Climate Change Altering Droughts, Impacts Across U.S.
As a major drought devastated the West and Midwest beginning in 2012, farmers racked up billions of dollars in crop losses and water managers grappled with possible water shortages for millions of people as reservoirs dried up in the heat. That drought is now gone. But scientists have found that the dry spell showed unusual wild extremes of … Read More
Desert Basins Could Hold ‘Missing’ Carbon Sinks
Deserts across the globe may contain some of the world’s “missing” carbon sinks — land masses scientists had not previously identified that absorb carbon from the atmosphere, according to researchers at China’s Lanzhou University. A study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience found that closed, or endorheic, basins in deserts — areas… Read More
Sharp Uptick in Wildfires Strains Great Plains Agencies
Arizonans evacuated as wildfire approached heat wave-parched subdivisions northeast of Phoenix on Thursday followed a drill that’s becoming agonizingly commonplace through a vast stretch of America’s interior. A satellite analysis published by scientists this week showed the number of large wildfires burning up swaths of the Great Plains rose 350… Read More
The U.S. Hit a Wind and Solar Power Milestone in March
Ten percent of all of the electricity generated in the U.S. in March came from wind and solar power, marking the first such milestone in U.S. history, according to a new U.S. Energy Information Administration report. The EIA estimates that wind and solar farms likely generated 10 percent of America’s electricity in April as well, which would be … Read More
U.S. Left as ‘Footnote’ in G7 Climate Talks
Rifts between the United States and its leading industrial allies over climate change deepened on Monday when Washington refused to subscribe fully to a Group of Seven statement on the environment. The U.S. said it would not sign up to a pledge by Italy, Canada, Japan, France, Britain and Germany which called the 2015 Paris agreement on climate … Read More
India’s Punishing Heat Waves More Deadly With Warming
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Heat waves in India have become more extreme and significantly more deadly even with the relatively moderate amount of human-driven warming that has occurred over the past few decades, new research shows. Coming on the heels of President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the landmark Paris agreement, which seeks to limit that warming to 2°C… Read More
West Coast Waters on Acid Trip; Fishing Industry in Peril
Hotspots of ocean acidification have been found in the waters that wash onto the shores of the West Coast, a major concern for the region’s billion dollar fishing industry as well as the region’s potentially fragile coastal ecosystems. A new study of a 600-mile span of coastline found some of the lowest pH levels ever measured on the ocean surface… Read More
Protecting Ocean Waters Will Aid Climate Adaptation
Setting aside vast swathes of ocean and protecting them from industrial uses such as overfishing and other development is critically important to helping both the earth and countries adapt to climate change, a global team of marine biologists says. Large marine reserves can also help prevent some of the worst effects of climate change by helping … Read More
