could easily beat them in 2004 Toyota Prius — that's how inefficient NASCAR race cars are.

"We could drive this real 'stock' (off-the-showroom-floor) car around and around the course for a while. Then we could stop and have pizza. We'd get back in the car and win. No other [NASCAR] team could even finish the race," Nye writes.

NASCAR vehicles are great at going fast, but terrible at everything that forward-looking companies like Tesla are trying to do, which is to design vehicles that produce little-to-no greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the EPA, transportation accounted for 27% of US greenhouse gas emissions between 1990-2013. Cleaner cars could make an important impact on our nation's carbon footprint.

And Nye says that NASCAR could be an important leader in this change:

"I get it. I understand the appeal of a stock car race. It's just exciting, and I'm all for it," he writes. "I just want NASCAR to adapt to the new mainstream. I want the circuit to produce vehicles that could compete in races anywhere in the world, and win. I want the racing series to spin off new tech that will do more with less. For me, as an American mechanical engineer, I hope NASCAR decides to look forward rather than backward."

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SEATTLE — At least three people were killed and about 250,000 homes and businesses were without power in Washington state on Wednesday after a storm blew down trees and triggered mudslides, authorities said.

A wide swath of the Puget Sound region was under flood watches and warnings through Wednesday afternoon, the National Weather Service said.

In the Spokane area of eastern Washington, utility Avista said nearly 115,000 customers were without power and the city closed schools on Wednesday after winds up to 70 mph (113 kph) tore through the area.

In Oregon, fallen trees, mudslides and floods shut down roads across the western part of the state on Tuesday night, including a 50-mile (80-km) stretch of Interstate 84 that authorities declared impassible into midday Wednesday. Several other highways remained closed, Washington state police said.

At least three people were confirmed to have died in storm-related accidents, authorities in Washington state said.

A motorist was killed on Tuesday near the city of Monroe, northeast of Seattle, when a tree fell from a cliff onto his car, said Snohomish County Fire Chief Merlin Halverson.

"Many roads are closed from downed trees, active power lines, flood waters," Halverson said. "It's a hell of a mess here."

In Spokane, police said a woman was killed by a falling tree while another woman died on State Route 904 southwest of the city when a tree struck her car, state police said on Twitter.

Puget Sound Energy, which supplies customers in parts of Seattle and its suburbs, reported roughly 70,000 outages on Wednesday morning, down from about 210,000 late on Tuesday.

To the north, in Snohomish County, the public utility district said about 65,000 customers were without power on Wednesday morning, compared with 150,000 the night before.

Mudslides and other debris blocked state and U.S. roads in parts of the state.

King County, home to Seattle, reported severe flooding on the Snoqualmie River, moderate flooding on the Green River and minor flooding on the Cedar River.

An airport in Olympia received 2.08 inches of rain on Tuesday, a record for daily precipitation, the National Weather Service said. The previous record was 1.61 inches set in 1959.

The Seattle-area was due to see scattered showers and some sunshine on Wednesday, the service said.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Additional reporting by Courtney Sherwood in Portland, Oregon, and Victoria Cavaliere in Los Angeles; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Bill Trott)

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If you've been paying attention to the weather news at all lately, you'll know that it's a big year for a weather event called El Niño.

The complex phenomenon could bring warmer, wetter weather to the Northeast this winter and much-needed rain to California, but worsen cold and drought conditions elsewhere in the US.

And this year's El Niño could be one of the most powerful on record, experts say.

"One of the strongest El Niño events in the past 65 years is likely to bring significant winter weather to the United States," James Aman, senior meteorologist at Earth Networks, said in a statement.

What the heck is El Niño, anyway?

El Niño is a weather event characterized by warmer-than-normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, with important consequences for global weather and climate, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By contrast, La Niña refers to colder-than-normal Pacific temperatures.

The effects of El Niño can be seen across the globe, from increased rainfall in the Southern US and Peru to drought in the Western Pacific and brush fires in Australia.

Previously, the 1997-98 El Niño was considered one of the most powerful in recorded history, triggering devastating droughts, flooding, and other severe weather events. It caused an estimated $35 billion in damage and 23,000 deaths worldwide, Vox reported.

