https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/31/two-thirds-of-us-money-for-fossil-fuel-pours-into-africa-despite-climate-goals By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The US government has funneled more than $9bn (£7.7bn) into oil and gas projects in  Africa  since it signed up to restrain global heating in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a tally of official data shows, committing just $682m (£587m) to clean energy developments such as wind and solar over the same period. Two-thirds of all the money the US has committed globally to fossil fuels in this time has been plowed into Africa, a continent rich in various minerals but also one in which 600 million people live without electricity and where  floods , severe  heatwaves  and  droughts  are taking an increasingly devastating toll as the planet heats due to the combustion of coal, oil and gas.…

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/a-close-look-at-melting-below-antarcticas-largest-ice-shelf By  Rachel Fritts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The  Antarctic Ice Sheet  is the largest block of ice in the world. It covers an area 4 times the size of China and holds more than 60% of the world’s fresh water. Where the ice sheet meets the ocean, it forms floating shelves that cool and freshen the salty waters below as they melt. Because of the Antarctic Ice Sheet’s vast size and effects on the ocean, the rates at which its shelves melt play key roles in influencing Earth’s climate. In a new study,  Vaňková and Nicholls  used 14 ground-based radars to monitor the rate at which the base of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf (FRIS)—the continent’s largest by ice volume, located in West Antarctica—has been melting both seasonally and annually. ...The researchers found that the highest melt rates follow episodes of low summer sea ice concentrations outside the ice shelf. ...the r...

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/oct/27/somalia-famine-climate-crisis-funds-un-humanitarian-chief-martin-griffiths By  Kaamil Ahmed , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The UN’s humanitarian chief has questioned why billions of dollars pledged to tackle the climate crisis have not been used to fight famine in  Somalia . Martin Griffiths said he did not know where the promised $100bn (£87bn) a year to fight the impact of global heating in poorer countries had gone, and called for greater transparency around climate finance. ...“Somalis are the victims of our behaviour, the victims of our habits – not of theirs. And yet we haven’t even managed to get to them the money that we pledged nobly some time ago for exactly this kind of purpose.” The UN  has warned  that a state of famine is likely to be declared in areas of Somalia by the end of the year as the country continues to struggle with drought and flare-ups of conflict. ...At the UN climate change confer...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/carbon-emissions-to-peak-in-2025-in-historic-turning-point-says-iea By Jasper Jolly , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Global carbon emissions from energy will peak in 2025 thanks to massively increased government spending on clean fuels in response to Russia’s invasion of  Ukraine , according to analysis by the world’s leading energy organisation. The International  Energy  Agency (IEA) said that government spending on clean energy in response to the crisis would mark a “historic turning point” in the transition away from fossil fuels, in its annual report on global energy. The invasion of Ukraine has prompted an energy crisis around the world, with global gas prices initially surging.  The crisis has caused steep inflation   that has made households poorer around the world. ...Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director and one of the world’s most influential energy economists, said the energy crisis caused by Russ...

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/oct/27/kenya-elephants-farmers-drought-taita-taveta-county By  Peter Muiruri , The Guardian .  Excerpt: When Francis Mutuku settled 35 years ago in Marungu, in Kenya’s south-eastern Taita-Taveta county, he had no concerns about how he would feed himself or a future family. Back then, the rains would come on time and he would harvest about 60 bags of maize and 20 bags of mung beans, enough to have a surplus for sale. In addition, there was “peaceful” coexistence between his family and the wild animals that roam the region. Mutuku’s two-hectare (5 acres) farm borders 33  wildlife conservancies and private ranches , and the vast Tsavo national park. “We did not have problems with elephants. Both had enough to eat,” says Mutuku. ...“Experts say we are suffering because people in rich countries have polluted the atmosphere,” says Mutuku. “I cannot plant maize any more and need to switch to crops that take a short time to matu...

https://www.science.org/content/article/oldest-british-dna-reveals-mass-immigrations-after-last-ice-age By Andrew Curry, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Genetic material recovered from two caves suggests climate change brought into new cultures and lifestyles. ...reindeer hunters etched designs onto human bones and drank out of carved human skulls about 15,000 years ago. A few hundred kilometers to the north, people living just a few hundred years later lived on freshwater fish and marine animals, laying their dead to rest in a cavern with decorated horse bones and bear-tooth pendants. Archaeologists had long thought these cultural shifts reflected people developing new tools and beliefs after the last ice age 18,000 years ago. But new evidence from the oldest known DNA from the British Isles shows the two sets of cave dwellers had dramatically different ancestry. These sweeping cultural changes weren’t signs of Great Britain’s first postglacial people adapting—they were signs of entir...

