https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/30/greenland-ice-melt/ Source:  By Andrew Freedman and Brady Dennis, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: The Greenland ice sheet is on track to lose mass at about four times the fastest rate observed over the past 12,000 years. At its current trajectory, such melting would dump huge quantities of freshwater into the sea, raising global sea levels and disrupting ocean currents, scientists concluded in   new research   Wednesday. The new findings, published in the journal Nature, warn that the only way to avoid a drastically accelerated meltdown of the massive ice sheet in coming decades is for the global community to curtail emissions of greenhouse gases in the near-term. [ Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say ] Greenland is already the largest contributor to sea level rise, though Antarctica has the potential to increase sea levels even more. As sea levels creep upward,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/29/global-ocean-layers-warming/ Source:  By  Andrew Freedman , Washington Post.  Excerpt: The layers of the world’s oceans aren’t mixing like they used to due to climate change, potentially speeding up how fast the planet will warm in the coming decades. This new finding, contained in a  study published Monday  in the journal Nature Climate Change, finds that the reduction in the mixing of ocean layers is piling up warm water near the surface while cutting back on the circulation of cold, deep water. The reduced up and down mixing is expected to have sweeping implications beyond just accelerating global warming. It is projected to increase energy available to hurricanes and other storms, reduce essential nutrients for fish in upper ocean layers and diminish the oceans’ ability to store carbon, among other impacts....   

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/can-china-worlds-bigger-coal-consumer-become-carbon-neutral-2060 Source:   By Dennis Normile, Science | AAAS.  Excerpt: China’s surprise pledge last week to cut its net carbon emissions to zero within 40 years has reignited hopes of limiting global climate change to tolerable levels. The country is the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), accounting for 28% of global emissions, and its move may inspire other countries to follow suit. But observers warn that China faces daunting challenges in reaching its goals. Kicking its coal habit will be particularly hard. “We aim to have CO 2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060,” Chinese President Xi Jinping told the United Nations General Assembly via a video link on 22 September. ...the new targets “won’t likely let us to stop at 1.5° Celsius [of global warming],” the preferred target set in the 2015 Paris agreement. “But below 2° might still be consistent

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/business/energy-environment/australia-rooftop-solar-coal.html Source:  By  Livia Albeck-Ripka  and  Ivan Penn , The New York Times.  Excerpt: CAIRNS, Australia — Australia is the world’s second-largest  exporter of coal , which plays an outsize role in its economy and politics. But the country has also quietly become a renewable energy powerhouse. About one in four Australian homes have rooftop solar panels, a larger share than in any other major economy, and the rate of installations  far outpaces the global average . The country is well ahead of Germany, Japan and California, which are widely considered leaders in clean energy. In California, which  leads U.S. states in the use of solar power , less than 10 percent of utility customers have rooftop solar panels. Most Australians who have embraced solar do not appear to have done so for altruistic reasons like wanting to fight climate change. Many are responding to incentives offered by state gover

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/flowers-are-changing-their-colors-adapt-climate-change Source:  By Lucy Hicks, Science | AAAS.  Excerpt: research [ https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31267-7 ] suggests that over the past 75 years, flowers have also adapted to rising temperatures and declining ozone by altering ultraviolet (UV) pigments in their petals. Flowers’ UV pigments are invisible to the human eye, but they attract pollinators and serve as a kind of sunscreen for plants, says Matthew Koski, a plant ecologist at Clemson University. Just as UV radiation can be harmful to humans, it can also damage a flower’s pollen. ...pigment in flowers at all locations increased over time—an average of 2% per year from 1941 to 2017, they reported this month in Current Biology. But changes varied depending on flower structure. In saucer-shaped flowers with exposed pollen, like buttercups, UV-absorbing pigment increased when ozone levels went down and decreased in

