Tag: climate change

Farmers Don’t Need to Read the Science. We Are Living It.

New York Times logoA new report is another dire warning on climate change.

FIREBAUGH, CALIFORNIA — Many farmers probably haven’t read the new report from the United Nations warning of threats to the global food supply from climate change and land misuse. But we don’t need to read the science — we’re living it.

Here in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, there’s not much debate anymore that the climate is changing. The drought of recent years made it hard to ignore; we had limited surface water for irrigation, and the groundwater was so depleted that land sank right under our feet.

Temperatures in nearby Fresno rose to 100 degrees or above on 15 days last month, which was the hottest month worldwide on record, following the hottest June ever. (The previous July, temperatures reached at least 100 degrees on 26 consecutive days, surpassing the record of 22 days in 2005.) The heat is hard to ignore when you and your crew are trying to fix a broken tractor or harvest tomatoes under a blazing sun. As the world heats up, so do our soils, making it harder to get thirsty plants the water they need.

View the complete August 9 commentary by U.S. farmer Alan Sano on The New York Times website here.

Sea level rise is combining with other factors to regularly flood Miami

Washington Post logoThe city is running out of options to deal with it.

It doesn’t take a hurricane to cause flooding in Miami anymore. In fact, it doesn’t even take a gust of wind.

“King tides” have been taking a toll on Miami for a number of years, and the phenomenon is only getting worse because of sea-level rise from human-induced climate change. A king tide is a higher -than-normal tide caused by specific alignments of the sun and moon.

Miami set daily high tide records for more than a week straight for the period bridging late July and early August, despite a total lack of storminess in the region.

View the complete August 8 article by Matthew Cappucci on The Washington Post website here.

As climate reckoning arrives over agriculture, USDA’s scientists face censorship

With this week’s IPCC report set to take a hard line on agriculture, USDA could see heightened scrutiny.

A government climate scientist who says the Trump administration buried a groundbreaking report he authored has left the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in protest over the “political views” top officials allegedly imposed on his work.

Politico reported Monday that Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist who worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) for more than 20 years, quit due to an increasingly political atmosphere at the agency. Ziska had worked on a major rice study last year, one that found rising levels of carbon dioxide could imperil the critical source of sustenance for some 600 million people globally. According to Ziska’s work, the mineral and protein content in rice, along with key vitamins, is expected to drop as greenhouse gas levels rise.

Agency scientists have accused department officials of seeking to bury that report, among others, in keeping with President Donald Trump’s stance denying and downplaying climate change. USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue has similarly dismissedglobal warming as “weather patterns.”

View the complete August 5 article by E.A. Crunden on the ThinkProgress website here.

Eden Prairie talks climate change, from the Community Center to Washington, D.C.

On the idyllic summer evening of July 30, nearly 70 people gathered indoors at the Eden Prairie Community Center to talk about how to save such days for future generations.

It was a community conversation on climate change, hosted by State. Rep. Laurie Pryor, DFL-Minnetonka, and both residents and elected officials turned out in force. Among them was Rod Fisher, a member of the local Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) chapter that had recently sent 20 members to Washington, D.C., to discuss bipartisan legislation to mitigate climate change; and Lia Harel, a recent Eden Prairie High School graduate and member of the climate activism group Minnesota Can’t Wait.

The mood was focused, and every speaker − including Eden Prairie Mayor Ron Case and City Council member PG Narayanan, State. Rep Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, DFL-Eden Prairie, and State. Sen. Steve Cwodzinski, DFL-Eden Prairie − expressed the urgency they felt as activists and United Nations reports alike call for immediate and far-reaching changes to prevent dramatic environmental shifts.

View the complete August 6 article by Eden Teller on the SW News Media website here.

Here’s how the hottest month in recorded history unfolded around the world

Washington Post logoDuring the hottest month that humans have recorded, a local television station in the Netherlands aired nonstop images of wintry landscapes to help viewers momentarily forget the heat wave outside.

Officials in Switzerland and elsewhere painted stretches of rail tracks white, hoping to keep them from buckling in the extreme heat.

At the port of Antwerp, Belgium, two alleged drug dealers called police for help after they got stuck inside a sweltering shipping container filled with cocaine.

