https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/business/hydrogen-power-cars.html Source:  By Roy Furchgott, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Mike Strizki powers his house and cars with hydrogen he home-brews. He is using his retirement to evangelize for the planet-saving advantages of hydrogen batteries. In December, the California Fuel Cell Partnership tallied 8,890 electric cars and 48 electric buses running on hydrogen batteries, which are refillable in minutes at any of 42 stations there. On the East Coast, ...there’s just one. His name is Mike Strizki. He is so devoted to hydrogen fuel-cell energy that he drives a Toyota Mirai even though it requires him to refine hydrogen fuel in his yard himself. ...You can make fuel using water and solar power, .... The byproduct of making hydrogen is oxygen, and the byproduct of burning it is water. Hydrogen is among the most plentiful elements on earth, so you don’t have to go to adversarial countries or engage in environmentally destructive extraction t

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/climate-solutions/amp-stories/climate-change-wine/ Source:  By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: French scientists are hard at work, trying to find varieties of grapes that will thrive in warm weather....  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/12/23/climate-moulins-greenland/ Source:  By  Chris Mooney , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: The scientists ...created two intersecting holes into the bed of a now frozen-over ice river.... The hole, scientists believe, ultimately penetrates more than a half-kilometer into the ice, joining a network of channels extending all the way to the base of the ice sheet. ...Covington and his colleague Jason Gulley, ...were motivated by a scientific question with enormous implications as the climate warms. Just how vast are these moulins, these ice caves found by the thousands across Greenland’s surface? How much are they undermining the integrity of the second-largest sheet of ice on the planet? And how much worse will it get as melting, and moulins, begin to extend farther and farther toward the airy center of Greenland, where the ice is well over a mile thick? ...As the climate warms — with the Arctic warming fastest of all — more and m

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/2020-climate-change.html Source:  By The New York Times.  Excerpt: 2020 was a crisis year: a pandemic, economic turmoil, social upheaval. And running through it all, climate change. Here’s some of the best reporting from The Times’s Climate Desk.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/climate/climate-change-stimulus.html Source:  By  Coral Davenport , The New York Times.  Excerpt: WASHINGTON — In the waning days of the 116th Congress, lawmakers have authorized $35 billion in spending on wind, solar and other clean power sources while curtailing the use of a potent planet-warming chemical used in air-conditioners and refrigerators....  

https://eos.org/articles/the-debate-over-the-united-nations-energy-emissions-projections Source:  By Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A new study finds the economic factor driving the divergence between emissions trajectories in climate assessments and reality. ...There is no question that climate change is reshaping Planet Earth and that things are getting ugly as global warming progresses. The debate now centers on just how bad things will get. But there are still major uncertainties when it comes to modeling future climate. Chief among them: How much more carbon dioxide will humans emit, and how sensitive is the climate system to all those emissions anyway?...To account for those uncertainties, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) created several baseline scenarios, known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), to describe just how much warming might result from a range of carbon emissions. ...The most extreme model,  RCP 8.5 —sometimes ca

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/geoengineers-inch-closer-sun-dimming-balloon-test Source:  By  Paul Voosen , Science Magazine  Excerpt: For years, the controversial idea of solar geoengineering—lofting long-lived reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight and diminish global warming—has been theoretical. ...Today, after much technical and regulatory wrangling, Harvard University scientists are proposing a June 2021 test flight of a research balloon designed to drop small amounts of chalky dust and observe its effects. ... the project, called  the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment  (SCoPEx), must first win the approval of an  independent advisory board , a decision that could come in February 2021. The need to study the real-world effects of releasing reflective particles is pressing, says David Keith, a Harvard energy and climate scientist and one of SCoPEx’s lead scientists. Solar geoengineering is no substitute for cutting greenhouse gas

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/climate/monarch-butterflies-endangered-species-list.html Source:    By Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times.  Excerpt: The monarch butterfly is threatened with extinction, but will not come under federal protection because other species are a higher priority, federal officials announced Tuesday. ...But their numbers have been decimated by climate-change-fueled weather events and pervasive habitat loss in the United States. ...The number of Eastern monarchs — which undertake an astonishing, multigenerational migration from as far north as Canada to overwinter in central Mexico — has declined by 75 percent since the 1990s, scientists estimate. Across the Rocky Mountains, Western monarchs have seen an even more alarming drop. Some of this collapse is tied to a need for milkweed, the only plant that monarch caterpillars can eat. Milkweed has declined across monarch breeding grounds throughout the United States since farmers started using crops that are ge