https://eos.org/articles/warmer-winters-keep-crops-sleepy-into-spring-hurting-yield By  Elise Cutts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Annual crops need frosty periods to break out of their winter dormancy,  reveal results  published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . Researchers grew winter oilseed rape, or canola, in temperature-controlled chambers and farm plots and found that the plant goes through a hibernation-like state that “breaks” only if the plants are sufficiently chilled. The new results highlight how climate change can shake up the finely tuned feedback systems linking life and the environment. ...“One of the main footprints of climate change is…the timing of biological events, like flowering in this case,” said ecologist  Johanna Schmitt  of the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the new research. Such events are “a big deal for ecosystems, the fitness of plant populations, a...

https://www.science.org/content/article/space-based-solar-power-getting-serious-can-it-solve-earth-s-energy-woes By Daniel Clery, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Late last month in Munich, engineers at the European aerospace firm Airbus showed off what might be the future of clean energy. They collected sunlight with solar panels, transformed it into microwaves, and beamed the energy across an aircraft hangar, where it was turned back to electricity that, among other things, lit up a model of a city. The demo delivered just 2 kilowatts over 36 meters, but it raised a serious question: Is it time to resurrect a scheme long derided as science fiction and launch giant satellites to collect solar energy in space? In a high orbit, liberated from clouds and nighttime, they could generate power 24 hours a day and beam it down to Earth. ...Private space company SpaceX has made the notion seem less outlandish. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lofts cargo at about $2600 per kilogram—less than 5% of what...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/18/lithium-mining-nevada-boom-car-battery-us-climate-crisis By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Deep in the parched landscapes of  Nevada , there is a stirring boom. The mining of lithium holds the promise of a treasured resource that can help slow disastrous global heating. Spurred by a growing demand for battery parts essential for electric vehicles, the US’s only major lithium mine, in Silver Peak, a remote outpost situated in desert scrub and nascent Joshua trees a three-hour drive north of Las Vegas, is doubling its production. Across Nevada, there are more than 17,000  prospecting claims  for lithium, a soft metal dubbed “white gold” by investors due to its scarcity and increasing value as clean energy components, with several new major projects now planned. This surge is a critical step in tackling the climate crisis according to Joe Biden’s administration, which has used cold war-era emergency powers to for...

https://eos.org/features/setting-the-stage-for-climate-action-under-the-montreal-protocol By  Stephen O. Andersen ,   Marco Gonzalez  and   Nancy J. Sherman , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt:  Twelve papers formed the scientific basis for fast action to strengthen the treaty, which was already safeguarding stratospheric ozone, so it also protects the climate by reducing super pollutants.  ...Joseph Farman and colleagues provided observational evidence of a stratospheric “ ozone hole ” over the Antarctic potentially linked to rising CFC concentrations [ Farman et al. , 1985], which ultimately led to international agreement on the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, better known simply as the Montreal Protocol. Twenty years later, every United Nations (UN) member state had become a party to the Montreal Protocol, ...and the ozone layer was well on the way to recovery [ WorldMeteorological Organization  ( WMO ), 2018; ...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/16/alaska-snow-crab-season-canelled-population-decline By Maya Yang , The Guardian.  Excerpt: ...The causes of the population collapse are being researched but likely include increased predation and stresses from warmer water, which the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) believes may have prompted the crabs to shift away from coasts. The fall Bristol Bay red king crab harvest will not happen. The winter harvest of smaller snow crab has also been cancelled for the first time. “In the Bering Sea, Alaska pollock, snow crab, and Pacific halibut have generally shifted away from the coast since the early 1980s … They have also moved northward by an average of 19 miles,” the federal  agency  said. ...“These are truly unprecedented and troubling times for Alaska’s iconic crab fisheries and for the hard-working fishermen and communities that depend on them,”  said  Jamie Goen, executive director of Alaska Bering Sea Crab...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/15/the-great-hydrogen-gamble-hot-air-or-net-zeros-holy-grail By Alex Lawson , The Guardian.  Excerpt: ...Companies including Cadent, National Grid, Centrica and boiler maker Worcester Bosch joined Bamford’s companies Ryze Hydrogen and Wrightbus in trying to convince Labour and Conservative MPs that hydrogen, the emissionless, highly combustible gas, can be a valuable weapon in the fight against the climate crisis. ...Since Jo Bamford bought bankrupt London bus maker Wrightbus in 2019, the grandson of JCB founder Joseph Cyril Bamford has bet big on hydrogen. It has  won several taxpayer-funded contracts  for green transport, including an £11.2m deal to develop hydrogen fuel cell technology in Northern Ireland. Last year, he launched HyCap, a £1bn investment fund designed to back hydrogen specialists from producers to fuelling stations and transport firms. ...Hydrogen is seen as a transition fuel to a future powered by renewable...

