https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/09/30/collapse-of-desert-birds-due-to-heat-stress-from-climate-change/ Source:   By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: As temperatures rise, desert birds need more water to cool off at the same time as deserts are becoming drier, setting some species up for a severe crash, if not extinction, according to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley. The team that last year documented a collapse of bird communities in Mojave Desert over the last century — 29% of the 135 bird species that were present 100 years ago are less common and less widespread today — has now identified a likely cause: heat stress associated with climate change. The researchers’ latest findings, part of UC Berkeley’s Grinnell Resurvey Project [ http://mvz.berkeley.edu/Grinnell/ ], come from comparing levels of species declines to computer simulations of how “virtual birds” must deal with heat on an average hot day in Death Valley, which can be in the 30s Ce...

https://eos.org/articles/600-years-of-grape-harvests-document-20th-century-climate-change Source:   By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Climate change isn’t just captured by thermometers—grapes can also do the trick. By mining archival records of grape harvest dates going back to 1354, scientists have reconstructed a 664-year record of temperature traced by fruit ripening. The records, from the Burgundy region of France, represent the longest series of grape harvest dates assembled up until now and reveal strong evidence of climate change in the past few decades. ...“Wine harvest is a really great proxy for summer warmth,” said Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York not involved in the research. “The warmer the summer is, the faster the grapes develop, so the earlier the harvest happens.”....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/climate/climate-change-oceans-united-nations.html Source:   By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: Climate change is heating the oceans and altering their chemistry so dramatically that it is threatening seafood supplies, fueling cyclones and floods and posing profound risks to the hundreds of millions of people living along the coasts, according to a sweeping United Nations report issued Wednesday. The report concludes that the world’s oceans and ice sheets are under such severe stress that the fallout could prove difficult for humans to contain without steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Fish populations are already declining in many regions as warming waters throw marine ecosystems into disarray, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders in policymaking....

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/alan-bigelows-solar-cooking-revolution Source:   By Ian Frazier, The New Yorker. Excerpt: Late one recent morning, Alan Bigelow set up seven solar-thermal cooking devices in the front yard of his house in Nyack, New York. ...One of the seven cookers cost essentially nothing, and consisted of linked cardboard panels covered with aluminum foil which reflected the sunlight to a central point, on which sat a pot of jasmine rice. Another was a metal box with silvery surfaces that unfolded upward, to catch the sun and aim it at a pot of chicken-and-tomato stew. A high-end solar cooker (about five hundred dollars, retail), which involved a large parabolic dish and a cooking surface like a burner on an electric stove, had already become hot enough to get a pan of stir-fry shrimp in turmeric sauce sizzling. Bigelow is the science director of Solar Cookers International (S.C.I.), a nonprofit that promotes solar cooking around the world. ...Fo...