Here's what El Niño looked like in 1997 (left) and now (right):

And here's a chart showing how this year's conditions have already surpassed those of 1997:

Already, this year's El Niño has helped put 2015 on track to be the hottest year on record. And it could have a big effect on winter weather in the US.

What El Niño means for winter in the US

California could get some drought relief from higher-than-normal rain and mountain snow, from the Golden State to the Southern Rockies. But unusually hot temperatures and lower-than-normal rain or snow in the Pacific Northwest will likely extend the drought there.

The Northern Plains could see warmer temperatures, from Montana to Minnesota.

The South will likely have colder temperatures and higher precipitation from Texas to Florida along the Gulf Coast, including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Tampa.

The Northeast can expect a warmer winter, with more precipitation up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Snowfall predictions in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston are still up in the air.

It may be a good year for snow in California's Sierra Nevada, the Southern Rockies (including Denver), and the Appalachians.

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NOW WATCH: 2015-2016 WINTER OUTLOOK: The expected impact of El Niño on weather across the US

Air pollution poses a serious threat to human health, especially in developing countries like China where the quality of air is particularly bad.

A recent study from UC Berkeley estimated that air pollution contributes to 1.6 million deaths in China per year.

Moreover, experts calculate that air pollution kills more people worldwide than AIDS, malaria, breast cancer, or tuberculosis.

For a broader perspective on the dangers of air pollution, the producers at Column Five— an agency that specializes in informative graphics — made this awesome graphic on the major causes of air pollution in China and globally, how to measure air quality, and what it would take to clean up air in some of the dirtiest places on Earth:

CHECK OUT: Before-and-after photos of China's air show just how terrible its air pollution is

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You can add Norway's state oil company to the list of petro-giants that have abandoned their dreams of finding black gold in the icy white Arctic.

Statoil is walking away from a block of leases it has held in the remote Chukchi Sea off Alaska, announcing this week that the area is "no longer considered competitive." The move as the price of oil is bouncing downward toward $40 a barrel, far below the $100-plus it commanded in early 2014.

"Since 2008, we have worked to progress our options in Alaska," Tim Dodson, Statoil's executive vice president for exploration, said in a statement announcing the decision. "Solid work has been carried out, but given the current outlook we could not support continued efforts to mature these opportunities."

Statoil's decision follows Royal Dutch Shell's September decision to abandon a hard-fought venture in the same area. Shell powered past regulatory hurdles and intense opposition from environmentalists to return to the Chukchi Sea after a disastrous 2012 effort, only to find the results disappointing.

"Pursuing oil and gas in the US Arctic Ocean is too risky and expensive for both the environment and companies' economic portfolios," Susan Murray, of the conservation group Oceana, said in a statement cheering Statoil's move. "The global threats imposed by climate change require that decisions made about important Arctic Ocean resources apply careful planning, precaution, and science to ensure a sustainable future for the Arctic and, in turn, our planet."

Chevron put a similar venture in Canada's Arctic on ice in 2014. ConocoPhillips, Statoil's partner in most of the leases abandoned this week, also has backed away from the region.

In October, the Obama administration canceled two offshore Arctic lease sales due to lack of interest — and Murray urged the administration to take the region off the table permanently.

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A first-of-its-kind examination of the Amazon's trees found that as many as half the species may be threatened with extinction or heading that way because of massive deforestation.

Among the more than 5,000 tree species in deep trouble: the ones that produce Brazil nuts and mahogany.

An international team of 158 scientists found that depending on the degree to which deforestation comes under control in the next 35 years, between 36 and 57 percent of the 16,000 tree species in the tropical rainforest area would be considered threatened.

Their study is published in Friday's edition of Science Advances.

The range rests on whether cutting down the region's forest continues at the rate of the late 20th and early 21st centuries or slows down to lesser levels proposed in 2006, study authors said. If deforestation continues at the same pace, nearly 8,700 tree types are in trouble, but the number of species at risk could be as low as 5,500 if nations are able to cut back as planned, said study co-author Nigel Pitman from the Field Museum in Chicago.

