http://www.climatesignals.org/climate-signals/increased-extreme-heat-and-heat-waves Source:   By Climate Signals For Investigation:   Excerpt: One of the strongest findings of climate science is that global warming amplifies the intensity, duration and frequency of extreme heat events. These events occur on multiple time scales, from a single day or week, to months or entire seasons. The more extreme the heatwave, the more likely the event can be attributed to global warming.  Roughly 75% of extreme heat events globally are attributed to climate change. The signal of climate change is particularly reflected in record-breaking heat waves. ...85% of recent record-hot days globally are attributed to climate change....

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/climate-lab Source:   By Vox and the Climate Lab of the University of California For Investigation:   Video #1 in a series: The biggest problem for the climate change fight isn’t technology – it’s human psychology....

https://eos.org/articles/more-intense-rains-in-u-s-midwest-tied-to-farm-mechanization Source:   By Bas den Hond, Earth & Space News EoS (AGU) For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: “Rain follows the plow,” or so the pioneers who started farms in the drylands of the American West were told. The 19th-century notion that cultivation will always lead to a beneficial change in the climate turned out to be false. But researchers have previously found that climate does respond to what people do on the ground, like when monsoon patterns have been altered by deforestation. Now a new study has investigated the climate effects of a century-long conversion in the United States, from farmers using animals to do almost all of the plowing and other heavy farmwork to using only machines. An increase in heavy rainfall events in the 20th century in the American Midwest appears to be closely tied to that switch from horsepower to mechanized agriculture, according to Taleena Sines of the Internationa

https://eos.org/opinions/climate-changes-pulse-is-in-central-america-and-the-caribbean Source:   By J. E. González, M. Georgescu, M. C. Lemos, N. Hosannah, and D. Niyogi, Earth & Space News (EOS; AGU) For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: Nations that border the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea are ideally placed for tracking the effects of global climate change and testing innovative ways to adapt to future changes. ...The global trend of increasing sea surface temperatures, for example, may work with or against natural modes of climate variability in the region, highlighting the physical system’s complexity and nonlinear nature. Hand in hand with these physical changes are the hazards they pose to people. More than 120 million people live in the area. Despite steady, albeit inequitable, economic growth during recent decades, the region has become increasingly exposed to climate-related pressures that threaten its social and economic well-being. The region’s extensive coastlines

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/climate-lab Source:   Vox and the Climate Lab of the University of California For Investigation:   10.3 Video #2 in a series: Going green does not need to be a sacrifice, either for us as individuals or for businesses, governments and the economy....

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/climate/tasmania-global-warming-shoreline-erosion.html Source:   By Justin Gillis, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: ISLE OF THE DEAD, Tasmania — Maybe the hardened convicts who carved the 19th-century gravestones dotting this tiny island were barely literate, or perhaps one of them just had a wicked sense of humor. The schoolmaster Benjamin Horne went to his repose in 1843 with this sentence chiseled above his head: “Sincerely regretted by all who knew him.” ...The very island on which he lies is being chewed away by the sea. The roots of trees that have stood for decades now dangle perilously over a fast-eroding shore. A few miles away, a seaside coal mine once worked by the convicts is under similar assault by the waves. ...In country after country, managers of national parks and other historic sites are realizing that climate change, with its coastal flooding and erosion, rising temperatures and more intense rainstorms, re

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-just-breached-the-410-ppm-threshold-for-co2/ Source:   By Brian Kahn, Scientific American For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: The world just passed another round-numbered climate milestone. Scientists predicted it would happen this year and lo and behold, it has. On Tuesday, the Mauna Loa Observatory recorded its first-ever carbon dioxide reading in excess of 410 parts per million (it was 410.28 ppm in case you want the full deal). Carbon dioxide hasn’t reached that height in millions of years. It’s a new atmosphere that humanity will have to contend with, one that’s trapping more heat and causing the climate to change at a quickening rate....