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/climate/nuclear-fusion-reactor.html Source:  By   Henry Fountain , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Scientists developing a compact version of a nuclear fusion reactor have shown in a series of research papers that it should work, renewing hopes that the long-elusive goal of mimicking the way the sun produces energy might be achieved and eventually contribute to the fight against climate change. Construction of a reactor, called   Sparc , which is being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spinoff company,   Commonwealth Fusion Systems , is expected to begin next spring and take three or four years, the researchers and company officials said. ...Fusion, in which lightweight atoms are brought together at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees to release energy, has been held out as a way for the world to address the climate-change implications of electricity production. ...Sparc takes advantage of a newer elec

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02716-4 Source:   By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Nature Magazine.  Excerpt: Infernos in South America’s Pantanal region have burnt twice the area of California’s fires this year. Researchers fear the rare ecosystem will never recover. ...Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, home to Indigenous peoples and a high concentration of rare or endangered species, such as jaguars and giant armadillos. Small fires occur every year in the region, which sprawls over parts of western Brazil and extends into Bolivia and Paraguay. But 2020’s fires have been unprecedented in extent and duration, researchers say. So far, 22% of the vast floodplain — around 3.2 million hectares (see ‘Biodiversity Hotspot Under Threat’) — has succumbed to the flames, according to Renata Libonati, a remote-sensing specialist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whose data are being used by firefighters to plan containment. That’s more than twice the ar

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/climate/ocean-heat-waves-blob.html Source:  By   Henry Fountain , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Six years ago, a huge part of the Pacific Ocean near North America quickly warmed, reaching temperatures more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Nicknamed “the blob,” it persisted for two years, with devastating impacts on marine life, including sea lions and salmon. The blob was a marine heat wave, the oceanic equivalent of a deadly summer atmospheric one. It was far from a solitary event: Tens of thousands have occurred in the past four decades, although most are far smaller and last for days rather than years. The largest and longest ones have occurred with increasing frequency over time. On Thursday, scientists revealed the culprit. Climate change, they said, is making severe marine heat waves much more likely. The   study, published in the journal Science , looked at the blob and six other large events around the world, including one in the Nort

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/hurricane-laura-storm-beta.html ] Source:  By  Rick Rojas , The New York Times.  Excerpt: CREOLE, La....in the weeks after Hurricane Laura submerged neighborhoods, obliterated businesses and unearthed coffins, many residents have begun agonizing over what feels like an impossible choice: rebuild yet again, or this time leave for good. ...as deadly and devastating storms have torn through and as Louisiana has waged a long and costly war over an eroding coastline where the Gulf has  claimed territory at an alarmingly aggressive pace . Over the years, it has swallowed hundreds of square miles of wetlands, imperiling a constellation of communities in danger of being engulfed. The calamitous toll of climate change is expected to  provoke an exodus  around the world, as millions are displaced by rising sea levels and heat climbing to uninhabitable temperatures. A brutal hurricane season, with enough named storms this year  to run through the alphabet ,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/23/california-electric-cars Source:    By Dino Grandoni, Faiz Siddiqui and Brady Dennis, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: California, the world’s fifth-largest economy and the state that created U.S. car culture, will stop selling gasoline-powered automobiles within 15 years, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced Wednesday. Facing a record-breaking wildfire season as well as years of heat waves and droughts exacerbated by climate change, the Golden State is seeking to accelerate the shift away from combustion engines on its roads, which account for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other source. ...Under Newsom’s order, the state’s air regulator, the California Air Resources Board, will develop regulations that ensure every new passenger car and truck sold in the state is electric or otherwise “zero-emissions” by 2035. ...Transportation currently  accounts for the largest source  of emissions in the state, outpacing the industri