"We've never had a good idea of how many species are threatened in the Amazon," Pitman said Friday. "Now with this study, we have an estimate."

About 15 years ago, the Amazon was losing about 11.6 million square miles of forest a year, said Tim Killeen, a scientist from Agteca Amazonica in Bolivia. But that figure has dropped to about 3.8 million square miles a year, he said.

Killeen said the tree that produces Brazil nuts is seriously under threat, while "mahogany is commercially extinct throughout the Amazon." He said that means there's no more industry harvesting the wood, but some trees exist.

Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not part of the study, praised the work as sensible and important.

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Last week, I wrote about new evidence that shows Earth’s climate system has moved into an unprecedented state over the last several months, at least since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. This week, our planet doubled down—raising new concerns about adverse impacts worldwide, some of which have already begun.

El Niño—a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean—is the most immediate reason for this year’s global heat wave, but global warming has also been stashing heat in the oceans for decades now. There’s now a 99.9 percent chance that 2015 will be the warmest year on record and most likely by a wide margin.

Fresh data this week show that the current El Niño is now the most intense ever measured, at least on a weekly basis, pushing ahead of huge events in 1982–83 and 1997–98, and likely 1877–78 as well. (Ocean data from the 19^th century is less reliable than that from theSpace Age.) On Twitter, one federal meteorologist said the new data were so extreme, he was initially in disbelief that they were accurate.

Broader measures of El Niño are updated only monthly or seasonally, and this El Niño is still strengthening, so we still don’t know for sure how huge it will become. But one thing’s for sure: Humanity has never before had to deal with global oceans quite like this.

“This event is playing out in uncharted territory. Our planet has altered dramatically because of climate change,” said Michel Jarraud, the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, in a statement on the latest data. “This naturally occurring El Niño event and human induced climate change may interact and modify each other in ways which we have never before experienced.”

Data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that October 2015 was the most unusually warm month ever measured, beating the previous record set just last month. Record warmth was observed on every continent and in every ocean.

For a taste of how weird last month was: Octobers have been warming by an average pace of about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1880. But October 2015 broke the monthly record by 0.2 degrees, essentially fast-forwarding global warming by more than 10 years. Such a surge has never been witnessed before.

All this extra heat is having a huge effect on the planet’s ecosystems and cities, with the most acute impacts in Indonesia, where massive forest fires have made more than 500,000 people sick due to persistent smoke and haze. A spokesperson for Indonesia’s national weather service has called the fires a “crime against humanity.” In India, weak monsoon rains linked to El Niño have created food shortages. Food shortages are also expected over the coming months across East and Southern Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia.

Earlier this summer, NOAA declared a global coral bleaching event, warning that the exceptionally warm oceans could cause permanent damage. As of this week, heat stress on coral reefs south of Hawaii moved literally off the charts:

Further north, a confused sea turtle was spotted last week in the San Joaquin River in central California—thousands of miles north of its typical range.

Though the world is a vastly different place now, millions of people died in El Niño–related famines in the 1870s, and tens of billions of dollars of economic impact were blamed on the 1997 event. The biggest achievement since then has been improved prediction. In California, officials in San Diego have declared a preemptive state of emergency to help prepare for likely heavy rains. The city of Los Angeles is stockpiling sandbags.

The impacts aren’t all bad, however: The world’s driest desert in Chile, the Atacama, has sprung to life in recent weeks thanks to unusual rains earlier this year—including a dazzling display of flowers.

Later this month, more than 100 heads of state, including President Obama, will gather in Paris to negotiate the first-ever global agreement on climate change.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.

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California is in the middle of its fourth year of drought. Experts say it's the worst the state has seen in 1,200 years.

Dwindling reservoirs, shrinking lakes, and dried-up farm fields are everywhere — and the drought shows no sign of stopping.

The state's snowpack, which typically provides about one-third of the water for its farms and residents, remains at its lowest level in history.

Still, many Californians are using virtually the same amount of water they were using before the drought began.

And one user stands out.

