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April 12th, 2016

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The 10.1 million acres that burned in the United States last year were the most since before 1960, and the top five years for acres burned since then were in the past decade. The federal costs of fighting fires rose to $2 billion last year, up from $240 million in 1985.

"We take our job to protect the public seriously, and recently, the job has become increasingly difficult due to the effects of climate change, chronic droughts and a constrained budget environment in Washington," Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, said in a statement, noting that seven firefighters died and 4,500 homes burned in wildfires in 2015.

Randi Jandt, a fire ecologist with the federally funded Alaska Fire Science Consortium, resists the term "year-round fire season" because Alaska and other places still have months with snow cover. She has adopted an alternative that she said reflects the more intense nature of recent fires.

"I'm worried about a runaway fire season," Ms. Jandt said. The term captures the idea that dry conditions could lead to fires that simply burn out of control, she explained, as some almost did last summer, Alaska's second-largest fire season on record, after 2004.

The issue has led to disagreements among many fire ecologists about how best to attack the problem. Some argue that fires should be left to take their natural course and clear out the thick, dry brush on the forest floor. But that approach has run into a challenge: More and more people are moving into wild lands.

Retirees and urbanites seeking more pastoral settings are pushing farther into places that firefighters must now protect. And these modern-day settlers have been supported by municipalities looking to expand their tax bases, and by technology that lets people live and work anywhere they can get an Internet connection, said Ray Rasker, the executive director of Headwaters Economics, a research organization that provides consulting services to communities and governments on fire prevention.

"It's a wonderful new world, where I can live anywhere I want," Mr. Rasker said, echoing an opinion he said he had often heard. "I want to live in the woods, but the woods are now flammable, much more flammable than they used to be."

"It adds up to more people dying, more houses burning, and agencies devoting more than half of their fire budget to defending homes," he said.

Hawaii, for example, exhausted in February the annual allocation of money it had set aside to fight wildfires, four months before the busy summer fire season. The United States Forest Service spent more than half of its entire budget on firefighting last year, at the expense of programs aimed at minimizing the risk of fires in the wild, such as planned burns of overgrown patches.

The agency finds itself caught in a troubling cycle: With budgets squeezed for treating forests to help prevent fires, it inevitably has to spend more money putting them out.

By key measures, fire season has grown significantly longer in the past 30 years. Dr. Jolly's research shows that the season, measured by how many days are hot and dry enough to increase the likelihood of fire, has lengthened by 30 to 45 days across big patches of the United States, notably the West.

By another measure, the time between the first and last large fires in a year, the length of the season in the West has increased by 78 days since the 1970s.

Firefighters in the United States and abroad have been trying different approaches. In the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Manitoba, which recorded more than twice as many fires last year than their 25-year averages, fire season started on March 1, a month ahead of the norm.

Alaska has also moved up its fire season, defined by the date that permits are required for residential yard or other refuse burning, to April from May. Increasingly, fire crews are making calculated decisions to let fire consume the land, concentrating their efforts on safeguarding communities and watersheds - and, in turn, minimizing the risks they face.

"More and more, fire crews are pulling back, willing to sacrifice land for safety," said Stephen J. Pyne, a professor at the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and one of the country's foremost fire historians.

Firefighters and state officials also face pressure to cut costs. But while firefighters are adapting as they can, "putting their efforts where the values are higher," as Mr. Pyne put it, states are struggling.

This year in Washington State - where a combination of drought, warm temperatures and dense forests made for a long and costly wildfire season last year - Peter Goldmark, public lands commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources, asked the State Legislature for an extra $24 million to train more firefighters, put more equipment into the hands of local fire districts and help homeowners clear brush from their properties. He got $6.7 million.

"Given the wet winter, it's hard to persuade people we may be entering a time of hotter, drier summers, and we need to be ready," Mr. Goldmark said.

Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change

He is preparing for "another very difficult fire season," he said. A large stretch of the Southwest, from Texas and New Mexico down through southern Arizona and into Nevada and California, has already been warned by national forecasters to prepare for an "above normal" risk of significant wildfires through July.

Clay Templin, fire and aviation manager for the Forest Service's Eastern Regional Office, which covers 17 national forests from Missouri to Maine, said that parts of the territory the office oversees, such as the White Mountains in New Hampshire, are now at risk of fire. That traditionally did not happen because "there was a whole lot more snow on the ground," he said.

Early last month, a fire broke out in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Northern Arizona, consuming about 600 acres of land that are usually moist in the winter.

"It's too early for fire in these parts," said James Molesa, chief deputy of the Navajo County Sheriff's Office.

Dry grass ignited in the forest when someone - officials have not identified the person - was shooting for practice at an oxygen tank, which then exploded, sending sparks flying, Chief Deputy Molesa said.

The flames traveled along some of the same area that burned in a big fire 14 years ago, though that fire happened in June, during the state's traditional fire season - another sign, fire officials said, of the changing conditions they face.

At the Arizona Wildfire and Incident Management Academy, where three classes of firefighters trained last month for their first season, instructors emphasized the value of a strategy known as "indirect attack," the safest and most common method to fight today's large, hot and volatile blazes.

The strategy calls for crews to carve a so-called fire line - buffer zones devoid of anything that burns - away from the edge of the fire, and then to burn the vegetation that stands in between, depriving the flames of the fuel that feeds them.

Dean Steward, a supervisor at the academy, said that fires were small enough 20 years ago that dirt trails, such as those used by all-terrain vehicles in the wild lands, were enough to stop them.

"Now," Mr. Steward said, "you can put a six-lane highway between your crew and the fire and, still, the fire will jump it."

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Wildfires, Once Confined to a Season, Burn Earlier and Longer

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The 10.1 million acres that burned in the United States last year were the most since before 1960, and the top five years for acres burned since then were in the past decade. The federal costs of fighting fires rose to $2 billion last year, up from $240 million in 1985.

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April 11th, 2016

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YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - Thanks in part to El Niño, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is greater than it has been in years. With the winter snowfall season winding down, California officials said that the pack peaked two weeks ago at 87 percent of the long-term average.

That's far better than last year, when it was just 5 percent of normal and Gov. Jerry Brown announced restrictions on water use after four years of severe drought. But the drought is still far from over, especially in Southern California, where El Niño did not bring many major storms.

Despite the better news this year, there are plenty of worrying signs about the Sierra snowpack, which provides about 30 percent of the water Californians use after it melts and flows into rivers and reservoirs, according to the state Department of Water Resources.

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Mohammad Safeeq and Erin Stacy from the University of California, Merced, measuring snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, an important water source. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Many of those concerns stem from the effects of climate change and the structure of Sierra forests, which can influence how the snowpack accumulates and melts. Because the snow, in effect, serves as a reservoir that is released over time, any changes can affect how much water is available for people, industry and agriculture, and when.

"We'll be getting more rain and less snow here," said Roger C. Bales, a professor at the University of California, Merced, and a principal investigator with the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory, which studies snowpack and other water-related issues. "That means less snowpack storage and faster runoff."

Dr. Bales was standing on a snowy slope in Yosemite last Thursday, at about 7,000 feet elevation, just off a 19th-century wagon road that is used by hikers and snowshoers. Nearby, amid car-size granite boulders and close to a soaring Ponderosa pine, were instruments that he and his fellow researchers use to obtain detailed information about the snowpack in several spots throughout the southern Sierra.

Roger C. Bales, a principal investigator with the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory, checking on instruments at Gin Flat, where there are monitoring stations that record moisture conditions in snowpack. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The effects of warmer temperatures can already be seen here, Dr. Bales said.

"Historically, this has been the reliable snow zone, where it accumulates till late March or early April and then melts," he said. But now the snowpack here is more like that at lower elevations, "where it will accumulate, melt, accumulate, melt," he said.

Proof was close at hand, as well. Until the last quarter-mile of a two-mile hike here from 6,300 feet, snowshoes were not needed. What snow remained was in small patches.

Similar effects of climate change have been seen throughout the Sierra, including at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, which is operated by the University of California at Berkeley near the Donner Pass, about 120 miles to the north. Researchers there still make some measurements the way they have since the lab started in the 1940s, by inserting special metal tubes into the snow.

A pole used to measure snow depth. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

"We are seeing an ever-increasing percentage of annual and winter precipitation in liquid rather than solid form," said Randall Osterhuber, who spends winters at the lab. The altitude above which snow accumulates is becoming higher as temperatures warm. "That change in elevation means a lot less terrain is covered in snow."

Climate change is also expected to increase precipitation in some areas, because warmer air can hold more moisture. But it is not yet clear if that will be the case in the Sierra Nevada.

Snowpack is measured in "snow water equivalent," or how much water would result if the snow were melted. When snow first falls in the Sierra, it is usually dry and powdery, with about 10 to 12 percent moisture by volume, but as it accumulates and compresses, the moisture content rises to about 40 percent. So 30 inches of snow on March 30 would be equivalent to about 12 inches of water.

The data from Dr. Bales's instruments will not be downloaded until later in the spring, but just up the slope, other instruments set up by the Department of Water Resources send data continuously to state offices in Sacramento. Last Thursday, they recorded a water equivalent of 18.36 inches. With warm spring temperatures, the snowpack here was past its peak, with the water equivalent declining by more than three inches in less than two weeks.

The Department of Water Resources instruments are set up in a relatively open part of the forest. The observatory's instruments, by contrast, are near the Ponderosa pine, and there are three of them: one next to the trunk, one a little farther away where water drips from the tips of the branches, and one in the open, about 20 feet away. Other sensors, which are buried, detect how much water is in the ground.

The goal is to gather a complete picture of the snowpack, which is far from a uniform blanket of white. A tree, for example can affect snow cover in several ways, Dr. Bales said. Some snow is caught by the branches and turns directly to vapor. Other flakes melt and the water drips to the ground. The tree trunk itself absorbs sunlight and re-emits it as heat, melting the snow around it. Boulders do the same thing. Even the tiniest pieces of forest litter - needles or bits of pine cones - can heat up in the sunlight and cause melting.

"We're strategically sampling the landscape," Dr. Bales said. "We pretty much know what topographic features affect snowpack." That will give water managers a truer understanding of how much water the snowpack will generate.

Trees also affect the amount of water stored in the mountains simply by growing, sucking up water from the ground. Some of it is used in photosynthesis, but much of it is lost through evaporation and transpiration through the leaves and stems. Dr. Bales and his colleagues study this, too, with instruments atop towers that measure the flow of water vapor from the tree canopy.

The scientists learned that a lot of water was lost through the trees - more than was even thought to be there in some cases. "That told us the precipitation estimates that people had for higher elevations were just plain wrong," Dr. Bales said.

Warmer temperatures also mean that trees grow faster, and don't necessarily shut down for the winter. Thus they use more of the melting snow, and over a longer period. That leaves less water to flow into streams and down to reservoirs.

Less snow, earlier melting and faster growth mean that more trees are running out of water in the summer. Mohammad Safeeq, a colleague of Dr. Bales at the university, said that, in general, water was flowing off the mountains two weeks earlier than in the past. "Two weeks in a three-month summer window is significant," he said.

Water-stressed trees are more susceptible to pests and disease, so one result of the changes is more tree deaths. This is readily apparent at Yosemite in the drive from the valley floor, where the green hillsides are dotted - in some cases in large numbers - with the brown of dead pines and firs.

Contributing to the problem is the fact that there are many more trees here than there used to be. A century ago, Dr. Safeeq said, Yosemite had perhaps 20 trees an acre; now the number is closer to 100. That means more of the melting snowpack never gets off the mountain to the valley below, he said. The greater number of trees is due in part to years of forest agency policies under which small natural fires were quickly extinguished to protect homes and other property in the mountains.

But smaller, less intense fires are nature's way of thinning the forest, culling trees that are less fire-resistant, said Martha H. Conklin, a Merced professor and another principal investigator with the observatory. Paradoxically, because fire suppression leaves so much timber on the mountains, it can lead to much bigger and hotter fires, like the Rim Fire that burned 250,000 acres in and around Yosemite and destroyed more than 100 structures in 2013.

