https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/little-bit-everything-burning-nasa-scientist-dissects-amazon-fires Source:   By Herton Escobar, Science Magazine. Excerpt: A rash of fires in the Brazilian Amazon has caused diplomatic tensions between Brazil and several European countries and triggered protests from environmental groups around the world. Brazil’s government has pledged to stop the fires and sent in the military but denies its policies and rhetoric are responsible. Science talked with remote sensing specialist Douglas Morton, one of the scientists who is closely watching the blazes. Morton heads the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which monitors land use and environmental changes through satellite data. Between January and late August, NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites have detected 100,000 “fire spots” in the Brazilian Amazon—the highest number in that period since 2010. The numbers are in line with those from B...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/30/climate-strike-teachers-students-greta-thunberg Source:  By Jonathan Isham and Lee Smithey, The Guardian. Excerpt: We risk losing credibility with young people if we cannot take action in support of the defining cause of their generation. Sometimes it’s the students who teach. This week, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg arrived in New York City in a zero-emissions yacht, en route to the United Nations climate change summit. The purpose of the trip? Let’s call it a teachable moment. Over the past year, Greta and more than 2 million teens around the world have led school strikes for climate justice, demanding that their leaders end the age of fossil fuels. Now these young people have declared 20 September 2019 a historic day for a global climate strike by all people, young and old....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/climate/fire-amazon-africa-siberia-worldwide.html Source:   By Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times. Excerpt: In South America, the Amazon basin is ablaze. Halfway around the world in central Africa, vast stretches of savanna are going up in flame. Arctic regions in Siberia are burning at a historic pace. ...Hotter, drier temperatures “are going to continue promoting the potential for fire,” said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of Idaho, describing the risk of “large, uncontainable fires globally” if warming trends continue. Wildfires contribute to climate change because not only do they release carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere but they can also kill trees and vegetation that remove climate-warming emissions from the air. ...And though the Amazon is widely described as the world’s lungs, a reference to the forest’s ability to produce oxygen while storing car...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/08/27/water-harvester-makes-it-easy-to-quench-your-thirst-in-the-desert/ Source:   By Bob Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: With water scarcity a growing problem worldwide, University of California, Berkeley, researchers are close to producing a microwave-sized water harvester that will allow you to pull all the water you need directly from the air — even in the hot, dry desert. In a paper appearing this week in ACS Central Science, a journal of the American Chemical Society, UC Berkeley’s Omar Yaghi and his colleagues describe the latest version of their water harvester, which can pull more than five cups of water (1.3 liters) from low-humidity air per day for each kilogram (2.2 pounds) of water-absorbing material, a very porous substance called a metal-organic framework, or MOF. That is more than the minimum required to stay alive. During field tests over three days in California’s arid Mojave Desert, the harvester reliably produced 0.7 liters...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/climate/heat-deaths-southwest.html Source:   By Christopher Flavelle and Nadja Popovich, The New York Times. Excerpt: WASHINGTON — Heat-related deaths have increased sharply since 2014 in Nevada and Arizona, raising concerns that the hottest parts of the country are struggling to protect their most vulnerable residents from global warming. In Arizona, the annual number of deaths attributed to heat exposure more than tripled, from 76 deaths in 2014 to 235 in 2017, according to figures obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heat-related deaths in Nevada rose almost fivefold during the same period, from 29 to 139. ...The long-term health effects of rising temperatures and heat waves are expected to be one of the most dangerous consequences of climate change, causing “tens of thousands of additional premature deaths per year across the United States by the end of this century,” according to the federal government’s Glob...

https://eos.org/articles/devastating-floods-hit-india-for-the-second-year-in-a-row Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Extreme monsoon rains have come to India for the second year in a row, causing millions to flee their homes and leading to more than a thousand deaths since May. Several Indian states experienced extreme precipitation in early August, causing rivers to flood their banks and hillsides to give way. In the state of Kerala, on India’s southwest coast, 121 people have died, and more than 83,000 have taken refuge in relief camps, according to the Times of India. The most casualties have occurred in the state of Maharashtra, where 245 people have died, reported AccuWeather. The flooding comes on the heels of disastrous flooding last year that left nearly 500 dead in Kerala and over 1,200 causalities across India. Both 2018 and 2019 brought flooding that would be expected only once every hundred years....

