https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ice-melting-dipole-arctic-oscillation By arolyn Gramling , Science. Excerpt: From 2007 to 2021, winds over North America and Eurasia were circulating in such a way that  they reduced the influx of warmer Atlantic water into the Arctic , researchers report in the Sept. 1  Science . That helped slow the rate of sea ice loss during that time period —  even as atmospheric warming ramped up  ( SN: 8/11/22 ). But that grace period may come to an end within just a few years. When the winds shift back, enhanced “Atlantification” of the Arctic may speed up sea ice loss, by giving an extra oomph of warming from below. “This phase has lasted about 15 years. We’re about at the end,” says physical oceanographer Igor Polyakov of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. ...From 1979 to 2006, the Arctic Dipole was in a “negative” phase, with winds rotating counterclockwise over North America and clockwise over Eurasia. That brought more Atlantic water into the Arctic via

https://eos.org/articles/greenland-was-much-greener-416000-years-ago By Bill Morris , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 2019, a team of scientists glimpsed an ancient, shrubby landscape at the base of a long-forgotten ice core—rare evidence that Greenland wasn’t always completely covered in ice. Now, they have pinpointed the age of that ecosystem, and the implications are disturbing—Greenland’s ice sheet, the finds show, could melt at any time, contributing to catastrophic sea level rise. ...The team  reported  the find in 2021 but at the time were unable to accurately date the deposits. Doing so, said coauthor  Tammy Rittenour , a paleoclimatologist with Utah State University, is crucial for “understanding the conditions at which you can melt the Greenland ice sheet.” ...Climate variability driven by the  El Niño–Southern Oscillation , North Atlantic Oscillation, and other patterns, Cronin said, could have driven Earth’s climate, ocean circulation, and ice dynamics to tipping points not predicted

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/us/heat-migrant-deaths-texas-mexico.html By Edgar Sandoval , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...at 100 degrees or higher. The heat has been stifling for many Texans, but deadly for some of those making their way through the hot, barren shrub land where migrants travel to avoid detection from Border Patrol agents. ...Fewer people are crossing from Mexico this year compared with last year, but already there have been more than 500 deaths in 2023....

https://www.science.org/content/article/human-ancestors-may-have-survived-brush-extinction-900-000-years-ago By ELIZABETH PENNISI , Science.  Excerpt: About 1 million years ago, our distant ancestors hunted in small bands and gathered their food with sophisticated stone tools. Then, about 900,000 years ago, something happened: The number of breeding individuals dwindled to only about 1300, according to a new study modeling ancient population sizes. Our ancestors came within a hair’s breadth of extinction, and populations remained that low for the next 100,000 years or more, researchers argue today in Science . ...Janet Kelso, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is skeptical. She notes that the genetic signal for the bottleneck is strongest only in present-day African populations, and not in people who today live outside Africa.... The conclusions, “though intriguing, should probably be taken with some caution and explored further,” she s

https://www.science.org/content/article/gardens-blooming-endangered-plants-could-prove-boon-conservation By GRETCHEN VOGEL , Science. Excerpt: ...For years, conservationists have heralded the benefits of growing native species in yards and gardens. But the potential for gardeners to help slow biodiversity loss by planting threatened species has received less attention, says Ingmar Staude, a botanist at the University of Leipzig. He and his colleagues now report in Scientific Reports that if more gardeners opted for conservation-relevant species, the overall threat level for plants—defined as the ratio of at-risk plant species to all species—could fall by 25% across Germany. They suggest other countries could see similar benefits.....

