https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/brazil-s-first-homemade-satellite-will-put-extra-eye-dwindling-amazon-forests Source:  Science Magazine.  Excerpt: The fate of Brazil’s satellite program—and the country’s capacity to monitor disappearing Amazon forest—will be decided in 17 minutes and 30 seconds on Sunday. That’s the time it will take to launch Amazonia-1, the first satellite entirely developed by the country. If the mission goes well, Brazil will join about 20 countries that have managed the whole chain of design, production, and operation of a satellite. Amazonia-1 will give researchers more frequent updates on deforestation and agricultural activity in the world’s largest tropical rainforest. But other challenges await, as Brazilian scientists deal with increasing cuts in research funding and a political split on the country’s space program.... 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/02/25/climate-curious-food-waste/ Source:  By Sarah Kaplan. The Washington Post.  Excerpt: The carbon footprint of U.S. food waste is greater than that of the airline industry. Globally, wasted food accounts for about  8 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions . The environmental consequences of producing food that no one eats are massive. ...Meanwhile, a staggering 26 million American adults told the Census Bureau last fall that they hadn’t had enough to eat in the previous week. The problem was even worse in households with children....  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/02/25/atlantic-ocean-currents-weakening-amoc-gulf-stream/ Source:  By  Chris Mooney ,   Andrew Freedman , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: A growing body of evidence suggests that a massive change is underway in the sensitive circulation system of the Atlantic Ocean, a group of scientists  said Thursday . The  Atlantic meridional overturning circulation  (AMOC), a system of currents that includes the  Florida Current  and the Gulf Stream, is now “in its weakest state in over a millennium,” these experts say. This has implications for everything from the climate of Europe to the rates of sea-level rise along the U.S. East Coast. Although evidence of the system’s weakening has been published before, the new research cites 11 sources of “proxy” evidence of the circulation’s strength, including  clues hidden in seafloor mud  as well as  patterns of ocean temperatures . Th...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/02/24/climate-solutions-electric-schoolbuses/ Source:  By  Steven Mufson  and  Sarah Kaplan , The Washington Pot.  Excerpt: Hundreds of electric school buses are about to hit the roads in Montgomery County in an effort to cut tailpipe emissions that warm the planet and can affect student health. The $1.3 million annual contract, which was approved by the county school board Tuesday, is the biggest single-district project in the country to swap combustion-engine school buses for electric vehicles. The county aims to gradually convert its entire fleet of 1,422 buses by 2035....  

https://eos.org/science-updates/assessing-social-equity-in-disasters Source:  By Eric Tate and Christopher Emrich, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Social vulnerability researchers seek to understand the impediments and capacities of people and communities to prepare for, respond to, and recover from extreme natural hazards. A major tool in this work is social vulnerability modeling, the use of which is expanding in large part because of   growing awareness   of the   social equity implications of disasters ....   See also   When Climate Adaptation Intervention Risks Further Marginalization   and   Building Resilience in Rural America .

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/laschamp-earth-magnetic-climate.html Source:  By Alanna Mitchell, The New York Times.  Excerpt: About 42,000 years ago, Earth was beset with oddness. Its magnetic field collapsed. Ice sheets surged across North America, Australasia and the Andes. Wind belts shifted across the Pacific and Southern Oceans. Prolonged drought hit Australia; that continent’s biggest mammals went extinct. Humans took to caves to make ochre-color art. Neanderthals died off for good. Through it all, one giant kauri tree stood tall — until, after nearly two millenniums, it died and fell in a swamp, where the chemical records embedded in its flesh were immaculately preserved. That tree, unearthed a few years ago near Ngawha Springs in northern New Zealand, finally allowed researchers to fit a tight timeline to what before had seemed like an intriguing but only vaguely correlated series of events. What if, the researchers posited, the crash of the magnetic fi...

https://eos.org/science-updates/the-imminent-calving-retreat-of-taku-glacier Source:    By Christopher McNeil, J. M. Amundson, S. O’Neel, R. J. Motyka, L. Sass, M. Truffer, J. M. Zechmann, and S. Campbell, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Long an anomaly among glaciers, advancing while most others shrank, Taku Glacier is starting to succumb to climate change, offering an unprecedented look at the onset of tidewater glacier retreat. ...Earth’s approximately 3,000  tidewater glaciers —those that interact directly with the ocean—represent 42% and 57% of the planet’s glacierized  area  and  volume , respectively, excluding the  Greenland  and  Antarctic  Ice Sheets (Figure 1). Tidewater glaciers differ from their land-terminating counterparts...