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....