https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/business/energy-environment/navigating-climate-change-in-americas-heartland.html Source:   By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: GLEN ELDER, Kan. — Doug Palen, a fourth-generation grain farmer on Kansas’ wind-swept plains, is in the business of understanding the climate. Since 2012, he has choked through the harshest drought to hit the Great Plains in a century, punctuated by freakish snowstorms and suffocating gales of dust. His planting season starts earlier in the spring and pushes deeper into winter. To adapt, he has embraced an environmentally conscious way of farming that guards against soil erosion and conserves precious water. He can talk for hours about carbon sequestration — the trapping of global-warming-causing gases in plant life and in the soil — or the science of the beneficial microbes that enrich his land. In short, he is a climate change realist. Just don’t expect him to utter the words “climat

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/energy-environment/us-health-officials-cancel-climate-conference-dont-say-why/2017/01/23/07709336-e1a4-11e6-a419-eefe8eff0835_story.html Source:   By Mike Stobbe | AP For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: NEW YORK — The government’s top public health agency has canceled a conference next month on climate change and health but isn’t saying why publicly. But a co-sponsor said he was told by the CDC that it was worried how the conference would be viewed by the Trump administration. The incoming administration did not ask or order that the meeting be canceled, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. ...the decision was “a strategic retreat,” intended to head off a possible last minute cancellation or other repercussions from Trump officials who may prove hostile to spending money on climate change science, Benjamin said Monday. ...Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the University

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qqifEdqf5g&feature=youtu.be Source:   National Geographic For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: 2min 49sec video These amazing windmills are among the oldest in the world. Located in the Iranian town of Nashtifan, initially named Nish Toofan, or "storm's sting," the windmills have withstood winds of up to 74 miles an hour. With the design thought to have been created in eastern Persia between 500-900 A.D., they have been in use for several centuries.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/business/energy-environment/offshore-wind-energy-long-island.html Source:   By Diane Cardwell, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: Only a few years ago, the long-held dream of harnessing the strong, steady gusts off the Atlantic coast to make electricity seemed destined to remain just that. ...Now the industry is poised to take off, just as the American political landscape and energy policy itself face perhaps the greatest uncertainty in a generation. Last fall, five turbines in the waters of Rhode Island — the country’s first offshore farm — began delivering power to the grid. ...Last year in Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, signed into law a mandate that is pushing development forward. And in New York, after years of stymied progress, the Long Island Power Authority has reached an agreement with Deepwater Wind, which built the Rhode Island turbine array, to drop a much larger farm — 15 turbines capable of runni

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/business/economy/climate-change-california-new-york.html Source:   By Eduardo Porter, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 2017-01-17. . . For GSS Climate Change chapter 10 and Energy Use chapter 4. Excerpt: ...for all the pluck of the Golden State’s politicians, California is far from providing the leadership needed in the battle against climate change. Distracted by the competing objective of shuttering nuclear plants that still produce over a fifth of its zero-carbon power, the state risks failing the main environmental challenge of our time. ...even a state like New York still has work to do. An analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers argued that to ensure that the global temperature does not rise more than 3.6 degrees above its preindustrial average, which world leaders have agreed is the tolerable limit, the carbon intensity of the global economy must decline 6.3 percent per year between now and 2030. The United States must decarbonize a

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=190748&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click Source:   NSF Press Release 17-003 For Investigation:  7.3, 9.1 Excerpt: Can cloud seeding -- dispersing particles into the air with the aim of increasing precipitation -- increase snowfall? This week, a team of researchers began a cloud-seeding project in southwestern Idaho to answer that question. Cloud seeding is a process by which artificial ice nuclei, such as silver iodide particles, are released into clouds, either from the air or via ground-based generators. The Idaho project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and dubbed SNOWIE (Seeded and Natural Orographic Wintertime Clouds -- the Idaho Experiment), will run from January 7 to March 17 in and around the Payette Basin, 50 miles north of Boise. "Scientists are still uncertain about cloud seeding for increasing precipitation, despite ongoing operations around the globe," says Nick Anderson, program director