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh8183 By THOMAS R. BENSON ,  MATTHEW A. COBLE , and  JOHN H. DILLES , Science. Excerpt: Developing a sustainable supply chain for the global proliferation of lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles and grid storage necessitates the extraction of lithium resources that minimize local environmental impacts. Volcano sedimentary lithium resources have the potential to meet this requirement, as they tend to be shallow, high-tonnage deposits with low waste.... Illite-bearing Miocene lacustrine sediments within the southern portion of McDermitt caldera (USA) at Thacker Pass [Nevada] contain extremely high lithium grades (up to ~1 weight % of Li), more than double the whole-rock concentration of lithium in smectite-rich claystones in the caldera and other known claystone lithium resources globally (<0.4 weight % of Li). Illite concentrations measured in situ range from ~1.3 to 2.4 weight % of Li within fluorine-rich illitic claystones....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/08/28/climate-action-poll/ By Kate Selig  and  Emily Guskin , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: A slim majority of Americans think their individual actions can reduce the effects of climate change, according to a  Washington Post-University of Maryland poll . But do they know which actions are the most effective? Not quite. The poll finds most people believe recyclinghas a lot or some impact on climate change. About three-quarters say not eating meat or dairy would have a little or no effect on climate change. Climate experts say they’re wrong on those and other counts. ...Among the 10 actions Americans were polled on, experts said flying less and cutting out meat and dairy are among the best steps people can take.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/climate/geothermal-energy-projects.html By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In a sagebrush valley full of wind turbines and solar panels in western Utah, Tim Latimer gazed up at a very different device he believes could be just as powerful for fighting climate change — ...a drilling rig, of all things, transplanted from the oil fields of North Dakota ...drilling for heat. Mr. Latimer’s company, Fervo Energy, is part of an ambitious effort to unlock vast amounts of geothermal energy from Earth’s hot interior, a source of renewable power that could help displace fossil fuels that are dangerously warming the planet. “There’s a virtually unlimited resource down there if we can get at it,” said Mr. Latimer. “Geothermal doesn’t use much land, it doesn’t produce emissions, it can complement wind and solar power....” ...Traditional geothermal plants ...work by tapping natural hot water reservoirs underground to power turbines that can generate elec

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groundwater-drying-climate-change.html By Mira Rojanasakul ,  Christopher Flavelle ,  Blacki Migliozzi  and  Eli Murray , The New York Times. Excerpt: ...another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view. Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole. The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. The investigation reveals how America’s life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are drainin

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/27/world/canada/canada-wildfires-kelowna-british-columbia.html By Ian Austen , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The fire advanced on the city of Kelowna [Canada] for 19 days — consuming 976 hectares, or about 2,400 acres — of forest. But at the suburban fringes, it encountered a fire prevention zone and sputtered, burning just a single house. The fire prevention zone — an area carefully cleared to remove fuel and minimize the spread of flames — was created by a logging company owned by a local Indigenous community. And as a new wildfire has stalked the suburb of West Kelowna this month, its history with the previous one — the Mount Law fire, in 2021 — offers a valuable lesson: A well-placed and well-constructed fire prevention zone can, under the right conditions, save homes and lives. It’s a lesson not only for Kelowna but also for a growing number of places in Canada and elsewhere threatened by  increased wildfire  amid climate change.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/us/heat-wave-school-year.html By Ernesto Londoño , Ann Hinga Klein and  Colbi Edmonds , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The late-summer heat wave that blanketed a large portion of the country this week prompted several schools to cancel classes or send students home early, underscoring how ill-prepared many districts are to cope with extreme weather events that have become more common. In Des Moines, school bus drivers received medical aid at the end of sweltering shifts.  Chicago teachers were told  to turn off overhead lights and draw shades to keep classrooms bearable. A marching band instructor outfitted students with water backpacks to prevent them from passing out from the heat — at 7:30 a.m.... 

https://eos.org/articles/a-lake-paves-the-way-for-defining-the-anthropocene By Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Just as chemists have their periodic table, Earth scientists can lay claim to their own brightly colored reference diagram: the  International Chronostratigraphic Chart , which divides our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history into meaningful chunks of time. Last month, researchers laid the groundwork for defining the current epoch of geologic time—a new line on that chart—that would cap the Holocene. They voted that Crawford Lake, a small body of water in southern Canada, serve as the reference site of the new proposed geologic epoch: the Anthropocene. ...deciding on one location that typifies humans’ influence on the planet was no small feat, said Waters. The proverbial fingerprints of our species—fallout from nuclear weapons testing, particulate matter from combustion, and nitrogen from fertilizer runoff, to name a few—are littered across the recent geologic record....