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/business/economy/fed-climate-network.html Source: By  Jeanna Smialek , The New York Times.  Excerpt: WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve is joining a network of central banks and other financial regulators focused on conducting research and shaping policies to help prepare the financial system for the effects of climate change. The Fed’s board in Washington voted unanimously to become a member of the  Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System , it said in a statement on Tuesday. The central bank began participating in the group more than a year ago, but its formal membership is something that Democratic lawmakers have been pushing for and that Republicans have eyed warily. ...The network exists to help central banks and other regulators exchange ideas, research and best practices as they figure out how to account for environment and climate risk in the financial sector. While the Fed had participated informally, its de

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/paris-climate-pact-5-years-old-it-working Source:   By  Warren Cornwall , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: When world leaders celebrated reaching a landmark climate change agreement in Paris in December 2015, the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe were illuminated with green floodlights and the message “Accord de Paris c’est fait!” (the Paris agreement is done!). Now, five tumultuous years later, a new slogan might be “travail en cours” (work in progress). That will be the implicit message sent tomorrow when nations gather—virtually—to look back on what the Paris agreement has achieved in its first half-decade and, more importantly, to unveil new pledges to further cut planet-warming emissions. Although analysts say the pact has helped make progress toward its goal of preventing average global temperatures from increasing by 2°C above preindustrial levels, the effort is also shadowed by ample evidence that many countries aren’t living up to the promi

https://eos.org/articles/using-food-to-tell-the-climate-change-story Source:  By  Rachel Crowell , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: “We all eat” is a simple statement that underscores the power of food as a vehicle for discussing the science of climate change, said  Michael Hoffmann , professor emeritus of entomology at Cornell University and lead author (along with Carrie Koplinka-Loehr and Danielle L. Eiseman) of the forthcoming book Our Changing Menu: What Climate Change Means to the Foods We Love and Need (2021). A companion website will feature a searchable database of ingredients and the impacts that climate change is having on them.  Coffee ,  wine , and  olives  are just a few of the foods that are projected to be heavily affected....  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/12/09/carbon-footprints-climate-change-rich-one-percent/ ] Source:  By  Brady Dennis ,  Chris Mooney  and  Sarah Kaplan ,  The Washington Post. Excerpt: The world’s wealthy will need to reduce their carbon footprints by a factor of 30 to help put the planet on a path to curb the ever-worsening impacts of climate change, according to new findings published Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program. Currently, the emissions attributable to the richest 1 percent of the global population account for more than double those of the poorest 50 percent. Shifting that balance, researchers found, will require swift and substantial lifestyle changes, including decreases in air travel, a rapid embrace of renewable energy and electric vehicles, and better public planning to encourage walking, bicycle riding and public transit. But individual choices are hardly the only key to mitigating the intensifying consequences of climate chan

https://eos.org/articles/feedback-loops-of-fire-activity-and-climate-change-in-canada Source:  By Saima Sidik, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Wildfires burned  more than 7,750 square kilometers  of Alberta’s forests last year. New research indicates the conflagrations are part of a pattern showing increased average burned areas every year since 1970, and climate change is poised to accelerate this trend.  Ellen Whitman , a forest fire research scientist from Natural Resources Canada, used historical records as well as satellite data from the  Landsat program  to analyze how the frequency, size, and distribution of forest fires in the province of Alberta changed between 1970 and 2019— research she’ll present  at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2020. She and coworkers from the Canadian Forest Service and the U.S. Forest Service found that forest fire activity in Alberta increased according to a plethora of metrics over the past 49 years, with the number of fires that consume at least 200 hectares of land almo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/08/arctic-climate-change-report-siberia/ Source: By  Andrew Freedman , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: The Arctic as we once knew it, an inhospitable, barely accessible and icebound place, is gone. Climate change has transformed it into a region that can  heat up to 100 degrees , is beset by ferocious wildfires, and is covered in permafrost that is no longer permanent. The sea ice cover that has long defined the Far North is fast disappearing. This is the picture from a new international scientific assessment released Tuesday. The 2020 Arctic Report Card, a report led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) involving 133 scientists from 15 countries, points to trends that, with each passing year, have grown more extreme and have far-reaching implications for people living far outside the region, including in the Lower 48 states....  