View the complete August 5 article by Brady Dennis and Andrew Freedman on The Washington Post website here.

Climate Could Be an Electoral Time Bomb, Republican Strategists Fear

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — When election time comes next year, Will Galloway, a student and Republican youth leader at Clemson University, will look for candidates who are strong on the mainstream conservative causes he cares about most, including gun rights and opposing abortion.

But there is another issue high on his list of urgent concerns that is not on his party’s agenda: climate change.

“Climate change isn’t going to discriminate between red states and blue states, so red-state actors have to start engaging on these issues,” said Mr. Galloway, 19, who is heading into his sophomore year and is chairman of the South Carolina Federation of College Republicans. “But we haven’t been. We’ve completely ceded them to the left.”

View the complete August 2 article by Lisa Friedman on The New York Times website here.

A Perfect Storm

Center for American Progress logoExtreme Weather as an Affordable Housing Crisis Multiplier

Overview

Extreme weather events fueled by climate change are exacerbating the intertwined crises of affordable housing and homelessness and thus require timely intervention by federal, state, and local governments.

Authors’ note: The disability community is rapidly evolving to using identity-first language in place of person-first language. This is because it views disability as being a core component of identity, much like race and gender. Some members of the community, such as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, prefer person-first language. In this report, the terms are used interchangeably.

Introduction and summary

Weeks after Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle last fall, leaders of the local recovery initiative estimated that as many as 20,000 residents of Bay County—more than 1 in 10 residents in the community of 185,000—were experiencing homelessness as a result of the storm.1 Rental homes make up nearly three-fourths of the community’s damaged properties, and when residents scrambled to find new places to live, they discovered that rents had skyrocketed due to the sudden supply shortage.2 The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been slow to provide temporary homes—which are only offered for up to six months—and is approving very few extension requests for the small number of residents lucky enough to receive temporary housing.3 As a result, many residents are living in structures that are not fit for human habitation, including damaged homes and tents, while others wait and wonder what will happen when the clock runs out on their FEMA housing.4

View the complete August 1 article by Guillermo Ortiz, Heidi Schultheis, Valerie Novak and Aleah Holt on the Center for American Progress website here.

We don’t have 12 years to save the climate. We have 14 months.

The deadline for protecting our children from a ruined climate is close at hand.

Scientific reality makes clear that the only plausible way to preserve a livable climate — and hence modern civilization — starts with aggressive national and global cuts in carbon pollution by 2030.

But political reality makes clear that such cuts can’t happen instantly — and that global action requires leadership from the United States. After all, the U.S. is the richest country in the world and the biggest cumulative source of heat-trapping emissions over the past century.

With eight years of a pro-science president, Barack Obama, the nation made steady progress on reducing emissions and committing to future reductions, enabling a global climate deal in Paris in 2015. But with just two and a half years of an anti-science administration, national and global progress have both stalled under President Donald Trump, who has begun to abandon the Paris Accord and undermine action here and abroad.

View the complete July 26 article by Joe Romm on the ThinkProgress website here.

Deadly Fungal Infection Emerged Because of Global Warming, Study Says

A new study on the mysterious origins of a deadly fungal infection that seemed to have simultaneously emerged in far-flung corners of the globe finds that global warming may be to blame.

Candida auris, a fungus that can kill anyone who comes into close contact with a carrier, was first identified in 2009 in a Japanese patient with an ear infection. It then started showing up in hospitals in Asia, Africa and South America in patients without a clear link — and no one could figure out why.

“The greatest mystery is how you end up with the same fungal species emerging in three different continents at roughly the same time when they are genetically different,” says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of the molecular microbiology and immunology department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He’s also the lead author of the new Candida auris study, published Tuesday in the journal mBio.

View the complete July 24 article by Sanya Mansoor on the Time website here.

Historic heat wave is double whammy for climate change

The Hill logoNearly two-thirds of the U.S. is expected to be hit by a massive weekend heat wave, forcing energy companies to brace for maxed out grids and potential blackouts.

It will also create a spike in carbon emissions, as the use of fossil fuels by people seeking to cool down expands.

In Texas, the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic and New England, states are facing historic heat advisories, with temperatures expected to reach into the 100s in some places.

View the complete July 19 article by Miranda Green on The Hill website here.