https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/warning-ancient-tree-rings-americas-are-prone-catastrophic-simultaneous-droughts Source:   By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. Excerpt: For 10 years, central Chile has been gripped by unrelenting drought. With 30% less rainfall than normal, verdant landscapes have withered, reservoirs are low, and more than 100,000 farm animals have died. The dry spell has lasted so long that researchers are calling it a “megadrought,” rivaling dry stretches centuries ago. It’s not so different from the decadelong drought that California, some 8000 kilometers away, endured until this year. By analyzing tree ring records, scientists have now found evidence that such tandem droughts are more than a coincidence: They are surprisingly common over the past 1200 years, and they may often share a common cause—an abnormally cool state of the eastern Pacific Ocean known as La Niña. ...Nor is it clear how the drought patterns will change as climate warms. A warming atmo

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/29/opinion/climate-change-hydroelectric-dam.html Source:    By Macarena Soler, Monti Aguirre and Juan Pablo Orrego, The New York Times (Opinion). Excerpt: ... rivers, like many worldwide, have been threatened by dam projects that aim to provide power for distant cities and mining operations. Only one-third of the world’s 177 longest rivers remain free flowing, and just 21 rivers longer than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) retain a direct connection to the sea. If we are to arrest global climate change, prevent the toxifying of freshwater sources and do right by all those who depend on rivers for survival, we must return more rivers to their natural state. ...Hydropower is not a clean, green technology. Rivers help regulate an increasingly volatile global carbon cycle by transporting decaying organic material from land to sea, where it settles on the ocean floor. This draws an estimated 200 million tons of carbon out of the air each year....

https://eos.org/articles/what-do-you-get-when-you-cross-a-thunderstorm-with-a-wildfire Source:    By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: There are few things more ominous than a looming thundercloud. Add a wildfire to the mix, and the result can be a towering tempest of thick smoke, smoldering embers, and superheated air. Fire-fueled thunderstorms are naturally occurring weather systems that sometimes spin up as a result of smoke and heat billowing from intense wildfires. These extreme storms, called pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb), occur infrequently, but when they do they can lead to tragic results. The Making of a Fire Storm [:] Wildfires give off intense heat, forcing large amounts of smoke and hot air to rise. As the mixture moves higher into the troposphere—the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere—it cools and expands as the air pressure drops. Moisture in the air soon condenses, forming big puffy clouds called pyrocumulus clouds. When conditions in the atmosphere are just right—inc

https://eos.org/articles/bipartisan-focus-on-energy-innovation-emerges Source:   By Randy Showstack, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: A congressional subcommittee has advanced three energy-related bills that push for technological innovation in geothermal energy development, battery storage, and power grid modernization—innovations that could help to slow greenhouse gas emissions. One of the bills, the Advanced Geothermal Research and Development Act of 2019 (H.R. 5374), “takes important steps toward advancing a woefully underutilized source of energy,” said Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) at the 19 December markup of the legislation by the Subcommittee on Energy of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. ...Geothermal energy, which is literally heat derived from Earth, contributes to just 0.4% of electric power generation in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Although the United States already generates more tota

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/scientists-have-discovered-world-s-oldest-forest-and-its-radical-impact-life Source:   By Colin Barras, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest forest in an abandoned quarry near Cairo, New York. The 385-million-year-old rocks contain the fossilized woody roots of dozens of ancient trees. The find marks a turning point in Earth’s history. When trees evolved these roots, they helped pull carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from the air and lock it away, radically shifting the planet’s climate and leading to the atmosphere we know today. Trees like those at Cairo had a big effect on the ancient climate, says Kevin Boyce, a geoscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Deep roots penetrate and break up the rocks within and below the soil. Geologists call this processing “weathering,” and it triggers chemical reactions that pull CO 2 from the atmosphere and turn it into carbonate ions in groundwater. This ulti

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/world/australia/record-heat.html Source:   By Jamie Tarabay, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...A national heat wave, triggered by a confluence of meteorological factors that extends well beyond Australia’s shores, pushed high temperatures across the country on Tuesday to an average of 105.6 degrees, or 40.9 degrees Celsius, breaking the record of 104.5, or 40.3 Celsius, set on Jan. 7, 2013. ...As the temperatures have risen, so has the threat of fires, which have ravaged large swathes of the country and shrouded Sydney in smoke. ...The highest temperature ever recorded in the country was 123 degrees on Jan. 2, 1960, in Oodnadatta, a remote outback town in South Australia. On Wednesday, the hottest place on the continent was Birdsville, Queensland, which reached 117 degrees. Nine of Australia’s 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005, with last year the third hottest....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/coral-reefs-suffer-around-world-reefs-french-polynesia-are-thriving Source:   By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine. Excerpt: In a world where warming seas, pollution, and predation are killing coral around the world, an extensive survey of French Polynesia in 2013 has found a ray of hope. On some atolls there, live coral covered 70% of the reef’s surface; on others, big fish such as grouper and barracuda that have almost disappeared elsewhere were thriving....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/climate/cop25-un-climate-talks-madrid.html Source:  By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times. Excerpt: In what was widely denounced as one of the worst outcomes in a quarter-century of climate negotiations, United Nations talks ended early Sunday morning with the United States and other big polluters blocking even a nonbinding measure that would have encouraged countries to adopt more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions next year.   Because the United States is withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, it was the last chance, at least for some time, for American delegates to sit at the negotiating table at the annual talks — and perhaps a turning point in global climate negotiations, given the influence that Washington has long wielded, for better or worse, in the discussions.The Trump administration used the meeting to push back on a range of proposals, including a mechanism to compensate developing countries for losses that

https://eos.org/articles/scientists-and-activists-examine-need-for-climate-action Source:    By Randy Showstack, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Scientists shouldn’t have to apologize for being advocates “for a fact-based, objective discourse over what is arguably the greatest threat that we face as a civilization.” For Varshini Prakash, the climate crisis “is obviously very depressing” and “terrifying with the timeline that we’re working on” to curb greenhouse gas emissions. However, Prakash isn’t letting that stop her as she works to organize and mobilize youth and others to stop climate change. She is the cofounder of the Sunrise Movement, an organization that advocates for climate action and supports the Green New Deal initiative. She spoke at a 9 December session at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2019 in San Francisco, Calif., on aligning U.S. energy policy with a 1.5°C climate limit above preindustrial levels. The session included climate scientists and activists....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas-methane-super-emitters.html Source:   Jonah M. Kessel, a New York Times visual journalist, and Hiroko Tabuchi, a Times climate reporter, went to West Texas oilfields with a camera that can photograph methane. Excerpt: Immense amounts of methane are escaping from oil and gas sites nationwide, worsening global warming, even as the Trump administration weakens restrictions on offenders....  See also: A Methane Leak, Seen From Space, Proves to Be Far Larger Than Thought - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/climate/methane-leak-satellite.html