https://eos.org/articles/using-dirt-to-clean-up-construction Source:  By Jackie Rocheleau, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Concrete ranks as the most popular construction material in the world. But its key ingredient, cement, is responsible for   8% of global carbon dioxide emissions   each year. Scientists want to replace concrete with a more environmentally friendly material, and one candidate is soil. In one of the most recent iterations of these efforts, the Banerjee Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University has created a tool kit for using local soil to make construction materials. ...“We need to go carbon neutral by 2050 and carbon negative thereafter,” Sant said. To do that, the construction industry needs to drastically change or replace concrete. “We’re talking about disrupting and transforming our entire basis of society as a whole in the next 30 years.”....  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/climate/climate-change-future.html Source:  By  John Branch  and  Brad Plumer , The New York Times. Excerpt: America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed. This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling  historic wildfires  that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of  tropical storms lining up  across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/climate/arctic-sea-ice-climate-change.html Source:  By  Henry Fountain , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A “crazy year” in the Arctic has resulted in the second-lowest extent of sea ice in the region, scientists said Monday. Researchers with the  National Snow and Ice Data Center  said the minimum was most likely reached on Sept. 15, with 1.44 million square miles of ocean covered in ice. Since then, with temperatures falling and new ice forming, coverage has been increasing. Since satellite measurements of sea ice began four decades ago, only 2012 has had a lower minimum, when 1.32 million square miles were measured. The 2020 minimum was nearly a million square miles less than the average annual minimum between 1981 and 2010. ...Sea ice has been shrinking by more than 13 percent per decade, relative to the 1981-2010 average, as global warming  affects the Arctic  more than any other part of the world. The region is warming more than twice as fast as

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/climate/arctic-sea-ice-climate-change.html Source:  By   Henry Fountain , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A “crazy year” in the Arctic has resulted in the second-lowest extent of sea ice in the region, scientists said Monday. Researchers with the   National Snow and Ice Data Center   said the minimum was most likely reached on Sept. 15, with 1.44 million square miles of ocean covered in ice. Since then, with temperatures falling and new ice forming, coverage has been increasing. Since satellite measurements of sea ice began four decades ago, only 2012 has had a lower minimum, when 1.32 million square miles were measured. The 2020 minimum was nearly a million square miles less than the average annual minimum between 1981 and 2010. ...Sea ice has been shrinking by more than 13 percent per decade, relative to the 1981-2010 average, as global warming   affects the Arctic   more than any other part of the world. The region is warming more than twice as fas

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/most-of-the-arctics-microscopic-algae-are-chilling-under-ice Source:   By Rachel Fritts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: New research reveals that tiny single-celled organisms in the Arctic Ocean are growing more numerous as climate change thins the ice. ...Marine phytoplankton are the solar panels of the sea, soaking up the Sun’s rays to make energy that powers ocean ecosystems. These single-celled organisms photosynthesize like plants, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and producing about half of the world’s oxygen . Scientists consider phytoplankton to be the ocean’s most important primary producers, because they take energy directly from the Sun and make it available to the rest of ocean life in such vast quantities. ... As climate change warms the ocean, ice thin enough for blooms to form underneath is becoming more common. “What we’re seeing now is thinner sea ice and earlier snowmelts, so there’s more light actually reaching through the ice into the

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/electric-cars-batteries-tesla-elon-musk.html Source:   By Jack Ewing , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Battery prices are dropping faster than expected. Analysts are moving up projections of when an electric vehicle won’t need government incentives to be cheaper than a gasoline model. ...As electric cars become more mainstream, the automobile industry is rapidly approaching the tipping point when, even without subsidies, it will be as cheap, and maybe cheaper, to own a plug-in vehicle than one that burns fossil fuels. The carmaker that reaches price parity first may be positioned to dominate the segment. ...A Tesla may even be cheaper to own than a BMW because it never needs oil changes or new spark plugs and electricity is cheaper, per mile, than gasoline. ...Current battery packs cost around $150 to $200 per kilowatt-hour, depending on the technology. That means a battery pack costs around $20,000. But the price has dropped 80 percent sinc

https://www.noaa.gov/news/with-alpha-2020-atlantic-tropical-storm-names-go-greek Source:  By NOAA.  Excerpt: Having reached the end of the alphabetical list of 21 Atlantic tropical storm names for 2020 with Tropical Storm #Wilfred today, the  naming protocol for all subsequent storms  will now consist of names pulled from the Greek alphabet as decided by the World Meteorological Organization. ...This is only the second time the Greek alphabet has been used to name storms. The first was during the 2005 hurricane season, where the last named storm was Zeta....  

