https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/07/31/electric-airplane/ Source:     By Ilana Marcus, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: When Val Miftakhov touched down at Cranfield Airport in England last month, his Piper Malibu Mirage six-seater became the first commercial-grade, zero-emission airplane to fly in Europe. That test flight was just 21 miles. But Miftakhov, the chief executive of a Silicon Valley start-up called ZeroAvia, envisions a future of passenger planes that fly on hydrogen-powered electricity, not jet fuel. Air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — much less than produced by cars. Despite a temporary dip due to the coronavirus, demand for air travel has been dramatically growing and planes are projected to produce as much as 25 percent of global carbon emissions by 2050. Miftakhov’s Piper was powered by batteries, but his company is working on integrating a hydrogen fuel cell for aviation. ...Think about the ...

https://eos.org/articles/indias-food-bowl-heads-toward-desertification Source:  By Gurpreet Singh, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Water-guzzling rice consumes more water than Punjab can recharge. If current irrigation rates continue, the state will empty its groundwater reserves within 20 years. ...In the mid-1960s, Punjab’s agricultural sector blossomed, owing in part to federal subsidies for fertilizers and pesticides. In the 1970s, the state government established a corporation to access the region’s abundant groundwater by constructing thousands of wells. Today at least 40% of India’s surplus food stocks are harvested in Punjab. ...In the pursuit of growing more rice and wheat, more than 1.4 million agriculture tube wells have been dug in Punjab over the past 60 years. On average, groundwater levels have sunk 51 centimeters every year. Last year, groundwater levels fell more than 60 centimeters, said Gopal Krishan, a hydrology and soil scientist at India’s National Institute of Hydr...

https://eos.org/opinions/earth-system-modeling-must-become-more-energy-efficient Source:   By Richard Loft, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Recently, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where I serve as director of technology development in the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, conducted a carbon footprint analysis. The organization was quite pleased with the results, until it realized that the analysis neglected to account for carbon dioxide emissions related to the lab’s modeling activities. When these emissions were included, the overall picture looked considerably less green. ...In his book How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, Mike Berners-Lee estimates that the energy required to transmit a typical email generates 4 grams of carbon dioxide equivalents. That number may give pause to some, while for others it may represent an acceptable cost of doing business in the modern world. Regardless, unlike a gasoline-powered car with an exh...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/siberia-s-gateway-underworld-grows-record-heat-wave-thaws-permafrost Source:  By Richard Stone, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Global warming is inflicting wounds across Siberia. Outbursts of pent-up methane gas in thawing permafrost have pocked Russia’s desolate Yamal and Gydan peninsulas with holes tens of meters across. Apartment buildings are listing and collapsing on the unsteady ground, causing about $2 billion of damage per year to the Russian economy. Forest fires during the past three summers have torched millions of hectares across Siberia, blanketing the land with dark soot and charcoal that absorb heat and accelerate melting. Intensifying this year’s fires was a heat wave that baked Siberia for the first half of 2020. On 20 June, the town of Verkhoyansk, just 75 kilometers from Batagay and one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, reached 38°C, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. The record-breaking heat ...

https://eos.org/articles/a-future-of-retreating-glaciers-in-the-himalayas Source:   By T. V. Padma, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: India’s first regional climate change assessment warns of accelerated glacier melt. ...Climate change has hastened glacial melting across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, home to some of the world’s tallest peaks, including Mount Everest. According to India’s first assessment of climate change [ https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811543265 ], the country’s glaciers—and water resources—will be at further risk without local actions. The Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) are a 3,500-square-kilometer stretch of mountains that span eight countries. The region is called the “Third Pole,” as it contains the largest reserve of freshwater outside the polar regions. Its glaciers feed 10 large Asian rivers, including the Ganges, Mekong, and Yangtze. Air over HKH warmed at a rate of 0.2℃ each decade from 1951 to 2014 and at the even higher rate of 0.5℃ per decade at elevation...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/after-40-years-researchers-finally-see-earths-climate-destiny-more-clearly Source:  By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: It seems like such a simple question: How hot is Earth going to get? Yet for 40 years, climate scientists have repeated the same unsatisfying answer: If humans double atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from preindustrial levels, the planet will eventually warm between 1.5°C and 4.5°C—a temperature range that encompasses everything from a merely troubling rise to a catastrophic one. Now, in a landmark effort, a team of 25 scientists has significantly narrowed the bounds on this critical factor, known as climate sensitivity. The assessment [ https://climateextremes.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/WCRP_ECS_Final_manuscript_2019RG000678R_FINAL_200720.pdf ], conducted under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and publishing this week in Reviews of Geophysics, relies on three strands of evidence: trends indi...