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2022/oct/15/australians-whove-sworn-off-flying-if-you-get-on-a-plane-youve-undone-a-years-worth-of-good By  Katie Cunningham , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Forgoing air travel is challenging in a country without convenient alternatives. But Australians who have stopped flying feel it’s a sacrifice proportionate to the climate crisis. ...an organisation called  Flight Free , which encourages Australians to stop flying. ...“The climate emergency puts us in a non-normal kind of world,” Carter says. “Being in an abnormal situation means we need to do things differently.” He likens inaction to watching TV while one’s house is burning down. “It’s that way of looking at it.”… 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/14/east-antarctic-glacier-melting-at-708bn-tonnes-a-year-due-to-warm-sea-water By Lisa Cox , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The Denman ice shelf in east  Antarctica  is melting at a rate of 70.8bn tonnes a year, according to researchers from Australia’s national science agency, thanks to the ingress of warm sea water. The CSIRO researchers, led by senior scientist Esmee van Wijk, said their  observations  suggested the Denman glacier was potentially at risk of unstable retreat. The glacier, in remote east Antarctica, sits atop the deepest land canyon on Earth. It holds a volume of ice equivalent to 1.5m of sea level rise. Until relatively recently, it was thought east Antarctica would not experience the same rapid ice loss that is occurring in the west. But some  recent studies have shown warm water is reaching that part of the continent too.…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/climate/climate-disasters-poor-nations-iimf.html By  Lisa Friedman , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Twenty countries most vulnerable to climate change are considering halting their repayment of $685 billion in collective debt, loans that they say are an “injustice,” Mohamad Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, said on Friday. When the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund conclude their annual meetings in Washington on Sunday, Mr. Nasheed said he would tell officials that the nations were weighing whether to stop payments on their debts. The finance ministers are calling instead for a debt-for-nature swap, in which part of a nation’s debt is forgiven and invested in conservation. “We are living not just on borrowed money but on borrowed time,” said Mr. Nasheed, who brought global attention to his sinking archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean by holding an underwater cabinet meeting in 2009. “We are under threat, and we shou...

https://eos.org/articles/not-your-childhood-water-cycle By  Jenessa Duncombe , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt:  The USGS just debuted a complete remaking of the water cycle diagram—with humans as headliners.  ...The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) water cycle diagram is still used by hundreds of thousands of students in the United States and worldwide. It’s also the basis for many, many spin-off diagrams. Today, the agency released a  new diagram  for the first time in more than 20 years, this time with humans as showrunners. Although people have long siphoned water from groundwater and diverted rivers into farm fields and industrial plants, the new diagram is the first time humans have been included in what was presented until now as a “natural” cycle. The change reflects the latest 20 years of research uncovering humanity’s central role in the cycle and how to communicate it visually.… 

https://eos.org/articles/seafloor-reveals-a-period-of-rapid-retreat-for-thwaites-glacier By  Javier Barbuzano , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...Thwaites is one of the main concerns of scientists studying Antarctic ice. As large as Florida and several kilometers thick, the melting of this mass of ice is responsible for 4% of present-day sea level rise worldwide. And warming waters and a seabed that deepens toward the ice sheet’s interior have primed the glacier for a rapid collapse that could raise sea levels by more than half a meter in the next century. ...In 2019, an expedition on board the  Nathaniel B. Palmer  icebreaker  approached the front of the glacier and released a remotely operated submersible that mapped an area of 13 square kilometers of the seabed with specialized sonar and other instruments. As soon as the researchers recovered the submersible and looked at the images, they realized they had made an extraordinary finding. ...The images showed hundreds of p...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/climate/florida-real-estate-hurricane-ian.html By  Christopher Flavelle , The New york Times.  Excerpt: The scale of the destruction from Hurricane Ian threatens to destabilize Florida’s insurance and real estate markets, as devastated residents file a record number of claims for damaged or destroyed homes. Privately insured losses from Ian are expected  to reach $67 billion , not including flood insurance, according to an estimate by RMS, a catastrophe modeling firm. That is in line with  other   forecasts  and puts Ian, which slammed into Florida two weeks ago, close to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the most expensive disaster in United States history. And it’s about twice the toll, in current dollars, of insured losses from Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which had been the most expensive storm ever to hit Florida and bankrupted some underwriters while causing others to flee the state. Data now makes it clear that Ian is part of ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/climate/global-food-waste-solutions.html By  Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In Seoul, garbage cans automatically weigh how much food gets tossed in the trash. In London, grocers have stopped putting date labels on fruits and vegetables to reduce confusion about what is still edible. California now requires supermarkets to give away — not throw away — food that is unsold but fine to eat. Around the world, a broad array of efforts are being launched to tackle two pressing global problems: hunger and climate change. Food waste, when it rots in a landfill, produces methane gas, which quickly heats up the planet. But it’s a surprisingly tough problem to solve. Which is where Vue Vang, wrangler of excess, comes in. On a bright Monday morning recently, she pulled up behind a supermarket in Fresno, Calif., hopped off her truck and set out to rescue as much food as she could under the state’s new law — helping store managers comply wi...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/12/pakistan-floods- impact -years-crops-farms By  Shah Meer Baloch , The Guardian.  Excerpt: PAKISTAN ...Nationwide, at least 4m[illion] acres of crops have been destroyed, part of the economic devastation  estimated by the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, at $30bn-$35bn  (£27bn-£31.6bn), and while the heavy rainfall which began in July has stopped, many areas in Balochistan and Sindh provinces remain flooded. Children play and swim in fields where green crops of rice should have been swaying in the air, ready for harvest. ...The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has warned the effects of the floods will be felt for years to come  with the country “on the verge of a public health disaster” , and the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report last week that it expected increased food insecurity.… 