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/biologists-think-they-know-why-stunning-hawaiian-plant-vanishing Source:   By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Maui’s silverswords (Argyroxiphium sandwicense subsp. macrocephalum) had been declining for centuries, victims of feral goats and tourists eager to uproot living souvenirs. Even before the silversword was declared a federally threatened species in 1992, conservationists had fenced the barren slopes of their habitat, rid the area of goats, and planted silversword seeds. The efforts seemed to be working until the 1990s, after which the Maui species declined by 60%. Plants that sit farther down the volcano have suffered the most, even though they live in wetter conditions. In 2016, Paul Krushelnycky, an ecologist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, noted that this recent drop coincided with more frequent changes in the trade winds, east-to-west winds that flow up the volcano. Increasingly, the trade winds’ cool, moist

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/climate/ocean-acidification-climate-change.html Source:   By Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times. Excerpt: The world’s oceans are gasping for breath, a report issued Saturday at the annual global climate talks in Madrid has concluded. The report represents the combined efforts of 67 scientists from 17 countries and was released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It found that oxygen levels in the world’s oceans declined by roughly 2 percent between 1960 and 2010. The decline, called deoxygenation, is largely attributed to climate change, although other human activities are contributing to the problem. One example is so-called nutrient runoff, when too many nutrients from fertilizers used on farms and lawns wash into waterways. The decline might not seem significant because, “we’re sort of sitting surrounded by plenty of oxygen and we don’t think small losses of oxygen affect us,” said Dan Laffoley, the principal adviser in

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/how-volcanic-eruption-helped-create-modern-scotland Source:   By Sid Perkins, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Over seven terrible years in the 1690s, crops failed, farming villages emptied, and severe famine killed up to 15% of the entire population of Scotland. The so-called Scottish ills (named after the biblical plagues) ushered in an era of crippling economic conditions. Soon after, the formerly independent nation joined Great Britain. Now, researchers suggest volcanic eruptions thousands of kilometers away may have helped spark this political transformation. Scientists have long known that volcanoes can alter Earth’s climate. During large eruptions, light-scattering droplets of sulfuric acid reach the stratosphere and spread around the globe, reflecting some of the Sun’s radiation back into space and cooling the planet. Such cold spells can last from several months to several years—and they can help trigger droughts and crop failures. The clu

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html Source:   Photographs and Video by Victor Moriyama, Written by Matt Sandy, The New York Times. Excerpt: Deforestation in the world’s largest rainforest, an important buffer against climate change, has soared under President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. ...For months, black clouds had hung over the rainforest as work crews burned and chain-sawed through it. Now the rainy season had arrived, offering a respite to the jungle and a clearer view of the damage to the world. The picture that emerged was anything but reassuring: Brazil’s space agency reported that in one year, more than 3,700 square miles of the Amazon had been razed — a swath of jungle nearly the size of Lebanon torn from the world’s largest rainforest. It was the highest loss in Brazilian rainforest in a decade, and stark evidence of just how badly the Amazon, an important buffer against global warming, has fared in Brazil’s first year unde

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/climate/california-fire-insurance-climate.html Source:   By Christopher Flavelle and Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: California’s wildfires have grown so costly and damaging that insurance companies — a homeowner’s last hope when disaster strikes — have increasingly been canceling people’s policies in fire-prone parts of the state. On Thursday, however, California took the highly unusual step of banning the practice, a decision that exacerbates the insurance industry’s miscalculation of the cost of climate change. The new policy imposes a one-year moratorium preventing insurers from dropping customers in or alongside ZIP codes struck by recent wildfires. The moratorium covers at least 800,000 homes around the state. The state has also asked insurers to voluntarily stop dropping customers anywhere in California because of fire risk for one year....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/climate/florida-keys-climate-change.html Source:   By Christopher Flavelle and Patricia Mazzei, The New York Times. Excerpt: KEY WEST, Fla. — Officials in the Florida Keys announced what many coastal governments nationwide have long feared, but few have been willing to admit: As seas rise and flooding gets worse, not everyone can be saved. And in some places, it doesn’t even make sense to try. ...The results released Wednesday focus on a single three-mile stretch of road at the southern tip of Sugarloaf Key, a small island 15 miles up Highway 1 from Key West. To keep those three miles of road dry year-round in 2025 would require raising it by 1.3 feet, at a cost of $75 million, or $25 million per mile. Keeping the road dry in 2045 would mean elevating it 2.2 feet, at a cost of $128 million. To protect against expected flooding levels in 2060, the cost would jump to $181 million....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/climate/climate-change-acceleration.html Source:   By Henry Fountain, The New York Times. Excerpt: More devastating fires in California. Persistent drought in the Southwest. Record flooding in Europe and Africa. A heat wave, of all things, in Greenland. Climate change and its effects are accelerating, with climate related disasters piling up, season after season. “Things are getting worse,” said Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, which on Tuesday issued its annual state of the global climate report, concluding a decade of what it called exceptional global heat. “It’s more urgent than ever to proceed with mitigation.” ...Seas are warming and rising faster, putting more cities at risk of tidal flooding or worse. Glaciers are melting at a pace many researchers did not expect for decades. The amount of Arctic sea ice has declined so rapidly that the region may see ice-free summers by the 2030s. Even the ground

https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/12/04/early-climate-modelers-got-global-warming-right-new-report-finds Source:   By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: Climate skeptics have long raised doubts about the accuracy of computer models that predict global warming, but it turns out that most of the early climate models were spot-on, according to a look-back by climate scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA. Of 17 climate models published between the early 1970s and the late 2000s, 14 were quite accurate in predicting the average global temperature in the years after publication, said Zeke Hausfather, a doctoral student in UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group and lead author of a new paper analyzing the models. “The real message is that the warming we have experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted it would be as much as 30 years ago,” he said. “This really gives us more confidence that today’s m