Fire suppression is a controversial subject in California. But thinning the forest by letting small fires run their course would increase snowpack because more of the snow would reach the ground, and less of the water would be taken up by the trees. That could be, in effect, like adding an entire new reservoir of water in the mountains, rather than building a new billion-dollar reservoir down in the valley.

If small fires were allowed to burn, Dr. Conklin said, "you'd have a forest of a very different structure." Even the types of trees would eventually change, she said, as species that are better able to resist fire replaced others. "I don't know if we can ever go back to a forest that has a natural fire regime," Dr. Conklin said. "It's very difficult to let a fire burn if you have houses dispersed in the forest."

But with climate change affecting how much water is available from the mountains, she added, "we have to think about how we're going to manage these forests."

Correction:

An article on Tuesday about the effects of climate change on California's mountain snowpack paraphrased incorrectly from comments by Mohammad Safeeq, a researcher at the University of California, Merced, about the density of trees in the Sierra Nevada now compared with a century ago. Sierra forests now average about 100 trees an acre, not 250, he said; and a century ago they had about 20 trees an acre, not 80.

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Sierra Nevada Snow Won't End California's Thirst

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YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - Thanks in part to El Niño, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is greater than it has been in years. With the winter snowfall season winding down, California officials said that the pack peaked two weeks ago at 87 percent of the long-term average.

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April 9th, 2016

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SYDNEY, Australia - Kim Cobb, a marine scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, expected the coral to be damaged when she plunged into the deep blue waters off Kiritimati Island, a remote atoll near the center of the Pacific Ocean. Still, she was stunned by what she saw as she descended some 30 feet to the rim of a coral outcropping.

"The entire reef is covered with a red-brown fuzz," Dr. Cobb said when she returned to the surface after her recent dive. "It is otherworldly. It is algae that has grown over dead coral. It was devastating."

The damage off Kiritimati is part of a mass bleaching of coral reefs around the world, only the third on record and possibly the worst ever. Scientists believe that heat stress from multiple weather events including the latest, severe El Niño, compounded by climate change, has threatened more than a third of Earth's coral reefs. Many may not recover.

Coral reefs are the crucial incubators of the ocean's ecosystem, providing food and shelter to a quarter of all marine species, and they support fish stocks that feed more than one billion people. They are made up of millions of tiny animals, called polyps, that form symbiotic relationships with algae, which in turn capture sunlight and carbon dioxide to make sugars that feed the polyps.

An estimated 30 million small-scale fishermen and women depend on reefs for their livelihoods, more than one million in the Philippines alone. In Indonesia, fish supported by the reefs provide the primary source of protein.

"This is a huge, looming planetary crisis, and we are sticking our heads in the sand about it," said Justin Marshall, the director of CoralWatch at Australia's University of Queensland.

Bleaching occurs when high heat and bright sunshine cause the metabolism of the algae - which give coral reefs their brilliant colors and energy - to speed out of control, and they start creating toxins. The polyps recoil. If temperatures drop, the corals can recover, but denuded ones remain vulnerable to disease. When heat stress continues, they starve to death.

Damaged or dying reefs have been found from Réunion, off the coast of Madagascar, to East Flores, Indonesia, and from Guam and Hawaii in the Pacific to the Florida Keys in the Atlantic.

The largest bleaching, at Australia's Great Barrier Reef, was confirmed last month. In a survey of 520 individual reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef's northern section, scientists from Australia's National Coral Bleaching Task Force found only four with no signs of bleaching. Some 620 miles of reef, much of it previously in pristine condition, had suffered significant bleaching.

In follow-up surveys, scientists diving on the reef said half the coral they had seen had died. Terry Hughes, the director of the Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland, who took part in the survey, warned that even more would succumb if the water did not cool soon.

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Bleached coral off New Caledonia in the Pacific last month. Credit XL Catlin Seaview Survey

"There is a good chance a large portion of the damaged coral will die," he added.

Scientists say the global bleaching is the result of an unusual confluence of events, each of which raised water temperatures already elevated by climate change.

In the North Atlantic, a strong high-pressure cell blocked the normal southward flow of polar air in 2013, kicking off the first of three warmer-than-normal winters in a row as far south as the Caribbean.

A large underwater heat wave formed in the northeastern Pacific in early 2014, and has since stretched into a wide band along the west coast of North America, from Baja California to the Bering Sea. Nicknamed the Blob, it is up to four degrees Fahrenheit warmer than surrounding waters, and has been blamed for a host of odd phenomena, including the beaching of hungry sea lions in California and the sighting of tropical skipjack tuna off Alaska.

Then came 2015, with the most powerful El Niño climate cycle in a century. It blasted heat across the tropical and southern Pacific, bleaching reefs from Kiritimati to Indonesia, and across the Indian Ocean to Réunion and Tanzania on Africa's east coast.

"We are currently experiencing the longest global coral bleaching event ever observed," said C. Mark Eakin, the Coral Reef Watch coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Maryland. "We are going to lose a lot of the world's reefs during this event."

Reefs that take centuries to form can be destroyed in weeks. Individual corals may survive a bleaching, but repeated bleachings can kill them.

Lurid reports of damaged reefs started coming in from worried scientists in the summer of 2014.

Lyza Johnston, a marine biologist in the Northern Mariana Islands, dived to the reefs off Maug, a group of small islands: "In every direction, nearly all of the corals were bright white."

Misaki Takabayashi, a marine scientist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, surfed the waves above the blue rice coral there: "I could see what looked like bleached white ghosts popping up off the ocean floor at me."

Cory Walter, a senior biologist at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, peered down from a boat over Wonderland Reef off the Lower Florida Keys: "It almost looks like it snowed on the reef."

Predicting the duration of the bleaching or forecasting the next one is difficult. The Blob has cooled somewhat, and El Niño, while weakening, is expected to stretch into 2017.

Dr. Eakin, the coral-reef specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said he expected the bleaching to continue for nine more months. Scientists will not be able to measure the full extent of the damage until it is over.

What is clear is that these events are happening with increasing frequency - and ferocity. The previous bleachings, in 2010 and 1998, do not appear to have been as extensive or prolonged as the current one.

The 1998 bleaching, which Dr. Eakin said had been set off by a fierce El Niño, killed around 16 percent of the world's coral. By 2010, oceans had warmed enough that it took only a moderate El Niño to start another round.

Then in 2013, Dr. Eakin said, "a lot of bleaching happened due to climate change, before the El Niño had even kicked in."

Reefs that were bleached in 2014, like those in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, had no time to regenerate before suffering further thermal stress from El Niño last year, leaving the coral vulnerable to disease and death.

The reefs in the Florida Keys "are about to go into a third year straight of bleaching, something that has never happened before," said Meaghan Johnson, a marine scientist at the Nature Conservancy. "We are worried about disease and mortality rates."

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of Australia's Global Change Institute, noted that 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded, both on land and in the oceans - breaking a record set just the year before.

"Rising temperatures due to climate change have pushed corals beyond their tolerance levels," he said, adding that back-to-back bleaching can be particularly deadly to the corals.

El Niño warms the equatorial waters around Kiritimati Island more than anywhere else in the world, making it a likely harbinger for the health of reefs worldwide. That is why Dr. Cobb, the Georgia Tech scientist who made the recent dive, has been making the trek at least once a year for the past 18 to the tiny atoll, part of the Line Islands archipelago.

Though the atoll sits just north of the Equator, trade winds suck water up from the depths of the ocean, usually keeping the water temperature surrounding the reefs a healthy, nearly constant 78 degrees.

But in 2015, the expected upwelling of deep, cold water did not happen, Dr. Cobb said, speaking by satellite phone after her dive. So water in the atoll was 10 degrees warmer than normal, and never cooled enough to allow coral to recover.

"The worst has happened," she said. "This shows how climate change and temperature stresses are affecting these reefs over the long haul. This reef may not ever be the same."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate-Related Death of Coral Around World Alarms Scientists. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Climate-Related Death of Coral Around World Alarms Scientists

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SYDNEY, Australia - Kim Cobb, a marine scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, expected the coral to be damaged when she plunged into the deep blue waters off Kiritimati Island, a remote atoll near the center of the Pacific Ocean.

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April 5th, 2016

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In May 2009, Ari Friedlaender, an ecologist with Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, was cruising along the Western Antarctic Peninsula when he encountered something he'd never seen. In Wilhelmina Bay, the water was so thick with humpback whales that "we couldn't count them fast enough," he recalls.

In the end, he and his colleagues counted 306 whales feeding on an immense aggregation of krill. It was the highest density of humpbacks ever documented in the region.

The humpback population has been recovering ever since commercial hunting was banned in 1966. But the whales are also being helped by another factor: climate change.

In the past, there wouldn't have been any humpbacks at all in Wilhelmina Bay in May, because the sea would have been covered with ice. The whales typically departed their feeding grounds along the Western Antarctic Peninsula by April, migrating thousands of miles north to spend the winter breeding in tropical waters.

But the sea ice is now advancing nearly two months later than it did in the 1970s and retreating a month earlier. Humpbacks can now stay in the Antarctic much later in the season and follow the krill moving inshore in large aggregations. Since that 2009 expedition, Friedlaender has been hearing the whales sing late in the season, a sign that they might be starting to breed right in Antarctic waters, without waiting to migrate north. That would be a fundamental change in their life history.

"We are just beginning to paint the picture of how quickly and well the humpback whales are able to use this habitat that was probably not available to them in the recent past," Friedlaender says.

It's not just humpbacks, and not just the Antarctic: Around the planet, as whale populations recover from commercial hunting, they're coming back to a different world. In the Arctic, north of the straits that connect it to the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, the seasonal open-water period has increased over the past thirty years by between one-and-a-half and three months.

For species such as polar bears, which depend on ice for their feeding behavior, that's bad news. But humpbacks and other large whale species are benefitting from the change-at least for now.

In the North Pacific off British Columbia, the humpback population has been growing steadily at a rate of about 7 percent per year and is now estimated at more than 21,000 animals. Two years ago the Canadian government downlisted the population from "threatened" to "species of special concern."

In both the Pacific and the Atlantic, sub-Arctic species such as humpback and fin whales are spending more time in the Arctic waters around the Bering, Davis, and Fram Straits. Over the past five years researchers using underwater hydrophones to record whale calls have documented the increase in "summer" whales.

"Recovering populations of summer whales are taking advantage of a productive and more open Arctic," says Sue Moore, a biological oceanographer with the Marine Ecosystems Division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The retreat and the thinning of the sea ice, she says, has led to increased and earlier blooms of microscopic plant plankton. They in turn feed an increase in the tiny crustaceans-copepods and krill-that feed the whales.

Like their Antarctic relatives, the North Pacific humpbacks are staying late on the Arctic feeding grounds. "They might be up there still in November," Moore says, "when people in Hawaii are starting to think that humpbacks should be coming down their way for mating."

Bowhead whales, which spend their whole lives in and around the Arctic, are feeding better these days too. "It is a good time to be a bowhead," Moore says.

The Alaska population, which migrates between the Bering Sea and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, had been reduced to just a few thousand animals when commercial whaling ended in 1910. It now stands at 17,000. A population that lives in the waters off eastern Canada and Greenland is increasing too.

"It is dramatic," says Craig George, a senior wildlife biologist with the North Slope Borough's Department of Wildlife Management, who has monitored bowheads for the last 35 years in Alaska in partnership with the Inupiat hunters who still harvest bowheads. "The hunters say that back in the 1940s they would wait all day and see a couple of blows. Now it is hundreds of blows." George has also documented a marked improvement in the body condition of young bowheads between 1989 and 2011.

Bowhead, humpback, and fin whales all use the same environment, but for now, not at the same time. Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington has studied the whales in Disko Bay in West Greenland. "You see bowheads leave, and within a week humpbacks move in," she says. "It is amazing."

