https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/us/tornadoes-usa.html Source:   By Kevin Williams and Alan Blinder, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...Now the severe weather had come to Celina, a city of about 10,000 people about 60 miles northwest of Dayton, causing the kind of devastation that has left state after state with ruined buildings and grieving families this spring. In the last week alone, the authorities have linked tornadoes to at least seven deaths and scores of injuries. Federal government weather forecasters logged preliminary reports of more than 500 tornadoes in a 30-day period — a rare figure, if the reports are ultimately verified.... The barrage continued Tuesday night, as people across the Midwest took shelter from powerful storms. A particularly destructive storm splintered homes, ripped up trees and downed power lines southwest of Kansas City. One tornado hit the outskirts of Lawrence, Kan., home to the University of Kansas. The worst damage was reported in nearby Linwood.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/business/economy/trump-gm-workhorse-lordstown.html Source:   By Nelson D. Schwartz, Matthew Goldstein and Neal E. Boudette, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...General Motors... was in negotiations to sell the plant in Lordstown, Ohio, to a new company affiliated with a little-known electrical vehicle maker called Workhorse. ...The new venture, whose name remains secret, exists almost entirely on paper. Headed by the founder and former chief executive of Workhorse, Steve Burns, the business would have to raise at least $300 million to get Lordstown running again. ...Between its founding in 2007 and the first quarter of 2019, Workhorse lost nearly $150 million. It has produced a total of 365 vehicles since its inception, fewer than Lordstown can churn out in a day. Last year, Workhorse’s revenue totaled $763,000, about $62,000 less than the combined salaries of its top three executives. ...Many electric-vehicle businesses haven’t built a single automob

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/climate/china-arctic.html Source:    By Somini Sengupta and Steven Lee Myers, The New York Times. Excerpt: ROVANIEMI, Finland — The Arctic is thawing, and China is seizing the chance to expand its influence in the north. For China, the retreating ice potentially offers two big prizes: new sources of energy and a faster shipping route across the top of the world. To that end, the country is cultivating deeper ties with Russia. More than 3,000 miles from home, Chinese crews have been drilling for gas beneath the frigid waters of the Kara Sea off Russia’s northern coast. Every summer for the last five years, Chinese cargo ships have maneuvered through the ice packs off Russia’s shores — a new passage that officials in Beijing like to call the Polar Silk Road. And in Shanghai, Chinese shipbuilders  recently launched the country’s second icebreaker , the Snow Dragon 2. China’s ambitions in the Far North, said Aleksi Harkonen, Finland’s ambassador for A

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/humans-held-responsible-twists-and-turns-climate-change-1900 Source: By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: While industry and agriculture belched greenhouse gases at an increasing pace through the 20th century, global temperature followed a jagged course, surging for 3 decades starting in 1915, leveling off from the 1950s to the late 1970s, and then resuming its climb. For decades, scientists have chalked up these early swings to the planet’s internal variability—in particular, a climatic pacemaker called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is characterized by long-term shifts in ocean temperatures. But researchers are  increasingly questioning  whether the AMO played the dominant role once thought. The oceanic pacemaker seems to be fluttering. It is now possible to explain  the record’s twists and turns  almost entirely without the AMO, says Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford in the United

h ttps://eos.org/articles/historic-solutions-to-sea-level-rise-may-help-modern-communities Source:  By Sarah Derouin, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: For centuries, fighting rising sea levels has been a regular part of life for people in the Netherlands. Since the early 20th century, archeologists have been digging into how humans adapted and thrived in these flooded environments. Settlers in the low-lying region of what is now the northern Netherlands built elevated platforms [called terps] on the land, protecting their homes, crops, and livestock from the rising ocean and frequent flooding. These constructed landforms were highly successful, allowing settlers to thrive in low-lying lands for more than 1,500 years. ...Terps were not simple piles of dirt, says Nieuwhof, but engineered structures that were resistant to erosion and could support a house without sagging. Early terps were built for a single home and were modest in height—only about 0.4 to 1 meter above what were likely the highest e

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/500-million-year-survey-earths-climate-reveals-dire-warning-humanity Source:  By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. Excerpt: When it opens next month, the revamped fossil hall of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., will be more than a vault of dinosaur bones. It will show how Earth's climate has shifted over the eons, driving radical changes in life, and how, in the modern age, one form of life—humans—is, in turn, transforming the climate. To tell that story, Scott Wing and Brian Huber, a paleobotanist and paleontologist, respectively, at the museum, wanted to chart swings in Earth's average surface temperature over the past 500 million years or so. The two researchers also thought a temperature curve could counter climate contrarians' claim that global warming is no concern because Earth was much hotter millions of years ago. Wing and Huber wanted to show the reality of ancient te

https://eos.org/articles/farm-ponds-sequester-greenhouse-gases Source:   By Ty Burke, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The world’s farmers nourish their fields with more than 120 million metric tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer each year. ...A small percentage of the nitrogen in fertilizers is converted into nitrous oxide (N2O), a gas that accounts for about 5.6% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Nitrous oxide traps heat at about 300 times the rate of carbon dioxide and can comprise as much as half of a farm’s warming effects. In North America’s Great Plains, tens of thousands of farm ponds store water for livestock and irrigation,.... Researchers found that farm ponds “were undersaturated and were actually acting as N2O sinks, which was a big surprise.” ...The researchers sampled emissions from 101 farm ponds in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and found that just over two thirds of them were acting as N2O sinks. Their results were published in the Proceedings of the N