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/rivers-could-generate-thousands-nuclear-power-plants-worth-energy-thanks-new-blue Source:   By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: BOSTON—...A new membrane could unlock the potential of “blue energy,” which uses chemical differences between fresh- and saltwater to generate electricity. If researchers can scale up the postage stamp–size membrane in an affordable fashion, it could provide carbon-free power to millions of people in coastal nations where freshwater rivers meet the sea. ...Blue energy’s promise stems from its scale: Rivers dump some 37,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater into the oceans every year. This intersection between fresh- and saltwater creates the potential to generate lots of electricity—2.6 terawatts, according to one recent estimate, roughly the amount that can be generated by 2000 nuclear power plants. There are several ways to generate power from that mixing. And a couple of blue energy power plants have bee

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/climate/carbon-dioxide-emissions.html Source:   By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: WASHINGTON — Emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide from fossil fuels hit a record high in 2019, researchers said Tuesday, putting countries farther off course from their goal of halting global warming. The new data contained glimmers of good news: Worldwide, industrial emissions are on track to rise 0.6 percent this year, a considerably slower pace than the 1.5 percent increase seen in 2017 and the 2.1 percent rise in 2018. The United States and the European Union both managed to cut their carbon dioxide output this year, while India’s emissions grew far more slowly than expected. And global emissions from coal, the worst-polluting of all fossil fuels, unexpectedly declined by about 0.9 percent in 2019, although that drop was more than offset by strong growth in the use of oil and natural gas around the world. Scientists have long warned, however, tha

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/climate/climate-change-ocean-fish-iceland.html Source:   By Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times. Excerpt: ISAFJORDUR, Iceland ... warming waters associated with climate change are causing some fish to seek cooler waters elsewhere, beyond the reach of Icelandic fishermen. Ocean temperatures around Iceland have increased between 1.8 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 20 years. For the past two seasons, Icelanders have not been able to harvest capelin, a type of smelt, as their numbers plummeted. The warmer waters mean that as some fish leave, causing financial disruption, other fish species arrive, triggering geopolitical conflicts. ...Different species of fish evolved to live in specific water temperatures, with some fish like sea bass requiring the temperate ocean climates like those found off the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and tropical fish like the Spanish hogfish preferring warmer waters such as those in the Caribbean.

https://eos.org/articles/antarctic-ice-cores-offer-a-whiff-of-earths-ancient-atmosphere Source:   By Katherine Kornei. Eos/AGU. Excerpt: To determine how Earth’s climate has varied over time, scientists are constantly on the lookout for the oldest whiffs of our planet’s atmosphere. The current record holders, recently extracted from Antarctic ice cores and dated to over 2 million years old, reveal concentrations of gases like carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane in ancient Earth’s atmosphere. Researchers have now shown that levels of these greenhouse gases fluctuated less millions of years ago than they did in more recent times. That discovery has implications for how Earth transitioned between two climatic periods roughly a million years ago, the team reported. ...The climatic history of Earth has been far from constant: For the past 800,000 years, continental-scale ice sheets have repeatedly grown and retreated in glacial-interglacial cycles occurring roughly every 100,000 years (t

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/new-un-climate-report-offers-bleak-emissions-forecast Source:   By Nathaniel Gronewald, E&E News, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Global emissions are expected to keep climbing despite promises from almost 200 nations to address climate change, propelling temperatures upward and threatening to shatter the threshold of 2°C that scientists say would invite dramatic changes to ecology and the economy. The 10th Emissions Gap Report [ https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2019 ] by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), released today, warned that there's "no sign" greenhouse gases will hit their zenith anytime soon. It arrived a day after the World Meteorological Organization revealed record-high concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. "The summary findings are bleak," the UNEP report said. "Countries collectively failed to stop the growth in globa

https://eos.org/articles/dire-and-drier-future-for-lake-victoria Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Lake Victoria in eastern central Africa supports over 40 million people, the industrial sectors of three large nations, and the largest freshwater tropical ecosystem in the world. New research, however, suggests that the lake might not be around to do all of this in the not-so-distant future. ...“Historically, the level of Lake Victoria has dropped pretty drastically,” and past research has shown that the lake twice dried out completely, 15,000 and 17,000 years ago. The team’s research showed that the lake also dried out at least once more in the past 100,000 years. ... Under the driest projected conditions—less than half the current amount of rainfall—Lake Victoria would stop supplying a major tributary of the Nile in about a decade. All major lakeside cities in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania could lose access to the lake in as little as 100 years, and the shoreline

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/us/florida-keys-flooding-king-tide.html Source:  By Patricia Mazzei, The New York Times. Excerpt: A brutal “king tides” season made worse by climate change has flooded the streets of a Florida Keys community for nearly three months. ... For nearly three months, the residents of Stillwright Point’s 215 homes have been forced to carefully plan their outings and find temporary workarounds to deal with the smelly, stagnant water — a result not of rain, but a rising sea — that makes their mangrove-lined streets look more like canals. Another Key Largo neighborhood, Twin Lakes, is similarly inundated. Scientists say a combination of factors, including disruptive hurricanes, have contributed to this year’s exceptionally high tides. “King tides” take place predictably each fall, when the alignment of the moon, sun and Earth creates a stronger gravitational pull on the warm oceans. Rising sea levels caused by climate change make the flooding worse. ... Geo

