https://eos.org/articles/ethiopias-coffee-growing-areas-may-be-headed-for-the-hills Source:   By Mekonnen Teshome Tollera, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Relocating Ethiopia’s coffee-growing areas to higher-altitude regions will be a key measure for climate change resilience in the country, a team of researchers suggests. ...a temperature increase of more than 2°C could occur by midcentury across much of Africa and exceed 4°C by the end of the century. This change could render up to 59% of Ethiopia’s current coffee-growing landscape unsuitable for growing coffee, said study coauthor  Sebsebe Demissew , a natural science professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the home of Coffea arabica, originally a forest plant restricted to the highlands and today the most prominent cultivar in the world. Arabica and other coffee varieties account for more than 30% of Ethiopia’s  exports , amounting to almost 240 metric tons in 2019. About 15 million people in Ethiopia ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/climate/california-fire-insurance-climate.html Source:   By Christopher Flavelle and Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: California’s wildfires have grown so costly and damaging that insurance companies — a homeowner’s last hope when disaster strikes — have increasingly been canceling people’s policies in fire-prone parts of the state. On Thursday, however, California took the highly unusual step of banning the practice, a decision that exacerbates the insurance industry’s miscalculation of the cost of climate change. The new policy imposes a one-year moratorium preventing insurers from dropping customers in or alongside ZIP codes struck by recent wildfires. The moratorium covers at least 800,000 homes around the state. The state has also asked insurers to voluntarily stop dropping customers anywhere in California because of fire risk for one year....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/08/climate/ghost-forests.html Source:   By Moises Velasquez-Manoff and Gabriella Demczuk (photographer), New York Times. Excerpt: Saltwater is killing woodlands along the East Coast, sometimes surprisingly far from the sea. ... Up and down the mid-Atlantic coast, sea levels are rising rapidly, creating stands of dead trees — often bleached, sometimes blackened — known as ghost forests. The water is gaining as much as 5 millimeters per year in some places, well above the global average of 3.1 millimeters, driven by profound environmental shifts that include climate change. Increasingly powerful storms, a consequence of a warming world, push seawater inland. More intense dry spells reduce freshwater flowing outward. Adding to the peril, in some places the land is naturally sinking. All of this allows seawater to claim new territory, killing trees from the roots up....

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.”....