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/magazine/how-a-warming-planet-drives-human-migration.html Source:   By Jessica Benko, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: Climate displacement is becoming one of the world’s most powerful — and destabilizing — geopolitical forces. Climate change is not equally felt across the globe, and neither are its longer term consequences. This map overlays human turmoil — represented here by United Nations data on nearly 64 million “persons of concern,” whose numbers have tripled since 2005 — with climate turmoil, represented by data from NASA’s Common Sense Climate Index . The correlation is striking. Climate change is a threat multiplier: It contributes to economic and political instability and also worsens the effects. It propels sudden-onset disasters like floods and storms and slow-onset disasters like drought and desertification; those disasters contribute to failed crops, famine and overcrowded urban centers; those crises inflame po

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/magazine/when-rising-seas-transform-risk-into-certainty.html Source:   By Brooke Jarvis, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: ...Spend a few days talking about floods and real estate in Norfolk, and you’ll quickly learn the importance of even tiny inclines. Locals know where, on what appears to the uninitiated to be a flat street, to park their cars to keep them from flooding past the axles when the wind pushes the tide up. Landscapers build what are essentially decorative earthen dikes around houses. ...In the coming decades, these fine distinctions will mean little, as the risk of flooding becomes the certainty of it. The operative measurement for rising waters in Norfolk is not inches but feet — as many as six of them by the end of the century, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, though estimates vary. City planners are forthright that they’re preparing for a future in which parts of the city do not survive. “We absolute

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/science/climate-change-glacier-yukon-river.html Source:   By John Schwartz, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: In the blink of a geological eye, climate change has helped reverse the flow of water melting from a glacier in Canada’s Yukon, a hijacking that scientists call “river piracy.” This engaging term refers to one river capturing and diverting the flow of another. It occurred last spring at the Kaskawulsh Glacier, one of Canada’s largest, with a suddenness that startled scientists. A process that would ordinarily take thousands of years — or more — happened in just a few months in 2016. Much of the meltwater from the glacier normally flows to the north into the Bering Sea via the Slims and Yukon Rivers. A rapidly retreating and thinning glacier — accelerated by global warming — caused the water to redirect to the south, and into the Pacific Ocean. Last year’s unusually warm spring produced melting waters that cut a canyon

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/business/energy-environment/offshore-wind-subsidy-dong-energy.html Source:   By Stanley Reed, The New York Times For Investigation:   By Stanley Reed, The New York Times Excerpt: LONDON — European governments have spent large sums of money in recent years subsidizing giant offshore wind projects in hopes of creating a clean source of energy that could eventually pay for itself. Now that moment may be here — and a lot sooner than expected. On Thursday, the Danish company Dong Energy, the largest offshore wind developer, won the right to build two large wind projects in the German North Sea with no government subsidies — a highly symbolic first for the industry. The company will receive the revenues from the electricity generated by the wind farms.  ...In a news release, Dong cited several factors that underpinned its bids. By the time the projects are completed in 2024, the company said, it expects turbine makers to offer a new generati

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/dealbook/coal-utilities-regulation-trump.html Source:   By Coral Davenport, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: WASHINGTON — In Page, Ariz., the operators of the Navajo Generating Station... have announced plans to close it by 2019. The electric utility Dayton Power & Light will shut two coal plants in southern Ohio by next year. Across the country, at least six other coal-fired power plants have shut since November, and nearly 40 more are to close in the next four years. President Trump campaigned on a pledge to restore the limping American coal industry, vowing to bring jobs and production back to a sector that has been on a steady decline for over a decade. But to do that, he would have to revive demand for coal by electric utilities, which for decades have been the largest consumer of the heavily polluting fuel. Nearly all the coal mined in the United States generates electricity. On March 28, Mr. Trump headed t

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/science/carbon-dioxide-plant-growth-antarctic-ice.html Source:   By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times For Investigation:   10.3 Excerpt: For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out what all the carbon dioxide we have been putting into the atmosphere has been doing to plants. It turns out that the best place to find an answer is where no plants can survive: the icy wastes of Antarctica. As ice forms in Antarctica, it traps air bubbles. For thousands of years, they have preserved samples of the atmosphere. The levels of one chemical in that mix reveal the global growth of plants at any point in that history. “It’s the whole Earth — it’s every plant,” said J. Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced. Analyzing the ice, Dr. Campbell and his colleagues have discovered that in the last century, plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years. Writing in the journal Nature