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/brazil-s-deforestation-exploding-and-2020-will-be-worse Source:   By Herton Escobar, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Development, most of it illegal, destroyed more than 9700 square kilometers of Brazilian Amazon rainforest in the year ending in July, according to a government estimate released on Monday—an increase of 30% from the previous year and the highest rate of deforestation since 2007–08.... See also "Massive Australian blazes will ‘reframe our understanding of bushfire’ [ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/massive-australian-blazes-will-reframe-our-understanding-bushfire ]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/climate/farms-climate-change-crops.html Source:   By John Schwartz, The New York Times. Excerpt: The damage from the destructive spring flooding in the Midwest has been followed in parts of the country by a miserable autumn that is making a bad farming year worse, with effects that could be felt into next spring. ... many farmers couldn’t get crops in the ground or had to delay planting until perilously late in the season. “Farmers told me in Eastern Illinois it felt like they were in a monsoon from April til May.” It was the wettest year on record for the lower 48 states, with the kind of extreme rainfall events that are increasingly associated with climate change. And then fall came in with unseasonably heavy rains and snow....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/world/australia/fires-water-tankers-climate-change.html Source:   By Damien Cave, The New York Times. Excerpt: As climate change pushes California’s fire season into Australia’s, an intricate system of resource sharing struggles with the load. SYDNEY, Australia — Sharing the giant air tankers that fight fires 5,000 gallons of water at a time used to be simpler. California’s wildfires faded before Australia’s bush fires surged, leaving time to prepare, move and deploy planes from one continent to another. But climate change is subverting the system. Fire seasons are running longer, stronger, hotter. The major fires now blanketing Sydney in smoke started early, within days of the last California blazes. And the strain is global. Countries that used to manage without extra help, like Chile, Bolivia and Cyprus, have started competing for plane and helicopter contracts as their own fires intensify. That is stretching capacity for the companies that pro

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/massive-australian-blazes-will-reframe-our-understanding-bushfire Source:   By John Pickrell, Science Magazine. Excerpt: SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA—Australia is on fire like never before—and this year’s “bushfire” season, which typically peaks in January and February, has barely begun. Driven in part by a severe drought, fires have burned 1.65 million hectares in the state of New South Wales, more than the state’s total in the previous 3 years combined. Six people have died and more than 500 homes have been destroyed. As Science went to press, some 70 uncontrolled fires were burning in adjacent Queensland, and South Australia was bracing for potentially “catastrophic” burns. David Bowman, a fire ecologist and geographer and director of the Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, spoke with Science about the crisis. The flames have charred even moist ecosystems once thought safe, he says. And the fires have become “white-hot politically,”

https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-will-make-us-sicker-and-lose-work-hours Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Climate change has medical experts worried about our health, according to a recent report from the Lancet Countdown, an interdisciplinary group of 34 academic institutions and United Nations agencies. Authors include climate scientists, doctors, economists, and other experts. Heat and air pollution are some of the worst offenders, according to the report. Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be the only way to lower health risks in the long run. Here are four major takeaways from the report for public health in the United States: 1. Worker productivity is dropping because of soaring temperatures. 2. Older adults are more and more at risk from heat waves. 3. Soot and small particles from burning coal and oil are killing people. 4. Children will face a lifetime of health risks from climate change....

https://eos.org/articles/modeling-how-groundwater-pumping-will-affect-aquatic-ecosystems Source:   By Adityarup Chakravorty, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Almost 30% of Earth’s freshwater supply lies hidden from view as groundwater. These waters, though mostly invisible, are vital for us humans. Groundwater provides about half the global supply of drinking water and is used to grow the majority of the world’s irrigated crops. Groundwater is also an inextricable cog in the global water cycle. In many areas, discharge from groundwater replenishes streams and rivers, helping sustain aquatic ecosystems. Many of these ecosystems are now under threat, according to a new study. Inge de Graaf, a hydrological environmental systems researcher at the University of Freiburg, and colleagues simulated on a global scale how current rates of groundwater extraction will affect surface streams and rivers and the ecosystems associated with them. “Almost 20% of the regions where groundwater is pumped currently su

https://eos.org/articles/peatlands-are-drying-out-across-europe Source:    By Michael Allen, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Peatlands are some of the world’s largest reservoirs of soil carbon, but new research finds that in Europe they are drying out, putting them at risk of turning from carbon sinks to carbon sources. These wetlands are vitally important for carbon storage, holding roughly 30% of global soil carbon, despite covering only around 3% of Earth’s surface. It is their saturated surface conditions that make peatlands such effective carbon stores. When peat mosses die, they sink into this wet environment, and the low-oxygen, often acidic conditions prevent microbes that decompose plant litter elsewhere from working effectively. Instead of breaking down, the dead mosses slowly build up, trapping the carbon dioxide that they sucked out of the atmosphere during photosynthesis underground. But a new study suggests that in Europe peatland water tables are falling. In the journal Nature Geo

https://eos.org/articles/toxic-algal-blooms-are-worsening-with-climate-change Source:    By Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Every summer, vast blooms of harmful algae erupt in freshwater lakes across the United States. This year, blue-green mats of algae blanketed more than 1,500 square kilometers of Lake Erie’s surface by August; toxic algae forced officials to close New Jersey’s largest lake to recreational activities, and officials in North Carolina and Georgia warned dog owners to keep their pets out of the water after at least four dogs died after swimming in contaminated water. Although these harmful algal blooms are not new to freshwater lakes, they do appear to be getting worse. But researchers weren’t certain whether freshwater blooms are actually intensifying or scientists are just paying closer attention. ...A new study that looked back at 3 decades of satellite data finds that these summertime algal blooms are indeed worsening in large freshwater lakes around the world