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-may-soon-have-a-battery-that-can-last-a-million-miles/ Source:    By Daniel Oberhaus, Wired Magazine. Excerpt: Elon Musk promised Tesla would soon have a million-mile battery, more than double what drivers can expect today. A new paper suggests he wasn't exaggerating. ...Earlier this month, a group of battery researchers at Dalhousie University, which has an exclusive agreement with Tesla, published a paper in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society [ http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/166/13/A3031 ] describing a lithium-ion battery that “should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1 million miles” while losing less than 10 percent of its energy capacity during its lifetime....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/climate/agriculture-climate-change.html Source:   By Marla Cone, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...With their deep roots and tough, gnarly branches, pistachio trees are hardy, tolerant of salty soils and brutal heat waves. Some can live for centuries. But while sweltering summers are the norm in this part of central California, there’s a new, existential threat to these trees, one that scientists warn could spell the end of the pistachio harvest: warmer winters. Many crops are facing similar threats as agricultural regions across the world experience previously unseen extremes in heat, rain and drought. Chilly winters are critical to nut and fruit trees, particularly pistachios. To break their slumber and spread their pollen, pistachios need to spend about 850 hours, or five weeks, at temperatures below 45 degrees. ...So as the San Joaquin Valley warms and its cooling fogs retreat, growers have found their orchards out of sync: Many male trees a...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/climate/global-climate-strike.html Source:   By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times. Excerpt: Anxious about their future on a hotter planet and angry at world leaders for failing to arrest the crisis, masses of young people poured into the streets on every continent on Friday for a day of global climate protests. Organizers estimated the turnout to be around four million in thousands of cities and towns worldwide. ...They turned out in force in Berlin, where the police estimated 100,000 participants, with similar numbers in Melbourne and London. In New York City, the mayor’s office estimated that 60,000 people marched through the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan, while organizers put the total at 250,000.  By the dozens in some places, and by the tens of thousands in others, young people demonstrated in cities like Manila, Kampala and Rio de Janeiro. A group of scientists rallied in Antarctica....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/world/europe/germany-climate-protection-merkel.html Source:   By Melissa Eddy, The New York Times. Excerpt: BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government on Friday agreed to support a $60 billion package of climate policies aimed at getting Germany back on track to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. ...Under the terms of the new package, Germany will work to reduce carbon emissions by 55 percent of 1990 levels by 2030. A cornerstone of the agreement is to begin charging in 2021 for carbon emissions that are generated by transportation and heating fuels. Companies in the transportation industry will be required to buy certificates for 10 euros (about $11) per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. The price will increase to 35 euros per ton by 2025, and a free-market exchange will open afterward, allowing the polluters to auction their carbon pollution permits. Consumers will likely face higher gas prices that the government w...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/can-world-make-chemicals-it-needs-without-oil Source:   By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Black, gooey, greasy oil is the starting material for more than just transportation fuel. It's also the source of dozens of petrochemicals that companies transform into versatile and valued materials for modern life: gleaming paints, tough and moldable plastics, pesticides, and detergents. Industrial processes produce something like beauty out of the ooze. By breaking the hydrocarbons in oil and natural gas into simpler compounds and then assembling those building blocks, scientists long ago learned to construct molecules of exquisite complexity. Fossil fuels aren't just the feedstock for those reactions; they also provide the heat and pressure that drive them. As a result, industrial chemistry's use of petroleum accounts for 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Now, growing numbers of scientists and, more important, companies ...

[ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists-have-been-underestimating-the-pace-of-climate-change/ ] Source:  By Naomi Oreskes, Michael Oppenheimer, Dale Jamieson, Science Magazine. Excerpt: ...climate change and its impacts are emerging faster than scientists previously thought, ...When new observations of the climate system have provided more or better data, or permitted us to reevaluate old ones, the findings for ice extent, sea level rise and ocean temperature have generally been worse than earlier prevailing views. ... Consistent underestimation is a form of bias—in the literal meaning of a systematic tendency to lean in one direction or another—which raises the question: what is causing this bias in scientific analyses of the climate system? The question is significant for two reasons. First, climate skeptics and deniers have often accused scientists of exaggerating the threat of climate change, but the evidence shows that not only have they not exaggera...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/blob-back-new-marine-heat-wave-threatens-pacific ] Source:   By Warren Cornwall, Science Magazine. Excerpt: In the fall of 2014, marine ecologist Jennifer Fisher was stunned when jellyfish and tiny crustaceans typically found in warmer waters filled her nets off the coast of Oregon. The odd catch was just one sign of the arrival of a vast patch of warm water that came to be known as “The Blob”—a massive marine heat wave that lasted 3 years and dramatically disrupted ecosystems and fisheries along North America’s Pacific coast. Now, with oceanographers warning that a new Blob could be forming in the Pacific Ocean, Fisher is again preparing for strange encounters when she heads out on a research cruise later this month. ...When The Blob arrived 5 years ago, “we didn’t realize the impact” it would have, recalls Toby Garfield, a physical oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Southwest Fisheries Scie...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/world/asia/indonesia-fires-photos.html Source:   By Richard C. Paddock and Muktita Suhartono, The New York Times. Excerpt: JAKARTA, Indonesia — Brazil has captured global attention over deliberately set fires that are burning the Amazon rainforest, often called the earth’s lungs. Now Indonesia is compounding the concern with blazes to clear forest on the other side of the world. Hundreds of wildfires burned across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra on Tuesday, producing thick clouds of smoke that disrupted air travel, forced schools to close and sickened many thousands of people. Poorly equipped firefighters were unable to bring them under control. Officials said that about 80 percent of the fires were set intentionally to make room for palm plantations, a lucrative cash crop that has led to deforestation on much of Sumatra. The slash-and-burn conflagrations, which tore through sensitive rainforests where dozens of endangered species live, immediat...

https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-is-coming-for-our-fish-dinners Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Your fish fillet may have less omega-3 fatty acids, an important nutrient for brain health, by the end of the century. Omega-3 fatty acids could be one reason that human brains evolved to be so powerful, but changing water conditions associated with climate change may reduce the amount of omega-3 available for human consumption. A new global tally of the omega-3 fatty acid docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) found it will drop in availability by 10%–58% depending on how aggressively humans curb greenhouse gas emissions over the next century....