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/us-drought-vulnerability-rankings-are-how-does-your-state-compare Source:   By:   Alison Stevens , NOAA.  Excerpt: [Includes map of U.S. drought vulnerability rankings] If asked where in the United States is most vulnerable to drought, you might point to those states in the West   currently suffering   under hot and dry conditions and raging wildfires. However, according to a   new NOAA-funded assessment , what makes a state vulnerable is driven by more than just a lack of rain: it’s a combination of how susceptible a state is to drought and whether it’s prepared for impacts. And the most and least vulnerable states could surprise you. These maps show each state’s overall drought vulnerability (red) and how it ranks in the three individual categories that make up the score: sensitivity (blue), exposure (yellow-orange), and ability to adapt (purple). Darker colors show higher overall drought vulnerability and a greater degree of fa

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/hurricane-sally-climate-change.html Source: By  Henry Fountain  and  John Schwartz , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Staggering rain totals, fueled by a warming atmosphere that can hold more moisture, are being recorded from the storm. ...As hurricanes go, Sally was not especially powerful. Rated a Category 2 storm when it struck the Gulf Coast on Wednesday, it was soon downgraded. But climate change likely made it more dangerous by slowing it down and feeding it more moisture, setting it up to pummel the region with wind and catastrophic rainfall. ...Climate change has also led to wetter storms, Dr. Wood said, because warmer air holds more moisture. ...Researchers increasingly see a link between stalling of  hurricanes  and climate change.  Rapid warming in the Arctic  has reduced the difference in temperature between that region and the tropics, leading to a weakening and slowing of the jet stream and related winds that drive hurricanes’ fo

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html Source: By Abrahm Lustgarten, The New York Times.  Excerpt: In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, .... Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. ...Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move? I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland,  collapsing dams in Michigan  and  raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes . Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of Ame

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/after-asteroid-wiped-out-dinosaurs-ocean-microbes-helped-life-rebound Source:  By  Katherine Kornei , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: The asteroid impact that killed most of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago also created conditions for ocean microbes to flourish, according to a new study. In microscopic rock crystals, researchers have found evidence that massive blooms of algae and photosynthetic bacteria covered the world’s oceans, providing food for larger marine creatures soon after the cataclysm. In 2016, researchers working in the Gulf of Mexico  drilled into the Chicxulub crater , the scar left behind by the asteroid impact, buried under the sea floor. They found that sediments deposited immediately after the impact were rich in micrite, a calcium carbonate mineral. Calcium carbonate, common in limestone, precipitates in the world’s oceans: Corals and plankton build skeletons of it, microbes such as bacteria produce it, and it can even form

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/14/glaciers-breaking-antarctica-pine-island-thwaites/ Source: By  Chris Mooney , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Two Antarctic glaciers that have long kept scientists awake at night are breaking free from the restraints that have hemmed them in, increasing the threat of large-scale sea-level rise. Located along the coast of the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, the enormous Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers already contribute around 5 percent of global sea-level rise. The survival of Thwaites has been deemed so critical that the United States and Britain have launched a targeted multimillion-dollar research mission to the glacier. The loss of the glacier could trigger the broader collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to eventually raise seas by about  10 feet . The  new findings , published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from analysis of satellite images. They