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/science/blue-holes-hurricanes.html Source:   By Katherine Kornei,  The New York Times   Excerpt: Scientists assembled a 1,500-year history of big storm activity by retrieving sediment from the island country’s submarine caverns. ... researchers have assembled a 1,500-year history of hurricanes in the Bahamas, based on sand and shell fragments pulled up from submarine caverns known as blue holes. Their results, published in October in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology [ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019PA003665 ], show that hurricane activity has varied over time. In fact, recent hurricane activity in the Bahamas has been low compared with historical highs, despite intense activity elsewhere in the Atlantic arena. The fluctuations are likely driven by changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation and volcanism, the scientists suggest. ... Cooler ocean surface temperatures have been linked to reduced hurricane activit

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/oceans-vented-carbon-dioxide-during-the-last-deglaciation Source:    By  Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: A new boron isotope record from South Pacific marine sediments offers a more complete picture of ocean-atmosphere carbon dioxide exchange during the late Pleistocene. During the late Pleistocene epoch, ice sheets advanced and retreated in tandem with changing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Researchers have long sought to understand the complex processes that modulate rising and falling carbon dioxide concentrations—a line of research with important implications today as levels reach highs not seen since roughly 3 million years ago in the Pliocene, when the Arctic was forested. ... The authors ...found widespread outgassing of carbon dioxide, particularly during the last deglaciation, which could be explained by an increase in upwelling of the gas from the deep ocean, according to the authors. ...The study fills an important gap in boron i

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/business/wine-scandinavia-climate-change.html Source:   By  Liz Alderman, The New York Times. Excerpt: Hotter weather is fueling efforts to create a commercial wine industry in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/science/seals-distemper.html Source:   By Karen Weintraub, The New York Times. Excerpt: Thawing sea ice may have opened the door, allowing the infection to cross oceans, a new study suggests.....

https://eos.org/articles/drones-capture-icelands-shrinking-glaciers Source:    By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Photographs of Iceland’s southern glaciers show pools of water where walls of ice once stood....

https://eos.org/articles/keystone-pipeline-spills-9120-barrels-of-oil-in-dakota-wetlands Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The leak took place along a preexisting section of the Keystone Pipeline. This is the pipeline’s fourth spill in 9 years. A section of the Keystone Pipeline spilled half an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of sludgy oil into a North Dakota wetland on 29 October. Cleanup is underway, but ecologists say that residue from this type of oil spill could persist in the wetlands for a long time. ...The tar sands oil that runs through the pipeline from Canada “contains a heavy oil called bitumen,” she said. “This bitumen is like peanut butter. It’s hard to push peanut butter through a straw. Likewise, it’s hard to push bitumen through a pipeline.” The industry cuts the sludge with a lighter gas, called a diluent, to flow it through the pipes, “somewhat like thinning a soup that’s too thick.”...

https://eos.org/articles/manure-happens-the-environmental-toll-of-livestock-antibiotics Source:   By Laura Poppick, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The widespread, routine use of antibiotics in livestock farming has generated fears of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” that could threaten human health. Now, a new study suggests that threats of agricultural antibiotics extend beyond the realm of human health and into the environment, where they can alter microbial activity as they enter the soil through animal manure. “The fact that there are so many ecosystem processes mediated by microbes makes this pretty interesting,” said Carl Wepking, a biologist at Colorado State University and lead author on the new paper. Wepking and colleagues found that soil microbes consumed carbon less efficiently and released carbon dioxide more readily into the atmosphere when stressed by certain antibiotics. ...As the use of agricultural antibiotics continues to swell with human population growth, potentially increa

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/where-does-the-carbon-go-when-permafrost-coasts-erode Source:   By Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Arctic coastlines have not been considered carefully in carbon cycles for long, but new research suggests that eroding permafrost may emit more greenhouse gases than previously thought. The Arctic is warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. As a result, the region is changing rapidly: Glaciers are melting, sea ice is disappearing, and permafrost is thawing, which could accelerate climate change. The northern permafrost region covers roughly a quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere and stores vast amounts of carbon—more than double the amount in the atmosphere today—much of it still locked away, frozen. Researchers have known for some time that permafrost could become a major source of greenhouse gases as the soil thaws and once-dormant microbes wake up and break down organic matter. This thaw is accelerated in places along Arctic

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/new-reactor-could-halve-carbon-dioxide-emissions-ammonia-production Source:    By Robert F. Service, Science. Excerpt: To feed more than 7 billion hungry souls, humanity relies on the century-old Haber-Bosch process to convert nitrogen from the air and methane from natural gas into ammonia, the starting material for fertilizer. But that process belches out more than 450 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually—about 1% of all human emissions, and more than any other industrial chemical reaction. Now, a new type of ceramic reactor could cut that in half. If it can be scaled up, the new technique could also lower the global price of fertilizer by making it easier to produce in small chemical plants close to where it’s used.....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/opinion/climate-change-clothing-policy.html Source:   By Elizabeth L. Cline, The New York Times. Excerpt: The clothing and footwear industry is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, nearly the same as the entire European Union, according to a study by the environmental services group Quantis. [https://quantis-intl.com/measuring-fashion-report-2018/] Without abrupt intervention, the industry’s impact on the climate is on track to increase by almost half by 2030. ... clothing affects every other environmental problem we care about. Let’s say you wear a cotton T-shirt — it required thousands of gallons of water to make. If that T-shirt is viscose rayon, it may well have come from a tree felled in the Amazon (viscose rayon is made from plants). And if it’s polyester, acrylic or nylon, you’re wearing plastic. When those plastic clothes get washed, they junk up our oceans with microplastic pollution. ...The clothing industry, lik

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/climate/trump-paris-agreement-climate.html Source:   By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times. Excerpt: WASHINGTON — The Trump administration formally notified the United Nations on Monday that it would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change, leaving global climate diplomats to plot a way forward without the cooperation of the world’s largest economy....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/29/climate/coastal-cities-underwater.html Source:   By Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times. Excerpt: Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities. The authors of a paper published Tuesday [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z ] developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury....

