https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/climate/climate-change-ocean-fish-iceland.html Source:   By Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times. Excerpt: ISAFJORDUR, Iceland ... warming waters associated with climate change are causing some fish to seek cooler waters elsewhere, beyond the reach of Icelandic fishermen. Ocean temperatures around Iceland have increased between 1.8 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 20 years. For the past two seasons, Icelanders have not been able to harvest capelin, a type of smelt, as their numbers plummeted. The warmer waters mean that as some fish leave, causing financial disruption, other fish species arrive, triggering geopolitical conflicts. ...Different species of fish evolved to live in specific water temperatures, with some fish like sea bass requiring the temperate ocean climates like those found off the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and tropical fish like the Spanish hogfish preferring warmer waters such as those in the Caribbe...

https://eos.org/articles/antarctic-ice-cores-offer-a-whiff-of-earths-ancient-atmosphere Source:   By Katherine Kornei. Eos/AGU. Excerpt: To determine how Earth’s climate has varied over time, scientists are constantly on the lookout for the oldest whiffs of our planet’s atmosphere. The current record holders, recently extracted from Antarctic ice cores and dated to over 2 million years old, reveal concentrations of gases like carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane in ancient Earth’s atmosphere. Researchers have now shown that levels of these greenhouse gases fluctuated less millions of years ago than they did in more recent times. That discovery has implications for how Earth transitioned between two climatic periods roughly a million years ago, the team reported. ...The climatic history of Earth has been far from constant: For the past 800,000 years, continental-scale ice sheets have repeatedly grown and retreated in glacial-interglacial cycles occurring roughly every 100,000 year...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/new-un-climate-report-offers-bleak-emissions-forecast Source:   By Nathaniel Gronewald, E&E News, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Global emissions are expected to keep climbing despite promises from almost 200 nations to address climate change, propelling temperatures upward and threatening to shatter the threshold of 2°C that scientists say would invite dramatic changes to ecology and the economy. The 10th Emissions Gap Report [ https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2019 ] by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), released today, warned that there's "no sign" greenhouse gases will hit their zenith anytime soon. It arrived a day after the World Meteorological Organization revealed record-high concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. "The summary findings are bleak," the UNEP report said. "Countries collectively failed to stop the growth in globa...

https://eos.org/articles/dire-and-drier-future-for-lake-victoria Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Lake Victoria in eastern central Africa supports over 40 million people, the industrial sectors of three large nations, and the largest freshwater tropical ecosystem in the world. New research, however, suggests that the lake might not be around to do all of this in the not-so-distant future. ...“Historically, the level of Lake Victoria has dropped pretty drastically,” and past research has shown that the lake twice dried out completely, 15,000 and 17,000 years ago. The team’s research showed that the lake also dried out at least once more in the past 100,000 years. ... Under the driest projected conditions—less than half the current amount of rainfall—Lake Victoria would stop supplying a major tributary of the Nile in about a decade. All major lakeside cities in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania could lose access to the lake in as little as 100 years, and the shore...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/us/florida-keys-flooding-king-tide.html Source:  By Patricia Mazzei, The New York Times. Excerpt: A brutal “king tides” season made worse by climate change has flooded the streets of a Florida Keys community for nearly three months. ... For nearly three months, the residents of Stillwright Point’s 215 homes have been forced to carefully plan their outings and find temporary workarounds to deal with the smelly, stagnant water — a result not of rain, but a rising sea — that makes their mangrove-lined streets look more like canals. Another Key Largo neighborhood, Twin Lakes, is similarly inundated. Scientists say a combination of factors, including disruptive hurricanes, have contributed to this year’s exceptionally high tides. “King tides” take place predictably each fall, when the alignment of the moon, sun and Earth creates a stronger gravitational pull on the warm oceans. Rising sea levels caused by climate change make the flooding worse. ......

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/brazil-s-deforestation-exploding-and-2020-will-be-worse Source:   By Herton Escobar, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Development, most of it illegal, destroyed more than 9700 square kilometers of Brazilian Amazon rainforest in the year ending in July, according to a government estimate released on Monday—an increase of 30% from the previous year and the highest rate of deforestation since 2007–08.... See also "Massive Australian blazes will ‘reframe our understanding of bushfire’ [ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/massive-australian-blazes-will-reframe-our-understanding-bushfire ]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/climate/farms-climate-change-crops.html Source:   By John Schwartz, The New York Times. Excerpt: The damage from the destructive spring flooding in the Midwest has been followed in parts of the country by a miserable autumn that is making a bad farming year worse, with effects that could be felt into next spring. ... many farmers couldn’t get crops in the ground or had to delay planting until perilously late in the season. “Farmers told me in Eastern Illinois it felt like they were in a monsoon from April til May.” It was the wettest year on record for the lower 48 states, with the kind of extreme rainfall events that are increasingly associated with climate change. And then fall came in with unseasonably heavy rains and snow....