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/earthworms-soil-climate.html Source:   By Alanna Mitchell, The New York Times. Excerpt: Cindy Shaw, ...while conducting a study in northern Alberta to see how the forest floor was recovering after oil and gas activity, ...saw something she had never seen there before: earthworms. “I was amazed,” she said. “At the very first plot, there was a lot of evidence of earthworm activity.” Native earthworms disappeared from most of northern North America 10,000 years ago, during the ice age. Now invasive earthworm species from southern Europe — survivors of that frozen epoch, and introduced to this continent by European settlers centuries ago — are making their way through northern forests, their spread hastened by roads, timber and petroleum activity, tire treads, boats, anglers and even gardeners. As the worms feed, they release into the atmosphere much of the carbon stored in the forest floor. Climate scientists are worried. “Earthworms are yet

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/science/helium-shortage-party-city.html Source:   By Heather Murphy, The New York Times. Excerpt: ... What happened to the helium? It’s supposed to be one of the most prevalent elements in the universe. ...Part of the problem is that as delightful — and essential — as helium may be, it’s an afterthought for many international businesses. Ninety-seven percent of the world’s helium is produced as a “waste product,” collected while processing natural gas or producing liquefied natural gas.... Longstanding sources of it in the United States, Qatar and elsewhere are currently running low. ...it’s extraordinarily expensive and difficult to store. ...a tiny bit of heat turns it to gas. Even when kept in a cryogenic container, the liquid slowly boils off, .... Store it as gas and it gradually leaks out of most containers....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/vanishing-bering-sea-ice-threatens-one-richest-us-seafood-sources Source:   By Warren Cornwall, Science Magazine. Excerpt: When ice failed to cover much of the eastern Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia in early 2018, oceanographer James Overland chalked it up to a freak chance. Then, it happened again this year, with late-winter sea ice falling to some of the lowest levels seen in at least 4 decades. Now, scientists are studying whether this is the meteorological equivalent of drawing the ace of spades twice in a row, or another sign of the systemic changes sweeping the Arctic as a result of climate change. "I'm not ruling out that we really have a new regime over the Bering Sea," says Overland, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle, Washington. A lasting shift could dramatically transform a region with some of the nation&#

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/in-pennsylvania-methane-emissions-higher-than-epa-estimates Source:   By Aaron Sidder, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: As a greenhouse gas, methane packs quite the punch: Its warming potential is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years and 28 times more potent over 100 years. Methane, mostly released into the atmosphere by livestock, landfills, and biomass burning, is also released during the production of coal and natural gas. Although the overall methane emissions from the coal and natural gas sectors have decreased over the past 20 years, they still account for over 30% of anthropogenic methane emissions in the United States. ...Barkley et al. used the top-down approach recently to estimate methane emissions from underground coal and natural gas production in southwestern Pennsylvania. ...Coal and natural gas have different ratios of ethane to methane, and biogenic sources do not emit ethane. ...methane emissions from coal production mostly m

https://eos.org/articles/strong-winds-leave-arctic-regions-on-thin-ice Source:   By Ty Burke, Eos/AGU. Excerpt:  As an Arctic heat wave pushed the mercury as much as 25°C above normal in late February 2018, a large polynya, a patch of open water surrounded by sea ice, opened in the Wandel Sea. No polynyas had previously been observed in this ice-bound area north of Greenland, and it seemed likely that this anomaly would be linked to thinner sea ice. But when researchers Kent Moore and Axel Schweiger ran the numbers, they found that wasn’t the case. In February 2018, a sudden stratospheric warming event occurred over Siberia. The west-to-east flow of the stratospheric polar vortex reversed, and cold air from the stratosphere plunged to Earth. This shift pushed Siberian air to Europe, bringing frigid temperatures in a weather system nicknamed the “Beast from the East.” In turn, Europe’s warmer air was pushed toward Greenland, and winds surged across the island at speeds approaching h