https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/25_october_2019/MobilePagedArticle.action?articleId=1531896&app=false#articleId1531896 Source:   By George Crabtree, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Electric vehicles are poised to transform nearly every aspect of transportation, including fuel, carbon emissions, costs, repairs, and driving habits. The primary impetus now is decarbonization to address the climate change emergency, but it soon may shift to economics because electric vehicles are anticipated to be cheaper and higher-performing than gasoline cars. ... By 2025, Norway aims to have 100% of its cars be either an electric or plug-in hybrid unit, and the Netherlands plans to ban all gasoline and diesel car sales by the same year. By 2030, Germany plans to ban internal combustion engines, and by 2040, France and Great Britain aim to end their gasoline and diesel car sales. The most aggressive electric vehicle targets are those set by China, which has almost half the glob

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/21/climate/hawaii-coral-bleaching.html Source:   By Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times. Excerpt: Parts of the Pacific Ocean are simmering, threatening coral reefs and livelihoods around Hawaii, and causing many to worry of worse to come. ... fish provided by the reefs, reefs which are now becoming sick in the warming waters. ...Researchers said the heat wave was reminiscent of 2014, when a hot spot that became known as the blob began forming in the Pacific. It expanded and lingered over much of the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Alaska for years. ...“The event in ’14-15 was maybe eight to 10 times the size of Alaska. And the current event we’re having is nearly that big,” Dr. Leising said. ...Researchers say they think that climate change strongly influenced the original blob’s creation. The blob also led to the first known mass bleaching event in Hawaii, in which coral reefs stressed by the extreme temperatures shed the symbiotic plan

https://eos.org/articles/europes-mightiest-glaciers-are-melting Source:    By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: When the photographer Walter Mittelholzer snapped pictures of Mont Blanc from his plane in 1919, he pointed his lens at the landscape’s rugged beauty. One century later, his images reveal the rapid loss of ice on the Alps’ highest peak. This summer, researchers re-created Mittelholzer’s images of three Mont Blanc glaciers by photographing the glaciers 100 years later. The scientists triangulated Mittelholzer’s original location on the basis of nearby peaks and flew a helicopter to an elevation of 4,700 meters  at the same spot near the Mont Blanc summit, which straddles the border of Italy and France. Viewed side by side, the images show the drastic effect of climate change on the region. The scientists chose three of the mountain’s largest glaciers: Argentière, Bossons, and Mer de Glace. In the photographs taken at Mer de Glace, the black-and-white image from 1919 show

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/plastic-bags-pollution-paper-cotton-tote-bags-environment-a9159731.html By Phoebe Weston , Independent.  Excerpt: Plastic bags  were invented to save the planet, according to the son of Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin who created them in 1959. The bags were developed as an alternative to paper bags, which were considered bad for the environment because they resulted in forests being chopped down. They were significantly stronger than paper bags, which meant – in theory – they could be used over and over again. However,  single-use plastic  took off and now our consumption of this polluting material is one of the biggest threats facing the world’s seas, with marine plastic set to outweigh fish by 2050.... 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/putting-artificial-ecosystem-drought-could-reveal-how-rainforests-will-cope-climate Source:   By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Earlier this month, the doors to the tropical rainforest, enclosed under a ziggurat of glass, were sealed shut. Christiane Werner turned a valve to release about $12,000 worth of carbon dioxide (CO2) spiked with carbon-13, an isotope that is normally scarce in the atmosphere. The luxuriant plants inside Biosphere 2, a 30-year-old set of greenhouses and artificial ecosystems in the Arizona desert, soaked up the isotopic tracer, enabling investigators to follow the flows of carbon through the healthy forest. Werner, an ecosystem physiologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany, and her team gathered these baseline data for the harsh test to come: the largest forest drought experiment ever monitored with isotopes. ...On 7 October, the researchers shut off the sprinklers that irrigate the rainforest, begi

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/14/dining/drinks/climate-change-wine.html Source:   By Eric Asimov, The New York Times. Excerpt: Wine, which is among the most sensitive and nuanced of agricultural products, demonstrates how climate change is transforming traditions and practices that may be centuries old. Around the wine-growing world, smart producers have contemplated and experimented with adaptations, not only to hotter summers, but also to warmer winters, droughts and the sort of unexpected, sometimes violent events that stem from climate change: freak hailstorms, spring frosts, flooding and forest fires, just to name a few. Farmers have been on the front line, and grape growers especially have been noting profound changes in weather patterns since the 1990s. In the short term, some of these changes have actually benefited certain regions. Places, like England, that were historically unsuited for producing fine wine have been given the opportunity to join the global

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/world/americas/amazon-fires-brazil-cattle.html Source:   By Clifford Krauss, David Yaffe-Bellany and Mariana Simões, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...The immense scale of the fires in Brazil this summer raised a global alarm about the risks they posed to the world’s largest rainforest, which soaks up carbon dioxide and helps keep global temperatures from rising. ...A deal inked 10 years ago was meant to stop the problem, but the ecological arson goes on as the Earth warms. ...In 2009, the three biggest Brazilian meatpacking companies signed an agreement with the environmental group Greenpeace not to buy cattle from ranchers who raised their beef in newly deforested areas. The deal was meant to be a model for the world, a partnership between private industry and environmental activists that would benefit both. ...But the vows made by those three companies — JBS, Minerva and Marfrig, which handle about 50 percent of the beef raised in the Amazon — ha

https://vis.sciencemag.org/greenlands-dying-ice/ Source:   By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine [in Sermilik Fjord, Greenland]. Excerpt: This summer, as meltwater streamed off the Greenland Ice Sheet in record amounts, a ramshackle research ship, the Adolf Jensen, sat idling in this fjord, icebergs near its bow and a mystery below it. Two years earlier, oceanographers had moored a sensor in the fjord's depths to decipher how warm Atlantic Ocean waters are eroding Helheim Glacier, one of the ice sheet's largest tongues. But now they couldn't retrieve the 500-meter-deep mooring—or its crucial data. ...Some two-thirds of Greenland's ice loss comes not as meltwater, but as chunks of ice that detach, or calve, from its 300 outlet glaciers—fast-moving rivers of ice that end in long fjords. ... warm Atlantic water is penetrating Sermilik Fjord, which researchers once thought was dominated by Arctic waters. Here, it meets cold meltwater draining through channels beneath the ice