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adk4500 By TULIO DE OLIVEIRA  AND  HOURIIYAH TEGALLY , Science. Excerpt: While the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis continues to spiral at a much faster speed than was expected.  Climate change is dominating our lives and causing a high level of distress . Countries all over the world are struggling to survive the damage caused by extreme events. ...However, there is also a new threat that is being overlooked—the interaction between climate change and infectious diseases. A comprehensive meta-analysis revealed that climate change  could aggravate more than 50% of known human pathogens . Unfortunately, this is happening now. ...some people may think neither climate change nor epidemics are real or that both will pass. However, there is overwhelming  evidence that climate change is fueling disease outbreaks and epidemics  and that it is not a matter of if, but when, such events will precipitate another pandemic....

https://www.science.org/content/article/emperor-penguins-abandon-breeding-grounds-ice-melts-around-them By ERIK STOKSTAD , Science. Excerpt: Emperor penguins need stable sea ice to reproduce and raise their chicks. But with the  ocean waters warming around Antarctica , the ice is breaking up earlier and earlier in the season, causing widespread abandonment of penguin breeding colonies. The finding,  reported today  in Communications Earth & Environment, “is bad news,” says Annie Schmidt, a seabird ecologist at Point Blue Conservation Science who was not involved in the work. Sea ice conditions vary from year to year, and colonies have  failed to breed before . But if a whole region becomes unsuitable, penguins will find it difficult to locate an alternate spot, Schmidt says....

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adj6951 By JULIA P. G. JONES  AND  SIMON L. LEWIS , Science.  Excerpt: Changes in land use, mostly deforestation in the tropics, emit 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually—second only to fossil fuel use, which emits 35 billion tons ( 1 ). Reducing emissions to net zero is necessary to stabilize global temperatures ( 2 ). One controversial approach to tackle fossil-fuel emissions from private companies, individuals, and governments has been to “offset” them by investing in projects to either stop emissions that would have otherwise occurred, such as by reducing deforestation, or by investing in carbon uptake projects, such as forest restoration. ...West  et al.  ( 3 ) show that offsetting through paying projects to reduce emissions by conserving tropical forests is not reducing deforestation as claimed and is worsening climate change.... 

https://www.science.org/content/article/hard-working-farmers-corals-cultivate-and-eat-their-resident-algae By MOLLY RAINS , Science. Excerpt: ...How do vibrant corals flourish in often-barren ocean landscapes? Known as the Darwin Paradox, this mystery has continued to puzzle generations of oceanographers. A new study published today in Nature offers a solution. According to its authors,  corals make up for nutrient scarcity by harvesting and feeding on their resident algae , like hungry farmers....

https://www.science.org/content/article/when-will-next-ocean-heat-wave-strike-scientists-develop-early-warning-systems By WARREN CORNWALL , Science. Excerpt: When heat waves began to sweep the world’s oceans in June, Alistair Hobday was not surprised. The biological oceanographer had foreseen the coming temperature spikes in forecasting models he’d helped develop. The massive pool of hot water in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, the  coral-killing warmth  in the Caribbean Sea, and the sweltering sea in the north Pacific Ocean had all appeared months earlier as orange and red patches on his computer screen at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The forecasts, which weren’t widely disseminated beyond fisheries managers and those in the fishing and aquaculture industry, proved to be a prescient warning of what was to come. ...As the global climate continues to warm, scientists around the world have been working to develop models that predict w

https://eos.org/articles/more-than-half-the-worlds-ocean-surface-is-getting-greener By Meghie Rodrigues , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Tropical oceans are changing color, according to new research. Over the past 2 decades, 56% of ocean surfaces have become greener, and that means microorganisms living close to the surface are changing as well. The study, recently published in  Nature , points to climate change as a possible cause for the shift. The world’s oceans get their color from sunlight bouncing off water molecules and whatever else is floating near the surface. That includes tiny phytoplankton, which contain abundant chlorophyll—a pigment that reflects green light.... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI Youtube.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/us/trees-heat-wave-new-haven-ct.html By Colbi Edmonds , The New York Times.  Excerpt: As the United States sweats through another unbearable  summer of record-breaking heat , planting more trees has emerged as a practical solution to cooling cities,  especially areas known as “heat islands”  where concrete and congestion magnify already brutal temperatures. Yet filling a neighborhood with trees is not as simple as it seems. Funding and maintenance are issues for cities grappling with  crime  and  housing . And not everyone, it turns out, wants a tree. ...Mr. Rodriguez, who volunteers with the Urban Resources Initiative, a nonprofit partnered with Yale University, spends much of his time persuading his neighbors that trees are worth the trouble. Because the trees are planted by a volunteer organization, residents have to take some responsibility for making sure the trees survive and thrive. The city of New Haven pays for tree planting and maintenance t