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566 Source:   By BBC News. Excerpt: So what is the environmental impact of flying and how do trips by train, car or boat compare? ...Train virtually always comes out better than plane, often by a lot. A journey from London to Madrid would emit 43kg (95lb) of CO2 per passenger by train, but 118kg by plane (or 265kg if the non-CO2 emissions are included), according to EcoPassenger. ...Diesel trains' carbon emissions can be twice those of electric ones. Figures from the UK Rail Safety and Standards board show some diesel locomotives emit more than 90g of C02 per passenger per kilometre, compared with about 45g for an electric Intercity 225, for example....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/science/batteries-supercapacitors.html Source:   By XiaoZhi Lim, The New York Times. Excerpt: Living in a world with smartphones, laptops and cars powered by batteries means putting up with two things: waiting for a depleted battery to charge, and charging it more frequently when its once-long life inevitably shortens. That’s why the battery’s cousin, the supercapacitor, is still in the game, even though batteries dominate electricity storage. “There are circumstances where you don’t need a lot of energy, but you need a very quick surge of power,” said Daniel Schwartz, a chemical engineer who leads the Clean Energy Institute at the University of Washington. For example, Dr. Schwartz’s new car has start-stop technology, which is common in vehicles in the European Union to meet stringent emission standards. Start-stop systems demand that the car’s starter battery deliver big bursts of power whenever the engine starts or stops, and that it rechar...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/technology/india-electric-vehicle-rickshaw.html Source:   Photographs and Video by Saumya Khandelwal, By Vindu Goel and Karan Deep Singh, The New York Times. Excerpt: A million electric rickshaws sprang up out of nowhere and are now being used by 60 million people a day. The government and vehicle makers are struggling to catch up. ...India’s million e-rickshaws make up the second-largest collection of electric vehicles in the world. Only China’s fleet of several hundred million electric motorcycles and bicycles is bigger. About 60 million Indians hop on an e-rickshaw every day, analysts estimate. Passengers pay about 10 rupees, or 14 cents, for a ride. In a country with limited shared transit options and a vast population of working poor people, the vehicles provide a vital service as well as a decent living for drivers, who are mostly illiterate....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/phoenix-heat.html Source:   Photographs by George Etheredge | Written by Marguerite Holloway, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...“You definitely feel the heat, but the nights are better,” Mr. Plautz said. “A lot of people hike right now instead of during the day because it is a lot cooler.” Phoenix, which had 128 days at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit last year, is one of the hottest and fastest-warming cities in the United States. Although it is on the leading edge, it is not alone: Most American cities are expected to drastically heat up in the next decades [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08540-3 ]. Many may have summers with heat waves and triple-digit days — summers that resemble Phoenix today. Here in the Valley of the Sun, that means work and play shift into the cooler hours. Neighborhoods thrum with activity at dawn and dusk when residents hike, jog and paddleboard. In the hottest months, the zoo opens at 6 a.m....