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/amazon-basin-tree-rings-hold-a-record-of-the-regions-rainfall By Rachel Fritts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The  Amazon  basin contains the world’s largest rain forest, famous for its rich biodiversity and importance in the world’s oxygen and  carbon cycles . It also has an outsized influence on water cycles in South America and beyond. Understanding how climate change is affecting  Amazon hydrology  is thus a key priority for climate researchers. However, modern measurements of the region’s annual rainfall don’t provide the historical context needed to explain a recent uptick in wet season precipitation. Baker et al.  use more than 200 years of oxygen isotope data from tree rings as a window into the region’s hydrological past. Oxygen isotopes can serve as  a proxy for historic rainfall amounts  because heavier isotopes are more likely to get flushed out of the atmosphere in precipitation in years of greater rainf...

https://www.science.org/content/article/climate-change-threatens-supercomputers By Jacklin Kwan, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Increasingly intense heat waves, wildfires, and droughts are forcing costly adaptations. ...In 2018, during a savage drought, the California wildfire known as the Camp Fire burned 620 square kilometers of land.... The disaster also had a ripple effect far from the flames, at a supercomputer facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) 230 kilometers away. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) typically relies on outside air to help cool its hot electronics. But smoke and soot from the fire forced engineers to cool recirculated air, driving up humidity levels. ...Managers at high-performance computing (HPC) facilities are waking up to the costly effects of climate change and the wildfires and storms it is intensifying. With their heavy demands for cooling and massive appetite for energy, HPC centers...are vulnera...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/10/climate/netherlands-drought-climate-change.html By Raymond Zhong , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ENSCHEDE, the Netherlands — The story of the Netherlands’ centuries of struggle against water is written all over its boggy, low-lying landscape. Windmills pumped water out of sodden farmland and canals whisked it away. Dikes stopped more from flooding in. Now, climate change is drying out great stretches of Europe, and, once again, the Dutch are hoping to engineer their way to safety — only this time, by figuring out how to hold onto more water instead of flushing it out. From  California  and  Texas  to  India  and  China , many parts of the world are grappling with widening swings between very wet conditions and very dry ones. The extra heat near the earth’s surface from global warming is, in many regions, increasing the chances of both punishing droughts and  violent rainstorms . Societies like the Netherland...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/world/middleeast/israel-solar-tower.html By  Patrick Kingsley , Photographs by Amit Elkayam, The New York Times.  Excerpt: ASHALIM, Israel ...This is the great solar tower of Ashalim, one of the tallest structures in Israel and, until recently, the tallest solar power plant in the world. “It’s like a sun,” said Eli Baliti, a shopkeeper in the nearest village. “A second sun.” To backers, the tower is an impressive feat of engineering, testament to Israeli solar innovation. To critics, it is an expensive folly, dependent on technology that had become outmoded by the time it was operational. For Mr. Baliti and the 750 or so other residents of the nearby village, Ashalim, after which the plant is named, the tower is also something far more tangible. It is the ever-present backdrop to their lives, a source of frustration, occasional fondness and even pride, eliciting both ire and awe. ...Using energy from the sun, the tower generates enough e...

