https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/30/us-food-production-climate-crisis-meat-monopoly-farming By Amanda Schupak , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Food and the climate crisis are locked in a tangled web of cause and effect. Globally, food systems contribute about  a third   of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yet they are also uniquely vulnerable to climate impacts: from soaring temperatures and drought to intense rainfall and flooding. Food production is caught in a battle between people and profits, as an  increasingly industrialized system  prioritizes low operating costs and high profits. ...Agriculture contributes  less than 1% to GDP  in the US – yet it is responsible for  11% of the country’s GHG emissions , polluted waterways and millions of acres of degraded land. ...The average American eats about  57lb of beef  in a year, nearly  twice the average   of other high-income countries. ...But beef is a climate disaster. It takes an enormous amount of land to raise cattle

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-epa-ruling-2e893673819a1b6c6aa272a5e814f0b0 By Mark Sherman, Associated Press.  Excerpt: In a blow to the fight against  climate change , the Supreme Court on Thursday limited how the nation’s main anti-air pollution law can be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. By a 6-3 vote, with conservatives in the majority, the court said that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad  authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions  from power plants that contribute to global warming. The decision, said environmental advocates and dissenting liberal justices, was a major step in the wrong direction — “a gut punch,” one prominent meteorologist said — at a time of increasing environmental damage attributable to climate change amid dire warnings about the future.… 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/climate/climate-change-hurricanes.html By  Veronica Penney , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Researchers are unsure about whether human-caused climate change will mean longer or more active hurricane seasons in the future, but there is broad agreement on one thing: Global warming is changing storms. Scientists say that unusually warm Atlantic surface temperatures have helped to increase storm activity. ...Here are some of those ways.  1. Higher winds.  There’s a solid scientific consensus that  hurricanes are becoming more powerful .  2. More rain.  Warming also increases the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere can hold. In fact, every degree Celsius of warming allows the air to hold about 7 percent more water. That means we can expect future storms to unleash more rain.  3. Slower storms.  Researchers do not yet know why storms are moving more slowly, but they are. Some say a slowdown in global atmospheric circulation, or global winds, could be p

https://eos.org/features/sea-level-science-and-applications-support-coastal-resilience By Nadya Vinogradova  and   Benjamin Hamlington , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Planetary warming is increasing the height, and thus the volume, of Earth’s ocean. Today, the ocean gains about 300 trillion gallons (almost 1,150 trillion liters) of liquid water every year. ...Spreading this volume over the ocean’s surface translates into about 3.4 millimeters of global mean sea level rise per year, a more familiar metric of climate change. As the  rising ocean  gradually encroaches on land, it increases the severity and frequency of flooding, threatening populated coastal communities, damaging property and infrastructure, posing risks to national security, and endangering coastal ecosystems and biodiversity. The ocean’s expansion will continue for millennia: ...we are already committed to a global sea level increase of 2–6 meters over the next 2 millennia [ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  ( IPCC ), 202

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/28/climate-crisis-food-shortages By Victoria Namkung , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Blistering heat, stronger storms, droughts, floods and fires are putting food production at risk. ...Huy Fong Foods, the southern California company that produces 20m bottles of sriracha annually, has experienced a low inventory of red jalapeño chilli peppers in  recent years  made worse by spring’s crop failure. The cause? Severe weather and drought conditions in Mexico. It’s not just chilli peppers. Mustard producers in France and Canada said extreme weather caused a 50% reduction in seed production last year, leading to a  shortage of the condiment  on grocery store shelves. Blistering heat, stronger storms, droughts, floods, fires and changes in rainfall patterns are also affecting the cost and availability of staples, including wheat, corn, coffee, apples, chocolate and wine. The climate crisis is increasing the intensity and frequency of extreme weather

