https://eos.org/geofizz/six-ways-satellites-tracked-covid-19 Source:    By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: A new database reveals dimmer cities, empty farming fields, and vacant ports. Three space agencies have released a database to help the public and policy makers trace the worldwide impact of the coronavirus. NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have collaborated to provide an online portal with regularly updated metrics. ...At least 17 satellites are being actively used in the dashboard, and others will join in the future. ...1. The Asparagus Crop Dropped by 30% in Germany. ...2. Light Pollution Intensified at a Medical Center in San Francisco. ...3. Beijing Factories Made Fewer Cars, and Singapore Patient Parking Rose. ...4. Nitrogen Dioxide Slashed by Half in Europe. ...5. Shipping Ports in New York Sat Empty. ...6. Carbon Dioxide in Beijing Fell, Then Boomeranged Back.... 

https://eos.org/articles/the-ticking-time-bomb-of-arctic-permafrost Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Arctic infrastructure is under threat from thawing permafrost. An Arctic ecosystem is in crisis this month after a fuel tank in Russia collapsed and spilled 20,000 tons of diesel into the environment. Thawing permafrost and aging facilities likely caused the spill, and the ecosystem could take more than a decade to recover. Although Arctic communities have long known that warming temperatures will undermine buildings, roads, and other infrastructure, scientific research is still catching up on how to create localized hazard maps of permafrost thaw. Meanwhile, communities don’t have time to wait for research to catch up. ...“I’ve heard of dozens of houses falling in, and a few churches. There are multiple graveyards that are falling in, and there’s nothing that anybody can do,” said Darcy Peter, a researcher at Woods Hole Research Center who specializes in permafrost t

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/science/rome-caesar-volcano.html Source:  By Katherine Kornei, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Scientists have linked historical political instability to a number of volcanic events, the latest involving an eruption in the Aleutian Islands. ...This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate. “They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,” said Jessica Ball, a volcanologist at the California Volcano Observatory, who was not involved in the research. ...There’s good evidence that the Northern Hemisphere was colder than normal around 43 B.C. Trees across Europe grew more slowly that year, and a pine forest in North America experienced an unusually early autumn freeze. Using c

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/controversial-russian-theory-claims-forests-don-t-just-make-rain-they-make-wind Source:    By Fred Pearce, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: ...For more than a decade, [Anastassia] Makarieva has championed a theory, developed with Victor Gorshkov, her mentor and colleague at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI), on how Russia’s boreal forests, the largest expanse of trees on Earth, regulate the climate of northern Asia. ...water vapor exhaled by trees drives winds: winds that cross the continent, taking moist air from Europe, through Siberia, and on into Mongolia and China; winds that deliver rains that keep the giant rivers of eastern Siberia flowing; winds that water China’s northern plain, the breadbasket of the most populous nation on Earth. With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world’s great forests are often referred to as the planet’s lungs. But Makarieva and Gorshkov ...say they are its beating hea

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/climate/climate-change-pregnancy-study.html Source:    By Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Pregnant women exposed to high temperatures or air pollution are more likely to have children who are premature, underweight or stillborn, and African-American mothers and babies are harmed at a much higher rate than the population at large, according to  sweeping new research examining  more than 32 million births in the United States. ...The research, published Thursday in JAMA Network Open, part of the Journal of the American Medical Association [ https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.8243 ], presents some of the most sweeping evidence so far linking aspects of climate change with harm to newborn children. ... 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/06/16/climate-solutions-manure/ Source:   By Jim Morrison, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Farmers and utilities are burning methane for energy — and curtailing a powerful greenhouse gas in the process. ...many of the tanks, where microorganisms digest manure and turn it into methane gas that can be burned as fuel or converted to electricity, had been abandoned. They proved too complicated to manage. ...while 87 percent of the digesters in the country had failed, he had a new recipe for success: add food waste to the manure. It would increase the energy output and boost the income for farmers through tipping fees from manufacturers, retailers and others looking to unload food waste. Best of all, it would use methane from the manure, instead of venting it into the atmosphere to contribute to climate change. ...Over the past two decades, there’s been a slow, steady rise in the transformation of farm and food waste to energy, but the

