https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climate-change-food-eating-habits.html Source:   By Julia Moskin, Brad Plumer, Rebecca Lieberman and Eden Weingart, The New York Times. Excerpt: Does what I eat have an effect on climate change? Yes. The world’s food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming greenhouse gases that humans generate each year. That includes raising and harvesting all the plants, animals and animal products we eat — beef, chicken, fish, milk, lentils, kale, corn and more — as well as processing, packaging and shipping food to markets all over the world. If you eat food, you’re part of this system.  How exactly does food contribute to global warming? Lots of ways. Here are four of the biggest: When forests are cleared to make room for farms and livestock — this happens on a daily basis in some parts of the world — large stores of carbon are released into the atmosphere, which heats up the planet. When cows, sheep and goats dige

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/dining/farming-climate-change.html Source:   By Kim Severson, The New York Times. Excerpt: The impact may not yet be obvious in grocery stores and greenmarkets, but behind the organic apples and bags of rice and cans of cherry pie filling are hundreds of thousands of farmers, plant breeders and others in agriculture who are scrambling to keep up with climate change. Drop a pin anywhere on a map of the United States and you’ll find disruption in the fields. Warmer temperatures are extending growing seasons in some areas and sending a host of new pests into others. Some fields are parched with drought, others so flooded that they swallow tractors. Decades-long patterns of frost, heat and rain — never entirely predictable but once reliable enough — have broken down. In regions where the term climate change still meets with skepticism, some simply call the weather extreme or erratic. But most agree that something unusual is happening.... [Examples giv

https://eos.org/articles/california-heat-waves-triggered-by-pacific-thunderstorms Source:   By Mary Caperton Morton, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Californians looking to beat the heat this summer might want to keep an eye on the eastern Pacific and Indian Oceans. A new study has found a link between tropical thunderstorm activity and heat waves in California’s Central Valley. The culprit is a large-scale atmospheric circulation pattern called the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), which moves from west to east in a series of phases across the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans, often dumping heavy rain in its wake. Previous studies have shown that the MJO can influence winter weather in North America, bringing fluctuating temperature spells to the Midwest and Northeast, but the new study, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, is the first to study the MJO’s effects on North America during the summer months, says corresponding author Richard Grotjahn of the University of California, Dav

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/ocean-s-tallest-waves-are-getting-taller Source:   By Colin Barras, Science Magazine. Excerpt: The frigid Southern Ocean is well known for its brutal storms, which can sink ships and trigger coastal flooding on distant tropical islands. Now, a new study suggests the biggest waves there—already the world’s largest—are getting bigger, thanks to faster winds attributed to climate change. Peter Ruggiero, a geophysicist at Oregon State University in Corvallis who was not involved in the study, calls the increase “substantial,” and says he is particularly concerned by evidence that the tallest waves are gaining height at the fastest rate. “If [those waves hit] at high tide, it could be potentially catastrophic.” For the past 33 years, global satellites have been collecting data on ocean waves—and the winds that drive them. ...although average wind speeds there have increased by 2 centimeters per second each year, the speed of the top 10% fastest w

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/emperor-penguins-flee-unsteady-ice-after-unprecedented-failure-breed Source:  By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Antarctica's charismatic emperor penguins are thought to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, because warming waters are melting the sea ice where they live and breed. Now, the penguins have abandoned one of their biggest colonies after breeding pairs there failed to raise almost any new chicks in 3 years. Although the move cannot directly be attributed to climate change, researchers say it is an ominous sign of things to come for the largest of penguin species. Emperor penguins need sea ice that remains solid for most of the year while they find mates, breed, and raise their chicks. This requirement has become a critical problem for their second-largest colony, in Halley Bay in the Weddell Sea. Starting in 2015, sea ice there has been disrupted by powerful storms driven a particularly intense El Nino, the pe

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/global-warming-may-boost-economic-inequality Source:   By Warren Cornwall, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Over the past half-century, climate change has been blamed for heat waves, flooding, and rising seas. Now, researchers say warmer temperatures are widening the chasm separating richer and poorer countries, effectively boosting the economies of many wealthy polluters while dampening growth in much of the developing world. As a result, inequality between the haves and have-nots is already 25% greater than it would be in a cooler world, the paper asserts. ...The new work builds on previous research that found economic activity peaks at an average temperature of 13°C. ...Lower temperatures can hamper weather-dependent sectors like agriculture, but hotter temperatures can wither crops, sap workers’ energy, and exacerbate social conflicts. ...In the new study, ...climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh and economist Marshall Burke...used climate and eco

