https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/technology/cloud-computing-energy-usage.html Source:   By Steve Lohr, The New York Times. Excerpt: The computer engine rooms that power the digital economy have become surprisingly energy efficient. A new study of data centers globally found that while their computing output jumped sixfold from 2010 to 2018, their energy consumption rose only 6 percent. The scientists’ findings suggest concerns that the rise of mammoth data centers would generate a surge in electricity demand and pollution have been greatly overstated. The major force behind the improving efficiency is the shift to cloud computing. In the cloud model, businesses and individuals consume computing over the internet as services, from raw calculation and data storage to search and social networks. ...The study findings were published on Thursday in an article in the journal Science[ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6481/984 ]....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/world/australia/climate-change-extremes.html Source:   By Damien Cave, The New York Times; photographs by Matthew Abbott. Excerpt: RAINBOW FLAT, Australia — Standing in thick mud between burned trees and a concrete slab where his house had been, Peter Ruprecht admitted that he was not sure how or when to rebuild. He was still dizzied by what Australia’s increasingly volatile climate had already delivered: first a drought, then a devastating bush fire, then a foot of rain from a tropical storm. ...With floods destroying homes not far from where infernos recently raged, they are confronting a cycle of what scientists call “compound extremes”: one climate disaster intensifying the next. Warmer temperatures do more than just dry out the land. They also heat up the atmosphere, which means clouds hold more moisture for longer periods of time. So droughts get worse, giving way to fires, then to crushing rains that the land is too dry to absorb. One resul

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/world/asia/philippines-climate-change-batasan-tubigon.html Source:  By Hannah Beech, The New York Times, photographs by Jes Aznar. Excerpt: BATASAN, Philippines — When the floods invade her home at night — and they always do, a little higher each year — Pelagia Villarmia curls up on her bed and waits.Someday soon, she knows, the water will creep past the bamboo slats of her bed. It will keep rising, salty and dark and surprisingly cold. ...What is happening to Ms. Villarmia and her neighbors on Batasan, an island in the Philippines, is a harbinger of what residents of low-lying islands and coastal regions around the world will face as the seas rise higher. ...Now climate change, with its rising sea levels, appears to be dooming a place that has no elevation to spare. The highest point on the islands is less than 6.5 feet above sea level. ...“The climate refugee message is more sensational but the more realistic narrative from the islanders themsel

https://eos.org/features/the-future-of-the-carbon-cycle-in-a-changing-climate Source:  By Aleya Kaushik, Jake Graham, Kalyn Dorheim, Ryan Kramer, Jonathan Wang, and Brendan Byrne, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Over the past 50 years, a growing wealth of long-term atmosphere, ocean, and ecosystem observations has provided essential insights into how climate change affects the ways that carbon moves through Earth’s environment, yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Perhaps the most challenging and societally relevant question is whether the rate at which the land and ocean can sequester carbon will continue to keep pace with rising carbon dioxide emissions. Emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane (CH 4 ) stemming from human activities are rapidly and dramatically altering Earth’s climate. Warmer temperatures drive longer and more destructive fire seasons, shifting precipitation patterns cause flooding in some areas and drought in others, and ocean acidification threatens mari

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/only-humans-can-create-climate-altering-methane-burns-new-studies-suggest Source:   By Warren Cornwall, Science Magazine. Excerpt: When it comes to forecasting global warming, methane is an unpredictable, menacing figure. The greenhouse gas is 28 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year span. And as the planet warms, scientists fear vast stores of the gas will be released from Arctic permafrost and the deep ocean, warming the planet even further. Evidence from two new studies offers hope: First, a swift release of massive quantities of ancient methane is unlikely. Second, humans seem to be a bigger source of modern methane emissions than previously thought—meaning people have more control over how much winds up in the atmosphere. “It’s generally encouraging news,” says Michael Dyonisius, a geochemist and graduate student at the University of Rochester (U of R) who led the study of ancient methane. ...The methan