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/science/tigers-climate-change-sundarbans.html Source:    By Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar, The New York Times. Excerpt: NEW DELHI — Climate change and rising sea levels eventually may wipe out one of the world’s last and largest tiger strongholds, scientists warned in a new study. The cats are among nearly 500,000 land species whose survival is now in question because of threats to their natural habitats, according to a report on Monday by the United Nations. The Sundarbans, 4,000 square miles of marshy land in Bangladesh and India, hosts the world’s largest mangrove forest and a rich ecosystem supporting several hundred animal species, including the endangered Bengal tiger. But 70 percent of the land is just a few feet above sea level, and grave changes are in store for the region, Australian and Bangladeshi researchers reported in the journal Science of The Total Environment. Changes wrought by a warming planet will be “enough to decimate” the few

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/as-sea-levels-rise-expect-more-floods Source:   By Aaron Sidder, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The global mean sea level currently measures 77 millimeters higher than in 1993 when the satellite sea level record began. According to the Fifth Assessment Report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global mean sea level is expected to continue rising throughout the 21st century. With 126 million Americans—40% of the total population of the United States—living along the coasts, rising seas could cause widespread property and socioeconomic damage in the coming century. Coastal communities require adaptation and mitigation strategies for both frequent, minor flooding and extreme, high-water events (i.e., major flooding). ...One challenge of strategic planning is that many statistical models struggle to simultaneously characterize both minor and major flood events resulting from rising sea levels. To address this challenge, Ghanba

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/international-space-station-has-found-its-scientific-calling Source:   By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. Excerpt: The International Space Station (ISS) has never been known as a hotbed of science, even though the United States and partner nations spent more than $100 billion to build it. Inside its cramped bays, astronauts study the biological effects of microgravity, and a few astrophysical experiments are mounted to its exterior. But ...the ISS has finally found a scientific calling: looking down at its home planet. The ISS is now home to five instruments that observe Earth, with two more set to join this year. One, NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3), ...will be the third prominent NASA mission to be mounted on the Japanese module within the past year. Ecostress, attached in July 2018, measures the heat given off by plants to gauge the impact of heat waves and drought. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), launch

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/climate/global-warming-drought-human-influence.html Source:   By  John Schwartz, The New York Times . Excerpt: Human activity was changing the Earth's drought and rainfall patterns as far back as the early 20th century, new research shows. Drying in many regions, the researchers suggested, will get worse, with sobering implications for feeding the planet’s billions of people. The new paper tracks long-term patterns of moisture levels in soil across regions of the world, including North America, Central America, Eurasia and the Mediterranean. The researchers found a “fingerprint” of human effects from producing greenhouse gases, as distinct from natural variability, as far back as 1900. Scientists have long known that the planet has shown an overall pattern of warmer temperatures since that time — the phenomenon is the subject of a famous cartoon [ https://xkcd.com/1732/ ] by Randall Munroe — but the new research shows the effects of that warmi

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/climate-change-gas-electricity.html Source:   By Justin Gillis and Bruce Nilles, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...We have some good news that sounds like bad news: Your gas stove has to go. We know how you’ll feel reading those words. We used to love cooking with gas, too. But if our society is going to solve the climate crisis, one of the things we must do is stop burning gas in our buildings. Nobody is going to shed a tear about having to switch to a more efficient furnace or water heater. But people feel emotional about gas stoves, and the gas industry knows it. Seeing this fight coming, the industry is already issuing propaganda with gauzy pictures of blue flames. What the gas companies will not tell you is that your stove is a danger not just to the world’s climate but also to your own family’s health. ...In Berkeley, Councilwoman Kate Harrison is proposing a ban on gas hookups in new buildings, part of an effort to make sure the city

https://eos.org/articles/burning-fossil-fuels-worsens-drought Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Tree rings help scientists trace the influence of greenhouse gas emissions on 20th-century drought conditions. California’s governor declared the end of the state’s 5-year drought emergency in April 2017, and the dry spell that at times covered more than half the state left many wondering whether climate change was to blame. But scientists looking to answer that question often face a troubling conundrum: The earliest measurements of drought conditions were taken long after climate change had already begun reshaping the landscape. “In order to know if something is unusual [in the present day], you generally have to rely on climate models to estimate preindustrial variability,” said climate scientist Kate Marvel at NASA and Columbia University. “I was interested in finding a way around that.” A study released 1 May in the journal Nature uses historical tree ring data to trac

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/science/flames-chimaera-turkey-methane.html Source:   By JoAnna Klein, The New York Times. Excerpt: At the top of a mountain in southwest Turkey, the ground spits fire. Known as the Flames of Chimaera, they have burned for millenniums. ...the fuel for this flaming mountaintop is gas escaping from deep within the earth. But it doesn’t come from the decay of ancient plant, algae or animal life, like fossil fuels. Instead, this gas comes from a chemical reaction inside rocks. And a series of studies published by a group of international scientists known as the Deep Carbon Observatory [ https://deepcarbon.net/ ] is showing that this source of gas is more common on our planet than previously known. “We have discovered these unusual types of methane in many, many sites. It’s not a rare phenomenon,” said Giuseppe Etiope, a member of the group who helped discover the cause of the flames of Chimaera in 2014. Over the past decade, the observatory’s communit