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/sodium-batteries-are-one-step-closer-saving-you-mobile-phone-fire Source:   By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Solid-state batteries, which use solids instead of liquids to ferry ions through their core, are attracting billions in investment, thanks to their potential for reducing battery fires. Now, researchers have created a solid-state sodium battery with a record capacity to store charge and a flexible electrode that allows recharging hundreds of times. What’s more, the battery’s use of sodium instead of expensive lithium could enable the development of cheaper energy storage devices for everything from small wearable electronics to solar and wind farms....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/amp-solar-cells-scientists-ditch-silicon Source:   By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Silicon dominates the world of solar power. Even the newest solar cell designs, tandem devices that have a silicon solar cell below a cell made of a crystalline material called a perovskite, rely on the material. Now, researchers are doing away with silicon altogether, creating tandems from two of the best yet perovskites, each tailored to absorb a different part of the solar spectrum. Because perovskites are easier to manufacture than silicon cells, the advance could lead to less costly solar power. ...Improvements in technology and manufacturing have dropped the price of [silicon] cells some 88% in the past decade, .... That has prompted, over the same period, a more than 30-fold increase in solar energy deployment around the world to more than 30 billion watts, or 30 gigawatts, of installed capacity, enough to power at least 3.7 million home

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/world/americas/coffee-climate-change-migration.html Source:   By Kirk Semple, The New York Times. Excerpt: CORQUÍN, Honduras — The farmer stood in his patch of forlorn coffee plants, their leaves sick and wilted, the next harvest in doubt. Last year, two of his brothers and a sister, desperate to find a better way to survive, abandoned their small coffee farms in this mountainous part of Honduras and migrated north, eventually sneaking into the United States. Then in February, the farmer’s 16-year-old son also headed north, ignoring the family’s pleas to stay. The challenges of agricultural life in Honduras have always been mighty, from poverty and a neglectful government to the swings of international commodity prices. But farmers, agricultural scientists and industry officials say a new threat has been ruining harvests, upending lives and adding to the surge of families migrating to the United States: climate change. ...Central America is among

https://eos.org/articles/the-ice-nurseries-of-the-arctic-are-melting Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Each winter, a cold, relentless wind blows over the northeastern Russian coast toward the sea. The wind pushes sea ice away from land, opening up pockets for new ice to form. The process repeats endlessly, bringing fresh crops of sea ice out to the Arctic Ocean and feeding a slow migration of ice westward toward Greenland. But a study published in Scientific Reports [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41456-y ] on 2 April reveals that warming temperatures are melting Russia’s coastal “ice nurseries” faster than before. Some 80% of nursery ice melts before it joins the open ocean, compared to 50% before 2000....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/magazine/climate-change-exxon-renewable-energy.html Source:   By Jesse Barron, The New York Times. Excerpt: Rex Tillerson ...explaining how the world worked...May 2015, in the middle of an oil-price crash, and Exxon Mobil’s earnings had fallen 46 percent compared with the same quarter the year before. But Tillerson, then Exxon’s chief executive, told his shareholders to be confident in the future. Oil and gas furnished billions of people, including the very poor, with cheap, reliable fuel — a fact not easily negated by a weak fiscal quarter. ...Later that morning, a Capuchin Franciscan friar rose to speak. ...Michael Crosby belonged to a tight circle of religious leaders who bought stock in public companies in the hope of exerting a moral influence on them. ...He submitted a motion to appoint a climate-change expert to Exxon’s board, ...he laid into Tillerson for having uttered “not one word or syllable” about climate change. ...Three

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/magazine/climate-change-bangladesh-scavenging.html Source:   By Andrea Frazzetta and Jacopo Pasotti, The New York Times. Excerpt: Standing sometimes waist-deep in seawater on the shores of the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, they work to find bricks, dig them out of the sludge and cart them to the side of the road to sell. The job is new, a result of devastating storm surges a little more than a decade ago. In 2007, and then again in 2009, cyclones battered the coastline just south of Kuakata, destroying homes and structures and drowning entire villages. The storms submerged forests of mangroves and left 99 local residents dead. ...Despite being responsible for only 0.3 percent of the emissions that cause global warming, Bangladesh is near the top of the Global Climate Risk Index, a ranking of 183 countries and territories most vulnerable to climate change. When scientists and researchers predict how global warming will affect populations

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/very-warm-water-observed-along-west-antarctic-ice-shelf Source:   By Terri Cook, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Two years of mooring observations at the edge of the continental shelf show that wind stress and upwelling control the inflow of some of the warmest water observed at an ice shelf front in Antarctica. ...One of the most important sources of the dense, oxygen- and nutrient-rich bottom waters that drive global ocean circulation is Antarctica’s Ross Sea. The cold, salty waters that form in this deep embayment play a crucial role in regulating heat and the availability of oxygen and vital nutrients throughout the world’s oceans. ...The data show there is a continual flow of Circumpolar Deep Water through the Siple Trough. Although this water often undergoes slight cooling or freshening as it approaches the continent, the data indicate there are frequent occasions when undiluted deep water up to 1.5°C—some of the warmest ever observed at an ice shelf fro