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/climate-change-denialist-given-top-role-major-us-science-agency Source: By  Scott Waldman, E&E News /Science Magazine.  Excerpt: A controversial researcher who rejects climate science was hired by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for a senior position, in a move suggesting the Trump administration is asserting growing influence over the study of rising temperatures. David Legates, a geography professor at the University of Delaware, has a long history of questioning fundamental climate science and has suggested that an outcome of burning fossil fuels would be a more habitable planet for humans....  

https://eos.org/articles/ethiopias-coffee-growing-areas-may-be-headed-for-the-hills Source:   By Mekonnen Teshome Tollera, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Relocating Ethiopia’s coffee-growing areas to higher-altitude regions will be a key measure for climate change resilience in the country, a team of researchers suggests. ...a temperature increase of more than 2°C could occur by midcentury across much of Africa and exceed 4°C by the end of the century. This change could render up to 59% of Ethiopia’s current coffee-growing landscape unsuitable for growing coffee, said study coauthor  Sebsebe Demissew , a natural science professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the home of Coffea arabica, originally a forest plant restricted to the highlands and today the most prominent cultivar in the world. Arabica and other coffee varieties account for more than 30% of Ethiopia’s  exports , amounting to almost 240 metric tons in 2019. About 15 million people in Ethiopia are involved in som

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/september-2020-enso-update-la-niña-here Source: By:  Emily Becke r, NOAA.  Excerpt: La Niña conditions were  present in August , and there’s a 75% chance they’ll hang around through the winter. NOAA has issued a  La Niña Advisory . ...La Niña’s altered atmospheric circulation over the Pacific Ocean affects global weather and climate. ...La Niña can make certain outcomes more likely. This includes more rain than average through Indonesia, cooler and wetter weather in southern Africa, and drier weather in southeastern China, among other impacts. ...One important global impact of La Niña is its effect on the  Atlantic hurricane season . La Niña reduces wind shear—the change in winds between the surface and the upper levels of the atmosphere— allowing hurricanes to grow . The likelihood of La Niña was factored into NOAA’s August  outlook for the Atlantic hurricane season , which favored an “extremely active” season. As of September 8th, w

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/us/climate-change-california-wildfires.html Source:  By   Thomas Fuller   and   Christopher Flavelle , The New York Times.  Excerpt: SAN FRANCISCO — Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in   toxic air . Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face....  See also The Washington Post articles, Western wildfires: Climate change fueled blazes engulf vast region in crisis . [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/california-oregon-washington-wildfires/ ],  Western wildfire smoke nearing Europe, may be on an around-the-world journey [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/16/wildfire-smoke-reaches-europe/ ] , and California fire tornadoes had winds up to 125 mph [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/24/california-fire-tornadoes/ ] Also New York Times article, It’s Not Just the West.

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/seaports-expected-to-grow-by-up-to-fourfold-by-2050 Source:   By   Liza Lester , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Seaport footprints will need to expand by up to 3,689 square kilometers (1,424 square miles) worldwide in the next 3 decades to cope with the combination of sea level rise and rising demand, according to a new study in Earth’s Future. Ships transport 80% of trade goods worldwide. Ports have been expanding since the 1980s to meet increasing growth in the sector driven by liberalization of trade, the opening of China’s economy, and increased use of containers. The new study by   Hanson and Nicholls   modeled trade growth and port demand through 2050 under four combinations of climate policy interventions and global temperature increases. All scenarios lead to increased traffic through ports, requiring doubling or even quadrupling port areas. The cost of building new port capacity to meet demand for freight traffic will dwarf sea level rise adaptation

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wildfires-american-west/2020/09/08/2e9bd2a6-f20b-11ea-a852-eb7526c580f4_story.htm Source:    By Scott Wilson, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Much of the American West is burning. Although the traditional fire season has yet to begin, parts of a half-dozen states from coastal California to the Rocky Mountains are being charred by more than 70 wildfires fed by tinder-dry vegetation, record heat and blustery winds that kicked up Tuesday across the region. Smoke has cast a worrisome pall over vast areas of terrain, turning the sky an ominous red and threatening those with allergies and asthma. ...the fires have set in motion a seasonal displacement of weary Westerners, many of whom are now accustomed to packing “go bags” each late-summer season when forced evacuations have become commonplace. In California, where two dozen major wildfires are burning, a new round of fast-moving blazes sparked up over the weekend just as thousands of people began re

