https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/climate/polar-vortex-weather-climate-change.html Source: By  John Schwartz , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Rough  winter weather  is working its way across the United States, with bitterly cold air hitting the Northeast and snowstorms expected along the East Coast next week. ...Disturbances to the upper-atmosphere phenomena known as the polar vortex can send icy blasts from the Arctic into the middle latitudes, chilling Europe, Asia and parts of North America. The disturbance and its effects have persisted for an unusually long time this year, said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, with two disruptions of the polar vortex so far this year and, potentially, a third on the way. ...Research into the interplay of the complex factors that bring on blasts from the polar vortex is ongoing, but climate change appears to be part of the mix. ...The United States  has already seen heavy snowfa...

https://eos.org/articles/what-a-new-executive-order-means-for-curbing-methane-emissions Source:  By Rishika Pardikar, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: On 20 January, the new administration of President Joe Biden issued  an executive order  calling for consideration of new methane regulations in the oil and gas sector. More stringent regulations could be a major part of climate change mitigation, as the United States is the world’s  largest producer of natural gas  with  steadily increasing production . ...Biden’s executive order comes just days after the release of a  Methane Tracker  report released by the International Energy Agency on 18 January. “Regulatory action to reduce methane emissions is more important now than ever before.…[Because] oil and gas will continue to be part of the energy mix for years to come, even in rapid clean energy transitions, it is crucial for the oil and gas industry to be proactive in limiting, in all ways possible, the e...

https://eos.org/articles/drought-not-war-felled-some-ancient-asian-civilizations Source:  By  Richard J. Sima , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Radiocarbon dating, luminescent sand grains, and climate records point to drought as the reason for the civilizations’ demise. When we read about the fall of ancient civilizations in history books, we may think of warfare and other struggles on the human stage as leading causes for a culture’s decline. But climate change also accounts for many a society’s ruin. Such seems to be the case for the central Asian civilizations of the Otrār oasis located at the junction of the Syr Darya and Arys Rivers in what is now southern Kazakhstan. In a  new study  published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, an interdisciplinary team of researchers report that the Otrār oasis had already been in a prolonged period of decline long before the Mongols invaded. ...The clues lie in irrigation canals...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/01/28/general-motors-electric/ Source:  By  Steven Mufson , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Big U.S. automaker says it will invest heavily in electric vehicles and be carbon neutral by 2040. GM chief executive Mary Barra, who antagonized many climate experts by embracing President Donald Trump’s relaxation of fuel efficiency targets, said Thursday the company now wants to lead the way to a greener future. “As one of the world’s largest automakers, we hope to set an example of responsible leadership in a world that is faced with climate change,” Barra said on LinkedIn. GM has said it would invest $27 billion in electric vehicles and associated products between 2020 and 2025, outstripping its spending on conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles. That figure includes refurbishing factories and investing in battery production in conjunction with LG Chem, a South Korean battery maker. ...As part of its plan, GM — maker...

https://eos.org/features/climate-change-uproots-global-agriculture Source:  By  Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In much of the world, climate change is altering regional growing conditions and making them more unpredictable. ... Small farms , which account for about 90% of the world’s 570 million farms, are particularly vulnerable to changes in seasonal climate. Land tended by families for generations may suddenly become  nonarable . A change in the timing or intensity of yearly rainy seasons or the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), for example, could bring rains or drought that wipe out a family’s crops. In early May 2020, the Nzoia River burst its banks. The floods that resulted in western Kenya capped off particularly heavy  long rains  that killed 237 people and adversely affected more than 800,000. Floods and landslides destroyed homes, schools, roads, bridges, and more than 8,000 acres (32 square kilometers) of Kenyan farmland. Kenya...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/01/25/ice-melt-quickens-greenland-glaciers Source:   By  Chris Mooney ,  Andrew Freedman , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Global ice loss has increased rapidly over the past two decades, and scientists are still underestimating just how much sea levels could rise, according to alarming  new   research  published this month. From the thin ice shield covering most of the Arctic Ocean to the mile-thick mantle of the polar ice sheets, ice losses have soared from about 760 billion tons per year in the 1990s to more than 1.2 trillion tons per year in the 2010s, a  new study  released Monday shows. That is an increase of more than 60 percent, equating to 28 trillion tons of melted ice in total — and it means that roughly 3 percent of all the extra energy trapped within Earth’s system by climate change has gone toward turning ice into water....  

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/trump-downplayed-costs-carbon-pollution-s-about-change Source: By  Paul Voosen , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Carbon pollution is about to get a lot more expensive. Over the past 4 years, the Trump administration low-balled the “social cost of carbon”—a number representing the burden that carbon emissions place on present and future generations, in terms of the cost of floods, droughts, farming losses, and death. The low estimate served to justify a permissive approach to regulating greenhouse gases, whether through power plant emissions rules or appliance efficiency standards. But now the cost—the price per ton of emitted carbon dioxide  (CO 2 )   methane, and nitrous oxide—is set to rise drastically. On 20 January, its first day in office, the Biden administration recreated an interagency working group (IWG) and  ordered it to update  the social cost of carbon within 30 days. Many economists believe the cost, set ...