As the sea ice retreats and whales change the timing of their migrations, however, they may eventually overlap and start competing for food. Things could get confusing for bowheads and humpbacks, which are both remarkable singers, says Kate Stafford of the University of Washington: "Because bowheads are spectacular mimics, it wouldn't surprise me if a bowhead started sounding like a humpback."

Humans are moving into ice-free Arctic waters too-and though we don't hunt whales the way we used to, they're still threatened by our noise, by collisions with ships, by oil spills, and by entanglement with fishing nets. "Growing large whale populations and increased use of the Arctic is going to lead to conflict," says Laidre.

The effects of our carbon emissions are the biggest uncertainty in the whales' future. As sea ice continues to decrease, and as carbon dioxide acidifies the ocean, what has so far been an increase in their food supply could flip into a sharp decrease.

Krill, for example, are vulnerable to acidification, and they are dependent on sea ice: Young krill spend the winter underneath it, feeding on algae that grow on the underside. Though Friedlaender sailed into an unusually dense aggregation of krill in Wilhelmina Bay, large decreases in krill biomass have already been reported in other parts of the Antarctic.

The whales will face pressure to adapt to rapid changes. "They are very good at it," Moore says optimistically. "They are great oceanographers."

One example of that, and of the way whales themselves affect their environment, comes from recent research on blue whales. In the Southern Ocean, blue whales were almost extirpated in the 1920s. Now the population is growing by 7.3 percent per year. In another half century it could return to its historic high.

More whales means more whale feces, and whale feces is extremely rich in iron, an essential plant micronutrient that the Southern Ocean is notoriously short of. As the resurgent blue whales defecate near the sea surface, says marine biologist Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, the recycled iron triggers a phytoplankton bloom that feeds krill -which are then eaten by the whales.

"The blue whales are fertilizing factories," Smetacek says. "They're maintaining their habitat in large areas in the open ocean."

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Some Whales Like Global Warming Just Fine

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In May 2009, Ari Friedlaender, an ecologist with Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, was cruising along the Western Antarctic Peninsula when he encountered something he'd never seen. In Wilhelmina Bay, the water was so thick with humpback whales that "we couldn't count them fast enough," he recalls.

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March 30th, 2016

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For half a century, climate scientists have seen the West Antarctic ice sheet, a remnant of the last ice age, as a sword of Damocles hanging over human civilization.

The great ice sheet, larger than Mexico, is thought to be potentially vulnerable to disintegration from a relatively small amount of global warming, and capable of raising the sea level by 12 feet or more should it break up. But researchers long assumed the worst effects would take hundreds - if not thousands - of years to occur.

Now, new research suggests the disaster scenario could play out much sooner.

Continued high emissions of heat-trapping gases could launch a disintegration of the ice sheet within decades, according to a study published Wednesday, heaving enough water into the ocean to raise the sea level as much as three feet by the end of this century.

With ice melting in other regions, too, the total rise of the sea could reach five or six feet by 2100, the researchers found. That is roughly twice the increase reported as a plausible worst-case scenario by a United Nations panel just three years ago, and so high it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.

The situation would grow far worse beyond 2100, the researchers found, with the rise of the sea exceeding a pace of a foot per decade by the middle of the 22nd century. Scientists had documented such rates of increase in the geologic past, when far larger ice sheets were collapsing, but most of them had long assumed it would be impossible to reach rates so extreme with the smaller ice sheets of today.

"We are not saying this is definitely going to happen," said David Pollard, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of the new paper. "But I think we are pointing out that there's a danger, and it should receive a lot more attention."

The long-term effect would likely be to drown the world's coastlines, including many of its great cities.

New York City is nearly 400 years old; in the worst-case scenario conjured by the research, its chances of surviving another 400 years in anything like its present form would appear to be remote. Miami, New Orleans, London, Venice, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia, are all just as vulnerable as New York, or more so.

In principle, coastal defenses could be built to protect the densest cities, but experts believe it will be impossible to do that along all 95,000 miles of the American coastline, meaning that immense areas will most likely have to be abandoned to the rising sea.

The new research, published by the journal Nature, is based on improvements in a computerized model of Antarctica and its complex landscape of rocks and glaciers, meant to capture factors newly recognized as imperiling the stability of the ice.

The new version of the model allowed the scientists, for the first time, to reproduce high sea levels of the past, such as a climatic period about 125,000 years ago when the seas rose to levels 20 to 30 feet higher than today.

That gave them greater confidence in the model's ability to project the future sea level, though they acknowledged that they do not yet have an answer that could be called definitive.

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Another view of icebergs calving from Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica in 2014. Researchers found that total rise of the sea could reach five or six feet by 2100. Credit Jim Yungel/NASA

"You could think of all sorts of ways that we might duck this one," said Richard B. Alley, a leading expert on glacial ice at Pennsylvania State University. "I'm hopeful that will happen. But given what we know, I don't think we can tell people that we're confident of that."

Dr. Alley was not an author of the new paper, though it is based in part on his ideas about the stability of glacial ice. Several other scientists not involved in the paper described it as significant, with some of them characterizing it as a milestone in the analysis of huge ice sheets and the risks they pose in a warming world.

But those same scientists emphasized that it was a single paper, and unlikely to be the last word on the fate of West Antarctica. The effort to include the newly recognized factors imperiling the ice is still crude, with years of work likely needed to improve the models.

Peter U. Clark of Oregon State University helped lead the last effort by a United Nations panel to assess the risks of sea level rise; he was not involved in the new paper. He emphasized that the research, like much previous work, highlighted the urgency of bringing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under control.

A large iceberg separated from Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier in November 2013. The new model, for the first time, successfully reproduced high sea levels of the past. Credit NASA, via Corbis

Dr. Clark described the new work as "a really important paper that adds to the growing recognition that in the absence of rapid and strong mitigation of carbon emissions, we are in store for a large sea level rise at rates that may be even faster than has been considered."

It was his panel that had estimated an upper limit of three feet or so on the likely sea level rise in the 21st century, while specifically warning that a better understanding of the vulnerability of Antarctic ice could change that estimate.

The new research is the work of two scientists who have been at the forefront of ice-sheet modeling for years. They are Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Dr. Pollard, who is a colleague of Dr. Alley's at Penn State.

In a lengthy interview on Monday, Dr. DeConto recounted years of frustration. The computer program he had built in a long-running collaboration with Dr. Pollard showed increasing sophistication in its ability to explain the behavior of ice sheets, but it had some trouble analyzing the past.

Unless global temperatures were raised to unrealistic levels, the model would not melt enough ice to reproduce the high sea levels known to have occurred in previous periods when either the atmosphere or the ocean was warmer. The ability to reproduce past events is considered a stringent test of the merits of any geological model.

"We knew something was missing," Dr. DeConto said.

The new idea came from Dr. Alley. He urged his colleagues to consider what would happen as a warming climate attacked huge shelves of floating ice that help to protect and buttress the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Smaller, nearby ice shelves have already started to disintegrate, most spectacularly in 2002, when an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island, the Larsen B shelf, broke apart in two weeks.

The West Antarctic ice sheet sits in a sort of deep bowl that extends far below sea level, and if it loses its protective fringes of floating ice, the result is likely to be the formation of vast, sheer cliffs of ice facing the sea. These will be so high they will become unstable in places, Dr. Alley said in an interview, and the warming atmosphere is likely to encourage melting on their surface in the summer that would weaken them further.

The result, Dr. Alley suspected, might be a rapid shrinkage as the unstable cliffs collapsed into the water. Something like this seems to be happening already at several glaciers, including at least two in Greenland, but on a far smaller scale than may be possible in West Antarctica.

When Dr. DeConto and Dr. Pollard, drawing on prior work by J. N. Bassis and C. C. Walker, devised some equations to capture this "ice-cliff instability," their model produced striking results. In contrast to many prior attempts, it suddenly had no difficulty recreating the high sea levels of past warm periods.

The obvious next step was to ask the model what might happen if human society continues to warm the planet by pouring huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The answer the scientists got is described in their paper in the dry language of science, but it could easily serve as the plot device of a Hollywood disaster movie. They found that West Antarctica, which is already showing disturbing signs of instability, would start to break apart by the 2050s.

Vulnerable parts of the higher, colder ice sheet of East Antarctica would eventually fall apart, too, and the result by the year 2500 would be 43 feet of sea level rise from Antarctica alone, with still more water coming from elsewhere, the computer estimated. In some areas, the shoreline would be likely to move inland by miles.

The paper published Wednesday does contain some good news. A far more stringent effort to limit emissions of greenhouse gases would stand a fairly good chance of saving West Antarctica from collapse, the scientists found. That aspect of their paper contrasts with other recent studies postulating that a gradual disintegration of West Antarctica may have already become unstoppable.

But the recent climate deal negotiated in Paris would not reduce emissions nearly enough to achieve that goal. That deal is to be formally signed by world leaders in a ceremony in New York next month, in a United Nations building that stands directly by the rising water.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ice-Sheet Melt Seen Harming Cities by 2100. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly

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For half a century, climate scientists have seen the West Antarctic ice sheet, a remnant of the last ice age, as a sword of Damocles hanging over human civilization. The great ice sheet, larger than Mexico, is thought to be potentially vulnerable to disintegration from a relatively small amount of global warming, and capable of raising the sea level by 12 feet or more should it break up.

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March 25th, 2016

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SAN FRANCISCO - Robert Reed, who is enjoying a surprising career turn as a busy tour guide at the latest hot spot here, stood smiling one recent sunny morning before 10 foreign dignitaries and journalists. They included the mayor of Genoa, Italy, and the general consuls from Italy, Canada and Switzerland.

Each visitor wore a sport coat and tie, and a yellow safety vest to ensure they wouldn't be run down by garbage trucks.

"It's always nice to meet new friends from around the world," Mr. Reed said in his introduction, beaming. "In fact, we've had visitors from 58 countries." Behind him stood a warehouse filled with a 630-ton mountain of refuse being pecked by sea gulls. "Come on," Mr. Reed continued, "I'll show you the bottles, cans and paper."

You won't find San Francisco's Pier 96 in any travel guidebook but it has become a must-see destination for visitors from Afghanistan to Vietnam. They've come to explore Recology - Mr. Reed is a spokesman - one of the world's most advanced recycling plants, a deafening, Rube Goldberg system of conveyor belts and sorters that, with the help of human hands, untangles a 30-foot hill of debris collected by trucks every day from across the city.

"It's like a modern art installation," marveled Mauro Battocchi, the Italian consul general here. "So fabulous - the people and machines and objects of our lives all working together."

Foreign officials and others come here to pick up tips on how to handle their own mushrooming piles of garbage back home. As the world's population grows, people are consuming more, creating more trash, and countries are looking for ways to deal with it that put less stress on the environment.

Many are part of a growing movement sometimes called Zero Waste or the Circular Economy. It entails trying to eliminate tough-to-recycle items like flimsy plastic bags and also pioneering new ways to recycle or compost everything else. Often, cities around the world have led the way, including Portland, Ore.; Seattle; and Milan, as well as the Basque region in Spain. That has given rise to a trash tourism circuit.

Recycling sites "don't have to market themselves," said Jessica Morrison, an environmental policy analyst for the Fraser Valley Regional District in British Columbia, who helped organize a tour in 2014 for a dozen officials to visit a recycling plant in Montgomery, Ala. "People like us are knocking down the doors."

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Marco Doria, left, the mayor of Genoa, Italy, with Robert Reed of Recology during a tour of the recycling plant last month. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times

And the interest remains despite strained recycling economics caused by falling oil prices. That has driven down the cost of new commodities, like plastic, and, in turn, the price of recycled materials sorted and sold by companies like Recology.

More broadly, skeptics contend that the energy and other resource costs required to recycle some items are not worth the investment. But the visitors to Recology tend to be among the converted, who believe that incineration and landfilling carry their own devastating, long-term ecological costs.

Recology, a private company, gets most of its operating budget from the monthly fee of $35.18 it charges each household for residential trash, recycling and compost.