Someone in Bel Air, the exclusive West LA neighborhood that's been home to celebrities from Kim Kardashian and Kanye West to Madonna and Adam Sandler, used close to 12 million gallons of water in a single year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

That's 30,000 gallons of water each day, or enough water to power roughly 90 regular-sized homes.

It's also the equivalent of flushing 400 toilets every hour, running two showers constantly, and having enough left over to water the lawn, according to The New York Times.

Los Angeles hasn't revealed the identity of the person who's being called the "Wet Prince of Bel Air," but estimates from CIR put their total water bill, measured for the year ending April 1, at roughly $90,000.

To put that in perspective, one of my friends' parents, who own a house in the Pasadena area with three bathrooms and a pool, told me their water bill this year was about $660. On average, households in the region fork over about $780 a year each, Gary Breaux, chief financial officer of the region's water district, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, recently told CNBC.

By a rough estimate (and not taking into base fees), the Wet Prince, then, is using 115 times the normal amount.

Why some excessive use is a problem for everyone

As a recent article in The Times points out, the burden of excessive water use is not being borne equally in California.

In fact, the only reason the city, which has mandated a cutback in water use of 16%, is meeting its goals is thanks to some households that are actually conserving. Meanwhile, the city's top water users — many of whom own property with multiple pools, vast, lush lawns, and decorative fountains and waterfalls — face no fines.

This is all possible because of the state's complex approach to water. California has mandated that all districts cut back water use by "up to 36%," but it oversees 400 separate water districts. And each one gets to come up with its own water-conservation regulations.

Some utilities are slamming users that go over their monthly water allotment with "drought surcharges" which can reach hundreds of dollars, according to The Times.

Others — like the one that oversees the Wet Prince — are doing nothing.

READ MORE: 13 things Californians are doing that waste more water than eating almonds

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Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is an indigenous climate activist, hip-hop artist, and he's on the frontlines of a youth-led environmental movement. He's also only 15 years old. 

Since age six, this "anti-Bieber" has spoken for schools, conferences and events around the world to engage people in the climate change movement. He spoke to the United Nations General Assembly in June, urging the representatives to take immediate action.

Martinez is also the Youth Director of Earth Guardians, a non-profit organization committed to promoting a youth-led environmental movement. After the short film, "Kid Warrior," produced by Purpose and BLKFLM, was released in April, Earth Guardians experienced a spike in global engagement, growing from 60 crews of environmentally committed teens in 24 countries to over 400 crews in 50 countries.

Earth Guardians has launched an online pledge to be a climate leader, which Xiuhtezcatl plans to deliver with a million signatures to world leaders at COP21 in December.

Story and editing by Chelsea Pineda.

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GENEVA - Weather-related disasters such as floods and heatwaves have occurred almost daily in the past decade, almost twice as often as two decades ago, with Asia being the hardest hit region, a UN report said on Monday.

While the report authors could not pin the increase wholly on climate change, they did say that the upward trend was likely to continue as extreme weather events increased.

Since 1995, weather disasters have killed 606,000 people, left 4.1 billion injured, homeless or in need of aid, and accounted for 90 percent of all disasters, it said.

A recent peak year was 2002, when drought in India hit 200 million and a sandstorm in China affected 100 million. But the standout mega-disaster was Cyclone Nargis, which killed 138,000 in Myanmar in 2008.

While geophysical causes such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis often grab the headlines, they only make up one in 10 of the disasters trawled from a database defined by the impact.

The report, called "The Human Cost of Weather Related Disasters", found there were an average of 335 weather-related disasters annually between 2005 and August this year, up 14 percent from 1995-2004 and almost twice as many as in the years from 1985 to 1994.

"While scientists cannot calculate what percentage of this rise is due to climate change, predictions of more extreme weather in future almost certainly mean that we will witness a continued upward trend in weather-related disasters in the decades ahead," the report said.

The release of the report comes a week before world leaders gather in Paris to discuss plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions and prevent world temperatures rising.

The United Nations says atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that causes global warming, have risen to a new record every year for the past 30 years.