https://eos.org/articles/glacial-earthquakes-spotted-for-the-first-time-on-thwaites Source:   By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: These seismic events, triggered by icebergs capsizing and ramming into Thwaites, reveal that the glacier has lost some of its floating ice shelf. ...These observations confirm that Thwaites’s floating ice shelf is degrading. That’s bad news, scientists agree, because the glacier helps hold back the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from flowing into the sea. ...Thwaites Glacier, roughly the size of the state of Florida, is one of the largest sources of ice loss in Antarctica and is responsible for about 4% of global sea level rise. It regularly sheds icebergs hundreds of meters on a side into the Amundsen Sea, but some of these chunks of ice aren’t just drifting away, said J. Paul Winberry, a geophysicist at Central Washington University in Ellensburg who led the new study. Thanks to their shape, they’re capsizing. “They’re taller than they are wide. They’re t

https://eos.org/articles/wine-grape-diversity-buffers-climate-change-induced-losses Source:   By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: By mixing up which wine grape varieties are planted where, the wine industry can better ride out the effects of a warming climate, new research reveals. Using climate models and historical records of wine grape ripening patterns, scientists have shown that roughly 50% of the planet’s current wine-growing areas won’t be climatically suitable for their present variety if temperatures increase by 2°C. But if growers opt to plan ahead for climate change and plant later-ripening varieties like grenache now, those losses can be cut in half. In other words, exploiting biological diversity can help vintners buffer against climate change–induced losses, the team concluded....

https://eos.org/opinions/science-gets-up-to-speed-on-dry-rivers Source:   By Margaret Shanafield, et al, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Australia’s third-longest river, the Darling, normally experiences periods of medium to low flow, punctuated by flood events. But vast stretches of the river in New South Wales have been bone dry for the past two summers, and in 2019 the river was dry by early spring. The lack of flows has left communities along its banks in dire straits, with many trucking in water to serve even basic domestic water requirements. Millions of dollars have been spent building pipelines to distant reservoirs, while groundwater resources have also been put under increased stress to fill gaps. River ecosystems have also felt the impacts acutely, with mass fish deaths being just one example. Periods of drought are partly responsible for the diminishing flows in the Darling. More important, however, are increasing water withdrawals over several decades that have taken a toll on this

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/13/climate/manila-san-francisco-sea-level-rise.html Source:   By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times global climate reporter, and Chang W. Lee, photographer for The Times. [They] traveled to the Philippines and California to see how rising sea levels are affecting two big metropolitan areas.. Excerpt: What do you do when the sea comes for your home, your school, your church? You could try to hold back the water. Or you could raise your house. Or you could just leave. An estimated 600 million people live directly on the world’s coastlines, among the most hazardous places to be in the era of climate change. According to scientific projections, the oceans stand to rise by one to four feet by the end of the century, with projections of more ferocious storms and higher tides that could upend the lives of entire communities. Many people face the risks right now. Two sprawling metropolitan areas offer a glimpse of the future. One rich, one poor,

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/somalia-unprecedented-effort-kill-massive-locust-swarms-biocontrol Source:   By   Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine . Excerpt: Somalia, one of several African nations being hit hard by enormous swarms of locusts, is planning to control them with a fungus in what would be the largest use of biopesticides against these insects. ...The moment is crucial, because the next generation of locusts is now maturing and could devastate crops planted at the end of March. “We have a short window of opportunity to act,” Dominique Burgeon, director of emergencies at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), said at a briefing Monday in New York City. In recent months, the Horn of Africa has been invaded by desert locusts that have consumed food crops and pasture. For Kenya, it is the worst infestation in 70 years. One swarm there was estimated at 100 billion to 200 billion locusts, marauding through 2400 square kilometers. FAO warned

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/climate/blackrock-oil-sands-alberta-financing.html Source:   By Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times. Excerpt: Some of the world’s largest financial institutions have stopped putting their money behind oil production in the Canadian province of Alberta, home to one of the world’s most extensive, and also dirtiest, oil reserves. In December, the insurance giant The Hartford said it would stop insuring or investing in oil production in the province, just weeks after Sweden’s central bank said it would stop holding Alberta’s bonds. And on Wednesday BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said that one of its fast-growing green-oriented funds would stop investing in companies that get revenue from the Alberta oil sands. They are among the latest banks, pension funds and global investment houses  to start pulling away from fossil-fuel investments amid growing pressure to show they are doing something to fight climate change....