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/28/climate-change-heatwaves-droughts-study-weather By Sofia Quaglia , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Climate change is to blame for the majority of the heatwaves being recorded around the planet but the relation to other extreme events and their impacts on society is less clear, according to a study. “I think on the one hand we overestimate climate change because it’s now quite common that every time an extreme event happens, there is a big assumption that climate change is playing a big role, which is not always the case,” said  Friederike Otto , a climate change and environment professor at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, who was one of the lead authors of the research. “But on the other hand, we really underestimate those events where climate change does play a role in what the costs are, especially the non-economic costs of extreme weather events to our societies.” In the  study  published in the journal Environmental Re

https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/28/in-10-years-crispr-transformed-medicine-can-it-now-help-us-deal-with-climate-change/ By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Coming from a long line of Iowa farmers,  David Savage  always thought he would do research to improve crops. That dream died in college, when it became clear that any genetic tweak to a crop would take at least a year to test; for some perennials and trees, it could take five to 10 years. ...But the advent of CRISPR changed all that. Savage is now pivoting to molecular crop breeding, hoping to find ways to improve their carbon uptake and the amount of carbon they return to the soil. ...“The advent of CRISPR basically allowed us to create new molecular tools for potentially skipping the slow aspects of plant tissue culture and plant genetic engineering, which are large barriers to doing experiments in plants,” said Savage, associate professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, ...a

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/business/dual-use-solar-panels-agrivoltaics-blue-wave-power.html By  Ellen Rosen . The New York Times.  Excerpt: In its 150-year history, Paul Knowlton’s farm in Grafton, Mass., has produced vegetables, dairy products and, most recently, hay. The evolution of the farm’s use turned on changing markets and a variable climate. Recently, however, Mr. Knowlton added a new type of cash crop: solar power. ...He had already installed solar panels to provide electricity for his home and barn. When a real estate agent came knocking to see if he was interested in leasing a small portion of his land for a solar array, “she planted the seed that I could do more,” Mr. Knowlton said. ...Soon, two small parcels of largely unused land were home to low-to-the-ground panels that produce power. This year, Mr. Knowlton’s farm will go one step further: In a third parcel, solar panels will share space with crops so that both can thrive. This approach is called agrivoltaics

https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-temperatures-major-latin-american-cities-could-be-linked-nearly-1-million By Rodrigo Perez Ortego, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: In mid-January, the southern tip of South America suffered its  worst heat wave  in years. In Argentina, temperatures in more than 50 cities rose above 40°C, more than 10°C warmer than the typical average temperature in cities such as Buenos Aires. The scorching heat sparked wildfires, worsened a drought, hurt agriculture, and temporarily collapsed Buenos Aires’s electrical power supply. It also killed at least 3 people, although experts estimate the true number might be much higher. With climate change, heat waves and cold fronts  are worsening  and taking lives worldwide: about 5 million in the past 20 years, according to  at least one study . In a new study published today in Nature Medicine, an international team of researchers estimates that almost 900,000 deaths in the years between 2002 and 2015 could be at

https://eos.org/articles/ocean-acidification-may-drive-diatom-decline By Clarissa Wright , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Diatoms contribute to global oxygen production, marine food webs, and carbon sequestration, but scientists predict that diatom populations will decline because of ocean acidification associated with climate change. ...acidification affects the survival of marine life, resulting in such phenomena as  coral bleaching ,  declining oyster reproduction ,  altered clam metabolism , and compromised  immune responses in sea urchins . The food webs associated with these organisms are not always able to adjust to swift population declines.…

https://eos.org/articles/algal-mats-may-be-a-key-to-the-arctic-food-web By Fanni Daniella Szakal , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The underside of sea ice in the Arctic is almost like the seafloor turned upside down—and covered with a biofilm of microorganisms and algae. As sea ice melts during the summer and forms melt ponds on its surface, some of the algae find their way into the ponds and the cracks between the ice, forming buoyant little mats on the surface. A recent  study  published in  Frontiers in Marine Science  showed that these mats have very high photosynthetic activity, suggesting that they might be an important, underexplored element of the Arctic food web. ...“The polar bears are only there because there is food for them somehow,” explained lead author  Kasper Hancke , a researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research. “What they eat also needs to eat something that needs to eat something, and everything starts from the algae.” ...The Arctic is warming at a rate  2–4 times