https://www.nytimes.com/article/fall-allergies-symptoms-treatment.html By  Dani Blum , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Climate change is making this allergy season longer and more intense. Here’s how to cope. ...Ragweed, a tall, willowy plant that grows in cities and rural areas alike, is the most common culprit behind fall allergies, said Dr. Michele Pham, an allergist and immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Just one pesky plant can release one billion grains of pollen, she said, which can irritate and inflame our sinuses. Ragweed starts to bloom in August and typically peaks in mid-September, but it can continue to grow into November. ...“What a lot of people don’t realize is that the allergy seasons have almost doubled in length and gotten more intense because of climate change,” said Kenneth Mendez, the president and chief executive of the  Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America . Higher carbon dioxide emissions spur plants to release larger a...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/climate/aviation-emissions-net-zero.html By  Hiroko Tabuchi , The New York Times.  Excerpt: After almost a decade of talks, the nations of the world committed Friday to drastically lower emissions of planet-warming gases from the world’s airplanes by 2050, a milestone in efforts to ease the climate effects of a fast-growing sector. ...Previously, companies had relied on offsetting aviation’s emissions growth through tree-planting programs or through yet-to-be-proven technology to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. But to reach net zero, companies and governments would need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in increasingly efficient planes and cleaner fuels to sharply reduce emissions from air travel itself. And even those investments are unlikely to be enough, compelling countries and companies to adopt policies to curb flying itself, by scrapping fuel subsidies or halting airport expansion plans, for example, or ending frequent flie...

https://eos.org/articles/device-made-for-the-moon-may-aid-in-carbon-sequestration-on-earth By  Bill Morris , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Carbon capture and storage ( CCS ) involves stripping carbon dioxide from emissions, pressurizing it into a “supercritical fluid,” then pumping it deep underground into porous rock reservoirs, where it will, in theory, remain entombed. Potential carbon storage sites include depleted oil and gas fields and deep saline aquifers. Although CCS technology has been around for decades, it has yet to be widely adopted. Partly, that’s because of the high cost of building sequestration plants, but it’s also due to lingering questions about how well the process actually works. Over extended periods, even a small amount of carbon dioxide leakage can become significant, and where storage sites are under the seabed, leakage can have profound effects on marine life. ...CCS monitoring typically relies on heavy seismic equipment mounted on trucks or ships. The equipme...

https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2022-10-06/solar-and-wind-farms-can-hurt-the-environment-a-new-study-offers-solutions-boiling-point By Sammy Roth, Los Angeles Times.  Excerpt: ...would you be willing to pay 3% more on your energy bills to protect the natural world? I didn’t pluck that number out of thin air. It comes from a  new study by the Nature Conservancy , an environmental advocacy group, finding the American West can generate enough renewable power to tackle climate change even if some of its most ecologically valuable landscapes are placed off-limits to solar and wind farms — without causing costs to spiral out of control.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/magazine/uruguay-renewable-energy.html By  Noah Gallagher Shannon , The New York Times.  Excerpt: No greater challenge faces humanity than reducing emissions without backsliding into preindustrial poverty. One tiny country is leading the way.… 

h ttps://observer.globe.gov/trees-2022 By The GLOBE Program.  Excerpt: 11 October to 11 November 2022 ...Help us estimate the number of trees that make up your area and contribute to tree and climate science by sharing your observations of trees. ...Forests are considered one of the world’s largest banks for the carbon emitted into the atmosphere through natural processes and human activities, since trees store carbon as they grow. Carbon calculations help scientists forecast climate change. Tracking how trees are changing over time – both in height and in the number of trees that make up an area – is also a good indicator of an ecosystem’s health in a changing climate. Both tree height and trunk circumference can also help to measure biomass, the total mass of living material above ground in a particular area. The Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program invites you to take part in our upcoming Trees Challenge: “Trees in a Changing Climate,” and contribu...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/food-deficits-in-africa-will-grow-in-a-warmer-world By Aaron Sidder , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Africa has one of the world’s fastest population growth rates. Growth models project the continent’s current population of about 1.3 billion people will nearly double to 2.5 billion by 2050—and it’s likely to keep growing beyond that. At the same time, malnutrition is widespread in Africa—21% of the population faces food insecurity—and the continent is especially vulnerable to climate change. Warmer regions are already experiencing  desertification , and areas of low agricultural productivity are susceptible to climate shocks from adverse weather,  drought , flooding, and erratic rainfall. The combined effects of population growth and climate change raise a serious question for the continent: How will Africa  feed its growing populace  in increasingly unfriendly conditions? Beltran-Peña and D’Odorico  applied the results from agrohydr...