https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/warming-oceans-are-hurting-seafood-supply-and-things-are-getting-worse Source:   By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Marine fish around the world are already feeling the effects of climate change—and some are reeling, according to the first large analysis of recent trends. Rising sea temperatures have reduced the productivity of some fisheries by 15% to 35% over 8 decades, although in other places fish are thriving because warming waters are becoming more suitable. The net effect is that the world’s oceans can’t yield as much sustainable seafood as before, a situation that is likely to worsen as global warming accelerates in the oceans. A silver lining is that the research suggests well-managed fisheries are more resilient in the face of rising temperature, says Rainer Froese, a marine ecologist with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, who was not involved in the work. “We have to stop overfishing to let

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/the-urban-dry-island-effect Source:   By Emily Underwood, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: A study of the Yangtze River Delta shows how urbanization dries out the atmosphere. Heat generated by people, vehicles, and the Sun is easily trapped by the materials used to build houses, industrial buildings, sidewalks, and parking lots. This heat often makes cities significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. Now, a new study of the highly developed Yangtze River Delta in southern China examines a less studied but related impact of city building: the desiccation of the local atmosphere. ...Here Hao et al. [ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018WR023002 ] hypothesize that in addition to increasing local temperatures in urban areas, this rapid development has altered the flow of water between the ground and the atmosphere, making built-up regions drier. To test that hypothesis, the researche

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/humming-ice-shelf-changes-its-seismic-tune-with-the-weather Source:   By Terri Cook, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Antarctica is ringed by ice shelves: vast, glacier-fed slabs of floating ice that can stretch hundreds of kilometers from the coastline into the sea. Because of their exposure to both the air above and the seawater below, ice shelves are considered more susceptible to rising global temperatures than either glaciers or continental ice sheets. Recent dramatic examples of ice shelf disintegration, including the collapse of 3,250 square kilometers of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002 and the ensuing accelerated ice loss in nearby glaciers, have highlighted the potential for widespread ice loss from the southernmost continent. Understanding how Antarctic ice shelves respond to warming temperatures is thus crucial for calculating future global sea level rise, which could affect hundreds of millions of people or more. To investigate how ice shelves respon

https://schoolsforclimateaction.weebly.com/news/slideshow-student-councils-help-end-climate-silence-and-congressional-climate-neglect-with-a-student-council-resolution Source:   By Schools for Climate Action. See Schools for Climate Action website [ https://schoolsforclimateaction.weebly.com ].

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheaper-one-company-aims-reinvent-nuclear-reactor-and-save-warming-planet Source:   By Adrian Cho, Science Magazine. Excerpt: CORVALLIS, OREGON—To a world facing the existential threat of global warming, nuclear power would appear to be a lifeline. Advocates say nuclear reactors, compact and able to deliver steady, carbon-free power, are ideal replacements for fossil fuels and a way to slash greenhouse gas emissions. However, in most of the world, the nuclear industry is in retreat. The public continues to distrust it, especially after three reactors melted down in a 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. Nations also continue to dither over what to do with radioactive reactor waste. Most important, with new reactors costing $7 billion or more, the nuclear industry struggles to compete with cheaper forms of energy, such as natural gas....Globally, nuclear power supplies just 11% of electrical power,

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/rising-temperatures-reduce-colorado-river-flow Source:   By Sarah Stanley, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The Colorado River flows through seven U.S. states and northern Mexico. Along the way, it provides drinking water to millions of people and irrigates thousands of square kilometers of cropland. However, although annual precipitation in the region increased by about 1% in the past century, the volume of water flowing down the river has dropped by over 15%. While it’s true that so much of the water is diverted on its route to the Gulf of California that it no longer discharges into the ocean, scientists have recently found an additional cause in the reduction in river flow. New research by Xiao et al. examines the causes behind this 100-year decline in natural flow, teasing out the relative contributions of rising temperatures and changes in precipitation. ...Rising temperatures can lower flow by increasing the amount of water lost to evaporation from soil