Mr. Reed says the Recology operation is cost effective, at least by one measure: San Franciscans pay the same amount or less than residents of other Bay Area big cities do for curbside pickup, but they compost or recycle a greater percentage of their garbage.

This success is partly why San Francisco's plant has achieved something approaching celebrity status, with numerous write-ups, including a big spread in France's Le Monde newspaper; visits from some 50 film crews, mostly for television; and roles in two major movies: the 2012 documentary " Trashed," featuring the British actor Jeremy Irons, and the popular new French documentary " Demain," about solutions to global problems.

San Francisco has become a recycling model for some cities, including Paris. The city's deputy mayor, Mao Peninou, visited in October 2014 and said Recology's composting now serves as a proof-of-concept for new Parisian efforts along the same lines.

Recology continues to draw visitors even though it is "not state of the art," said Jack Macy, the Zero Waste coordinator for San Francisco. He acknowledged that other places have pulled ahead with newer technology, and noted that San Francisco itself originally drew inspiration from Germany, which was recycling and beginning to compost in the 1980s.

Today, San Francisco diverts around 80 percent of waste away from landfills, putting it among the elite recycling cities. (And Recology plans to spend $11 million to upgrade its facility in the next year to deal with more packaging from online shopping.)

San Francisco also has a world-class reputation for its composting processes, which turns food waste into fine, coffee-like grounds that is sent to farms as fertilizer.

The Recology tour starts at Pier 96, an industrial hub at the city's southern edge, inside the doors of a cavernous, 200,000-square-foot warehouse.

The first step is the separation of all recyclable garbage, with tractors scooping up piles and pouring them onto five conveyor belts. It travels up to the first culling level, where human "classifiers" wearing masks, gloves and aprons pull out the biggest pieces of cardboard and drop them down chutes where they are baled.

A few feet later, everything else bustles up a fast-moving moving ladder that carries the lighter paper to the top, while heavier cans and bottles fall back down. The bottles and cans are then divided.

Farther along, an optical sorter uses a beam of light to determine which plastic bottles are clear and which ones are colored. The clear ones are flipped off the belt by puffs of air.

"It's Willy Wonka's everything-you-can-imagine recycling place," Mr. Reed said during the recent tour. The former freelance reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle loves talking about recycling and composting so much that it is as enjoyable "as a woman asking if she can give me a back rub." he says.

Mr. Reed likes to explain that Recology is a private, employee-owned company that has created around 210 jobs, most of them drawn from Bayview-Hunters Point, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, where the plant is.

"It's the Silicon Valley of recycling," said Christian Forthomme, chief executive of RealChange, a Bay Area-based consulting firm that brings foreign executives and officials to visit Silicon Valley, including four delegations to Recology in the past six years.

One group included Bruno Hug de Larauze, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Brittany, France, who likens Recology to an Uber or Airbnb for waste that shows how technology and capitalism can change the world. Plus, the place is just impressive, Mr. de Larauze said.

"It was the wow effect. It was incredible," he said of his first visit (he's been twice), and added with a laugh, "It smelled, let me be frank."

After the tour with Genoa's mayor and the consuls general, Mr. Reed organized a lunch of salad with French and Italian cheeses. As they sat down to eat, Mr. Reed raised the possibility of another destination for the group.

"I hope you'll get a chance to visit our composting facility," he told the dignitaries. "But we probably don't want to talk about that while you're eating."

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San Francisco, 'the Silicon Valley of Recycling'

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SAN FRANCISCO - Robert Reed, who is enjoying a surprising career turn as a busy tour guide at the latest hot spot here, stood smiling one recent sunny morning before 10 foreign dignitaries and journalists. They included the mayor of Genoa, Italy, and the general consuls from Italy, Canada and Switzerland.

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January 19th, 2015

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Update

Seventeen notable New York City hotels have committed to getting greener.

Marquee properties like the Waldorf Astoria New York, Grand Hyatt New York, Loews Regency New York and the Peninsula New York recently joined the NYC Carbon Challenge, a program Michael R. Bloomberg started as mayor in 2007 with the city's universities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Hospitals, commercial office buildings and multifamily residences were eventually added, and in late December, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the initiative would expand to include hotels.

This initial group of properties - accounting for more than 11,000 guest rooms - has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions from their buildings by 30 percent or more in the next 10 years, a move that could reduce emissions by more than 32,000 metric tons and save $25 million of energy operating costs. Buildings account for around 75 percent of greenhouse emissions in New York City, and getting the hospitality industry on board will significantly help to cut down on the city's overall emissions, said Nilda Mesa, the director of the Mayor's Office of Sustainability.

"Hotels are definitely a cause of emissions, and their involvement can have a big impact in achieving the goals of the NYC Carbon Challenge and the mayor's overall sustainability goals," she said. That broader vision, set forth by Mr. de Blasio in September 2014, is to reduce citywide greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

The Office of Sustainability worked with the Hotel Association of New York City, a trade group that represents 275 hotels in the city, to get the first group of properties to make a commitment.

Though 17 is a small number relative to the hotel association's members, its chairman, Vijay Dandapani, says that his group will continue to encourage more hotels to join the program.

"For the hotels who need it, we can connect them with environmental consultants and give them our best practices handout on going green," he said. "We hope that our help and the visibility of the hotels that have agreed so far gives others the push they need to sign up for the Challenge."

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The Grand Hyatt New York. Credit Grand Hyatt New York

In the interim, many of the properties that have committed to the project are already on their way to meeting its goals, and the changes they are making, for the most part, involve minor construction and are unlikely to affect their guests.

The Grand Hyatt New York, a 1,306-room hotel next to Grand Central Terminal, for example, is spending $160,000 to install exhaust controls in its four kitchens by the end of January that expend minimal energy when stoves and ovens aren't in use; the current exhausts, in contrast, operate constantly. Also, the hotel is spending $150,000 on 16,000 LED bulbs for its guest rooms and public areas, a project that is expected to be completed by the end of March.

But the biggest undertaking is the $2.3 million expenditure on a new building management system that controls air-conditioning and heat. "It will operate on demand-based ventilation that doesn't burn excess energy," said Ron McGill, the hotel's director of engineering. All told, he said, the three changes will reduce Grand Hyatt's carbon emissions by 2,400 metric tons annually.

Similar to the Grand Hyatt, other NYC Carbon Challenge hotels may have to financially invest in energy conserving upgrades, but their leadership realizes that they will save money in the long run.

The Peninsula New York. Credit The Peninsula New York

The Peninsula New York is spending around $250,000 to install LED lighting in the entire hotel, including the 235 guest rooms, by the end of 2017 and another $1.1 million in 2018 on eight new elevators that run with less energy. The money for both projects is worth it, said its general manager, Jonathan Crook. "It's a hefty sum up front, but it will save us money in the long run," he said.

The 1,415-room Waldorf Astoria New York, however, won't substantially reduce its carbon emissions so soon after joining the program until it has undergone a restoration, scheduled to begin in 18 to 24 months. "We'll replace our windows to make them more energy-efficient and try to make any aspect of the property more sustainable where it's possible," said Michael Hoffmann, the managing director. But while a major overhaul is still down the line, he said that the hotel has cut down its emissions by 20 percent since 2005 through a series of changes, such as switching to biodegradable packaging materials.

Like the Waldorf, tackling the issue of greenhouse gas emissions was already a priority for several of the properties before becoming a part of the NYC Carbon Challenge, but now they're intensifying their efforts.

The Westin New York at Times Square, for example, completed a three-year renovation late last year that prioritized energy conservation - the 873 guest rooms were retrofitted with low-flow showerheads, and energy-efficient boilers and coolers replaced older units. Since joining the Challenge, however, the entire building will be retrofitted with close to 9,000 LED bulbs, and all guest room bathrooms will have sensors that switch off lights after 30 minutes of inactivity. "We were already reducing our carbon footprint, but the Challenge is a reason to do more," said Sean Verney, the general manager.

And 1 Hotel Central Park, part of 1 Hotels, the sustainability-driven brand created by the Starwood Capital Group chairman and chief executive Barry Sternlicht, is using the goals of the Carbon Challenge as leverage to accomplish its own. Although LED lights, an energy-conserving air-conditioning system, recycled materials and a fleet of electric house cars from Tesla are hallmarks at the hotel, the company's director of impact, Michael Laas, said that powering the boiler with natural gas instead of diesel fuel will reduce the hotel's emissions a significant 27 percent. "We have been working with the city to get that change to happen and hope that being a part of the Carbon Challenge gets us there faster," he said.

The Westin at Times Square.

But while these moves from 1 Hotel Central Park and other NYC Carbon Challenge properties will most certainly be a factor in helping to meet the project's goals, they are not necessarily visible to hotel guests, who usually have the option of participating in their property's eco-conscious efforts with actions such as reusing their bath towels.

No matter, said Adam Weissenberg, the head of the travel, hospitality and leisure sector at Deloitte & Touche, because travelers, especially millennials, want the hotels they stay at to be helping the environment even if that help isn't tangible. "These changes may not be in their faces, but the guests who care will educate themselves about how their hotels are trying to be greener," he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page TR2 of the New York edition with the headline: New York Hotels Make a Green Pledge. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Update Seventeen notable New York City hotels have committed to getting greener. Marquee properties like the Waldorf Astoria New York, Grand Hyatt New York, Loews Regency New York and the Peninsula New York recently joined the NYC Carbon Challenge, a program Michael R.

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January 18th, 2016

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Are die-offs occurring more often?

To the casual reader, it can certainly seem that reports emerge on a regular basis of thousands of animals of a species suddenly dying.

The latest victims are common murres in the Northeast Pacific. They have been dying for months, but estimates of the toll jumped sharply when David Irons, a retired United States Fish and Wildlife Service biologist walking a beach in Whittier, Alaska, found close to 8,000 dead birds in early January.

Since then, scouting teams in boats from Fish and Wildlife, the United States Geological Survey and the Prince William Sound Science Center counted another 10,000 to 12,000 dead murres on beaches and in the open water of Prince William Sound, said Kathy Kuletz, a seabird specialist for the Alaska region with the Fish and Wildlife Service.

As with most die-offs, theories are close at hand. Murres weigh about two pounds and live in large groups, diving to feed on fish like juvenile pollock. In winter, they usually gather near the continental shelf, and they need to eat a lot to keep going, up to half their body weight in a day.

There are more than two million of them in Alaskan waters alone. But last year was not good for them.

The birds are emaciated and seem to be starving, according to the National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin, which has found no evidence of disease or toxins that could cause such deaths.

When there are changes in water temperature, as has been occurring in the Northeast Pacific, food fish may disappear.

Still, this die-off has surprised experts, because it has been going on for around a year and it covers such a vast area.

Most die-offs in the past have been more concentrated in time and space, said John F. Piatt, a seabird expert with the United States Geological Survey in Anchorage.

The effects of the current El Niño, a change in ocean currents, also have not yet reached Alaska. If history is any guide, El Niño means trouble to murres.

"I still don't think we've seen the worst," said Dr. Piatt, who said it was likely that 100,000 or more birds had died and speculated that if the worst happened, the deaths could reach into the many hundreds of thousands.

A tougher question for researchers is trying to understand how one population crash fits in with die-offs of other animals and whether die-offs have been increasing in recent years.

Certainly, there are remarkable recent events, like the death of half of all saiga antelope last year. And moose, bees and dolphins off the East Coast have also had die-offs in recent years.

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Katie Middlebrook and Guy Runco of the Bird Treatment and Learning Center in Anchorage, which has treated numerous emaciated murres. Credit Dan Joling/Associated Press

Samuel Fey, a researcher in biology at Yale University, was moved by news media attention of die-offs to research whether they were really increasing over time. "These individual events garner so much attention," he said. "They have shock and awe value."

So he and Stephanie Carlson, a specialist in environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a group of other researchers put together a database of more than 700 such events worldwide in 2,400 animal populations dating to the late 19th century.

Their analysis, published a year ago, showed that the magnitude of die-offs since about 1940 had increased. But in terms of frequency, all they could say was that reports of die-offs were certainly increasing.