"All we can say is that certain disaster types are increasing. Floods are definitely increasing," said Debarati Guha-Sapir, professor at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at UCL University in Louvain, Belgium, which co-authored the report.

"Whether it's increasing due to global warming, I think it's safe to say the jury's out on that. But rather than focus on the ifs, whys and wherefores, I think we should focus on how to manage floods."

Margareta Wahlstrom, head of the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), said floods were not just caused by heavy rain but also by poorly planned construction.

UNISDR estimates natural disasters of all types cause losses of $250 billion-$300 billion globally each year.

The report drew on a database of weather events that defines an event as a disaster if 10 or more people are killed, 100 or more are affected, a state of emergency is declared, or if there is a call for international assistance.

The countries hit by the highest number of weather-related disasters over the past decade were the United States, with 472, China with 441, India with 288, the Philippines with 274 and Indonesia with 163. 

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Alison Williams)

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Ever since we were children, we’ve learned in grade school and from Ranger Rick about the cutting down of the rainforest.

We learned that it’s bad—that lots of animals and trees are killed and people’s livelihoods are turned upside down.

We’ve been told random facts and figures about how many acres are destroyed every second. We eventually start to become numb to it.

So what’s really going on there? There are 15,000 known species of trees in the Amazon.

How are those species of trees—the lifeblood and kings of the Amazon—faring? A large international team of researchers set out to find answers to just these questions.

Perhaps not surprisingly, their findings were grim: up to 57 percent of all Amazonian tree species are likely to qualify as globally threatened.

What We Knew Before

The rainforests of Amazonia are estimated to have originally covered 2.2 million square miles—a staggering number.

Amazonian forests have lost approximately 12 percent of that since industrialization began. Most of this has occurred in the southeastern part, in a region known as the “arc of deforestation.”

Many people have tried to understand and explain the consequences of massive forest loss at an ecosystem level i.e. soil erosion, diminished ecological services (not the least of which is oxygenation of the atmosphere) and climatic patterns gone haywire. But, no one has really attempted to figure out what is going on at a species level. In other words, we roughly know how much forest is being cleared, but what tree species are being destroyed, which ones are in the most danger, and how will that affect the overall destruction of the Amazon? Will the collapse of certain species have a domino or exponential effect on the process? That is precisely what tropical forest ecologist and leader of the study Hans ter Steege wanted to figure out.

Two Future Scenarios

Ter Steege and his team took highly a detailed model of tree abundance across Amazonia, developed from 1485 different forest inventories and overlaid two other models representing different deforestation scenarios. Each scenario combined historical, current, and projected rates of cutting. One scenario predicted what would happen if “business as usual” (BAU) or current rates of clearing continued. The other, titled the “improved governance scenario” (IGS) showed how much forest might be cleared if the integrity of indigenous peoples territories and protected areas were strictly maintained.

Under the BAU scenario, approximately 40 percent of the original Amazon forest would be destroyed by 2050, and under the less drastic IGS scenario, about 21 percent of original forest would be lost. Overall, and perhaps more startling, ter Steege and his team concluded that one-quarter to one half of all Amazonian tree species may experience population declines of over 30 percent. This affects all trees, including iconic species like the Brazil nut (63 percent could be lost by 2050) and wild populations of major food crops like cacao (which would see 50 percent population decline) and acai palm (which would experience a 72 percent loss).

 A positive outcome of this study, note the researchers, would be to officially classify up to 57 percent of all Amazonian tree species as threatened on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List (the highest regarded and most accurate database on the status of biodiversity all around the globe). “It’s [the IUCN Red List] a political instrument that has been used across a wide array of areas and situations” for conservation purposes and carries significant weight.

Ter Steege goes even further to suggest that most tropical tree species on earth may be eligible for official Threatened classification by the IUCN, considering that Africa and Asia have lost about 55 percent and 35 percent of their tropical forests respectively. And while it’s important to assess all species of flora and fauna, plant species can get overlooked. “Mammals and birds create more attention, but there are many more plant species, and our data on them is much less” says ter Steege.