https://eos.org/articles/worsening-water-crisis-in-the-eastern-caribbean Source:    By Sarah Peter, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: For years, people living in the eastern Caribbean have not had reliable supplies of fresh water: Their homes might go for months without running showers or flushing toilets, let alone potable fresh water on tap. ...In a Facebook post in early June, Prime Minister Allen Chastanet raised the alarm that the country is “currently experiencing drought conditions said to be the worst in more than 50 years.” The island’s sole reservoir is at “alarmingly low water levels,” Chastanet said, owing to lower than average rainfall made worse by heavy siltation that has reduced the reservoir’s capacity by “a whopping 30%.” ...Although they contribute far less than 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, small island nations like the ones that make up the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States are among the first to experience the most destructive impacts of clim...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/global-warming-shrinks-bird-breeding-windows-potentially-threatening-species Source:   By Charlotte Hartley, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: For breeding birds, timing is everything. Most species have just a narrow window to get the food they need to feed their brood—after spring’s bounty has sprung, but before other bird species swoop in to compete. Now, a new study suggests that as the climate warms, birds are not only breeding earlier, but their breeding windows are also shrinking—some by as many as 4 to 5 days. This could lead to increased competition for food that might threaten many bird populations.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/climate/polar-bear-extinction.html Source:  By Henry Fountain, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Polar bears could become nearly extinct by the end of the century as a result of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic if global warming continues unabated, scientists said Monday. ...By rough estimates there are about 25,000 polar bears in the Arctic. Their main habitat is sea ice, where they hunt seals by waiting for them to surface at holes in the ice. In some areas the bears remain on the ice year round, but in others the melting in spring and summer forces them to come ashore. “You need the sea ice to capture your food,” Dr. Molnar said. “There’s not enough food on land to sustain a polar bear population.” But bears can fast for months, surviving on the energy from the fat they’ve built up thanks to their seal diet. ...the time that the animals would be forced to fast would eventually exceed the time that they are capable of fasting. In short, the an...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/world/middleeast/iraq-gas-flaring-cancer-environment.html Source:  By Alissa J. Rubin and Clifford Krauss, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Iraq is the rare country that imports gas but also burns natural gas from oil wells into the air. The wasted gas is enough to power three million homes. Burning it is making people sick. ...The chemicals in the air — in Nahran Omar and other oil towns across southern Iraq — come from the smoky orange flames atop the oil wells, burning away the natural gas that bubbles up with the oil. Many countries have reduced the practice, known as flaring, in part because it wastes a precious resource. ...flaring also produces chemicals that can pollute the air, land and water. It has been shown to worsen asthma and hypertension, contribute to the incidence of some cancers and speed climate change. Iraq, however, still flares more than half the natural gas produced by its oil fields, more than any other country except ...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/modeling-water-stress-for-shared-water-resources Source:   By Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A third of the world’s population is living with high levels of water stress, according to the World Resources Institute [ https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/08/17-countries-home-one-quarter-world-population-face-extremely-high-water-stress ]. Reservoirs in major cities in India, South Africa, and elsewhere have nearly run dry because of ever increasing water demand, and climate change is expected to make these arid regions even drier. Researchers typically evaluate such factors as local climate, population, and resource management decisions to predict a region’s future water stress. But such predictions are especially complex in transboundary basins, where populations separated by national borders share the same water resources. ...Consider the Colorado River: The waterway flows across the U.S. Southwest, serving 35 million Americans, before flowing...