They could not say whether the reports represented a real increase or just increased attention because, as Dr. Fey said last week after reports of the murre deaths, there is no central database of big die-offs of birds, fish, frogs and other animals.

He is, however, working to remedy this with Dr. Julie Lenoch, a veterinarian and deputy director of the National Wildlife Health Center of the geological survey in Madison, Wis.

The center does necropsies on wild animals sent to it by agencies like Fish and Wildlife and keeps track of what it finds. But, Dr. Lenoch said, "We only test samples we receive."

And because that is their only lens on the phenomenon of die-offs, they are handicapped in trying to answer bigger questions.

"Understanding both the cause and consequence of animal die-offs is critically important," she said, because disease may be involved, like rabies, West Nile or avian influenza, that could spread to farm animals, domestic animals or humans. Toxic chemicals may be a cause, and those can affect other animals and humans.

Or changes in climate or weather may be involved, and recognizing patterns could help prepare for future events and understand natural systems better.

Some databases exist now. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has one for oceanic wildlife. And the geological survey has a historical database of animal die-offs called Whispers that went online about a year ago. Separate databases are not adequate, however, Dr. Lenoch said. So she and Dr. Fey are hoping to have a meeting of representatives of state and federal agencies and others involved in animal care to begin work on creating a central database.

For the murres, there is nothing to be done other than observe, study and record the deaths, with an eye to understanding what they say about the effects of changes in the ocean.

The birds have a great capacity to rebound, said Dr. Piatt. From 1984 to 1985, he said, 95 percent of the common murres in the Barents Sea off Russia and Norway disappeared, apparently because of overfishing of capelin. Today, there are more of them there than ever.

On the other hand, when murres near the Farallon Islands off California had a population crash in 1983, some colonies almost vanished, and population growth was very slow after the die-off.

"Murres can rebound," Dr. Piatt said, "but sometimes, they don't."

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Animals Die in Large Numbers, and Researchers Scratch Their Heads

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Are die-offs occurring more often? To the casual reader, it can certainly seem that reports emerge on a regular basis of thousands of animals of a species suddenly dying. The latest victims are common murres in the Northeast Pacific.

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October 31st, 2015

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More than 40 of the nation's leading environmental and social justice groups demanded a federal investigation of Exxon Mobil on Friday, accusing the huge oil and gas company of deceiving the American public about the risks of climate change to protect its profits.

In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the groups, citing recent news reports, suggested that Exxon Mobil might be guilty of the same kind of fraud that the tobacco companies were found to have perpetrated when they hid the risks of smoking. Those violations ultimately cost the companies tens of billions of dollars in penalties.

The call for an investigation echoes demands made in recent days by three Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and by several Democrats in Congress.

Exxon Mobil rejected the comparison to the tobacco industry, declaring that it had helped to finance accurate scientific research about climate change and that it had made its research public from the 1970s to the present.

"There is a definite risk from climate change," the company's vice president for public affairs, Kenneth P. Cohen, said on Friday in an interview. "We have an unbroken record of participation in significant and serious scientific inquiry into this problem."

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Wyn Hornbuckle, said the department was reviewing the letter from the advocacy groups, but had no additional comment on it.

An investigation of Exxon Mobil on the climate issue would be politically touchy, given that many Republicans in Congress oppose action on climate change and would most likely come to the company's defense. The administration has walked a fine line in recent years, pushing stronger climate policies but avoiding overt battles with the oil companies, and continuing to approve drilling leases and permits.

The letter from the groups follows recent articles from two news organizations, Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times, about Exxon Mobil's role in blocking political action on global warming.

The broad outlines of the company's activities have been known for years. From the time the scientific community first began worrying about the climate issue in the 1970s, the company financed research on the topic, with its scientists generally supporting an emerging consensus that fossil fuel emissions could pose risks for society. Company scientists have contributed to dozens of scientific papers that supported this view and explored the extent of the risks.

But in the late 1990s - under a new chairman and chief executive, Lee R. Raymond - Exxon also joined with many business groups to try to block American participation in an international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol.

For at least a decade, it helped to finance right-leaning ideological organizations that not only fought the treaty, but also mounted attacks on climate science, raising lingering doubts in the public mind about whether the situation was as serious as most scientists believed it to be.

The recent news reporting has found, for example, that Exxon's senior leaders and board decided to go forward with their political activities even though they had been briefed extensively on the risks of global warming by the company's own scientists. (Exxon merged with Mobil in 1999.)

The letter sent on Friday drew a comparison to the activities of the major tobacco companies. In the 1950s and '60s, they financed internal research showing tobacco to be harmful and addictive, but mounted a public campaign that said otherwise, and helped finance scientific research later shown to be dubious. In 2006, the companies were found guilty of "a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public."

From what is publicly known so far, the Exxon situation appears to differ from the activities of the tobacco companies.

The science conducted by its in-house researchers has never been kept secret - company scientists have appeared as authors on more than 50 published papers on climate change - and has generally lined up with the findings of other climatologists. Exxon scientists have also participated extensively in the reports of the United Nations panel that periodically reviews and summarizes climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At least two company scientists, Haroon Kheshgi and William Landuyt, played active roles in the most recent series of I.P.C.C. reports, published in 2013 and 2014. Those reports warned of profound risks from climate change and an urgent need to rein in emissions.

Exxon has on occasion funded science that mainstream researchers considered to be dubious. It was, for example, one of several fossil fuel companies that financed the research of Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tried to show that recent climate change could be explained by solar variations. Dr. Soon's failure to disclose these ties was recently exposed in documents made public by environmental advocates.

Under rising criticism for its role in funding organizations that promulgated climate denialism, Exxon Mobil began scaling back such ties late in the last decade, and awarded its last grant to Dr. Soon in 2010. In a major shift, the company endorsed a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide in 2009.

Any effort to convict the company of fraud might involve trying to hold it responsible for the scientific statements of the advocacy groups it helped to finance, or for its own public statements about the Kyoto treaty or other government policies. Several experts said in interviews on Friday that, without compelling evidence of an intent to deceive, such advocacy would most likely be protected as free speech.

"A leading obstacle would be the First Amendment, as climate change is a matter of robust public debate," said John C. Coffee Jr., a law professor at Columbia University, who added that he was "not assuming that Exxon behaved honorably."

The letter to the Justice Department was signed by numerous environmental, justice and indigenous groups, including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the League of Conservation Voters. Among them was Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who has a track record of working closely with corporate leaders.

"We don't have all the facts about what Exxon knew, and we're not prejudging what happened," Mr. Krupp said in a statement. "But what several teams of journalists have reported is detailed, troubling, and deserving of further investigation."

Matt Apuzzo and Clifford Krauss contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Revelations Prompt Calls for Federal Investigation of Exxon Mobil . Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Exxon Mobil Accused of Misleading Public on Climate Change Risks

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More than 40 of the nation's leading environmental and social justice groups demanded a federal investigation of Exxon Mobil on Friday, accusing the huge oil and gas company of deceiving the American public about the risks of climate change to protect its profits.

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August 14th, 2015

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Opinion

FOR California, there hasn't ever been a summer quite like the summer of 2015. The state and its 39 million residents are about to enter the fifth year of a drought. It has been the driest four-year period in California history - and the hottest, too.

Yet by almost every measure except precipitation, California is doing fine. Not just fine: California is doing fabulously.

In 2014, the state's economy grew 27 percent faster than the country's economy as a whole - the state has grown faster than the nation every year of the drought.

California has won back every job lost in the Great Recession and set new employment records. In the past year, California created 462,000 jobs - nearly 9,000 a week. No other state came close.

The drought has inspired no Dust Bowl-style exodus. California's population has grown faster even as the drought has deepened.

More than half the fruits and vegetables grown in the United States come from California farms, and last year, the third growing season of the drought, both farm employment and farm revenue increased slightly.

Amid all the nervous news, the most important California drought story is the one we aren't noticing. California is weathering the drought with remarkable resilience, because the state has been getting ready for this drought for the past 20 years.

The future of water is going to be turbulent for all of us - not far away, but right where we live; not in some distant decade, but next month or next spring. A sense of water insecurity is coming to many places that have never had a water worry. Here's what California's scorching summer of 2015 is showing us: We know what to do. We just have to do it.

Cannon Michael, 43, is a sixth-generation farmer in California's Central Valley, growing tomatoes, cotton, melons and wheat on 10,000 acres of dirt that were part of the holdings of his great-great-great grandfather Henry Miller, a rancher who was known as the "Cattle King."

Mr. Michael returned to work the family farm in 1998, and has gradually transformed the mix of crops and how they are grown. In the past 10 years, he has spent $10 million installing drip irrigation on about half the land. When he grows tomatoes using drip hoses that squirt water right below where the plants emerge from the ground, he uses about 35 percent less water per acre than he would with traditional irrigation. But the plants produce more tomatoes - he says that he gets at least 70 percent more tomatoes per 1,000 gallons of water.

Mr. Michael isn't an isolated example. He's part of a trend. Since 1980, the amount of California farmland watered by drip- or micro-irrigation has gone from almost nothing to nearly three million acres, 39 percent of the state's irrigated fields. In perfect parallel, farmland that is flood-irrigated - using more water to produce less food - has fallen to about 3.5 million acres from more than six million.

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Some California farmers have turned to drip irrigation to reduce their water use. Credit Citizens of the Planet/Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

California's urban areas are also slowly transforming themselves. East of Los Angeles is a quietly innovative water district called the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, providing water for just under a million people.

The agency has an aggressive water recycling program, which cleans and resupplies 52 million gallons of water a day for an immediate second use, on farms, in factories and commercial laundries, in recharging the area's groundwater.

And although it is dozens of miles from the Pacific Ocean, the agency also desalinates water. The Inland Empire sits over an aquifer that has been polluted by a legacy of careless agricultural and human habitation. The desalination process removes chemicals and salt, turning 35 million gallons a day of tainted brine into water at least as clean as tap.

Those techniques expand Inland Empire's water supply without actually requiring any new water, and they represent the leading edge of an effort in Southern California toward "water independence." In water terms, California is famously a kind of teeter-totter: Most of the water is in the north, most of the people are in the south, and the water flows to the people.

But across Southern California, the progress is quietly astonishing. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California now supplies roughly 19 million people in six counties, and it uses slightly less water than it did 25 years ago, when it supplied 15 million people. That savings - more than one billion gallons each day - is enough to supply all of New York City.

California's resilience is fragile. It won't last another two years, it might not last another year.

And to say that the state is weathering the drought is not to trivialize the damage. This summer's wildfires - which have killed one firefighter, have already burned more acreage to date than last year's fires and have destroyed dozens of homes - are just one example.

In the town of East Porterville, in the central part of the state, the drinking wells began to go dry a year ago or more. Many residents rely on bottled water and water distributed at the fire station. Their taps, their toilets, their showers are dry - an astonishing level of deprivation in a state with great wealth.

Farm production numbers look good partly because prices for produce are high. Irrigation water, which comes from surface water sources mostly in the north, is allocated based on history, law and availability. Despite cuts of irrigation water of up to 100 percent, farmers have continued to get water, pumping it from aquifers under their land.

California is the only state in the nation that has never regulated groundwater - farmers are largely free to pump as much as they want, without even tracking what they use. In wet years, pumping well water is generally unnecessary and expensive. In dry years, it's survival.

In 2014, California farmers were able to substitute groundwater for 77 percent of the irrigation water they did not receive. In 2015, farmers are increasing their pumping by an astonishing one billion gallons a day, but the irrigation cuts are so severe that they will replace only 71 percent of their water.

The farmers are saving themselves now, but they are inflicting long-term damage to the vast underground water supply that is really California's only remaining water cushion.

In Pleasanton, Calif., recycled water is part of the effort to fight the drought. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

What can we learn from California's resilience in this drought? The first lesson goes back 20 years before it started, when cities began to put conservation measures in place - measures that gradually changed water use and also water attitudes. If cities look at the water they have - rainwater, reservoir water, groundwater, wastewater - as different shades of one water, they quickly realize that there's no such thing as "storm water" or "wastewater." It's all water. You can start giving yourself new water sources quickly by cleaning and reusing the water you've already got.

