https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/new-generation-flow-batteries-could-eventually-sustain-grid-powered-sun-and-wind Source:   By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: ...With the rise of wind and solar power, energy companies are looking for ways to keep electrons flowing when the sun doesn't shine and the wind ebbs. Giant devices called flow batteries, using tanks of electrolytes capable of storing enough electricity to power thousands of homes for many hours, could be the answer. But most flow batteries rely on vanadium, a somewhat rare and expensive metal.... Last week, researchers reported overcoming many of these drawbacks with a potentially cheap, long-lived, and safe flow battery.  ...flow batteries ...store electrical charge in tanks of liquid electrolyte that is pumped through electrodes to extract the electrons; the spent electrolyte returns to the tank. When a solar panel or turbine provides electrons, the pumps push spent electrolyte back through the el

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/climate/exxon-lawsuit-climate-change.html Source:   By John Schwartz, The New York Times. Excerpt: New York’s attorney general sued Exxon Mobil on Wednesday, claiming the company defrauded shareholders by downplaying the expected risks of climate change to its business. The litigation, which follows more than three years of investigation, represents the most significant legal effort yet to establish that a fossil fuel company misled the public on climate change and to hold it responsible.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/climate-change-global-warming-trump.html Source:   By Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Excerpt: The latest report from the world’s climate scientists has made clear the size of the challenge if the world is to stay below the global warming limit hoped for in the Paris climate agreement. Unfortunately, with current trends we are likely to cross this threshold within the next two decades because we are already two-thirds of the way there. But how do we know what is driving these climate trends? It comes down to the same kind of detective work that typifies a crime scene investigation, only here we are dealing with a case that encompasses the whole world. Let me give you my view, which does not necessarily represent the position of NASA or the federal government....   

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/scientists-take-opposing-sides-youth-climate-trial Source:   By Julia Rosen, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Next week, barring a last-minute intervention by the Supreme Court, climate change will go to trial for just the second time in U.S. history. In a federal courtroom in Eugene, Oregon, 21 young people are scheduled to face off against the U.S. government, which they accuse of endangering their future by promoting policies that have increased emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other planet warming gases. The plaintiffs aren't asking for monetary damages. Instead, they want District Judge Ann Aiken to take the unprecedented step of ordering federal agencies to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere....

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/business/energy-environment/california-coast-wind-farms.html Source:   By Ivan Penn and Stanley Reed, The New York Times. Excerpt: LOS ANGELES — California’s aggressive pursuit of an electric grid fully powered by renewable energy sources is heading in a new direction: offshore. On Friday, the federal Interior Department took the first steps to enable companies to lease waters in Central and Northern California for wind projects. If all goes as the state’s regulators and utilities expect, floating windmills could begin producing power within six years. Such ambitions were precluded until now because of the depths of the Pacific near its shore, which made it difficult to anchor the huge towers that support massive wind turbines. “They would be in much deeper water than anything that has been built in the world so far,” said Karen Douglas, a member of the California Energy Commission. Several contenders are expected to enter the bidding, equipped wi

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/climate-change-prompts-rethink-everglades-management Source:   By Richard Blaustein, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Efforts to restore the rich ecology of the Florida Everglades have so far focused on fighting damage from pollutant runoff and reestablishing the natural flow of water. But now, an expert panel is calling for federal and state agencies to reassess their plans in light of threats from climate change and sea-level rise. A congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, released on 16 October, asks the managers of the 18-year-old Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) to conduct a “midcourse assessment.” The new evaluation should account for likely conditions in the wetlands in “2050 and beyond” and model how existing restoration projects would fare under various sea-level rise scenarios.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/climate/climate-change-historic-sites.html Source:   By Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...some of the most important ancient sites in the Mediterranean region — the Greek city of Ephesus, Istanbul’s historic districts, Venice’s canals — might not survive the era of climate change. Those places joined a list of others that we’ve covered extensively here at The Times. Our series on cultural heritage has looked at the Cedars of Lebanon , the Stone Age villages of Scotland and the statues of Easter Island , all of which are threatened by climate change. In the case of Scotland and Easter Island, the menace is from rising seas. Many civilizations of the past, much like many present-day cities, were centered on coastal areas. As sea levels rise — both because warmer water takes up more space than cooler water, and because of melting glaciers — these heritage sites face sharply increased risks from both coastal erosion and flooding...

http://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/solar-power-could-electrify-sub-saharan-africa/ Source:   By Public Affairs, UC Berkeley. Excerpt: Solar energy could be the key to providing low-cost, highly reliable energy to the roughly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who currently live without power, says new UC Berkeley research published today in Nature Energy. ...The research team analyzed 10 years of solar data from NASA to calculate the cheapest ways to build stand-alone solar energy systems. At current costs, they found that most regions in Sub-Saharan Africa can get 95 percent reliable power — meaning customers can use electricity from some combination of solar panels and batteries 95 percent of the time — for roughly 40 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Though this price is still higher than the price of energy from a grid, their model indicates that with future declines in the costs of decentralized systems, these prices may become competitive with the grid in many parts of th

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/science/drought-beer-climate.html Source:   By James Gorman, The New York Times. Excerpt: If horrific hurricanes and a new, scarier-than-ever United Nations report don’t change attitudes on climate change, perhaps a new report on barley will. A small international team of scientists considered what the effect of climate change would be for this crop in the next 80 years, and they are raising an alarm they hope will pierce the din of political posturing. They are predicting a beer shortage....   

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/slaying-the-climate-dragon/ Source:   By Kate Marvel. Scientific American. Excerpt: A fairy tale whose ending, still unwritten, is by no means guaranteed to be happy. Once upon a time there was an enchanted kingdom, full of magic and fairies and tame dragons that slumbered safely under the mountains. The people of this kingdom lived in great happiness and prosperity, for out of the ground bubbled a magical elixir that could make their every wish come true. Unfortunately for the people of the kingdom, there also lived in the enchanted land an evil witch. Evil, of course, being a relative term; one cannot help but suspect she was merely very tired of everything that was going on. At any rate, she grew angry and cast an awful curse on them. The magic elixir, the source of all the kingdom’s power and wealth, now came with a deadly side effect: it had the power to wake dragons. And so it was. The reports were hazy at first- disappearing sh

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/key-climate-panel-citing-impending-crisis-urges-crash-effort-reduce-emissions Source:   By Dennis Normile, Science Magazine. Excerpt: The United Nations’s climate panel has moved the goal posts for limiting climate change, setting the world a staggering challenge. A report released yesterday [ http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ ] in Incheon, South Korea, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says allowing the planet to warm by more than 1.5°C could have dire consequences, and that a speedy transformation of the world’s energy systems is needed to avoid breaching that limit, which is notably tighter than the target of 2°C cited in the Paris agreement of 2015. “Net [carbon dioxide] emissions at the global scale must reach zero by 2050,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in Paris and a key participant in drafting the report. ...There is no time for delay