What It Means

Ultimately, for the IUCN to be able to officially list a species in any category it must be fully assessed which requires a much more thorough hashing out of each species’ current state. But, since over 90 percent of all tree species on Earth are tropical, it might be a good idea to heed this advice. Despite the gloomy results, ter Steege remains hopeful. “Though 11% of the Amazon has been lost, more than 80 percent of it is still there. And around 50% of it has some conservation status. So while we might not be able to stop all deforestation we still have huge possibilities for comprehensive conservation in one of the richest terrestrial regions in the world.”

 It’s also important to remember that these estimates do not represent exactly what is going to happen. If the late Joe Strummer had anything to add when it comes to conservation it would probably be that “the future is unwritten.” This study presents a warning that most certainly requires our attention, for sure, especially with climate change exacerbating all environmental challenges of the present and future (climate change enhances the effects of deforestation like soil erosion and desertification), but it’s also a check up. It lets us know where we are, and what we need to do to avoid ending up somewhere we don’t want to be.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science.

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NOW WATCH: Study reveals the Earth is on track to run out of trees in 300 years

The heaviest ship in the world is Pioneering Spirit. It’s so big, that it carries cranes big enough to carry other cranes.

It’s owned by Allseas, an oil rig company. The boat can lay oil pipes on the ocean floor, and can lift entire oil platforms from the sea and transport them. At sea, it displaces 900,000 metric tons of water — the equivalent of 300,000 elephants.

Story by Jacob Shamsian and editing by Carl Mueller.

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Floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts cost the global economy between $250bn ($165bn) and $300bn each year, new research has estimated. The report, released by the United Nations on 23 November, also noted that 90% of major global disasters were caused by weather-related events.

The report – The Human Cost of Weather Related Disasters– was published by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). It aimed to highlight the impact that climate change has had on the world since the first Climate Change Conference (COP) in 1995. It revealed that 606,000 lives were lost due to weather-related incidents over the past 20 years, with 4.1 billion people being injured, displaced or left in need of emergency assistance.

"Weather and climate are major drivers of disaster risk and this report demonstrates that the world is paying a high price in lives cost," said Margareta Wahlstrom, the head of UNISDR. "Economic losses are a major development challenge for many least developed countries battling climate change and poverty."

The research revealed that the top five countries hit by the highest number of climate-related disasters were the United States (472), China (441), India (288), Philippines (274) and Indonesia (163). Asia is said to record the largest effects of climate disasters, with 332,000 deaths and 3.7bn people affected.

The total number of weather-related disasters is also noted to be on the rise, with an increase of 14% recorded since 1995. Floods are believed to have been the most frequent threat between 1995 and 2005, accounting for 47% of all weather-related disasters; however, storms were the deadliest threat, taking 242,000 lives in the same time period.

The research was revealed days before the UN's climate summit is scheduled to begin in Paris on 30 November. More than 190 countries are expected to come together for a week to debate how to tackle global warming. This year world leaders will aim to achieve a legally-binding universal agreement on climate change.

"In the long term, an agreement in Paris at COP21 on reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be a significant contribution to reducing damage and loss from disasters which are partly driven by a warming globe and rising sea levels," Wahlstrom said.

However, Wahlstrom noted that in the short term there was a need to reduce disaster risk by ensuring people were risk-informed and that they did not increase the exposure of people to natural hazards on flood plains, low-lying coastlines, or other locations considered unsuitable for human settlement.

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A landslide just outside of Los Angeles caused Vasquez Canyon Road to buckle and break last week. By the time the land stopped shifting, the road looked more like a rollercoaster. 

The power lines appeared as if they might tip over. The local utility shut off the electricity coursing through the wires, and was able to reroute residents' power so they didn't experience any outages, KTLA5 reported. 

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Vasquez Canyon Road is located outside of Los Angeles.

The geology of the area is fairly unstable, and landslides are common.

Source: Southern California Regional Rocks and Roads

This landslide was a bit more intense than most. It started out small on Thursday, November 19.

A 60-meter stretch of road in Santa Clarita, California, rose up off the ground and crumbled in the space of about 3.5 hours on Thursday 10 November, with further buckling reported over the next few days.