California's progress has been bumpy. The second lesson is that a drought starkly reveals water absurdities that need to be fixed, often urgently.

How can the largest agricultural economy in the country not require farmers to report how much water they use - and allow them to use groundwater without limit?

How can the water-starved city of Los Angeles have an elaborate system of drains and pipes to collect the rain that does fall - often in brief, intense torrents - only to discard it in the Pacific instead of storing it?

How can it be that in Sacramento nearly half the homes have no water meters? Residents don't know how much water they use and can't see how much they conserve if they want to.

And the third lesson is how to use water insecurity to create its opposite. A drought like this one creates the opportunity to change things - even really big things - that couldn't be changed without a sudden sense of vulnerability.

Last fall, prodded by Gov. Jerry Brown's administration, the California Legislature passed a sweeping groundwater law, taking California from having the least regulated groundwater in the country to being a model. The concept is simple: No community will be allowed to pump more water from the underground aquifers than can refill those aquifers - either naturally, or with human help.

The law is so innovative, it will eventually remake water use across the state, and if other states pay attention, across the nation. The law could inspire new techniques for getting rainwater to refill overtaxed aquifers.

In a similarly future-focused move, San Francisco just passed an ordinance to require that new buildings of a certain size have on-site water recycling systems, and reuse their own wastewater. It's the first city in the United States with such a requirement.

In May, the water district for all of Southern California decided to use the drought to change attitudes about lawns. It increased funding more than fivefold for a program that gives rebates to homeowners who replace their lawns with desert-appropriate landscaping. Las Vegas helped pioneer such "cash for grass" programs as a water-saving technique, removing 170 million square feet of turf - thousands of lawns - since 1999.

The response in Southern California, where $340 million was allocated for the program, stunned even experienced water managers. After five weeks, all the rebate money had been spoken for. The amount of turf set to be removed: about the same square footage that Las Vegas needed 16 years to take out.

For a century, California has pioneered innovations that have changed the way we all live. Without much fanfare, the state is doing that again, with water, moving to make standard what has been novel. A lawn landscaped with rocks and cactus instead of turf, morning coffee brewed matter-of-factly with recycled water, cities designed to return rainwater to the ground - these aren't just symbols, they are how you handle water when you understand its value.

One of the wonderful ironies of water is that the more attention you pay to it, the less you have to worry about it. By the drought of 2045, the way California uses water will have been transformed again. Just as powerfully, the way ordinary Californians regard water will have been transformed. More than any water conservation practice in particular, it's that attitude that will save the state - and the rest of us, as well.

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Opinion | How California Is Winning the Drought

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Opinion FOR California, there hasn't ever been a summer quite like the summer of 2015. The state and its 39 million residents are about to enter the fifth year of a drought. It has been the driest four-year period in California history - and the hottest, too.

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January 7th, 2016

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Oklahoma was rocked Wednesday night by two of the state's largest earthquakes in recent years, further fueling scientists' concern that the continued burial of oil and gas wastes in seismically active areas was courting a much more powerful earthquake.

The two quakes, measured at magnitudes 4.7 and 4.8, struck at 11:27 p.m. in rural northern Oklahoma, directly beneath a major oil and gas production area. The second quake, which came about 30 seconds later, was the fourth-largest recorded in the state. There were no reports of injuries or damage, the authorities said Thursday.

The two quakes followed a series of smaller ones last week that peeled brick facades, toppled columns and caused a power failure in Edmond, an upscale Oklahoma City suburb. Some experts said those quakes hinted at the possibility of a larger shock.

"I do think there's a really strong chance that Oklahoma will receive some strong shaking," said Daniel McNamara, a research geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado, who has followed the state's quakes.

Referring to the shocks that occurred Wednesday night, he added, "I'm surprised it didn't rupture into a larger event."

Five years ago, Oklahoma recorded three earthquakes of magnitude 3 - roughly the level at which shocks are felt - or greater. Last year, it recorded 907 quakes, or nearly two and a half a day - and that number was 50 percent higher than in 2014.

Virtually all the quakes are the result of slippage in faults that have effectively been lubricated by watery wastes from oil and gas production that have been pumped underground.

In a state where oil and gas carry immense economic and political clout, Gov. Mary Fallin and the State Legislature have left it to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which oversees the industry, to find a solution.

With no explicit authority to regulate seismic issues, the commission has persuaded producers to voluntarily follow a series of ever-stricter directives on waste disposal in earthquake zones. But while those orders appear to have curtailed earthquakes in some areas, the overall number has continued to soar.

Last month, a financially troubled producer in the northern oil and gas fields struck by Wednesday's quakes, SandRidge Energy Incorporated, broke industry ranks and refused the commission's request to scale back its underground waste disposal. The two sides are scheduled to meet on Friday in a final attempt to avert a court battle over the commission's authority.

Some critics charge that the state and the commission are moving too slowly and deferring too often to industry leaders, and that more sweeping action is needed.

Cory Williams, a Democratic state representative who has called for action on the issue, said it was unlikely that the Legislature, which is scheduled to meet this month, would act.

"Absent a catastrophic loss of life or property, there will be zero reaction from the Oklahoma House or Senate," he said in an interview. "They don't want to touch it. It's a third rail."

But Oklahoma's secretary of energy and environment, Michael Teague, said in an interview that regulators had sufficient power to rein in waste disposal and the full support of Ms. Fallin, a Republican.

"I don't think we need legislative action," he said. "We all know this is a problem we have to solve."

The president of the Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association, Chad Warmington, said he believed that the regulators' "measured" steps to rein in waste disposal in quake zones were working, but that there might be a lag between the cutbacks and a decrease in tremors.

In interviews, Dr. McNamara and two other scientists who have studied earthquakes in the state stressed that it was impossible to say with certainty whether larger shocks would follow. They added, however, that science and statistics suggest that the possibility is rising.

Both the quakes on Wednesday, and the earlier ones in Edmond, occurred in faults running northeast-to-southwest that are the most prone to slipping. A similar fault near waste-disposal wells produced a magnitude-5.7 earthquake in 2011 that was the largest in Oklahoma history.

Experts still do not know the size of the northern Oklahoma fault involved in the tremor Wednesday. But the Edmond fault, about 13 miles long, is capable of producing a shock as big as the record 2011 one, they said.

That quake damaged dozens of homes in rural Prague, but the effect in a heavily populated area would be much greater, they said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Earthquakes in Oklahoma Raise Fears of a Big One. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Earthquakes in Oklahoma Raise Fears of a Big One

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Oklahoma was rocked Wednesday night by two of the state's largest earthquakes in recent years, further fueling scientists' concern that the continued burial of oil and gas wastes in seismically active areas was courting a much more powerful earthquake. The two quakes, measured at magnitudes 4.7 and 4.8, struck at 11:27 p.m.

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January 5th, 2016

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A procession of storms pushing across the Pacific is bringing at least five days of rain and snow to California, a bit of relief for a state sapped by four years of drought.

Light rain began Sunday into Monday, and heavier back-to-back downpours are expected to pulse across the state and even into sections of the southwestern United States through Friday.

Forecasters said most of California will get about an inch of precipitation, a substantial amount for a state of its size, with parts of the southern half receiving as much as six inches.

"Basically, the rainy season is occurring, pretty much as scheduled," said David Roth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains could get more than a foot of snow, enlarging snowpack that plays a major role in meeting the state's water needs as it melts in the spring.

The storms are the first of a weather pattern expected to bring above-average rainfall to California over the next few months. It is linked to an unusually strong El Niño, a warming in the Pacific Ocean that alters weather around the world.

The storms carry dangers of flooding and mudslides, especially in areas made unstable by wildfires, as well as dangerously tall surf, and emergency response agencies across the state are warning residents to be prepared.

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Residents in Glendora, Calif., picked up sandbags on Monday. The area was the site of wildfires in 2014 and officials warned about a threat of mud and debris flows. Credit Watchara Phomicinda/Los Angeles News Group, via Associated Press

On Tuesday morning, commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area confronted flooded roads and several collisions, the California Highway Patrol said.

The Weather Service warned of waves rising as high as 15 feet in Southern California and up to 25 feet along the central coast, threatening to flood low-lying areas and damage structures like piers along the coastline.

This week's water is a welcome interruption in sunny California, but meteorologists noted that it would take several above-average rainy seasons to reverse the state's drought. Still, it helps.

"This is beneficial," said Mark Jackson, a meteorologist at the Oxnard, Calif., office of the National Weather Service. "All of California is receiving precipitation right now. There's no question about it, even though we can have damaging impacts that we have to watch for. At the same time we need the rain."

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Thanks to El Niño, Thirsty California Is Suddenly All Wet

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A procession of storms pushing across the Pacific is bringing at least five days of rain and snow to California, a bit of relief for a state sapped by four years of drought. Light rain began Sunday into Monday, and heavier back-to-back downpours are expected to pulse across the state and even into sections of the southwestern United States through Friday.

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January 4th, 2016

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Tropical diseases - some of them never before seen in the United States - are marching northward as climate change lets mosquitoes and ticks expand their ranges.

But that does not mean that epidemics will break out, scientists say. Whether a few cases explode into a full-fledged outbreak depends on a set of factors far more complex than the weather.

The list of scary bug-borne illnesses seems to get longer every year: Lyme, West Nile, Chagas, dengue, chikungunya - and now Zika, the first case of which turned up in Puerto Rico last week.

Some factors in the new spread are, for now, unstoppable, scientists say: the weather is hotter; cheap airfares mean humans travel more than they did decades ago; and cities in tropical countries are becoming more crowded, creating nurseries for each disease.

But other factors can be manipulated to stop outbreaks: insects can be killed; patients can be cured before they are bitten again; vaccines can be developed; and simple measures like screens, air-conditioning and bug spray can play big roles.

Brazil is now in a panic over Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that may be causing thousands of babies to be born with tiny heads and brains, a defect called microcephaly.

Until May, Zika had never touched this hemisphere except on Easter Island, 2,200 miles off the Chilean coast. Now it circulates in 14 Latin American or Caribbean countries and Puerto Rico.

Early last month, an official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted that Zika would follow the pattern in the United States that dengue has: many cases in Puerto Rico, followed by outbreaks in Florida, Gulf Coast states and maybe Hawaii.

But the C.D.C. is unwilling to predict the aftermath, including whether all outbreaks will be snuffed out before any babies will suffer.

"Information is pretty limited," Dr. Erin Staples, a C.D.C. epidemiologist for vector-borne diseases, said of Brazil's outbreak. "There hasn't been enough testing for Zika, so it's not known how many women have been infected."

Prominent virologists say Zika plays a role in microcephaly but they are not sure it is the only cause; it may depend, for example, on whether the mother was previously infected with dengue, a related virus.

How far the infection can spread in the United States will depend on whether the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, turns out to transmit it as efficiently as Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito.

The yellow fever mosquito is not usually seen much farther north than Washington, D.C., and Kentucky, but the chill-tolerant Asian tiger is sometimes found as far north as New York and Chicago.

Pest control will also be crucial. Florida's two dengue outbreaks - in Key West in 2010 and in Martin County in 2013 - were stopped by aggressive anti-mosquito measures, including aerial spraying, larvicide in ponds and neighborhood sweeps for containers that hold water.

Zika's arrival in this hemisphere only one year after chikungunya is "probably a coincidence," said Scott C. Weaver, the director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Both outbreaks demonstrate that illnesses do not inevitably follow weather patterns. They often follow linguistic or ethnic ones.

In this hemisphere, chikungunya was first seen in late 2013 on the island of St. Martin. It started on the island's French-speaking half and jumped to other Francophone islands and to French Guiana, Dr. Staples said.

Zika arrived on Easter Island in 2014. Although the island is Chilean territory, its original population was Polynesian. Zika has been island-hopping in the South Pacific since 2007.