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/climate/california-wildfires-climate.html Source:  By The New York Times.  Excerpt: What do California’s wildfires have to do with climate change? The connections are very strong, scientists who have studied the issue say. While California’s climate has always made the state prone to fires, the   link between human-caused climate change and bigger fires   is inextricable, said Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “This climate-change connection is straightforward: Warmer temperatures dry out fuels. In areas with abundant and very dry fuels, all you need is a spark,” he said. Here is a selection of our coverage of the connection between climate change and California’s wildfires....    

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/world/europe/russia-arctic-eruptions.html Source:  By   Andrew E. Kramer . The New york Times.  Excerpt: MOSCOW — A natural phenomenon first observed by scientists just six years ago and now recurring with alarming frequency in Siberia is causing the ground to explode spontaneously and with tremendous force, leaving craters up to 100 feet deep. ...While initially a mystery, scientists have established that the craters appearing in the far north of western Siberia are caused by subterranean gases, and the recent flurry of explosions is possibly related to global warming, Mr. Chuvilin said. ...Mr. Chuvilin said the conditions causing the explosions, which are still not fully understood, are probably specific to the geology of the area, as similar craters have not appeared elsewhere in Siberia or in permafrost zones in Canada and Alaska that are also affected by global warming. ...The explosions occur underneath small hills or hummocks on the tundra w

https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2667/Aviation-is-responsible-for-35-percent-of-climate-change-study-finds Source:  By NOAA.  Excerpt: New research that provides the most comprehensive calculations of aviation’s impact on the climate finds that global air travel and transport is responsible for 3.5 percent of all drivers of climate change from human activities. The study, published in the journal   Atmospheric Environmen t , evaluated all of the aviation industry’s contributing factors to climate change, including emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx), and the effect of contrails and contrail cirrus – short-lived clouds created in jet engine exhaust plumes at aircraft cruise altitudes that reflect sunlight during the day and trap heat trying to escape at night....  

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/industrial-waste-can-turn-planet-warming-carbon-dioxide-stone Source:    By  Robert F. Service , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: In July 2019, Gregory Dipple, a geologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, hopped on a 119-seat charter flight in Yellowknife, Canada, and flew 280 kilometers northeast to the Gahcho Kué diamond mine, just south of the Arctic Circle. Gahcho Kué... is an expansive open pit mine.... ...Dipple and two students...were looking to use the mine’s crushed rock waste as a vault to lock up carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) for eternity. At Gahcho Kué, Dipple’s team bubbled a mix of CO 2  and nitrogen gas simulating diesel exhaust through a grayish green slurry of crushed mine waste in water. Over 2 days, the slurry acquired a slight rusty hue—evidence that its iron was oxidizing while its magnesium and calcium were sucking up CO 2  and turning it into to carbon-based minerals. ... a wide array of rock and mudlike wastes from

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/business/energy-environment/california-electricity-blackout-battery.html Source:  By I van Penn , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Last month as a heat wave slammed California, state regulators sent an email to a group of energy executives pleading for help. ...The manager of the state’s grid was   struggling to increase the supply of electricity   because power plants had unexpectedly shut down and demand was surging. The imbalance was forcing officials to order rolling blackouts across the state for the first time in nearly two decades. What was unusual about the emails was whom they were sent to: people who managed thousands of batteries installed at utilities, businesses, government facilities and even homes. California officials were seeking the energy stored in those machines to help bail out a poorly managed grid and reduce   the need for blackouts . Many energy experts have predicted that batteries could turn homes and businesses into mini-pow