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Growing numbers of people are going hungry as climate change accelerates, report finds
The Independent
The world is seeing record sea level rises and devastating floods, storms, heat waves and wildfires as climate change impacts grow, a United Nations (UN) report has said.
The organisation’s secretary general Antonio Guterres said “there is no longer any time for delay” on tackling climate change as the World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) state of the climate 2018 report was published.
The physical signs of climate change and the impacts on people are accelerating as record greenhouse gas concentrations drive global temperatures to increasingly dangerous levels, the report said.
Bloomberg
The Rockefeller Foundation intends to disband its 100 Resilient Cities initiative, the largest privately funded climate-adaptation program in the U.S., according to people familiar with the foundation’s plans.
The program was started by Rockefeller in 2013 to help U.S. cities — including Boston, Miami, New York and Los Angeles — as well as cities overseas prepare for threats related to climate change. Rockefeller plans to close the organization’s offices and dismiss its staff of almost 100 as soon as this summer, said the people, who asked to be anonymous because they weren’t authorized to discuss the move.
The Rockefeller Foundation didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did 100 Resilient Cities, which operates as a separate entity.
Science Magazine
Rising global temperatures are making Greenland feel a bit more like the United Kingdom—and that’s bad news for the ice sheet that covers the massive arctic island. Rain is becoming more frequent, melting ice and setting the stage for far more melt in the future, according to a new study. Even more disturbing, researchers say, is that raindrops are pockmarking areas of the ice sheet even in the dead of winter and that as the climate warms, those areas will expand.
“This is what climate change looks like, it’s the ‘Atlantification’ of the Arctic,” says climate scientist Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen, who was not involved in the study. “This paper identifies a really important mechanism and we need to figure out how it plays into our predictions of sea level rise.”
Philly.com
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a sweeping report Friday on back bay flooding in New Jersey that singles out climate change as a “significant” contributor and says coastal communities face a combined average of nearly $1.6 billion a year in damage in the future if steps aren’t taken.
The report, called the “New Jersey Back Bays Coastal Storm Risk Management Study,” analyzes engineering, economic, social and environmental issues surrounding flooding in the back bays, defined as tidal waterways located landward of the Atlantic Ocean coast in Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic, Burlington, and Cape May Counties. In all, it’s a 950-square-mile area that includes 3,400 miles of shoreline.
Washington Post
MIDDLETOWN, N.C. — The salty patches were small, at first — scattered spots where soybeans wouldn’t grow, where grass withered and died, exposing expanses of bare, brown earth.
But lately those barren patches have grown. On dry days, the salt precipitates out of the mud and the crystals make the soil sparkle in the sunlight. And on a damp and chilly afternoon in January, the salt makes Dawson Pugh furrow his brow in dismay.
“It’s been getting worse,” the farmer tells East Carolina University hydrologist Alex Manda, who drove out to this corner of coastal North Carolina with a group of graduate students to figure out what’s poisoning Pugh’s land — and whether anything can be done to stop it.
Of climate change’s many plagues — drought, insects, fires, floods — saltwater intrusion in particular sounds almost like a biblical curse. Rising seas, sinking earth and extreme weather are conspiring to cause salt from the ocean to contaminate aquifers and turn formerly fertile fields barren.
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