Easter Island holds an annual festival that attracts Polynesians, who may have brought Zika with them. The virus probably reached Brazil by a different route, via the influx of tourists during the 2014 World Cup, or paddlers from French Polynesia who participated in a canoe race in Rio de Janeiro.

West Nile, which appeared in this hemisphere in 1999, famously exemplifies a virus moving independent of climate change.

The outbreak began in New York City, and the strain was 99 percent identical to an Israeli one, so many virologists believe it arrived in the blood of someone on a plane. The first cases were in Queens, home to Kennedy International Airport, so the virus might also have been hiding in a stowaway mosquito or, less likely, a bird.

West Nile spread slowly west, halting each winter as mosquitoes died off and the birds they fed on flew south. It took till 2005 to reach the Pacific Northwest.

Mosquito-borne pathogens are not the only ones on the move.

Ticks can carry more than 30 diseases, and some, including Rocky Mountain spotted fever, can be fatal. That infection, once banished from northern Mexico, is surging again and moving up into Arizona for the first time, according to Gerardo Alvarez, an epidemiologist at the University of Sonora.

Children, especially those who sleep beside dogs, are the hardest hit, and some Indian reservations in Arizona have held "rodeos" of the semiferal dogs that roam from house to house, putting tick collars on them.

Elsewhere in the United States, the Gulf Coast tick is expanding north, and other species that carry a combined 18 infectious bacteria are being found in new places.

The importance of living conditions and medical treatment is exemplified by malaria. It once was widespread in the South and ranged as far north as Boston in hot summers.

In this age of jet travel, almost 2,000 Americans return from overseas with malaria each year. But outbreaks do not occur because the victims are usually treated quickly, killing the parasites in their blood.

Further, most American homes have screens and air-conditioning, so their inhabitants get only a few bites a year, not the hundreds that a poor child living in a windowless shack in Rio or Mexico City might.

Zika's passage through the United States should be easier to follow than it was in Brazil, Dr. Weaver said.

Many Brazilians have had dengue or have been vaccinated against yellow fever. They have antibodies in their blood that cause false positive results on tests for Zika virus.

Very few Americans have those antibodies, so testing should be more effective. On the other hand, Zika produces symptoms like fever and rash far less often than dengue does, so it may be spread by silent carriers who feel well.

In 2009, Dr. Weaver was a co-author of a paper that foresaw the emergence of Zika virus in the Americas, although he envisioned Japanese encephalitis and Rift Valley fever as the greatest threats. He ranked Zika in the "also keep an eye on" category, with yellow fever and Mayaro virus.

"Zika may have changed in the past decade," he said. "It might have increased its transmissibility in Aedes aegypti or its ability to build up to high levels in the human bloodstream."

"In the scientific community, it caught many of us by surprise," he added. "Before 2007, Zika was pretty obscure."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Opening Door to Tropical Diseases. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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U.S. Becomes More Vulnerable to Tropical Diseases Like Zika

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Tropical diseases - some of them never before seen in the United States - are marching northward as climate change lets mosquitoes and ticks expand their ranges. But that does not mean that epidemics will break out, scientists say. Whether a few cases explode into a full-fledged outbreak depends on a set of factors far more complex than the weather.

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January 4th, 2016

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MANTUA TOWNSHIP, N.J. - Behind a Lowe's home improvement store here, scientists are methodically scraping and sifting through a quarry pit that may contain unique insights to the mass extinction that eliminated the dinosaurs.

Back then, about 66 million years ago, the oceans were higher, and this part of southern New Jersey was a shallow sea, 10 to 15 miles offshore from an ancient mountain range that rose from the water. Today's quarry pit was once the sea bottom, and one particular layer about 40 feet beneath the surface contains a bounty of fossils.

Kenneth J. Lacovara, a professor of paleontology and geology at nearby Rowan University, calls the layer a "mass death assemblage." He believes it may be the only known collection of animal remains that dates from the mass extinction itself.

It's just a hypothesis at the moment, and a tough one to prove. Dr. Lacovara and the university, which is to complete its purchase of the quarry this month, have deployed graduate students to meticulously catalog the fossils near in time to the mass extinction.

But they are not the only fossil hunters here.

Once a year for the past four years, the quarry has been opened to the public, and citizen paleontologists have come in droves - about 1,500 for the most recent community event last fall.

"I found a pile of rocks," said Alexandra Hopper of Mantua, one of the participants. "When we rinse them off, we're hoping some of them are fossils." The diggers kept the fossils they found, and there are plenty to go around. The doomed creatures in the pit were mostly clams and oysters. But the fossils of animals like crocodiles and sea turtles are here, too, as well as the occasional mosasaur, a ferocious aquatic lizard with two long teeth at the back of its throat that pointed toward its gullet, ensuring that any prey it swallowed would never struggle out.

Fossils are being found throughout the sediment that fills the pit, but the assemblage occupies a single concentrated layer. Bones and shells sometimes pile up when currents sweep dead sea creatures toward a particular eddy, where they accumulate over years or centuries.

But here the skeletons of the larger creatures remain largely intact. That suggests they all died at the same time and then settled gently on the sea bottom.

The dating of the fossil layer puts their deaths tantalizingly close in time to the impact of a meteor off what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Most paleontologists think that the climatic cataclysm that followed killed three-quarters of the species living on Earth - and all of the dinosaurs except those that evolved into birds.

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In a cordoned-off area, graduate students scraped through a layer of 66-million-year-old sediments, carefully cataloging the remains of a "mass death assemblage." Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times

A seeming paradox of mass extinctions is that scientists rarely find the remains of any of the billions of animals that died. All over the world, the bones of the last dinosaurs are almost always found well below the extinction layer, which is marked by iridium, an element concentrated in asteroids and comets.

For paleontologists, that is not a surprise, given the rare conditions needed to preserve fossils and the fact that world is not crammed with animals.

"Kill every deer in New Jersey and then try to find a dead deer, and you're not going to find one," said Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

A future paleontologist would struggle to find a bone bed or other signs of an instant die-off, "because the square footage of animals isn't very big compared to the square footage of the world," Dr. Johnson said.

And yet here in Mantua, there is a mass death assemblage close to 66 million years old. "It sounds silly, but is it the case that this pit in South Jersey, behind Lowe's, has the one window into this pivotal moment in time?" Dr. Lacovara said.

Finds and 'Bone Wars'

A century and a half ago, southern New Jersey was a hotbed of dinosaur discoveries. While scattered bones had been found in Europe, the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton - that of an 8-foot-tall, 14-foot-long duck-billed hadrosaurus - was dug up in a quarry in Haddonfield in 1858.

New Jersey became an early battlefield in the "bone wars," the ferocious competition between two pre-eminent American paleontologists of the 19th century, Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Othniel C. Marsh of Yale University.

Cope lived in Haddonfield and collected fossils in the area. After inviting Marsh for a visit, Cope claimed that his guest paid the Haddonfield quarry owners to send fossils to Yale, not to the academy.

In 1866, Cope described the bones of a meat-eating dinosaur, a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, found in another Mantua quarry. But he and Marsh shifted their attention to grander fossil sites in the West, and New Jersey's paleontological history faded.

In recent years, the most stunning dinosaur fossils have come from places as far away as Argentina, Mongolia and the Sahara. In 2014, Dr. Lacovara, then at Drexel University in Philadelphia, unveiled Dreadnoughtus, a behemoth unearthed in the Patagonia region of Argentina.

One of the amateur paleontologists shows a fossil of a Cucullaea clam that she found. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times

If not for the recession in 2007, the fossils in Mantua might be buried and out of reach.

For the better part of a century, the Inversand Company scooped a dark greenish sand called marl from the quarry for use in water treatment plants. But tightened environmental regulations turned that business into a money loser, and Inversand started looking to close the site.

A Mantua redevelopment plan called for filling the hole and building apartments and a shopping center on top. Almost six years ago, Dr. Lacovara proposed something different. He wanted to preserve the quarry, both as a dig site for paleontologists and as a museum for inspiring the younger generation.

Paleontologists had long known about the fossils in the quarry and in other marl pits in the region.

Inversand enthusiastically supported the idea. Bulldozers cleared out a section of the pit so that Dr. Lacovara and his students could meticulously excavate fossils, and there they uncovered the mass death assemblage.

Township officials wanted to buy the quarry, but did not have the $2 million that the 65-acre site would cost.

Inversand was spending several hundred thousand dollars a year keeping the pumps running to divert water that would otherwise flow in. An application for a state grant remained in limbo. And so last summer company officials told Dr. Lacovara that the pumps would be turned off at the end of the year.

"That was going to be it, and the quarry was going to be a lake by mid-January," he said.

Rowan turned out to be the savior.

After shipping the Dreadnoughtus skeleton back to Argentina at the end of 2014, Dr. Lacovara met with the university's president, Ali A. Houshmand. Dr. Houshmand lured Dr. Lacovara, who was a student there when it was Glassboro State College, with a promise to create a school of the earth and environment, of which Dr. Lacovara would be the founding dean.

For Dr. Lacovara, an essential part of the deal was for Rowan to buy the Inversand quarry. Dr. Houshmand agreed.

Sandbox for All Ages

In September, crowds filled the quarry for the fourth annual community fossil dig. They arrived in four waves, at appointed times, and Dr. Lacovara greeted each group.

This summer, the Inversand Company, which owned the quarry, decided it could no longer afford to maintain the site. Rowan University agreed to buy it. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times

"Who wants to find some fossils?" he exhorted. "Go have some fun." For this day, the quarry was a scientific sandbox for people big and small.

In a cordoned-off area, some of Dr. Lacovara's graduate students continued their work on the precious layer, explaining their finds to onlookers.

Elsewhere visitors scooped through the soil, presenting their finds to the experts, mostly the grad students, as if in a fossil version of " Antiques Roadshow " - except these heirlooms were millions of years old.

Some were just rocks, others hardened lumps of sand that came apart when squeezed. But there were thrilling exceptions.

"This is a brachiopod," one expert told Michael Lloyd, 8, of Mantua, describing a clamlike creature.

"Daddy, I found a brachiopod!" the discoverer shouted.

With the future of the quarry now safe, Dr. Lacovara envisions more fossil days and school trips and a visitors center overlooking the pit. "We really want to integrate this in the community," he said. "It's a living, changing place."

The hope is not necessarily to produce paleontologists, but to teach young people how to decipher the mysteries of the world.

"Kids start to think of science as a process," Dr. Lacovara said. "It's a way of asking questions about your world."

As for the possibility that he has found a dinosaur-era graveyard dating to the mass extinction, Dr. Lacovara is careful to say that he does not have convincing evidence yet.

"We are in the trying-to-poke-holes-in-it phase," he said. "There's going to be so many arrows aimed at that."

But it is a hypothesis worth pursuing.

"Certainly we have rocks that are near that time," he said. "I know we're damned close."

Correction:

An article on Tuesday about a quarry pit in New Jersey that contains many fossils referred incorrectly to a fossilized specimen of a brachiopod, a sea creature. Although it resembled a clam, it was not a mollusk. The article also referred incorrectly to the nature of the element iridium that identifies the rock layer corresponding to the mass extinction. Natural iridium is not radioactive.

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Behind a Shopping Center in New Jersey, Signs of a Mass Extinction

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MANTUA TOWNSHIP, N.J. - Behind a Lowe's home improvement store here, scientists are methodically scraping and sifting through a quarry pit that may contain unique insights to the mass extinction that eliminated the dinosaurs.

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October 28th, 2015

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ntil two years ago, if you had walked down to the shore of Maquoit Bay at low tide, you would have seen a meadow of eelgrass stretching nearly as far as the eye could see across the exposed seafloor. Here near the head of the bay, the sea grass stretched for two miles to the opposite shore, creating a vast nursery for the shellfish and forage species of Casco Bay, of which Maquoit is a part.

Now there's only mud.

Green crabs took over the bay in the late fall of 2012 and the spring and summer of 2013, tearing up the eelgrass in their pursuit of prey and devouring almost every clam and mussel from here to Yarmouth. Fueled by record high water temperatures in 2012 and a mild winter in 2013, the green crab population grew so huge that the mudflats of Casco Bay became cratered with their burrowing, and much of the Maquoit and adjacent Middle Bay bottom turned into a lunar landscape.

