http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/flow-battery-could-power-green- homes-when-sun-goes-down-and-wind-stops-blowing Source:   By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: With solar and wind electricity prices plunging, the hunt is on for cheap batteries to store all this power for use around the clock. Now, researchers have made an advance with a flow battery, the type of battery being developed to soak up enough excess wind and solar power to fuel whole cities. They report the discovery of a potentially cheap, organic molecule that can power a flow battery for years instead of days. ...Flow batteries have the same components as the typical lithium-ion cells in your cellphone, but work in a way that allows them to be scaled up to provide megawatts. They have pairs of electrodes that convert energy stored in chemicals into electricity, and electrolytes that ferry charges from one electrode to another. But where conventional batteries package electrodes and electrolytes t...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/california-birds-climate-change.html Source:   By Wallace Ravven, The New York Times. Excerpt: More than a century ago, zoologist Joseph Grinnell launched a pioneering survey of animal life in California, ...to all corners and habitats of the state, from Death Valley to the High Sierra. ...Grinnell ...produced one of the richest ecological records in the world: 74,000 pages of meticulously detailed field notes, recording the numbers, habits and habitats of all vertebrate species that the team encountered. In 2003, ...Morgan Tingley, ... an ecology graduate student at the university, ...wanted to know how birds had fared since Grinnell last took a census. ...Dr. Tingley and his colleagues discovered that most species now nest about a week earlier than they did 70 to 100 years ago. That slight advance in timing translates into nesting temperatures about two degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the birds would encounter had they not moved up th...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/climate-change-plants-global-greening.html Source:   By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times. Excerpt: “Global greening” sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Plants need carbon dioxide to grow, and we are now emitting 40 billion tons of it into the atmosphere each year. A number of small studies have suggested that humans actually are contributing to an increase in photosynthesis across the globe. Elliott Campbell, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues last year published a study that put a number to it. Their conclusion: plants are now converting 31 percent more carbon dioxide into organic matter than they were before the Industrial Revolution. Climate change denialists were quick to jump on Dr. Campbell’s research as proof that increased carbon dioxide is making the world a better place. ...Dr. Campbell ...feels [they] are drawing the wrong lessons from his research. Here are four reasons he bel...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/climate/record-heat-waves.html Source:   By Somini Sengupta, Tiffany May and Zia ur-Rehman, The New York Times. Excerpt: Expect more. That’s the verdict of climate scientists to the record-high temperatures this spring and summer in vastly different climate zones. The contiguous United States had its hottest month of May and the third-hottest month of June. Japan was walloped by record triple-digit temperatures, killing at least 86 people in what its meteorological agency bluntly called a “disaster.” And weather stations logged record-high temperatures on the edge of the Sahara and above the Arctic Circle. Is it because of climate change? Scientists with the World Weather Attribution project concluded in a study released Friday that the likelihood of the heat wave currently baking Northern Europe is “more than two times higher today than if human activities had not altered climate.”...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/world/europe/uk-hot-weather.html Source:   By Ceylan Yeginsu, The New York Times. F Excerpt: LONDON — To the casual observer, it may seem as if Britain is completely unprepared to deal with long spells of scorching-hot weather. The casual observer would be mostly right. The monthlong heat wave has broken records, spawned wildfires in Wales and England, spurred delays in the transportation system and given birth to names like “Furnace Friday,” as Britons tried to find ways to describe this puzzling pain. “Shops are out of fans, ice, sun cream, ice cream, and there’s a water shortage that has left our beautiful, lush parks all parched and yellow,” said Lucy Thornton.... Summer started out with unusually good weather: The rain stopped, the skies cleared, and the sun came out. Some Britons were so delighted that they canceled vacations abroad. ...Then came the heat. Unlike other European countries that are accustomed to coping with hot weather, Br...

https://eos.org/articles/why-are-siberian-temperatures-plummeting-while-the-arctic-warms Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The answer involves the intricacies of stratospheric circulation, which, if better represented in climate models, could help predict extreme weather events in Siberia and elsewhere. ...Climate change is warming the Arctic and melting sea ice, yet Siberia has experienced significantly colder and harsher winters for the past few decades. A study published yesterday in Science Advances shows that interactions between melting regional sea ice and the stratosphere—an atmospheric layer spanning about 10–50 kilometers above Earth’s surface—play a key role in creating these frigid winter conditions....

https://eos.org/articles/heat-waves-more-than-coral-death-may-cause-fish-to-flee-reefs Source:   By Ilima Loomis, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: It’s no secret that global warming is bringing dramatic changes to coral reef ecosystems. Scientists have widely believed that habitat loss caused by coral death has the biggest effect on reef fish and invertebrates. ...Changes caused by warm water are actually faster and more widespread than the effects of habitat loss. Now new research has found that reef fish populations shift in direct response to the temperature itself and that changes caused by warm water are actually faster and more widespread than the effects of habitat loss. The findings are significant for coral reef protection because a loss of biodiversity, especially of fish that eat harmful algae, could make it harder for reefs to recover from heat waves. “I was surprised by how dramatic the response was over such a short time period,” said Chris Brown, a marine ecologist with the Aus...