Climate

Professor Joanne Chory at the Salk Institute, where she leads her Ideal Plant project. Photograph: John Francis Peters

Dr Joanne Chory hopes that genetic modifications to enhance plants’ natural carbon-fixing traits could play a key role – but knows that time is short, for her and the planet

theguardian.com - by Adam Popescu - April 16, 2019

If this were a film about humanity’s last hope before climate change wiped us out, Hollywood would be accused of flagrant typecasting. That’s because Dr Joanne Chory is too perfect for the role to be believable.

The esteemed scientist – who has long banged the climate drum and now leads a project that could lower the Earth’s temperature – is perhaps the world’s leading botanist and is on the cusp of something so big that it could truly change our planet.

She’s also a woman in her 60s who is fighting a disease sapping her very life.

Outside the small village of Chicua, in the western highlands, in an area affected by extreme-weather events, Ilda Gonzales looks after her daughter.

newyorker.com - by Jonathan Blitzer - Photography by Mauricio Lima - April 3, 2019

. . . In most of the western highlands, the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when. “Extreme poverty may be the primary reason people leave,” Edwin Castellanos, a climate scientist at the Universidad del Valle, told me. “But climate change is intensifying all the existing factors” . . . Farming, Castellanos has said, is “a trial-and-error exercise for the modification of the conditions of sowing and harvesting times in the face of a variable environment.” Climate change is outpacing the ability of growers to adapt.

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Figure 1: Trends in TWS (in centimetres per year) obtained on the basis of GRACE observations from April 2002 to March 2016. The cause of the trend in each outlined study region is briefly explained and colour-coded by category. The trend map was smoothed with a 150-km-radius Gaussian filter for the purpose of visualization; however, all calculations were performed at the native 3° resolution of the data product.

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Emerging trends in global freshwater availability

trend.pewtrusts.org - by Jay Famiglietti - March 13, 2019

Global changes are altering where and how we get fresh water, sparking the need for worldwide cooperation.

The availability of fresh water is rapidly changing all over the world, creating a tenuous future that requires attention from policymakers and the public . . .

Ocean heatwaves destroy kelp forests, which provide food and shelter for many other species. Photograph: Thomas Schmitt/Getty Images

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Marine heatwaves threaten global biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services

Extreme temperatures destroy kelp, seagrass and corals – with alarming impacts for humanity

theguardian.com - by Damian Carrington - March 4, 2019

The number of heatwaves affecting the planet’s oceans has increased sharply, scientists have revealed, killing swathes of sea-life like “wildfires that take out huge areas of forest”.