Some parts of the road are now completely cracked and unusable, while others have risen more than 4.5 meters (15 feet) above the ground, but no one's quite sure what caused such a dramatic shift.

When roads buckle like this, it's usually due to serious shifts in the earth below caused by earthquakes or serious rainstorms, but geologists have already ruled out these possibilities.

"There was no big rainstorm that triggered this. There was no big earthquake that triggered this," University of California, Los Angeles geologist Jeremy Boyce told CBS News.

Boyce took the opportunity to get his students out on the field to see a rare example of how geological events can happen surprisingly quickly — turns out Earth's bits and pieces don't always move at a glacial pace.

"When we think about geology, we think about processes that happen over millions and billions of years, so the opportunity to bring students out and see something happening over a scale of hours gives them the idea that not only does geology take forever, it can also happen almost instantaneously,"he said.

The best hypothesis scientists have been able to come up with is that the crumbling, buckling road is the result of a progressive landslide in the surrounding hills. Satellite images going back to 2011 show obvious cracks in the surface of the road, as well as significant shifts in the shape of the hills, perhaps due to getting saturated by a great deal of water at some point.

"[It] appears as though the soil moved underneath the road, and then lifted it up. Which is quite odd,"George Dvorsky reports for Gizmodo. "Normally, a landslide would just wipe the road away. Before-and-after pics of the site show that the road is situated on a box cut, and that the unloading of material from the slope likely contributed to the landslide."

The jury's still out on this one, but for now, the 3-km stretch of Vasquez Canyon Road between Lost Creek Road and Vasquez Way is reportedly closed until further notice.

Here's some recent drone footage of the site:

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Deep-fried turkey is delicious but dangerous.

Each year plenty of Americans whip out the turkey fryer and, before Thanksgiving is over, cause an estimated $15 million in property damage.

That's because turkey fryers require a lot of hot oil to work — about 3 gallons of cooking oil should do the trick for a standard 30-quart frying pot.

The mistake that some of us inevitably make with turkey fryers is to mix water with the hot oil. That's a recipe for disaster, not delicious deep-fried turkey, and here's why.

Water is denser than oil. So if you mix room-temperature water with oil of the same temperature, then the water will sink to the bottom of the container.

Now, heat that oil up to its boiling point and add water. Depending on how much and how quickly you add the water, you can get a seriously dangerous fireball, like this:

That's because oil boils at a higher temperature than water. So when you add water to your boiling pot, the water is quickly heated by the oil to above its boiling point and turns to steam. 

But if you add a lot of water, fast enough — or if you take a frozen turkey and plop it in the pot — then some of that water will travel down to the bottom of the pot. 

There, it heats up, quickly changing from a liquid to a gas. The gas then pushes the oil up, out of the pot, and you get a lot of hot oil spattering everywhere.

The spattering oil mixes with the steam creating a dangerous fountain, as Matthew described on physics.stackexchange:

"This fountain creates a fine mist of the very hot oil, this greatly increased surface area coupled with the already hot oil causes it to ignite which then ignites surrounding droplets until the entire batch of oil that was displaced from the pot is a huge fireball," Matthew explained.

The same thing happens if you mix cool oil with hot oil, as shown below:

So, this year, make sure to be extremely careful with moisture around your turkey fryer, if you plan to use one. Here are some quick tips on how to avoid a Thanksgiving fireball:

• Always deep-fry your turkey outside at least 10 feet away from anything else. 
• Follow the instructions for how full to fill your fryer pot with oil. Do NOT fill it too full.
• Use a thermometer to monitor the temperature of your oil. If it gets hotter than 350 degrees the oil could catch fire.
• Thaw and pat down your turkey completely to minimize moisture before gently placing it in the fryer. 
• If the fryer catches fire do NOT add water. Keep a fire extinguisher on hand. 
• Be aware that your fryer will remain hot for hours after cooking, so be careful!
• And the best way to avoid a Thanksgiving fireball is to buy your deep-fried turkey from a professional establishment, such as grocery stores, specialty-food retailers, and restaurants.

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