https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/03/31/gulf-of-mexico-warm-tornadoes-hurricanes Source:   By Matthew Cappucci, The Washington Post. Excerpt: Water temperatures are running about three degrees above normal. Water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are running more than three degrees above average, increasing the prospects for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes this spring and potentially stronger hurricane activity in the summer and fall. The last time Gulf of Mexico waters were similarly warm in 2017, it coincided with an above-average tornado season through the spring, and then Category 4 Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas Gulf Coast at the end of summer....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/30/trump-mileage-standards-environment Source:   By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, The Washington Post. Excerpt: The new rule will improve the U.S. car and light truck fleet’s efficiency by 1.5 percent a year, versus nearly 5 percent under current law....  See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/climate/trump-fuel-economy.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/climate/xprize-carbon-coronavirus.html Source:   By Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...The five-year competition, the Carbon XPrize, was designed to create a financial incentive to capture carbon dioxide and use it profitably, instead of releasing it. ...as the Brooklyn vodka makers — along with the nine other finalists from as far afield as Nova Scotia (stronger concrete), India (an ingredient in pharmaceuticals) and China (a plastics replacement) — were approaching the finish line, the competition has been delayed by the coronavirus crisis. ...Mr. Niven wrote his thesis on how to turn carbon dioxide into concrete.... Dimensional Energy, with Mr. Salfi as chief executive. The technology uses concentrated sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into industrial energy sources like syngas, which is used to produce jet fuel, diesel and other liquid fuels. ...Air Co. entered its vodka in a blind taste test at last year’s Luxury Masters comp

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/ancient-warming-threw-crucial-atlantic-current-chaos-it-could-happen-again# Source:   By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. Excerpt: The Atlantic Ocean’s “conveyor belt,” a powerful current that drags warm water north before submerging it in the North Atlantic, has been humankind’s constant companion. For 8000 years, it has held steady, nourishing Western Europe with tropical warmth. But a new study of the current’s strength over the past half-million years suggests global warming may not shut down the current any time soon, as some scientists fear. Instead, it could trigger a replay of ancient events, when multiple bouts of warming caused rapid, centurylong swings in the current’s strength, sowing climate chaos that may have alternately chilled and warmed Europe....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/world/australia/bleaching-great-barrier-reef.html Source:   By Richard Pérez-Peña, The New York Times. Excerpt: Record-breaking warm waters have bleached large parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef this year, as they did in 2016 and 2017, scientists reported on Thursday — the latest sign that global warming threatens the health of one of the world’s most important marine ecosystems. “We can confirm that the Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its third mass bleaching event in five years,” David Wachenfeld, chief scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said in a video [http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/the-reef/reef-health] posted on its website. ...Scientists say reefs around the world have been dying at an alarming rate for several years because of global warming. Reef corals grow very slowly, and while most of them can live only in warm water, they are highly sensitive to above-normal temperatures....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/world/europe/belarus-russia-nuclear.html Source:   By Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew Higgins, The New York Times. Excerpt: the location of Belarus’s first nuclear power plant — an area of pristine farmland just 40 miles from the capital of neighboring Lithuania — points to calculations that go beyond just kilowatts. .....The facility’s two reactors, set to go into operation soon, will produce far more electricity than Belarus can consume and lie far away from industrial areas eager for cheap power on the other side of the country. ...The plant was built by Rosatom, a state-owned Russian nuclear conglomerate, and financed with a $10 billion credit line from Moscow. ...Russia’s success — it has sold more nuclear technology abroad since Mr. Putin came to power in 1999 than the United States, France, China, South Korea and Japan combined, according to a recent study — is in part commercial, generating lucrative contracts in Europe, Asia and even Africa

https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier. Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Scientists have shown that mineral carbonation can permanently capture and store carbon quickly enough and safely enough to rise to the challenge of climate change. In carbon storage experiments tied to geothermal power plants in Iceland, 90% of injected carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) transformed into minerals in just 2 years. Standard carbon storage methods can take thousands of years to do the same. “We are basing our methods on this natural process which is part of the big carbon cycle where all carbon on Earth derives from and ends up in rocks,” said one of the lead researchers, Sandra Snæbjörnsdóttir. She is the head of CO 2  mineral storage at CarbFix [ https://www.carbfix.com/ ]....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/business/electric-semi-trucks-big-rigs.html Source:   By Susan Carpenter, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...Mr. Williams has been a truck driver for 22 years, logging at least a million miles with diesel power. Since December, he has been testing the battery-electric eCascadia as part of a pilot program in Southern California. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “You don’t go home with your ears ringing every night.” Two years ago, the eCascadia was nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation.... Now it’s one of several competing models, from start-ups as well as established truck makers, that are gearing up for production next year with real-world testing. Orders have poured in, from companies eager to shave operating costs and curb emissions, for trucks that won’t see roads for months or even years. ...“We want them quicker than the manufacturers can produce them,” said NFI’s president, Ike Brown. NFI, a freight hauler based in New Jersey, has been operati