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/climate/heatwave-coronavirus.html Source:  By John Schwartz, The New York Times.  Excerpt: For much of the United States, the last several days have been brutal: record temperatures recorded around the country, and coronavirus case numbers are on the rise as well, complicating efforts to protect people at risk. ...Greg Carbin, the chief of the forecast operations branch at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, said, “It’s July — you kind of expect this, to some extent. But the magnitude of it is a little severe.” This is the beginning of a summer that NOAA has warned is likely to have many more scorching days. The combination of heat and humidity sent heat indexes in places like central Oklahoma above 115 degrees, and “that is just really dangerous to spend any time outdoors in, unless you’re standing under a cool waterfall somewhere,” Mr. Carbin said, who also noted that the heat index in New Orlea...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/climate/siberia-heat-wave-climate-change.html Source:  By  John Schwartz, The New York Times.  Excerpt: ... scientists looked at two recent examples of exceptional heating in Siberia, one long-term and the other more brief. The first was the overall rise in temperature across the region from January to June, which was more than nine degrees Fahrenheit above average temperatures recorded between 1951 and 1980. The second was the astonishing spike on June 20 that put temperatures at the Russian town of Verkhoyansk at a reported 100.4 degrees, which the Russian Meteorological Service said is a record for temperatures anywhere north of the Arctic Circle. In their analysis, the scientists said climate change made the prolonged heat event 600 times as likely to occur as it would be without climate change.....   See also Washington Post article -   Siberian heat streak and Arctic temperature record virtually ‘impossible’ without glo...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/climate/methane-emissions-record.html Source:   By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Global emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, soared to a record high in 2017, the most recent year for which worldwide data are available, researchers said Tuesday. And they warned that the rise — driven by fossil fuel leaks and agriculture — would most certainly continue despite the economic slowdown from the coronavirus crisis, which is bad news for efforts to limit global warming and its grave effects. The latest findings, published on Tuesday in two scientific journals [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab9ed2], underscore how methane presents a growing threat, even as the world finds some success in reining in carbon dioxide emissions, the most abundant greenhouse gas and the main cause of global warning. ...Methane, a colorless, odorless gas ...is a powerful greenhouse gas that traps the sun’s heat, warming the ...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/ancient-sea-levels-in-south-africa-may-offer-modern-analogues Source:   By Aaron Sidder, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere as of June 2020 exceeds 416 parts per million, a level not seen since the mid-Pliocene warm period approximately 3 million years ago. Indeed, the entire Pliocene (5.33–2.58 million years ago) serves as a potential analogue for our present and future climate. ...Geological proxies like fossilized flora and fauna indicate that temperatures during the Pliocene were about 3°F–5°F (2.7°C–4.0°C) hotter than those in the preindustrial era. Coastal rocks and sediments can also help identify the Pliocene’s elevated sea levels from a time when polar ice extents were drastically smaller than today. ...Three of the 17 surveyed sites provided reliable age data, establishing that average sea levels during the Pliocene were between 15 and 30 meters higher than the present waterline....  ...