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/polar-vortex-weather-forecasting-good-now/581605/ Source:   By Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic. Excerpt: The polar vortex is just the latest example of how reliable five-day forecasts have become. ... It is dangerous, record-breaking, can’t-look-away weather. Yet this cold snap’s arrival was preceded by a marvel so spectacular that we hardly noticed it: It was correctly predicted. As early as a month ago, forecasters knew that colder-than-average weather would likely strike North America this month; a week ago, computer models spit out some of the same figures that appeared on thermometers today. ...“A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980,” says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. “Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future.”...  See also How far out can we forecast the weather? Scientists have a new answer [ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/how-far-out

http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/americans-are-increasingly-alarmed-about-global-warming/ Source:   By Abel Gustafson, Anthony Leiserowitz and Edward Maibach, Yale University. Excerpt: Six in ten Americans are now either “Alarmed” or “Concerned” about global warming. From 2013 to 2018, the proportion of “Alarmed” more than doubled....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/here-s-how-your-city-s-climate-will-change-2080-if-you-re-canada-or-united-states Source:   By Sid Perkins, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Climate change is a hard thing to imagine, especially 60 years into the future. With that in mind, environmental scientists have developed a web-based app that can tell people living in one of 540 cities in Canada or the continental United States how their homes will transform by the year 2080—and which modern-day city it is most likely to resemble. ...In the lower-emissions scenario, about 70% of the cities have a “future climate sister city,” but it’s typically hundreds of kilometers away and farther south, the researchers report today in Nature Communications [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08540-3 ]. For example, residents of Washington, D.C., can expect a climate in the 2080s that resembles the current climate in Paragould, Arkansas, about 132 kilometers northwest of Memphis, Tennessee. ...If

https://eos.org/articles/the-deep-blue-sea-is-getting-bluer Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Ocean color will intensify in the next century due to global warming altering phytoplankton communities. The ocean’s aquamarines and seafoam greens are shifting as climate change warms the planet. A study [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08457-x ] published Monday in Nature Communications predicts that the colors of the world’s oceans will intensify by the end of this century as changes in phytoplankton patterns alter light reflection. Water molecules absorb all visible light except for those at blue wavelengths, making the ocean appear blue. When phytoplankton float near the surface, they change how incoming light reflects. Typically, the greener the ocean water, the more phytoplankton occur there. ...“If climate change shifts one community of phytoplankton to another, that will also change the types of food webs they can support.”...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/spud-s-you-breeding-revolution-could-unleash-potential-potato Source:   By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine. Excerpt: THE SACRED VALLEY OF THE INCAS IN PERU—On a bleak, brown hill here, David Ellis examines a test plot of potato plants and shakes his head. "They're dead, dead, dead," he says. Pests and lack of rain have laid waste to all 17 varieties that researchers had planted. It is a worrying sign for Ellis, the now-retired director of the gene bank at the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima. People have grown potatoes in this rugged stretch of the Andes for thousands of years. In recent years, that task has gotten tougher, in part because of climate change. Drought and frost are striking more often. The rains come later, shortening the growing season. And warmer temperatures have allowed moths and weevils to encroach from lower elevations. To find potatoes that can cope with those challenges, researchers and Peruvian f

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/climate/little-ice-age-colonization.html Source:   By Niraj Chokshi, The New York Times. Excerpt: When they arrived in the Americas centuries ago, European colonists brought pestilence and death. Their arrival was so devastating, in fact, that it may have contributed to a period of global cooling, according to a new study. The research, to be published in the March issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews [ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261 ], represents an ambitious attempt to show that, through a series of events, human activity was affecting the climate long before the industrial revolution and global warming. The authors found that disease and war wiped out 90 percent of the indigenous population in the Americas, or about 55 million people. The earth, they argue, then reclaimed the land that these populations left behind. The new vegetation pulled heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and int

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/05/climate/melting-lake-ice-global-warming.html Source:   By Nadja Popovich, The New York Times. Excerpt: Global warming is melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, but for millions of people, ice is vanishing closer to home as lakes lose their winter cover. In a study [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0393-5.epdf ] published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists for the first time quantified the effects of rising temperatures on ice cover across 1.4 million lakes in the Northern Hemisphere. They found that, from Wisconsin to Japan, thousands of lakes that used to freeze reliably every winter already see some years without ice, and that “an extensive loss of lake ice will occur within the next generation.” The vanishing ice will affect cold-water ecosystems and be felt by millions of people who live near northern lakes, the study said....