https://eos.org/meeting-reports/understanding-how-climate-engineering-can-offset-climate-change Source:   By Ben Kravitz, Alan Robock, and Jón Egill Kristjánsson, Eos, Earth & Space Science News, AGU For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: Climate intervention, also called geoengineering or climate engineering, is an emerging, important area of climate science research. This research focuses on deliberate climate modification to offset some of the effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) was formed to better understand climate intervention through simulations conducted by multiple climate models. GeoMIP held its sixth annual meeting at the University of Oslo in Oslo, Norway, in June 2016. The meeting was held in conjunction with the Norwegian project Exploring the Potential and Side Effects of Climate Engineering (EXPECT), which seeks to understand the implications of climate intervention and to stimulate interdisc

http://www.noaa.gov/news/2016-was-2nd-warmest-year-on-record-for-us Source:   NOAA news release For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: 15 weather and climate disasters caused 138 deaths, $46B in damages. ...depending on where you live, 2016 was either parched, soggy — or both. ...The average U.S. temperature in 2016 was 54.9 degrees F (2.9 degrees F above average), which ranked as the second warmest year in 122 years of record-keeping. This is the 20th consecutive year the annual average temperature exceeded the average. Every state in the contiguous U.S. and Alaska experienced above-average annual temperatures, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. ...This is the second highest number of disasters experienced in one year, with double the record number of inland flooding events for one year. ...1 drought (affected multiple areas); 1 wildfire (affected multiple areas); 4 inland floods; 8 severe storms; and 1 hurricane (Matthew)....

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/polar-bear-plan-climate-change/ Source:   By John R. Platt, Scientific American For Investigation:   10.3 For GSS Climate Change chapter 8 and Losing Biodiversity chapter 8. Excerpt: Climate change is “the primary threat” to the survival of polar bears, according to a conservation management plan released today by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The plan—which also addresses issues such as human-bear conflict, subsistence hunting by Alaskan Native people, and minimizing the risk of oil spills—says global action on climate change is necessary to save this sea-ice dependent species, which has over the past several years become the conservation icon related to climate change. ...The 106-page plan addresses multiple issues facing polar bears, presenting a complex portrait of their threats and what it will take to save them....

https://eos.org/articles/more-frequent-glacial-quakes-on-greenland-signal-ice-retreat Source:   By JoAnna Wendel, EoS - Earth & Space Science News, AGU For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: As the Greenland ice sheet creaks and cracks, scientists are listening.Since the 1990s, researchers have seen a rise in the number of glacial earthquakes emanating from Greenland’s glaciers—earthquakes that stem from massive blocks of ice calving from glacier fronts. Nearly half of the glacial earthquakes in the past quarter century occurred between 2011 and 2013, a team of researchers has now found after digging through seismic data. These earthquakes could be a signal of a warming climate’s effect on the stability of the ice sheet itself.  “The rise in glacial earthquakes is part of the larger pattern of ice loss that is happening all over the Greenland ice sheet,” said Kira Olsen, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in New York, who led the new study. Along with recorded ice loss and m

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/west-antarctic-ice-shelf-breaking-up-from-the-inside-out Source:   By Lauren Lipuma, EoS - Earth & Space Science News, AGU For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: Pine Island Glacier and its nearby twin, Thwaites Glacier, sit at the outer edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Like corks in a bottle, the two glaciers block ice flow and keep nearly 10% of the ice sheet from draining into the sea. Studies have suggested that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is particularly unstable and could collapse within the next 100 years. The collapse could lead to a sea level rise of nearly 10 feet (3 meters), which would engulf major U.S. cities such as New York and Miami and displace 150 million people living on coasts worldwide. A nearly 225-square-mile (588-square-kilometer) iceberg—nearly the size of Chicago—broke off from Pine Island Glacier in 2015, but it wasn’t until researchers were testing some new image-processing software that they noticed something s

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-is-raising-flood-risk-in-the-northern-u-s/ Source:   By Erika Bolstad, ClimateWire, reprinted by Scientific American For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: ...Scientists who combined an on-the-ground look at stream gauge data and an above-the-ground view from satellites have determined that as the Earth warms, the threat of flooding is growing in the northern half of the United States. The research from the University of Iowa, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that shifting rainfall patterns and the amount of water in the ground are likely causes for the changes. The work fed off research published in 2015 that looked at stream gauges in the central United States, said Gabriele Villarini, an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering at the university and a co-author of the new paper with Louise Slater. His earlier research showed limited evidence of significant changes in the