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/26/world/europe/g7-summit-ukraine-war-climate-change.html By  Katrin Bennhold  and  Jim Tankersley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: BERLIN — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seemed like an unexpected opportunity for environmentalists, who had struggled to focus the world’s attention on the kind of energy independence that renewable resources can offer. With the West trying to wean itself from Russian oil and gas, the argument for solar and wind power seemed stronger than ever. But four months into the war, the scramble to replace Russian fossil fuels has triggered the exact opposite. As the heads of the Group of 7 industrialized nations gather in the Bavarian Alps for a meeting that was supposed to cement their commitment to the fight against climate change, fossil fuels are having a wartime resurgence, with the leaders more focused on bringing down the price of oil and gas than immediately reducing their emissions. Nations are   reversing plans to stop burni

https://eos.org/articles/a-hail-of-a-night-in-mexico By  Humberto Basilio , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt:  When a severe hailstorm hit Mexico’s capital last week, citizens began to wonder whether climate change could be the cause. But is that the right question to ask?  ...Approximately 20 metric tons of hail collapsed the 1,000-square-meter roof of the local supermarket. ...more than a dozen other incidents were reported that night in the Álvaro Obregón, Benito Juárez, Iztapalapa, and Coyoacán municipalities. ...Although hail is frequent in Mexico City during the spring-summer transition, citizens were surprised by the sheer volume covering the highways and houses on 12 June. ...Still, for  Jorge García , a climate physicist at Columbia University, the problem is that the question being asked (“Is this severe weather caused by climate change?”) is wrongly formulated from the start. Extreme weather events have always existed; none of them are specifically, solely “caused” by climate change. But c

https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-carbon-layer-may-have-sparked-ancient-bout-global-warming By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: There is no perfect parallel in Earth’s past for present-day climate change—human-driven warming is simply happening too fast and furiously. The closest analog came 56 million years ago, when over the course of 3000 to 5000 years, greenhouse gases soared in the atmosphere, causing at least 5°C of warming and pushing tropical species to the poles. The cause of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) has long been debated, with researchers invoking exotic mechanisms such as catastrophic releases of methane from the sea floor or even asteroid strikes. But over the past few years, evidence has mounted for a more prosaic culprit: carbon-spewing volcanoes that emerged underneath Greenland as it tore away from Europe. Now, researchers have found signs of an effect that would have supercharged the warming effect of the volcanoes, making them a

https://www.science.org/content/article/can-farm-and-food-waste-power-tomorrow-s-airplanes By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: It’s a painful truth for people who fly: ...Air travel is among the most carbon-polluting human activities. A round trip from New York City to London emits nearly 1000 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) per passenger.... Annually, airplanes spew some 920 million tons of CO 2 , accounting for roughly 3.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Derek Vardon is hoping a yellowish, foul-smelling liquid will help change that. The fluid is a collection of short, chainlike molecules called volatile fatty acids (VFAs) from decaying food waste, .... In a process he and colleagues developed, the VFAs are vaporized, then ...knit the VFAs into longer chains called ketones. ...the ketones are piped to another reactor ...to make kerosene, aka jet fuel. Vardon, a chemist who spent most of the past decade at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), i

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/side-benefits-of-climate-action-may-save-millions-of-lives-in-africa ]  By  Saima Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Moving from fossil fuels to clean energy sources comes with many side benefits, including a reduction in air pollution, which is responsible for premature deaths of 8–10 million people around the world. In a new study,  Shindell et al .  model the impacts that cleaner air and sustainable growth would have on Africa under a scenario in which Earth warms by about 2°C by 2100. The researchers predict that levels of many pollutants in Africa, including carbonaceous aerosols, sulfur dioxide, and ammonia, would drop substantially, but the magnitudes of the drops would vary across different regions. ...the researchers predict that all regions of Africa will experience massive benefits if climate action results in cleaner air. By around 2050, the annual number of premature deaths could drop by around 45,000 in southern Africa and 175,000 in West Afric