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/greta-thunberg-four-days-into-atlantic-crossing Source:   By Seth Jacobson, The Guardian. Excerpt: Climate activist is four days into a two-week journey on solar-powered yacht. Four days into its two-week Atlantic crossing, the solar-powered yacht carrying climate activist Greta Thunberg is becalmed in the ocean after a choppy start to the trip, still 2,500 nautical miles from New York. ...On Friday the boat, which is a high-speed planing monohull built for the 2016-17 single-handed, non-stop round-the-world Vendée Globe race, had “experienced uncomfortable conditions and everyone is feeling a bit seasick but nothing too bad or unexpected”, Herrmann tweeted on Friday. August is not the ideal time to cross the ocean as it is in the middle of the Atlantic’s hurricane season. The team’s progress is being tracked on a website [ https://tracker.borisherrmannracing.com/ ]. Thunberg is hoping to cross to the US in time to appear at t...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/New-maps-show-how-little-is-left-of-West-Coast-14339398.php Source:   By Peter Fimrite, San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpt: The most detailed study ever done of coastal estuaries concludes that nearly 750,000 acres of historic tidal wetlands along the West Coast, including enormous swaths of Bay Area habitat, have disappeared largely as a result of development. The cutting-edge survey led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined that 85% of vegetated tidal lands that once existed in California, Oregon and Washington has been diked, drained or cut off from the sea. The study, published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS One [ https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0218558 ], documented dramatic decreases in wetland habitat around San Francisco Bay, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and nearly 450 other bays, lagoons, river deltas and coastal creek mouths throughout the We...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/mystery-volcano-cooled-ancient-world-traced-el-salvador Source:   By Katherine Kornei, Science Magazine. Excerpt: The sixth century was a rough time to be alive: Lower-than-average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere triggered crop failure, famine, and maybe even the onset of bubonic plague. The ultimate culprit, scientists say, were two back-to-back volcanic eruptions—one in 536 C.E. and another around 540 C.E. The first likely happened in Iceland or North America. But the location of the second one has remained a mystery—until now. Researchers studying ancient deposits from El Salvador’s Ilopango volcano knew that a massive eruption had taken place there sometime between the third and sixth centuries. That event, dubbed Tierra Blanca Joven (TBJ), or “white young earth,” sent a volcanic plume towering nearly 50 kilometers into the atmosphere....

https://eos.org/articles/sinking-wastewater-triggers-deeper-stronger-earthquakes Source:   By Mary Caperton Morton, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The effects of pumping wastewater from oil and gas extractions may last a decade or more after the injections stop. The oil and gas industry’s practice of pumping wastewater fluids underground for disposal has been implicated in the dramatic uptick in earthquakes in the central United States. Now a new study has found a correlation between the increasing depth of the earthquakes and the rate at which these fluids descend through Earth’s crust, a finding that could have implications for how such fluids are regulated. Over the past decade, earthquakes in the central United States greater than magnitude 3.0 have increased dramatically because of disposal of oil field wastewater into deep geologic formations. Injecting these fluids under pressure can destabilize faults and, in some places, trigger hundreds of induced earthquakes a year over magnitude...

https://eos.org/opinions/when-does-weather-become-climate Source:   By Oliver Bothe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Individuals and political organizations alike often define “climate” as climate scientist John Kennedy did on Twitter: “Practically speaking: weather’s how you choose an outfit, climate’s how you choose your wardrobe.” Meanwhile, the scientific literature rarely defines climate more specifically than as the “statistics of weather.” ...Possibly the most common current definition is that from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which distinguishes between “climate in a narrow sense…as the average weather…over a period of time ranging from months to…millions of years” and “climate in a wider sense” as “the state…of the climate system.” ...Earth’s climate system includes its atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. Besides statistics, descriptions of the climate system’s behavior may employ thermodynamics and flui...

https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/state-of-the-climate/ Source:   By American NOAA, Meteorological Society (AMS). Excerpt: The report, compiled by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, is based on contributions from scientists from around the world. It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments located on land, water, ice, and in space....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/bioenergy-plantations-could-fight-climate-change-threaten-food-crops-un-panel-warns Source:   By Erik Stokstad. Science Magazine. Excerpt: In the effort to keep the planet from reaching dangerous temperatures, a hybrid approach called BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) has a seductive appeal. Crops suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, power plants burn the biomass to generate electricity, and the emissions are captured in a smokestack and pumped underground for long-term storage. Energy is generated even as CO2 is removed: an irresistible win-win. But this week, the United Nations's climate panel sounded a warning [ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/ ] about creating vast bioenergy plantations, which could jeopardize food production, water supplies, and land rights for poor farmers. "Our report is kind of a reality check," says Lennart Olsson of the Center for Sustainability Studies at Lund University in ...