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/godzilla-dust-storm-traced-shaky-northern-jet-stream Source:  By  Warren Cornwall , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: In June, residents of Puerto Rico woke to a Sun shrouded in a thick haze, and everything outside seemingly coated in reddish dust. Little did they know the phenomenon was connected to winds swept up by the largest African dust storm on record—an event so massive, scientists have dubbed it Godzilla. These winds, researchers now report, were in turn triggered by a meandering jet stream that circles the planet farther north. The new findings identify yet another way in which a warming Arctic might disturb the weather half a world away. The root cause of the extra-wavy jet stream is under fierce debate, but some scientists believe Arctic warming and declining sea ice are to blame for Godzilla’s far-reaching effects. “Arguably there is at least an indirect connection between climate change and this notable dust storm,” says Michael Mann,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/denmark-phaseout-oil-production/2020/12/04/c5559eb4-35b0-11eb-9699-00d311f13d2d_story.html Source:  By Florian Elabdi,  Rick Noack  and  Steven Mufson , The Washington Post. Excerpt: COPENHAGEN — Denmark on Friday became the first major oil-producing nation to announce an end to state-approved exploration in the North Sea, with the aim of phasing out all extraction by 2050.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/business/energy-environment/oil-refineries-renewable-diesel.html Source:  By  Clifford Krauss , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Many businesses are betting that  electric  and  hydrogen-powered cars and trucks  will play a critical role in the fight against climate change. But some oil companies are hoping that so will smelly restaurant grease and slaughterhouse waste. Companies that refine crude oil into fuel are increasingly using such putrid scraps to make a renewable version of diesel that can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from trucks, buses and industrial equipment without requiring families and businesses to invest in expensive new vehicles and factory gear. Phillips 66, Marathon, HollyFrontier and several other refiners are spending roughly $2 billion to retool refineries to produce the fuel over the next four years. Renewable diesel has been around for years, and its production, while tiny compared with its fossil fuel counterp

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/climate/climate-change-health-risks.html Source:  By  Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Rising temperatures and environmental pollutants are already endangering the health and well-being of Americans, with fatal consequences for thousands of older men and women, a team of public health experts warned Wednesday. Their report,  published in The Lancet , called on lawmakers to stem the rise of planet-warming gases in the next five years. The  section on the United States  presents climate change as a public health risk now, rather than a hazard faced by future generations. It points to the immediate dangers of extreme heat, wildfires and air pollution, and makes the case for rapidly shifting to a green economy as a way to improve public health....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/02/un-climate-report-2020-warmest-year Source:  By  Andrew Freedman , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: This year will be one of the three hottest on record for the globe, as marine heat waves swelled over 80 percent of the world’s oceans, and triple-digit heat invaded Siberia, one of the planet’s coldest places. These troubling indicators of global warming are laid out in a  U.N. State of the Climate report  published Wednesday.... 

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/acidifying-oceans-could-get-help-from-kelp Source:  By   Elizabeth Thompson , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Carbon dioxide is well known as a greenhouse gas, but its effects on climate and environments aren’t limited to the atmosphere. As more carbon dioxide fills the air, more of the gas dissolves into seawater, making the ocean more acidic and threatening marine organisms.   Giant kelp   may offer a local solution. As kelp grows, it captures carbon from the water and produces oxygen, possibly removing enough carbon dioxide to   relieve acidification .   Hirsh et al.   investigate conditions inside and outside a kelp forest in Monterey Bay, Calif., to evaluate kelp’s ability to mitigate ocean acidification in sensitive areas.... .  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/11/27/climate-solutions-seaweed-methane/ Source:  By Tatiana Schlossberg, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: ...Asparagopsis taxiformis and Asparagopsis armata — two species of a crimson submarine grass that drifts on waves and tides all around the world’s oceans... could practically neutralize one of the most stubborn sources of a powerful greenhouse gas: methane emissions from the digestive processes of some livestock, including the planet’s 1.5 billion cows, which emit methane in their burps. ...In lab tests and field trials, adding a small proportion of this seaweed to a cow’s daily feed —   about 0.2 of a percent of the total feed intake in a recent study   — can reduce the amount of methane by 98 percent. That’s a stunning drop when most existing solutions cut methane by about 20 or 30 percent. ...growing seaweed used for the feed supplement could also help sequester carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, and reduce ocean acid

https://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-forecast-that-still-holds-up Source:  By Andrei Lapenis, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 1972, Mikhail Ivanovich Budyko used a simple methodology to make climate predictions that remain surprisingly accurate today and that could serve as a new “business-as-usual” scenario. ...He predicted that Earth’s mean global temperature would increase about 2.25°C by 2070 and that the Arctic would no longer be covered by ice year-round by 2050 [Budyko, 1972]. (Budyko briefly discussed the part of his forecast dealing with Arctic ice in a 1972   Eos article   cited more than 100 times since.) Despite his confidence in his work, he cautioned that his estimates were made under assumptions of a significantly simplified climate system and should be viewed accordingly [Budyko, 1972], so it might have surprised him to see how closely actual events aligned with his predictions. Comparing 2019 to 1970, Budyko predicted an increase in the global mean temperatur