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/climate/young-climate-activists.html By David Gelles , The New York Times. Excerpt: As Kaliko Teruya was coming home from her hula lesson on August 8, her father called. The apartment in Lahaina was gone, he said, and he was running for his life. He was trying to escape the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century, .... But for Kaliko, 13, the destruction of the past week has reinforced her commitment to a cause that is coming to define her generation. “The fire was made so much worse due to climate change,” she said. “How many more natural disasters have to happen before grown-ups realize the urgency?” Like a growing number of young people, Kaliko is engaged in efforts to raise awareness about global warming and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, last year she and 13 other young people, age 9 to 18, sued their home state, Hawaii, over its use of fossil fuels. With active lawsuits in five states, TikTok videos that mix humor and o

https://www.science.org/content/article/raging-wildfires-may-doomed-californias-ancient-megamammals-tar-pit-fossils-reveal By MICHAEL PRICE , Science.  Excerpt: Paleontologists have long tried to understand why once-numerous populations of these and other megafauna vanished across North America toward the end of the last ice age.  A study published in this issue of  Science  points to a new catalyst  that ties together the two leading hypotheses: human activity and climate change. Each played a role, but fire was the key mediator, the authors argue. In their scenario, when the climate suddenly became warmer and drier toward the end of the last ice age, human-caused blazes grew out of control, permanently altering the landscape—and spelling the end for the animals....

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adj4430 By TERRY J. MCGENITY  AND  PIERRE PHILIPPE LAISSUE , Science.  Excerpt: It is imperative to understand the fate of crude oil that escapes into the ocean to minimize its environmental, economic, and societal harm. Large amounts of crude oil enter the sea, as occurred this past month on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil does not easily mix with water, which can restrict oil degradation through microbes, a key pathway to remove hydrocarbons from the environment. However, turbulent seas and response measures, such as dispersant addition, generate smaller oil droplets that are attractive to voracious microbial activity. ...Prasad  et al report that bacteria attach to oil droplets, then grow as a film on the oil surface, sometimes reshaping spherical droplets into finger-like protrusions. This dynamic process increases the oil’s surface area and accelerates its biodegradation. The finding should improve predictions of spilled oil

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj0728 By Gianluca Cerullo et al, Science.  Excerpt: The European Union’s Biodiversity and Forest Strategies for 2030 mandate protecting all remaining old-growth forests across the EU, increasing the area of habitat patches set aside within forests harvested for timber, and limiting clear-felling in timber-producing landscapes. Although saving old-growth forests is critical, stand-alone policies can produce unintended consequences. Without simultaneously reducing demand for forest products or increasing supply from plantations and secondary forests, such measures can lead to increased harvesting elsewhere, often in tropical countries ...with weaker legal protections.... 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/14/montana-climate-trial-young-activists-judge-order By Dharna Noor , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The judge who heard the US’s  first constitutional climate trial  earlier this year has ruled in favor of a group of young plaintiffs who had accused state officials in Montana of  violating their right  to a healthy environment. ...In a case that made headlines around the US and internationally, 16 plaintiffs, aged five to 22, had alleged the state government’s pro-fossil fuel policies contributed to climate change. In trial hearings in June, they testified that these policies therefore  violated   provisions in the state constitution that guarantee a “clean and healthful environment”, among other constitutional protections. On Monday, Judge Kathy Seeley said that by prohibiting government agencies from considering climate impacts when deciding whether or not to permit energy projects, Montana is contributing to the climate crisis and stopping the

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/12/climate/clean-energy-us-fossil-fuels.html By David Gelles ,  Brad Plumer ,  Jim Tankersley ,  Jack Ewing , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The United States is pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other renewable energy, even in areas dominated by the oil and gas industries. ...renewables are  now expected to overtake  coal by 2025 as the world’s largest source of electricity. ...China, which already leads the world in the sheer amount of electricity produced by wind and solar power,  is expected to double its capacity by 2025, five years ahead of schedule . In Britain, roughly one-third of electricity is generated by wind, solar and hydropower. And in the United States, 23 percent of electricity is expected to come from renewable sources this year, up 10 percentage points from a decade ago....