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/10/magazine/climate-change-pinkertons.html Source:   By Noah Gallagher Shannon, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...According to the World Bank, by 2050 some 140 million people may be displaced by sea-level rise and extreme weather, driving escalations in crime, political unrest and resource conflict. Even if the most conservative predictions about our climate future prove overstated, a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in temperature during the next century will almost certainly provoke chaos, in what experts call climate change’s “threat multiplier”: Displacement begets desperation begets disorder. ...it wasn’t difficult to see why a company might consider enhancing its security protocols. ...Allan Pinkerton organized his agency in response to the lawlessness of the frontier. ...in the early 1850s, a majority of the territories west of the Mississippi remained ungoverned; few towns offered policing, and fewer still had the means to investigate crimes

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/09/magazine/climate-change-politics-economics.html Source:   By David Leonhardt, The New York Times. Excerpt: On a Saturday afternoon in early December, inside a soaring auditorium on the campus of Stockholm University, William Nordhaus gave the crowning lecture of his half-century career as an economist. The occasion was his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in economics, .... The title of the lecture was “Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics.” ...The Nobel was a tribute to the originality and influence of his work developing economic models that help people think about how to slow climate change. ...Climate change is a threat like no other. Fatal heat waves, droughts, wildfires and severe hurricanes are all becoming more common, and they are almost certain to accelerate. Avoiding horrific damage, as a United Nations panel of scientists recently concluded, will require changes in human behavior that have “no documented histor

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/what-climate-models-get-wrong-about-future-water-availability Source:   By Emily Underwood, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: One of the most challenging questions about climate change is how Earth’s warming atmosphere will affect water availability across the globe. Climate models present a range of possible scenarios—some more extreme than others [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/todays-drought-in-the-west-is-nothing-compared-to-what-may-be-coming/2015/02/12/0041646a-b2d9-11e4-854b-a38d13486ba1_story.html ]—which can make it difficult for cities, states, and countries to plan ahead. Now, however, in a new study, Padrón et al. [ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018GL080521 ] suggest a way to reduce uncertainty using precipitation patterns from the past. ...sometimes proposed in the past was that dry regions will get drier and wet regions will get wetter.... ...historically accurate models lacked many of the extrem

https://www.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/ams/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/a-framework-for-sustained-national-climate-assessment-in-the-united-states/ Source:   By R.H. Moss et al (Climate advisory panel disbanded by President Trump). [The panel was reconstituted by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and includes members from academia, corporations and the government. Twelve of the original 15 members, along with eight additional experts, spent a year preparing the report designed to help local officials incorporate the latest climate science in their planning.]

https://eos.org/articles/north-atlantic-circulation-patterns-reveal-seas-of-change Source:   By Mary Caperton Morton, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), involving the deep-ocean mixing of warm, salty waters with colder, fresher waters in the North Atlantic, is a major influencer of Earth’s climate. As warm tropical currents journey north, pushed by prevailing winds, they cool, become denser, and sink in a process known as overturning. Historically, most models have shown that the bulk of this overturning occurs in the Labrador Sea, west of Greenland. But a new study indicates that the eastern North Atlantic between Greenland and Scotland may actually be the dominant overturning venue. ... As the overturning of seawater in the North Atlantic changes, so does the ocean’s ability to absorb and store atmospheric carbon, Lozier says. “Since the Industrial Revolution, the oceans have taken up about a third of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide humans have

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/ancient-snowball-earth-thawed-out-flash Source:   By Lucas Joel, Science Magazine. Excerpt: More than half a billion years ago, our planet was a giant snowball hurtling through space. Glaciers blanketed the globe all the way to the equator in one of the mysterious “Snowball Earth” events geologists think occurred at least twice in Earth’s ancient past. Now, scientists have found that the final snowball episode likely ended in a flash about 635 million years ago—a geologically fast event that may have implications for today’s human-driven global warming. The ice, which built up over several thousand years, “melted in no more than 1 million years,” says Shuhai Xiao, a paleobiologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg who was part of the team that made the discovery. That’s the blink of an eye in our planet’s 4.56-billion-year history, suggesting the globe reached a sudden tipping point, Xiao says. Although the

https://eos.org/articles/youth-call-climate-change-a-generational-justice-issue Source:   By Randy Showstack, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: “Climate change is a generational justice and equity issue,” Jonah Gottlieb, a high school junior in Rohnert Park, Calif., told youth and adults in a jam-packed room in the U.S. Capitol Building. It was filled with earnest middle schoolers and high schoolers as well as adult climate change activists and some members of Congress. Climate change, Gottlieb said, “disproportionately affects students and young people in future generations.” As the codirector of Schools for Climate Action [ https://schoolsforclimateaction.weebly.com/ ], Gottlieb was at the Capitol for the Youth and Educator Climate Advocacy Summit on 28 March to encourage Congress to support climate change policies.... See also "Template Email to School Board Members" and "Student Council Resolution Toolkit" [ https://schoolsforclimateaction.weebly.com/resources.html ]