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/11/24/native-americans-climate-change-swinomish/ Source:  By Jim Morrison, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: ...In 2010, the Swinomish became one of the first communities to assess the problems posed by a warming planet and enact a climate action plan. An additional 50 Native American tribes have followed, creating climate strategies to protect their lands and cultures, ahead of most U.S. communities. The Swinomish see the tasks beyond addressing shoreline risk and restoring habitats. They look at climate adaptation and resilience with the eyes of countless generations. They recognize that the endangered “first foods” — clams, oysters, elk, traditional plants and salmon — are not mere resources to be consumed. They are central to their values, beliefs and practices and, therefore, to their spiritual, cultural and community well-being. ... The Tulalip tribes,   neighbors to the south, are  relocating nuisance beavers   from urban area

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-most-important-climate-legislation-has-already-passed Source: By Justin Guay, Greentech Media.  Excerpt: one of the most powerful pieces of climate change legislation the Biden administration will need has already been passed: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. This legislation, known for creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other public safeguards against financial wrongdoing, also empowers key agencies including the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission to limit systemic risks to financial stability. The largest systemic risk of them all, climate change, is driven by reckless investments in fossil fuels, exactly the kind of speculative activities Dodd-Frank was designed to bring to a halt ...For investors, one of the greatest risks is losing money on coal, oil and gas infrastructure that is forced into early retirement due to the   ine

ttps://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/11/23/kerry-climate-change/ Source:  By   Brady Dennis ,   Steven Mufson   and     Juliet Eilperin , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: ‘America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is,’ Kerry tweeted after the announcement....    

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/an-extraordinary-winter-in-the-polar-north Source:  By   Kate Wheeling , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The winter of 2019–2020 in the Northern Hemisphere was one of extremes. The massive region of cold polar air encircled by stratospheric winds, known as the stratospheric polar vortex, was particularly strong, keeping the frigid air whirling above the polar region and leading to a very   mild winter   in many regions farther south. The strong polar vortex coincided with a record-breaking positive   Arctic Oscillation   circulation pattern and record low ozone levels in the Arctic that lasted into spring. In a review, published as part of an AGU   special collection ,   Lawrence et al. outline the unique conditions that allowed this “truly extraordinary” winter season to arise....  

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/fires-can-kindle-biodiversity-sparking-new-approaches-conservation Source:  By  Meagan Cantwell ,  Katie Free , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Raging fires throughout the United States and Australia over the past year have put  vulnerable species at risk . But not all blazes are devastating—in fact, fire can promote biodiversity. In grasslands, fires prevent trees and roots from taking hold. This allows grazing animals the space and vegetation they need to thrive. As the pattern of wildfires changes, a new review in Science outlines effective ways to  let natural fires burn, while preventing out-of-control blazes . Watch to learn how a few of these techniques have been applied around the world... . 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/science/extinction-global-warming.html Source:  By Lucas Joel, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Paleontologists call it the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, but it has another name: “the Great Dying.” It happened about 252 million years ago, and, over the course of just tens of thousands of years, 96 percent of all life in the oceans and, perhaps, roughly 70 percent of all land life vanished forever. The smoking gun was ancient volcanism in what is today Siberia, where volcanoes disgorged enough magma and lava over about a million years to cover an amount of land equivalent to a third or even half of the surface area of the United States. But volcanism on its own didn’t cause the extinction. The Great Dying was fueled, two separate teams of scientists report in two recent papers, by extensive oil and coal deposits that the Siberian magma blazed through, leading to combustion that released greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. “There was lo

https://eos.org/articles/sea-level-rise-may-erode-development-in-africa Source:  By Hope Mafaranga, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Sea level rise and extreme weather associated with climate change are threats to human health, safety, food and water security, and socioeconomic development in Africa, climate change experts said in a new report. “Climate change is having a growing impact on the  African continent , hitting the most vulnerable hardest, and contributing to  food insecurity , population displacement and stress on water resources. In recent months, we have seen devastating floods, an invasion of  desert locusts  and now face the looming  specter of drought  because of a La Niña events,” said  Petteri Taalas , secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), when introducing the 2019–2020 “ State of the Climate in Africa .” ...Sea level rise associated with climate change includes an increase in coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion in drinking, hygiene, and irrigatio