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/06/16/new-jersey-aims-lead-nation-offshore-wind-so-its-building-biggest-turbine-port-country / Source:    By Dino Grandoni, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Gov. Phil Murphy (D) said his state will build the country’s first port dedicated to assembling the turbines that will go up not just in New Jersey but across the Eastern Seaboard. ...The port is part of the state’s broader plan to get all of its electricity from clean energy by the middle of the century. New Jersey, already one of the nation’s fastest-warming places, wants to generate 7,500 megawatts from offshore wind by 2035 — enough to power half of New Jersey’s homes. ...Over the past decade, wind energy has eaten into the market share of coal and nuclear power. It now accounts for about 7 percent of all the nation’s electricity....   

https://eos.org/articles/now-is-the-time-for-green-recovery-scientists-say Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe. Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Daily carbon dioxide emissions are spiking again as economies roar back to life from pandemic lockdowns. ...Le Quéré believes the CO2 reductions are short-lived, as the recent data show. “As soon as the confinement eases, then they come back up again, ...We still have the same roads, we have the same cars, we still have the same heating systems for the other sectors, and the same industries.” “The changes in emissions during confinement are not structural changes. They are forced behavior changes—they are painful, they are brutal even,” Le Quéré said. Future reductions will rely on positive changes that boost quality of life and create jobs. How? Le Quéré has some ideas: Invest in green infrastructures, build cycle paths, insulate homes, install heat pumps, install renewable power, and “electrify everything.” Cook vegetarian meals, train workers to renovate hom

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/06/12/india-emissions-climate/ Source:  By Joanna Slater, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: ...About 1.75 million electric rickshaws ply India’s roads — more than the total number of electric cars sold in the United States. The scrappy, slightly anarchic industry is a homegrown success story in India’s fight against climate change and debilitating air pollution. It’s a small leap forward in a much longer race. As the world confronts a changing climate, India is a crucial unknown, and its decisions could either doom efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions — or jump-start them. ... In the coming years, India will need policies that not only lower pollution and carbon emissions but also create jobs for its growing workforce. In that regard, the spread of electric rickshaws is instructive. Unlike in the United States, where the transportation sector is the largest single contributor to emissions, in India the sector accounts for about a

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/global-warming-ordovician-extinction.html Source:  By Shannon Hall, The New York Times. Excerpt: It has long been our planet’s greatest and oldest murder mystery. Roughly 445 million years ago, around 85 percent of all marine species disappeared in a geologic flash known as the Late Ordovician mass extinction. But scientists have long debated this whodunit, in contrast to clearer explanations for Earth’s other mass extinctions. ...“The Ordovician one has always been a little bit of an oddball,” said Stephen Grasby of the Geological Survey of Canada. Now he and David Bond of the University of Hull in England say they have cracked the case in a study published last month in the journal Geology. Widespread volcanic eruptions unleashed enough carbon dioxide to heat up the planet and trigger two pulses of extinction separated by 1 million years, they report. If true, it places the first grand wipeout of life on Earth in good company: Many of th

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52966178 Source:  BBC News. Excerpt: A Chinese car battery-maker says it is ready to manufacture a product capable of powering a vehicle for 1.2 million miles (two million kilometres) across the course of a 16-year lifespan. ...The European market for EVs and plug-in hybrids grew by 72% in the first three months of the year compared to the same period in 2019, representing 7% of all delivered new cars, according to research firm Canalys....

https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2020/michael-mann-on-climate-denial-and-doom Source:   By Bryan Schatz, California Magazine.  Excerpt: The climatologist is taking on both the fossil fuel lobby and those who think the climate fight is futile. ONE AUGUST AFTERNOON IN 2010, Michael Mann was opening mail in his office at Penn State University when a dusting of white powder emerged from an envelope. ...Death threats weren’t exactly the kind of thing Mann ’89 had imagined as an undergrad at Cal, when he was first thinking about a life in academia. But his career as a climate scientist had attracted some very powerful and determined enemies. Over the years, he’d gotten used to verbal attacks and idle threats, but this was on a different level. He began to worry about his family’s safety. In the end, the powder proved to be cornstarch, but police gave Mann a hotline number just in case. He and his wife put it on the refrigerator. Mann’s troubles started a decade earlie

https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2636/Rise-of-carbon-dioxide-unabated Source:    By NOAA.  Excerpt: Atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa Observatory reached a seasonal peak of 417.1 parts per million for 2020 in May, the highest monthly reading ever recorded, scientists from NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego announced today. ...“Progress in emissions reductions is not visible in the CO 2  record,” said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. ”We continue to commit our planet - for centuries or longer - to more global heating, sea level rise, and extreme weather events every year.” If humans were to suddenly stop emitting CO 2 , it would take thousands of years for our CO 2  emissions so far to be absorbed into the deep ocean and atmospheric CO 2  to return to pre-industrial levels....  