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/southern-california-climate-change-over-100000-years Source:   By Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Southern California is one of only a few places outside the Mediterranean Basin to enjoy a Mediterranean-like climate. Mild summers and wet winters have long supported some of the state’s (and the country’s) most biodiverse locations. But Southern California is warming faster than nearly anywhere else in the contiguous United States, and climate projections for the state forecast higher temperatures and increasingly erratic precipitation—conditions that could drive the Mediterranean region farther north and leave in its place a subtropical desert. Indeed, new research suggests this has happened before. Glover et al. looked at natural variation in vegetation and wildfire to better understand how Southern California will respond to climate change in the future....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/instead-of-releasing-this-greenhouse-gas-beer-brewers-are-selling-it-to-pot-growers/2020/02/11/cf1410ae-49c3-11ea-b4d9-29cc419287eb_story.html Source:   By Jennifer Oldham, The Washington Post. Excerpt: DENVER — The state of Colorado and three small businesses are trying a novel approach to reduce carbon emissions that sounds like something out of the fever dreams of Willie Nelson: using carbon dioxide produced from beer brewing to help marijuana plants grow. Denver Beer Co., Colorado’s seventh-largest craft brewery by volume, is testing technology developed by Austin-based Earthly Labs to capture carbon dioxide emitted naturally during fermentation that was previously vented into the air. The refrigerator-sized device purifies the greenhouse gas and chills it into a liquid. Stored in 750-pound tanks, the recovered CO 2 is transported about nine miles to the Clinic, where growers vaporize the liquid and pump it into rooms full of pot

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/climate/lightning-africa-climate-change.html Source:    By Shola Lawal, The New York Times. Excerpt: Africa is experiencing bigger and more frequent thunderstorms as global temperatures rise, according to researchers at Tel Aviv University. ...meteorologists wondered at the time whether thunderstorms were becoming more common in Africa in the era of climate change. The answer, according to the new research, published in January in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate [ https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0781.1 ], is yes. An increase in temperatures in Africa over the past seven decades correlates with bigger and more frequent thunderstorms, the researchers found....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/08/climate/antarctica-record-temperature.html Source:      By Derrick Bryson Taylor, The New York Times. Excerpt: Antarctica ... set a record high temperature on Thursday, underscoring the global warming trend, researchers said. Esperanza, Argentina’s research station on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, reached 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 18.2 degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record of 63.5 degrees set on March 24, 2015, according to Argentina’s National Meteorological Service. The station has been recording temperatures since 1961....

https://eos.org/articles/helping-alaskan-communities-facing-climate-risks Source:   By andy Showstack, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Everything is changing in Shishmaref, ...with Alaska warming twice as quickly as the global average and faster than any other U.S. state. Shishmaref, on the front lines of climate change, faces increased flooding, erosion, and thawing permafrost, and a December 2019 assessment prepared for the Denali Commission ranked it as the second most threatened community in Alaska. (The Denali Commission is a federal agency that provides utilities, infrastructure, and economic support throughout Alaska.)....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/06/climate/bumblebees-extreme-heat-weather.html Source:    By Kendra Pierre-Louis and Nadja Popovich, The New York Times. Excerpt: Behold the humble bumblebee. Hot temperatures linked to climate change, especially extremes like heat waves, are contributing to the decline of these fuzzy and portly creatures, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science [ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6478/685 ]. Researchers found that bumblebee populations had recently declined by 46 percent in North America and by 17 percent across Europe when compared to a base period of 1901 to 1974. The biggest declines were in areas where temperatures spiked well beyond the historical range, which raises concerns that climate change could increase the risk of extinction for bees, which are already threatened by pesticide use and habitat loss. ...Bumblebees are one piece of the ecological networks threatened by climate change. “Bumblebees

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/global-warming-speeding-earth-s-massive-ocean-currents Source:   By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. Excerpt: The oceans’ great continent-wrapping currents, each one moving as much water as all the world’s rivers combined, can rightly be considered the planet’s circulatory system. And this circulation, it appears, has started to thump faster: For nearly 25 years the currents have been rapidly speeding up, partly because of global warming....