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/a-new-proxy-for-past-precipitation Source:   By Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: To understand our rapidly changing climate, researchers often look back at how Earth’s climate has behaved in the past. Marine sediment cores, like tree rings, can provide a log of former environmental conditions, allowing scientists to infer everything from the temperature and salinity of the oceans to precipitation rates on land. ...Here Mendes et al. [ https://doi.org/10.1029/2019PA003691 ] describe a new proxy for determining past precipitation from marine sediment cores using luminescence signals from feldspar and quartz grains. Together with other reconstructive methods, the new technique can provide a more complete picture of precipitation and continental erosion, the team notes. ...The team showed that the results from the new proxy generally agree with those from other proxies of precipitation in marine cores, as well as model simulations. The authors al...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/chinook-salmon-columbia.html Source:   By Jim Robbins, The New York Times. Excerpt: Warming waters and a series of dams are making the grueling migration of the Chinook salmon even more deadly — and threatening dozens of other species. ...NORTH FORK, Idaho ...Some 45,000 to 50,000 spring-summer Chinook spawned here in the 1950s. These days, the average is about 1,500 fish, and declining. And not just here: Native fish are in free-fall throughout the Columbia River basin, a situation so dire that many groups are urging the removal of four large dams to keep the fish from being lost. ...Before the 20th century, some 10 million to 16 million adult salmon and steelhead trout are thought to have returned annually to the Columbia River system. The current return of wild fish is 2 percent of that, by some estimates. While farming, logging and especially the commercial harvest of salmon in the early 20th century all took a toll, the single gre...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/11/us/midwest-flooding.html Source:   By Sarah Almukhtar, Blacki Migliozzi, John Schwartz and Josh Williams, The New York Times. Excerpt: This year's flooding across the Midwest and the Southg affected nearly 14 million people, ...To measure the scope of the spring floods, The New York Times analyzed satellite data from the Joint Polar Satellite System using software, developed by government and academic researchers for flood detection, that is frequently used in disaster response. The data covers the period from Jan. 15 to June 30 and shows an interconnected catastrophe along the Missouri, Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers, a system that drains more than 40 percent of the landmass of the continental United States. ...The causes of flooding are complicated, but climate change is increasingly an exacerbating factor. Warmer air can hold more moisture, and that moisture can fall back out of the sky, whether as rain or snow, in greater amou...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/global-warming-has-made-iconic-andean-peak-unrecognizable Source:   By Tim Appenzeller, Science Magazine. Excerpt: On 23 June 1802, German geographer Alexander von Humboldt and his companions could climb no higher. ...they faced a final obstacle in their quest to climb Chimborazo, a 6268-meter-high volcano in Ecuador then thought to be the world's highest mountain. ...But they had to turn back, some 400 vertical meters short of their goal. ...Not long after his descent from the mountain, he sketched a spectacular diagram that used the slopes of Chimborazo to depict a concept that had crystallized during his climb: that climate is an organizing principle of life, shaping the distinct communities of plants and animals found at different altitudes and latitudes. The diagram—Humboldt called it his Tableau Physique—has become what one recent paper described as "an iconic milestone, almost a foundation myth, in the history of ecology....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/climate/canada-flood-homes-buyout.html Source:   By Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times. Excerpt: Unlike the United States, which will repeatedly help pay for people to rebuild in place, Canada has responded to the escalating costs of climate change by limiting aid after disasters, and even telling people to leave their homes. It is an experiment that has exposed a complex mix of relief, anger and loss as entire neighborhoods are removed, house by house. “Canadians are stubbornly beginning to reconsider the wisdom of building near flood-prone areas,” said Jason Thistlethwaite, a professor of environment and business at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “It’s taking government action to obligate people to make better decisions.”....