https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-pressures-land-and-food-resources-report-warns Source:   By Randy Showstack, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Climate change is putting increased pressure on land and food resources while poor land use and food management are also contributing to climate change, according to a new report issued today, 8 August, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The special report [ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/ ] on climate change and land details these impacts and outlines near- and long-term actions that can help to mitigate and stave off far worse impacts. ...Among the impacts that climate change is having on land are increases in the frequency and intensity of weather and climate extremes; threats to food security, human health, and terrestrial ecosystems; contributions to desertification; and effects on land degradation through actions such as increased rainfall intensity, flooding, heat stress, and sea level rise. In addition, the report...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Oysters-in-peril-as-warming-climate-alters-the-14288818.php Source:   By Peter Fimrite, San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpt: Human-caused climate change is increasingly harming oysters in Tomales and San Francisco bays and could soon devastate shellfish across California, as the chemistry of the water in estuaries morphs and livable habitat shrinks, a UC Davis study has found. Even moderate changes in water temperature, acidity and dissolved oxygen make it harder for native and commercial oysters to grow their calcium-based shells, a situation that does not bode well for the future, concluded the paper published this week in the journal Limnology and Oceanography. It means the severe climatic changes predicted as the Earth warms over the next few decades could dramatically shrink the habitat for both farmed oysters and the native species that scientists have been trying desperately to restore, said Ted Grosholz, a professor of enviro...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/06/climate/world-water-stress.html Source:   By Somini Sengupta and Weiyi Cai, New York Times. Excerpt: Countries that are home to one-fourth of Earth’s population face an increasingly urgent risk: The prospect of running out of water. From India to Iran to Botswana, 17 countries around the world are currently under extremely high water stress, meaning they are using almost all the water they have, according to new World Resources Institute data published Tuesday....

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/europes-record-heat-melted-swiss-glaciers Source:   By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News. Excerpt: The sweltering heat wave that roasted much of Europe last month has since moved north, where it's wreaking havoc on the Greenland ice sheet. But while all eyes are currently trained on the Arctic ice, scientists are finding that Europe's coldest places have also suffered. According to initial findings from the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network (GLAMOS), Swiss glaciers experienced unusually high melt rates during the last heat wave, which occurred in late July, and an earlier heat wave that struck the continent in late June. Matthias Huss, a glaciologist with Swiss University ETH Zurich and head of GLAMOS, tweeted last week that the nation's glaciers lost about 800 million metric tons of ice during the two heat waves alone....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/world/europe/russia-siberia-yakutia-permafrost-global-warming.html Source:   By Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times. Excerpt: ...As the Arctic, including much of Siberia, warms at least twice as fast as the rest of the world, the permafrost — permanently frozen ground — is thawing. ...The thawing of the permafrost — along with other changes triggered by global warming — is reshaping this incredibly remote region sometimes called the Kingdom of Winter. It is one of the coldest inhabited places on earth, and huge; Yakutia, if independent, would be the world's eighth largest country. ...The loss of permafrost deforms the landscape itself, knocking down houses and barns. The migration patterns of animals hunted for centuries are shifting, and severe floods wreak havoc almost every spring. The water, washing out already limited dirt roads and rolling corpses from their graves, threatens entire villages with permanent inundation. Waves chew away the le...

https://eos.org/articles/greenland-ice-sheet-beats-all-time-1-day-melt-record Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The Greenland ice sheet broke records on 1 August 2019 by losing more water volume in 1 day than on than any other day since records began in 1950, shedding 12.5 billion tons of water into the sea. The record-breaking day came during a weeklong extreme melt event hitting Greenland due to soaring temperatures and low snow accumulation over the winter. The warmer temperatures are part of a heat wave that scorched Europe in late July, setting records in several countries including Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Air temperatures rose to 10°C above average in places in Greenland this week and peaked above the freezing point for hours at a time at the ice sheet’s summit more than 3,200 meters above sea level. The months of April, May, June, and July also had higher than average temperatures in Greenland....