2022-06-19.  Republican Drive to Tilt Courts Against Climate Action Reaches a Crucial Moment . [ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/climate/supreme-court-climate-epa.html ] By  Coral Davenport , The New york Times. Excerpt: ...The [Supreme Court] case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming. Coming up through the federal courts are more climate cases, some featuring novel legal arguments, each carefully selected for its potential to block the government’s ability to regulate industries and businesses that produce greenhouse gases.… 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/18/burning-planet-why-are-the-worlds-heatwaves-getting-more-intense Fiona Harvey ,  Ashifa Kassam  in Madrid,   Nina Lakhani  in Phoenix, and  Amrit Dhillon  in New Delhi , The Guardian.  Excerpt: ...When the temperature readings  started to come through from Antarctic weather stations  in early March, scientists at first thought there might have been some mistake. Temperatures, which should have been cooling rapidly as the south pole’s brief summer faded, were soaring – at the Vostok station, about 800 miles from the geographic south pole, thermometers recorded a massive 15C hotter than the previous all-time record, while at Terra Nova coastal base the water hovered above freezing, unheard of for the time of year. ...But that was not all. At the north pole, similarly unusual temperatures were also being recorded, astonishing for the time of year when the Arctic should be slowly emerging from its winter deep freeze. The region was more than 3C

https://www.science.org/content/article/electrocuted-birds-are-sparking-wildfires By Richard Kemeny, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: In 2014, a wildfire ripped through central Chile, destroying 2500 homes and  killing at least 13 people . A year later, a blaze in Idaho burned more than 4000 hectares, an area nearly 12 times the size of New York City’s Central Park. Both conflagrations had one thing in common: Experts believe they were started by birds. Our feathered friends love to perch on power lines, .... But if a bird touches the wrong wires together, or somehow forms an electrical pathway to the ground, it can get fried. Falling to the floor like winged Molotov cocktails, birds can spark an inferno if they hit an especially dry, tindered patch of earth. More than three dozen fires started this way in the United States from 2014 to 2018, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of such blazes. ... Humans are responsible for the vast majority of wildfires in the United S tates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/climate/peecycling-farming-urine-fertilizer.html By  Catrin Einhorn , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Human urine... is full of the same nutrients that plants need to flourish. It has a lot more, in fact, than Number Two, with almost none of the pathogens. Farmers typically apply those nutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — to crops in the form of chemical fertilizers. But that comes with a high environmental cost from fossil fuels and mining. ...Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has worsened a worldwide fertilizer shortage that’s  driving farmers to desperation  and  threatening food supplies . Scientists also warn that feeding a growing global population in a world of climate change will only get more difficult. ...Toilets, in fact, are by far the largest source of water use inside homes,  according to the Environmental Protection Agency . Wiser management could save vast amounts of water, an urgent need as climate change worsens drought in pl

https://eos.org/articles/reevaluating-ecosystems-on-the-basis-of-climate-change-vulnerability By Deepa Padmanaban . Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Ecosystems play a vital role in maintaining biodiversity and provide such services as water and air filtration, pollination, and erosion prevention. But globally, ecosystems are being degraded by such human impacts as land development and pollution. To assess the status of ecosystems and guide conservation policies, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) established the Red List of Ecosystems ( RLE ) in 2014. Ecosystems are evaluated and categorized with terms borrowed from IUCN’s internationally recognized categories for endangered species: from least concern ...to collapsed (the most severe, akin to extinction). Risk factors used for RLE assessment include rates of spatial decline, rates of abiotic degradation (such as erosion), and rates of disruption to biotic processes (such as epidemics). Now a  study  conducted by scientists f