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/11/hawaii-fires-made-more-dangerous-by-climate-crisis By Oliver Milan, The Guardian.  Excerpt: Katharine Hayhoe, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that global heating is causing vegetation to dry out, priming it as fuel for an outbreak of fire. “Climate change doesn’t usually start the fires; but it intensifies them, increasing the area they burn and making them much more dangerous,” Hayhoe tweeted. ...Nearly a fifth of Maui, the Hawaiian island where the fires have occurred, is in severe drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. The island has experienced other serious fires in recent years, with blazes in 2018 and 2021 razing hundreds of homes and causing the evacuation of thousands of residents and tourists. Experts say that wildfires in Hawaii are now burning through four times the amount of area than in previous decades, in part due to the proliferation of more flammable non-native grasses but also rising global te

https://www.science.org/content/article/great-indian-desert-could-disappear-within-century By Tanvi Dutta Gupta, Science.  Excerpt: ...Each year, the South Asian monsoon deluges the verdant east of India and leaves the west, where India and Pakistan share a border, bone-dry. That asymmetry, between the Himalayan rainforests and the “Great Indian Desert”—the most populated in the world—has shaped civilizations. But as climate change heats up, the monsoon is moving farther west into this region. Within a century, a new study suggests, the desert could disappear completely. “This is going to affect a billion people,” says Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography ...the study’s findings portend an increased risk of floods in the Great Indian Desert, also known as the Thar Desert, similar to what happened in 2022, when a deluge in Pakistan displaced 8 million people and caused almost $15 billion in property damage....Most studies predict that Earth’s de

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/climate/carbon-dioxide-direct-capture.html By Robert F. Service, Science.  Excerpt: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced it will spend $1.2 billion for two pioneering facilities—one in Texas, the other in Louisiana—that will remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) annually from the atmosphere using a technology known as direct air capture (DAC). Part of a controversial effort to combat global warming, the awards represent the first phase of $3.5 billion in funding for DAC hubs set aside in last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and mark the first major governmental backing in the world for the emerging carbon capture technology. ...But critics of the strategy are plentiful as well. Benson’s Stanford colleague Mark Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist, calls the program “a boondoggle” and “a complete waste of money.” He argues that because DAC requires so much energy to capture CO 2 , purify it, and pump it underground for per

https://eos.org/articles/herbivore-diversity-helps-maintain-arctic-tundra-diversity By  Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt:  A long-term experiment in southwestern Greenland reveals that the presence of musk oxen and caribou helps stave off declines in Arctic tundra diversity brought on by climate change. ... 

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi0658 By Erin O'Donnell et al, Science.  Excerpt: Water management failings in [Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin] MDB, which is home to more than 40 First Nations who have lived sustainably with water for tens of thousands of years through the creation and application of Indigenous water science ..., have drawn attention to the living legacies of colonial exploitation and the associated social and ecological impacts. We need to learn from Australia’s failures and change the way we know, value, and manage water, including learning from Indigenous scientists and Elders. The MDB, which supports a center of irrigated agriculture across more than 1 million km 2 , is known for its multiyear “boom-bust” riverine cycles, but climate change is intensifying these extremes. ...When the British invaded Australia, the legitimacy of their occupation was founded on the assumption of terra nullius, or land belonging to no one, despite the clear presenc

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj4631 By Emily J. Beverly.  Excerpt: ...Although there is now consensus that all modern humans originated from a population in Africa, there is considerable disagreement as to how, when, and why they migrated to Europe and what happened once they arrived. Therefore, the focus of research has shifted to the identification of when humans could feasibly have migrated out of Africa. For example, a climate model was used to identify windows of time over the past 300,000 years in which humans could have migrated across difficult terrain in northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.... Other researchers took a different approach, determining whether freshwater springs would persist through major climate swings in Africa related to long-term changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This was combined with mapping the maximum distance that a human could travel from these perennial sources of water (∼3 days, 150 km) to determine potential migration pa

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/health/heat-mental-health.html By Apoorva Mandavilli , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Soaring temperatures can damage not just the body but also the mind. As heat waves become more intense, more frequent and longer, it has become increasingly important to address the impact on mental health, scientists say. “It’s really only been over the past five years that there’s been a real recognition of the impact,” said Dr. Joshua Wortzel, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s committee on climate change and mental health, which was set up just two years ago. ...High temperatures are  strongly associated  with an  increase  in  suicides , researchers have found. Heat has been linked to a rise in  violent   crime  and  aggression ,  emergency   room   visits  and  hospitalizations  for  mental disorders , and  deaths  — especially among people with  schizophrenia , dementia, psychosis and substance use. For every 1 degree Celsius (or 1.8 degrees Fah