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/climate/state-birds-climate-change.html Source:   By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: Each state in America has an official state bird, usually an iconic species that helps define the landscape. Minnesota chose the common loon, whose haunting wails echo across the state’s northern lakes each summer. Georgia picked the brown thrasher, a fiercely territorial bird with a repertoire of more than 1,000 song types. But as the planet warms and birds across the country relocate to escape the heat, at least eight states could see their state birds largely or entirely disappear from within their borders during the summer, according to a new study [ https://climate.audubon.org/] ....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/10/climate/driving-emissions-map.html Source:   By Nadja Popovich and Denise Lu, The New York Times. Excerpt: Transportation is the largest source of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the United States today and the bulk of those emissions come from driving in our cities and suburbs. The map below shows a year’s worth of CO2 from passenger and freight traffic on every road in the [choose city] metro area....

https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2559/So-what-are-marine-heat-waves Source:   By NOAA. Excerpt: ...in recent years, marine scientists have been turning their sights on another kind of heat wave — one that occurs in the ocean. From 2014 to 2016, the ocean waters off the West Coast were hit with hotter-than-usual temperatures in a marine heat wave that came to be known as “the Blob.” This stretch of warm water had big impacts on the West Coast marine environment and economy, and stands as the largest marine heat wave since NOAA satellites started keeping track in 1981. Now, three years after the last Blob, another marine heat wave has surfaced off the West Coast, and scientists say it’s the second-largest one they’ve seen....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/08/climate/ghost-forests.html Source:   By Moises Velasquez-Manoff and Gabriella Demczuk (photographer), New York Times. Excerpt: Saltwater is killing woodlands along the East Coast, sometimes surprisingly far from the sea. ... Up and down the mid-Atlantic coast, sea levels are rising rapidly, creating stands of dead trees — often bleached, sometimes blackened — known as ghost forests. The water is gaining as much as 5 millimeters per year in some places, well above the global average of 3.1 millimeters, driven by profound environmental shifts that include climate change. Increasingly powerful storms, a consequence of a warming world, push seawater inland. More intense dry spells reduce freshwater flowing outward. Adding to the peril, in some places the land is naturally sinking. All of this allows seawater to claim new territory, killing trees from the roots up....

https://cpo.noaa.gov/News/News-Article/ArtMID/6226/ArticleID/1772/Heat-waves-could-increase-substantially-in-size-by-mid-century-says-new-study Source:   By Alison Stevens - NOAA Affiliate. Excerpt: ...in a new study, scientists funded in part by the NOAA Climate Program Office’s Climate Observations and Monitoring Program ...found that by mid-century, in a middle greenhouse emissions scenario, the average size of heat waves could increase by 50%. Under high greenhouse gas concentrations, the average size could increase by 80% and the more extreme heat waves could more than double in size. “As the physical size of these affected regions increases, more people will be exposed to heat stress,” said Brad Lyon, Associate Research Professor at the University of Maine and lead author of the new paper published in Environmental Research Letters. [ https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab4b41] “Larger heat waves would also increase electrical loads and peak energy demand on

https://eos.org/articles/human-activity-outpaces-volcanoes-asteroids-in-releasing-deep-carbon Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Of the 1.85 billion billion metric tons of carbon that exist on Earth, 99.8% exists belowground, according to new reports on deep carbon. The research estimates that human activity annually releases into the atmosphere around 40 to 100 times as much carbon dioxide as does all volcanic activity. That’s also a slightly higher rate of carbon emission than Earth experienced just after the asteroid impact that likely killed the dinosaurs, the researchers found. ...The new reports summarize 10 years of field data collection, lab experiments, and computer modeling of the origin of Earth’s carbon, how it circulates throughout the Earth system, and extreme events that can upset Earth’s carbon balance....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/indonesias-fires-are-bad-new-measures-prevented-them-becoming-worse Source:   By Dennis Normile, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Once again haze is suffocating Indonesia, but some scientists say it could have been worse. Acrid smoke from fires set to clear land for agriculture has sent scores to hospitals with respiratory problems and closed thousands of schools in Indonesia and neighboring Malaysia. At its thickest, in mid-September, more than 100 flights had to be canceled because of poor visibility. Although the government has tried to seed clouds for rain and dump water from the air, only the monsoon rains due later this month are likely to quench the fires. Yet countermeasures Indonesia has taken since the last major haze event, in 2015, have helped limit this year’s disaster. A new agency is restoring degraded peatlands, where agribusiness has drained and dried out meters-thick layers of waterlogged vegetation, making it vulnerable to ground

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/01/tech/makani-wind-energy-kites-electricity-mission-ahead/index.html Source:   By Ahiza Garcia, CNN Business. Excerpt: California-based Makani -- which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet -- is using power from the strongest winds found out in the middle of the ocean, typically in spots where it's a challenge to install traditional wind turbines. Makani hopes to create electricity to power communities across the world. Despite a growing number of wind farms in the United States and the potential of this energy source, only 6% of the world's electricity comes from wind due to the the difficulty of setting up and maintaining turbines, according to the World Wind Energy Association....

https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/09/30/collapse-of-desert-birds-due-to-heat-stress-from-climate-change/ Source:   By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: As temperatures rise, desert birds need more water to cool off at the same time as deserts are becoming drier, setting some species up for a severe crash, if not extinction, according to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley. The team that last year documented a collapse of bird communities in Mojave Desert over the last century — 29% of the 135 bird species that were present 100 years ago are less common and less widespread today — has now identified a likely cause: heat stress associated with climate change. The researchers’ latest findings, part of UC Berkeley’s Grinnell Resurvey Project [ http://mvz.berkeley.edu/Grinnell/ ], come from comparing levels of species declines to computer simulations of how “virtual birds” must deal with heat on an average hot day in Death Valley, which can be in the 30s Celsiu