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/why-did-nearly-million-king-penguins-vanish-without-trace Source:   By Eli Kintisch, Science. Excerpt: Where on Earth, wondered Henri Weimerskirch, were all the penguins? It was early 2017. Colleagues had sent the seabird ecologist aerial photos of Île aux Cochons, a barren volcanic island halfway between Madagascar and Antarctica that humans rarely visit. The images revealed vast areas of bare rock that, just a few decades before, had been crowded with some 500,000 pairs of nesting king penguins and their chicks. It appeared that the colony—the world’s largest king penguin aggregation and the second biggest colony of any of the 18 penguin species—had shrunk by 90%. ...he and his colleagues suspect that changes in the surrounding ocean forced the penguins to swim farther to find food. Studies of other king penguin colonies suggest foraging birds from Île aux Cochons normally swim toward an oceanic feature hundreds of kilometers to the south k

https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-covid-19-is-doing-to-our-pollution-levels Source:   By Jacinta Bowler, Science Alert. Excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic is getting more overwhelming by the day, with increasing lockdowns, a death toll of more than 7,000 people across the world, and a direct hit to the global economy. But if there's a sliver of good news, it's about how the spread of the new coronavirus has been decreasing air pollution, and possibly even saving lives in the process. ..."Given the huge amount of evidence that breathing dirty air contributes heavily to premature mortality, a natural - if admittedly strange - question is whether the lives saved from this reduction in pollution caused by economic disruption from COVID-19 exceeds the death toll from the virus itself," Burke writes....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/prominent-us-climate-denial-group-fires-president-amid-financial-crisis Source:   By Scott Waldman, E&E News. Excerpt: The Heartland Institute is undergoing its second leadership change in less than a year. The group, which rejects climate science, is ousting its president, Frank Lasée, after being buffeted by financial turbulence that led to significant layoffs, according to two sources close to Heartland....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/next-generation-water-splitter-could-help-renewables-power-globe Source:    By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Running the world on renewable energy is simple, in principle: Harvest solar and wind energy, and use any extra to power devices called electrolyzers that split water into oxygen (O 2 ) and hydrogen gas. Hydrogen (H 2 ) can serve as a fuel; it is also a staple of the chemical industry. The trouble is that current electrolyzers are costly, requiring either expensive catalysts or pricey metal housings. ... To make the water able to better conduct ions that move through the devices, today’s most common electrolyzers add high levels of potassium hydroxide (KOH) to the water. ... But KOH is highly caustic, so engineers have to build their devices out of expensive inert metals such as titanium.... That drawback prompted researchers in the 1960s to develop a version of the technology known as a proton-exchange membrane (PEM) e

https://eos.org/articles/tropical-forests-are-losing-their-ability-to-soak-up-carbon Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The towering stands of old-growth trees in Africa’s Salonga National Park in the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the most pristine and protected rain forests on the continent. But these trees are slowly sequestering less and less carbon each year, according to a new study in Nature [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2035-0 ]. In a survey of hundreds of thousands of trees across South America and Africa, including in Salonga National Park, analysis suggests that tropical trees have reached their limit when it comes to absorbing carbon because too many trees are dying and forests are shrinking....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/climate/shinnecock-long-island-climate.html Source:   By Somini Sengupta and Shola Lawal, The New York Times. Excerpt: SHINNECOCK NATION, Southampton, N.Y. — A maritime people who once spanned a large swath of the eastern Long Island shore, the Shinnecock Indians have been hemmed into a 1.5-square-mile patch of land on the edge of a brackish bay. Now, because of climate change, they’re battling to hold on to what they have left. Rising seas are threatening to eat away at the Shinnecock lands. But the tribe is using everything at its disposal to calm the waves and restore a long, slim beach at the edge of Shinnecock Bay: dredged sand, sea grasses, beach grasses, boulders, oyster shells. ...Climate change is swelling and heating the world’s oceans at an accelerating pace. Inevitably, the Shinnecock will have to bring more sand to replenish what the rising tide keeps washing away. More grass will have to be planted. This spring, Shavonne Smith, dire

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/climate/australia-wildfires-climate-change.html Source:   By Henry Fountain, The New York Times. Excerpt: Confirming what had been widely suspected, researchers have found that human-caused climate change had an impact on Australia’s recent devastating wildfires, making the extremely high-risk conditions that led to widespread burning at least 30 percent more likely than in a world without global warming....

https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-is-intensifying-arctic-ocean-currents Source:   By Hannah Thomasy, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Melting ice means that strong Arctic winds create more energetic currents in the Beaufort Gyre....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/climate/goks-uncertainty-language-interior.html Source:   By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times. Excerpt: An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change — including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial — into the agency’s scientific reports, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. ...The wording ... inaccurately claims that there is a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming. In Interior Department emails to scientists, Mr. Goklany pushed misleading interpretations of climate science, saying it “may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason;” climate modeling has largely predicted global warming accurately....

http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2017/climate-migrants/index.html Source:   By Esri's Story Maps team. Excerpt: Climate change is already displacing thousands of people. There is little doubt that the coming decades will see a vast increase in the number of people forced from their homes by global warming....