https://eos.org/articles/below-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch-more-garbage Source:   By Mara Johnson-Groh, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...“We have a very limited understanding of where all the plastic and stuff that’s being put into the ocean ends up,” said Matthias Egger, the lead scientist behind the new study and a researcher with The Ocean Cleanup. “We know roughly there’s tens of millions of tons of plastics going into the ocean. A large part of that should be afloat, but it’s not.” This mystery is known as the missing plastic problem. Plastic found adrift in the ocean makes up only 1% of what should be out there, though a large portion is thought to circulate in coastal environments. The largest known reservoirs of plastic at sea are giant, swirling “garbage patches” that can stretch over areas twice the size of Texas. Could some of the missing plastic have sunk beneath these massive gyres? ...The scientists estimated that between 5 and 2,000 meters below the surface, the total mass of

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-arctic-oil-spill-siberia/2020/06/04/a1d24ad8-a667-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html Source:  By Isabelle Khurshudyan, The Washington Post. Excerpt: MOSCOW — A major fuel spill in Siberia has prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare a state of emergency in an environmentally sensitive Arctic region after publicly scolding local authorities for what he said was a botched response. A fuel tank at a power plant ruptured Friday in Norilsk — above the Arctic Circle in north-central Russia — leaking at least 20,000 tons of diesel fuel into the nearby Ambarnaya River. Satellite images showed large swaths of the waterway contaminated from the spill....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/climate/floating-windmills-fight-climate-change.html Source:   By Stanley Reed, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...offshore is now the fastest-growing segment of the wind business, but marine wind farms have been limited to water shallow enough to allow turbines to sit on piles or other supports on the sea bottom. About 200 feet in depth is the outer limit for such devices, people in the industry say. If platforms could be put almost anywhere at sea, “we can go to areas where we have never before harnessed the wind,” said José Pinheiro, the project director of WindFloat Atlantic. Mr. Pinheiro’s machine floats on three partly submerged columns, each about 100 feet long. Steel catwalks bridge the gaps between the giant cylinders. Sensors signal to pumps to add or remove water from the columns to keep the platform at the right level for optimal wind generation. In a gentle sea in the bay, the vessel, which weighs thousands of tons, seemed remarkably sta

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/climate/deforestation-climate-change.html Source:  By Henry Fountain. Excerpt: Brazil was responsible for more than a third of the total global loss in 2019. [Images: Deforestation between 2001–2019 in Alto Paraiso, Brazil. (Source: World Resources Institute)] Destruction of tropical forests worldwide increased last year, led again by Brazil, which was responsible for more than a third of the total, and where deforestation of the Amazon through clear-cutting appears to be on the rise under the pro-development policies of the country’s president. The worldwide total loss of old-growth, or primary, tropical forest — 9.3 million acres, an area nearly the size of Switzerland — was about 3 percent higher than 2018 and the third largest since 2002. Only 2016 and 2017 were worse, when heat and drought led to record fires and deforestation, especially in Brazil....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/06/01/summers-are-growing-longer-due-climate-change-while-winters-dramatically-shrink/ Source:  By Brian Brettschneider, The Washington Post. Excerpt: The Earth is warming and disturbing the balance of the seasons. Data makes it clear that summers are expanding while winters are substantially shortening. I recently completed an analysis that examined the hottest and coldest 90 days of the year, approximating summer and winter, over the past two 30-year periods, 1960-1989 and 1990-2019. What I learned was that the hottest temperatures that defined the first 30 years expanded over additional days in the most recent 30 years. Conversely, the coldest temperatures defining the preceding 30 years contracted. In other words, most locations globally, including in the United States and Canada, have seen their summer season lengthen and the winter season shrink....