https://eos.org/articles/600-years-of-grape-harvests-document-20th-century-climate-change Source:   By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Climate change isn’t just captured by thermometers—grapes can also do the trick. By mining archival records of grape harvest dates going back to 1354, scientists have reconstructed a 664-year record of temperature traced by fruit ripening. The records, from the Burgundy region of France, represent the longest series of grape harvest dates assembled up until now and reveal strong evidence of climate change in the past few decades. ...“Wine harvest is a really great proxy for summer warmth,” said Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York not involved in the research. “The warmer the summer is, the faster the grapes develop, so the earlier the harvest happens.”....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/climate/climate-change-oceans-united-nations.html Source:   By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: Climate change is heating the oceans and altering their chemistry so dramatically that it is threatening seafood supplies, fueling cyclones and floods and posing profound risks to the hundreds of millions of people living along the coasts, according to a sweeping United Nations report issued Wednesday. The report concludes that the world’s oceans and ice sheets are under such severe stress that the fallout could prove difficult for humans to contain without steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Fish populations are already declining in many regions as warming waters throw marine ecosystems into disarray, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders in policymaking....

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/alan-bigelows-solar-cooking-revolution Source:   By Ian Frazier, The New Yorker. Excerpt: Late one recent morning, Alan Bigelow set up seven solar-thermal cooking devices in the front yard of his house in Nyack, New York. ...One of the seven cookers cost essentially nothing, and consisted of linked cardboard panels covered with aluminum foil which reflected the sunlight to a central point, on which sat a pot of jasmine rice. Another was a metal box with silvery surfaces that unfolded upward, to catch the sun and aim it at a pot of chicken-and-tomato stew. A high-end solar cooker (about five hundred dollars, retail), which involved a large parabolic dish and a cooking surface like a burner on an electric stove, had already become hot enough to get a pan of stir-fry shrimp in turmeric sauce sizzling. Bigelow is the science director of Solar Cookers International (S.C.I.), a nonprofit that promotes solar cooking around the world. ...Four m

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-may-soon-have-a-battery-that-can-last-a-million-miles/ Source:    By Daniel Oberhaus, Wired Magazine. Excerpt: Elon Musk promised Tesla would soon have a million-mile battery, more than double what drivers can expect today. A new paper suggests he wasn't exaggerating. ...Earlier this month, a group of battery researchers at Dalhousie University, which has an exclusive agreement with Tesla, published a paper in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society [ http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/166/13/A3031 ] describing a lithium-ion battery that “should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1 million miles” while losing less than 10 percent of its energy capacity during its lifetime....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/climate/agriculture-climate-change.html Source:   By Marla Cone, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...With their deep roots and tough, gnarly branches, pistachio trees are hardy, tolerant of salty soils and brutal heat waves. Some can live for centuries. But while sweltering summers are the norm in this part of central California, there’s a new, existential threat to these trees, one that scientists warn could spell the end of the pistachio harvest: warmer winters. Many crops are facing similar threats as agricultural regions across the world experience previously unseen extremes in heat, rain and drought. Chilly winters are critical to nut and fruit trees, particularly pistachios. To break their slumber and spread their pollen, pistachios need to spend about 850 hours, or five weeks, at temperatures below 45 degrees. ...So as the San Joaquin Valley warms and its cooling fogs retreat, growers have found their orchards out of sync: Many male trees are n

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/climate/global-climate-strike.html Source:   By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times. Excerpt: Anxious about their future on a hotter planet and angry at world leaders for failing to arrest the crisis, masses of young people poured into the streets on every continent on Friday for a day of global climate protests. Organizers estimated the turnout to be around four million in thousands of cities and towns worldwide. ...They turned out in force in Berlin, where the police estimated 100,000 participants, with similar numbers in Melbourne and London. In New York City, the mayor’s office estimated that 60,000 people marched through the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan, while organizers put the total at 250,000.  By the dozens in some places, and by the tens of thousands in others, young people demonstrated in cities like Manila, Kampala and Rio de Janeiro. A group of scientists rallied in Antarctica....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/world/europe/germany-climate-protection-merkel.html Source:   By Melissa Eddy, The New York Times. Excerpt: BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government on Friday agreed to support a $60 billion package of climate policies aimed at getting Germany back on track to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. ...Under the terms of the new package, Germany will work to reduce carbon emissions by 55 percent of 1990 levels by 2030. A cornerstone of the agreement is to begin charging in 2021 for carbon emissions that are generated by transportation and heating fuels. Companies in the transportation industry will be required to buy certificates for 10 euros (about $11) per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. The price will increase to 35 euros per ton by 2025, and a free-market exchange will open afterward, allowing the polluters to auction their carbon pollution permits. Consumers will likely face higher gas prices that the government will

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/can-world-make-chemicals-it-needs-without-oil Source:   By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Black, gooey, greasy oil is the starting material for more than just transportation fuel. It's also the source of dozens of petrochemicals that companies transform into versatile and valued materials for modern life: gleaming paints, tough and moldable plastics, pesticides, and detergents. Industrial processes produce something like beauty out of the ooze. By breaking the hydrocarbons in oil and natural gas into simpler compounds and then assembling those building blocks, scientists long ago learned to construct molecules of exquisite complexity. Fossil fuels aren't just the feedstock for those reactions; they also provide the heat and pressure that drive them. As a result, industrial chemistry's use of petroleum accounts for 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Now, growing numbers of scientists and, more important, companies

[ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists-have-been-underestimating-the-pace-of-climate-change/ ] Source:  By Naomi Oreskes, Michael Oppenheimer, Dale Jamieson, Science Magazine. Excerpt: ...climate change and its impacts are emerging faster than scientists previously thought, ...When new observations of the climate system have provided more or better data, or permitted us to reevaluate old ones, the findings for ice extent, sea level rise and ocean temperature have generally been worse than earlier prevailing views. ... Consistent underestimation is a form of bias—in the literal meaning of a systematic tendency to lean in one direction or another—which raises the question: what is causing this bias in scientific analyses of the climate system? The question is significant for two reasons. First, climate skeptics and deniers have often accused scientists of exaggerating the threat of climate change, but the evidence shows that not only have they not exaggerated,