Visit the NASA page  Sea Level 101, Part Two: All Sea Level is ‘Local'   Excerpt: ...we know sea level on the open ocean isn’t really flat. A number of factors combine to determine the topography of the ocean surface. Global sea level rise is complex as well. To begin with, it has multiple causes, including the thermal expansion of the ocean as it warms, runoff of meltwater from land-based ice sheets and mountain glaciers, and changes in water that’s stored on land. These factors combine to raise the height of our global ocean about 3.3 millimeters (0.13 inches) every year. That rate is accelerating by another 1 millimeter per year (0.04 inches per year) every decade or so. ...“Relative sea level” refers to the height of the ocean relative to land along a coastline. Common causes of relative sea level change include: Changes due to heating of the ocean, and changes in ocean circulation Changes in the volume of water in the ocean due to the melting of land ice in glaciers, ice ...

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/june-2020-third-hottest-june-record Source:   By Tom Di Liberto, NOAA.  Excerpt: After five consecutive months to start the year that were either the warmest or second warmest on record, June 2020 finally broke the streak by becoming only the [drumroll] third-warmest June on record. 2020’s heat has been relentless. The blazing first half of 2020 has made it incredibly likely that 2020 will finish the year as one of the five warmest years on record. There’s even around a 35% chance 2020 will dethrone 2016 as the warmest on record.  For more information on global temperatures and precipitation in June 2020, check out the June 2020 global climate summary [ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202006 ] by the National Centers for Environmental Information.... 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/seawater-could-provide-nearly-unlimited-amounts-critical-battery-material Source:  By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Booming electric vehicle sales have spurred a growing demand for lithium. But the light metal, which is essential for making power-packed rechargeable batteries, isn’t abundant. Now, researchers report a major step toward tapping a virtually limitless lithium supply: pulling it straight out of seawater. “This represents substantial progress” for the field, says Jang Wook Choi, a chemical engineer at Seoul National University who was not involved with the work. He adds that the approach might also prove useful for reclaiming lithium from used batteries. Lithium is prized for rechargeables because it stores more energy by weight than other battery materials. Manufacturers use more than 160,000 tons of the material every year, a number expected to grow nearly 10-fold over the next decade. But lithium supplie...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/climate/oil-fracking-bankruptcy-methane-executive-pay.html Source:  By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times.  Excerpt: The day the debt-ridden Texas oil producer MDC Energy filed for bankruptcy eight months ago, a tank at one of its wells was furiously leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. As of last week, dangerous, invisible gases were still spewing into the air. By one estimate, the company would need more than $40 million to clean up its wells if they were permanently closed. But the debts of MDC’s parent company now exceed the value of its assets by more than $180 million. In the months before its bankruptcy filing, though, the company managed to pay its chief executive $8.5 million in consulting fees, .... Oil and gas companies in the United States are hurtling toward bankruptcy at a pace not seen in years, driven under by a global price war and a pandemic that has slashed demand. And in the wake of this economi...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/climate-solutions/phoenix-climate-change-heat/ By  Sarah Kaplan , photos by  Cassidy Araiza , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: ...The goal is for Phoenix to become the country’s first heat-ready city — equipped to survive a rapidly warming world. Each year, more Americans die from extreme heat than are killed by storms, floods and wildfires combined. In few places is the problem more pronounced than in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and its suburbs. In 2019, the region saw  103 days of triple-digit temperatures and  197 fatalities  from heat-related causes. It was the highest number of heat-associated deaths on record for the county, and the fourth year in a row of record-setting heat deaths there. Those numbers are only expected to increase as the climate changes. ...Urban conservation program manager Maggie Messerschmidt had envisioned a project called “ Nature’s Cooling Systems ,” which would harness the power...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/climate-solutions/phoenix-climate-change-heat/ Source:    By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: ...summer in Phoenix, where a cocktail of climate change and rapid development has pushed temperatures into the danger zone. The threats are greatest in black, Latino and low-income communities, which are significantly hotter than wealthier, leafier parts of the city. ...Yet the city is working to fight the literal heat. The goal is for Phoenix to become the country’s first heat-ready city — equipped to survive a rapidly warming world. Each year, more Americans die from extreme heat than are killed by storms, floods and wildfires combined. In few places is the problem more pronounced than in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and its suburbs. In 2019, the region saw 103 days of triple-digit temperatures and 197 fatalities from heat-related causes. It was the highest number of heat-associated deaths on record for the county,...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/business/energy-environment/renewable-energy-natural-gas.html Source:    By Ivan Penn, The New York Times.  Excerpt: As coal declines and wind and solar energy rise, some are pushing to limit the use of natural gas, but utilities say they are not ready to do so. Utilities around the country are promoting their growing use of renewable energy like hydroelectric dams, wind turbines and solar panels, which collectively provided more power than coal-fired power plants for the first time last year. But even as they add more green sources of power, the industry remains deeply dependent on natural gas, a fossil fuel that emits greenhouse gases and is likely to remain a cornerstone of the electric grid for years or even decades. ...Coal plants supply less than 20 percent of the country’s electricity, down from about half a decade ago. Over that same time, the share from natural gas has doubled to about 40 percent. Renewable energy has also mor...

https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/tackle-climate-change/climate-change-stories/site-wind-right/ Source:  By The Nature Conservancy.  Excerpt: The Nature Conservancy supports the rapid expansion of renewable energy, and America’s ample wind resources offer the opportunity to provide clean, low-impact power for people and wildlife. Achieving the wind energy development necessary to meet our climate goals will require quadrupling current wind capacity in the United States by 2050. Much of this new wind development is likely to occur in the Great Plains, home to some of the nation’s most promising wind resources. The Great Plains also provide our best remaining grassland habitat in North America, and the unique wildlife that is home on this range, such as bison, pronghorn antelope, deer, and prairie chickens. ...The Nature Conservancy is providing the  award -winning  Site Wind Right map  now! This interactive online map uses GIS technology an...