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/heat-killing-more-people-ever-scientists-are-looking-ways-lower-risk Source:    By  Elizabeth Pennisi .  Excerpt: High body temperatures are inevitable in firefighting: A study in 2013 uncovered about 50 heat-related injuries across the United States during that fire season. But ...Warmth from the firefighters’ physical exertion, not heat from the fires, was the greatest danger, the researchers found. Another surprise: “The assumption across the fire community was that if somebody went down, it was because they just didn’t drink enough water,” Orcasitas says. But the team found otherwise. “You can’t drink yourself out of a heat-related injury,” explains project leader Joseph Domitrovich, an exercise physiologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s National Technology and Development Program. ...researchers like Domitrovich are working to pin down how heat affects workers and vulnerable populations, such as the elderly. They are studying low-tech measur

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/climate/fti-consulting.html Source:  By   Hiroko Tabuchi , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In early 2017, the Texans for Natural Gas website went live to urge voters to “thank a roughneck” and support fracking. Around the same time, the Arctic Energy Center ramped up its advocacy for drilling in Alaskan waters and in a vast Arctic wildlife refuge. The next year, the Main Street Investors Coalition warned that climate activism doesn’t help mom-and-pop investors in the stock market. All three appeared to be separate efforts to amplify local voices or speak up for regular people. On closer look, however, the groups had something in common: They were part of a network of corporate influence campaigns designed, staffed and at times run by FTI Consulting, which had been hired by some of the largest oil and gas companies in the world to help them promote fossil fuels... .  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/business/hydrogen-fuel-california.html Source:  By   Ivan Penn   and   Clifford Krauss , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...in California, the beginnings of a hydrogen economy may finally be dawning after many fits and starts. Dozens of hydrogen buses are lumbering down city streets, while more and larger fueling stations are appearing from San Diego to San Francisco, financed by the state and federal governments. With the costs of producing and shipping hydrogen coming down, California is setting ambitious goals to phase out vehicles that run on fossil fuels in favor of batteries and hydrogen. ...With about 7,500 hydrogen vehicles on the road, an aggressive state program of incentives and subsidies from cap-and-trade dollars envisions 50,000 hydrogen light-duty vehicles by middecade and a network of 1,000 hydrogen stations by 2030. ...Hydrogen-powered vehicles are similar to electric cars. But unlike electric cars, which have large batteries, these

https://eos.org/opinions/reframing-the-language-of-retreat Source:  By Julie Maldonado, Elizabeth Marino, and Lesley Iaukea.  E xcerpt: With so many communities facing relocation from a changing climate, reframing “managed retreat” is needed to respect people’s self-determination. When faced with the looming effects of climate change   along coasts —larger storms, rising seas, flooding, and eroding shorelines—arguing to promote linguistic framing of climate change–driven migration may seem like a fool’s errand. Does anyone care what it’s called if hundreds of millions of people globally—up to 13.1 million people in the United States alone [ Hauer et al. , 2016]—relocate from coastlines en masse before 2100? ...Implicit in terms like   managed retreat , forced migration, community relocation, and others are assumptions about who is deciding what is appropriate adaptation and how those decisions influence, suggest, or require compliance. How and, especially, by whom these plans are de

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/trump-put-climate-denier-charge-key-us-report Source: By   Scott Waldmann, E&E News .  Excerpt: President Donald Trump’s administration is focused on promoting climate denial even as it counts down the president’s final days. The Trump team is preparing to appoint a climate denier to head development of the National Climate Assessment for the next two months, …. On Friday, the administration quietly removed Michael Kuperberg from his job as executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (GCRP), …. Meanwhile, planning has been underway for weeks to appoint the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s David Legates, a climate change denier recently named as deputy assistant Commerce secretary…. Legates is a geologist from the University of Delaware and an affiliate of the Heartland Institute, which exists to muddy the public’s understanding of climate change. He has said burning more fossil fuels would benefit humanit