Eelgrass coverage in Maquoit Bay fell by 83 percent. With nothing rooted to the bottom, the seawater turned far muddier, making life hard on any plants or baby clams that tried to recolonize the bay.

"We were astounded," says Hilary Neckles of the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, who linked the destruction to the green crabs. "The ecological ramifications really reverberate throughout the ecosystem, because sea grass is the preferred habitat of so many fish and shellfish species."

Over the past decade, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world's oceans, allowing warm-water intruders to gain a toehold and earlier invaders such as the green crab to take over. Coupled with declines of the cold-loving species that have dominated the gulf for thousands of years, the ecological effects of even more gradual long-term warming are expected to be serious, even as precise forecasting remains beyond the state of scientific knowledge.

Scientists say the 2012 "ocean heat wave" was an unusual event, and that the 10-year accelerated warming trend is likely part of an oceanographic cycle and unlikely to continue. But the gulf has been consistently warming for more than 30 years, and long-term forecasts project average sea surface temperatures in our region could reach 2012-like levels by mid-century. The events of 2012 and the nearly as warm year that followed likely provide a preview of things to come, of a gulf radically transformed, with major implications for life on the Maine coast.

G

enevieve MacDonald, who fishes for lobster out of Stonington, was standing on the dock at Isle au Haut one morning that summer, looked in the water, and couldn't believe her eyes. There, swimming around the harbor like mackerel, were dozens and dozens of longfin squid, temperate creatures rarely seen in the chill waters of eastern Maine. "If you had a cast net you could have brought in a whole basket full of squid," she recalls.

Since then, people from Brunswick to Bristol have been encountering gigantic beds of gelatinous, finger-shaped pods in shallow water at low tide, some measuring four feet across. Researchers from the University of Maine's Darling Marine Center ran across one in the Damariscotta River in August 2014 and, perplexed as to what they were, brought them back to the lab. A colleague recognized it at once: a longfin squid egg mass containing thousands of squirming embryos.

The squid, apparently, are intending to stick around, and MacDonald hopes they do, since they're the stuff of calamari. "Climate change is real, but it might also provide some new opportunities if we're careful," she says. "Lobstering is really lucrative, and I hope it stays that way, but if something happens it would be nice to have a backup plan."

Marissa McMahan spent that notoriously warm summer of 2012 lobstering with her father out of Georgetown and encountered a different visitor, a large, stout gray-and-black fish she'd never seen before. The fish, which began turning up in lobster traps up and down the coast, was the black sea bass, a succulent mid-Atlantic species normally unable to tolerate Maine's cold sea.

McMahan is now a doctoral student at Northeastern University and doing her dissertation on how black sea bass are spreading and interacting with lobster and other native species. "I don't see anything to immediately worry about, but I talk to a lot of fishermen south of Cape Cod who think sea bass have played a role in reducing lobster numbers there," she says. "They tend to open up the sea bass they catch, and they do have a lot of lobsters inside them."

"It's a very sought-after and marketable fish, so it could create an economic subsidy where we're pretty much dependent on one single fishery," McMahan adds. "But if there are all these other species moving north, we may have a lot more predators on lobsters."

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ther invaders appear to have few upsides.

Larry Harris of the University of New Hampshire has been tracking the spread of an unpleasant Asian weed, the pancake batter tunicate, an ugly, bloblike sea squirt that grows in dense colonies that spread in sheets across the seafloor, smothering native creatures. "It can overgrow mussels and sponges and anemones and other species that provide food for predators," he says, noting that nothing here wants to eat it. "It's the tunicate from hell."

Brought to New England by shellfish farmers using Asian oysters, the tunicate used to die back each winter, but with the warmer water temperatures, its expanded over large swaths of the bottom from Passamaquoddy Bay to Georges Bank, where Harris thinks its presence may be contributing to the failure of cod stocks.

Green crabs, a European species introduced to the East Coast in the mid-19th century, reached Maine in the late 1940s, when the gulf began experiencing a warming spike second only to the present one. Then, as now, the crabs' assault on soft-shell clams made newspaper headlines. "Green Killers March On," the Portland Evening Express warned in January 1952, reporting that "old-timers suggest extreme cold and heavy sheet ice ... were responsible for keeping them under control."

The gulf has seen cold and warm cycles since, but with an ever warmer background trend, the green crabs appear to be doing more lasting damage.

With its 20-foot tides and miles of sheltered bottom, Cobscook Bay, a multi-chambered estuary in easternmost Maine, is to intertidal ecologists what the Amazon is to rainforest ones, a place where whelks and periwinkles grow to Jurassic proportions. Animals that normally live below the low-tide mark - accessible only by scuba or submarine - live in the intertidal zone here and can be studied with no more than a pair of boots.

Carl Merrill, director of Suffolk University's field station in Edmunds, on the western end of the bay, has been studying Cobscook's shores for nearly 40 years. In his surveys, he used to find both the smooth and rough periwinkles in concentrations of hundreds to thousands of individuals per square meter. Now he gets dozens or fewer per square meter. "The decline is substantial and very obvious," he says. "Sometimes you don't find one."

The culprit isn't harvesters - "wrinklers" collect the larger, non-native common periwinkle, which lives lower down the intertidal zone. "The green crab is the likely explanation," he says. The crustaceans appear to be picking the shore clean of the little snails, with unknown ecological effects.

T

he crabs also appear to be stripping much of the coast of mussels. On shorelines that 20 or 30 years ago would be carpeted with the bivalves - taking up half the available space - they now cover less than 10 percent. Water temperature and ocean acidification may be playing a role, but green crabs appear to be a large part of the picture, since wild larvae settle and grow just fine at mussel farms and on the undersides of buoys and other objects the crabs can't climb to.

Brian Beal, a marine shellfish ecologist at the University of Maine at Machias, says it's likely not just green crabs but also lobsters and even Asian shore crabs, another invasive species that's already become the dominant shore crab in seacoast New Hampshire. Together, he suspects, they're eating the juvenile mussels, which explains why the bivalve is found only in places crabs can't easily get to.

Warming is also responsible for the collapse of soft-shell clam populations in Freeport, Brunswick, Penobscot and other communities, Beal says. "As water temperature increases, we get a higher predation rate because most of the predators are invertebrates who are much more active in warm water," including milky ribbon worms, moon snails and, of course, the green crab, he adds.

To prove his point, in April 2014 Beal oversaw the placement of net-covered plots in Freeport's Harraseeket River, which were then seeded with juvenile clams. Seven months later, 90 percent of the seeded clams in all plots had survived, plus a staggering 1,400 wild clams per square foot were taking refuge under the nets, designed to stop green crabs from entering. "We estimated that close to 13 million wild clams settled into those 40 netted plots during that seven-month experiment," Beal said. Just a few feet away from the 40 nets, his team found just 0.4 clams per square foot, suggesting predators account for the difference.

"We know that when we have cold water we have more shellfish survival," says Freeport clammer Chad Coffin, president of the Maine Clammers Association. "The real question is what we are going to do when it gets really warm again."

I

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Invasive species exploit a warming Gulf of Maine, sometimes with destructive results

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ntil two years ago, if you had walked down to the shore of Maquoit Bay at low tide, you would have seen a meadow of eelgrass stretching nearly as far as the eye could see across the exposed seafloor.

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October 28th, 2015

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FRANKFURT - A remarkable period of growth ended at Volkswagen on Wednesday when the carmaker reported its first quarterly loss in at least 15 years and began the costly process of absorbing the expense of fixing millions of cars designed to cheat on emissions tests.

The day also was the end of a defining era of Volkswagen ambition. Matthias Müller, the new chief executive, signaled that the company would no longer be focused on becoming the world's largest carmaker.

He said on Wednesday that sales would cease to be an overriding measure of success. In another shift, he also said that top executives at company headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, who had been criticized for micromanaging, would no longer get involved in details of product design.

Mr. Müller's statement represents a clear break from his predecessor, Martin Winterkorn, who resigned in late September after the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States disclosed that Volkswagen diesel cars were equipped with software that could detect when a car was being tested and crank up pollution controls.

After he became chief executive in 2007, Mr. Winterkorn declared his determination to make Volkswagen the world's largest carmaker, overtaking Toyota. He was known for his intense attention to the technical fine points of the vehicles the company produced.

"A lot of things were subordinated to the desire to be faster, higher, larger," Mr. Müller said in a conference call with analysts and reporters on Wednesday. He also said, "I have no intention of intervening in the details of product design."

Mr. Winterkorn's management style, coupled with a relentless drive for growth, is cited by some critics of the company as a contributing factor to the scandal by impeding open communication and perhaps causing subordinates to cheat rather than admit failure.

The earnings report on Wednesday provided a first taste of the financial cost to Volkswagen of its past behavior. The company said it had a net loss of $1.84 billion in the third quarter as it set aside a huge sum to help cover the expected damage from the company's emissions-cheating scandal.

It was the first quarterly loss in as long as anyone could remember. A company spokesman said that internal records went back only to 2001. Previously, Volkswagen did not report quarterly earnings. The loss, totaling 1.67 billion euros, was in contrast to a profit of €2.97 billion in the third quarter of 2014.

Volkswagen subtracted €6.7 billion from profit to cover the expense of recalling and repairing about nine million cars in Europe and the United States equipped with the illegal software.

That sum does not cover the cost of fines Volkswagen is likely to have to pay to the E.P.A. and to other authorities around the world. Volkswagen also faces hundreds of lawsuits from customers who say the company sold them cars based on a false promise.

"It is still far too early to calculate the cost of legal measures," Frank Witter, the chief financial officer, said in the conference call on Wednesday.

The company said it expected profit for full-year 2015 "to be down significantly" from 2014. Volkswagen shares rose on Wednesday, but the stock is down more than 20 percent since the emissions cheating became known on Sept. 18.

During tests, the Volkswagen diesel engines with illegal software make full use of pollution controls and can pass emissions tests. But during regular operation, the engines emit many times the allowed amount of nitrogen oxide.

Because the deception became known less than two weeks before the end of the most recent reporting period, the third-quarter results provide only a glimpse of the fallout. Volkswagen executives said on Wednesday that they had not seen any signs that the damage to the company's reputation from the scandal had kept buyers away from showrooms. But they added they were closely watching for possible negative effects in the months to come.

Volkswagen said it had an operating loss of €3.5 billion in the quarter, compared with an operating profit of €3.2 billion a year earlier. The loss was partly offset by €1.5 billion in profit the company received for selling its nearly 20 percent stake in the Japanese vehicle maker Suzuki in September.

Sales in the quarter rose 5.3 percent to €51.5 billion, Volkswagen said, largely because of gains by its Audi, Bentley and Porsche divisions and favorable currency movements. However, the number of vehicles sold slipped to 2.35 million in the quarter from 2.44 million a year earlier.

The recent sales data showed that Volkswagen was vulnerable even before the scandal. Sales have been slumping in China, the company's largest market, and other important markets like Brazil, which is in a severe recession.

Shortly after the conference call Wednesday, Mr. Müller joined Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on a trip to China. He was expected to brief her on Volkswagen's response to the scandal.

Volkswagen this year briefly surpassed Toyota in the number of cars produced, but has since slipped back to No. 2. Mr. Müller said that while size was important - it allowed car companies to spread costs of development over more vehicles - Volkswagen would put more emphasis on factors like customer satisfaction and profitability.

"The point is not whether we sell 100,000 more or less than a major competitor," he said.

Mr. Müller said that Volkswagen was conducting its own investigation of how the emissions cheating occurred, but provided no new details on the progress of the inquiry. "We need to find out the truth and learn from it," he said.

Volkswagen had advertised that its "clean diesel" motors were environmentally responsible while delivering excellent fuel economy and performance. But the deceptive software made that economy and performance possible only by allowing the engines to emit up to 40 times the allowable limit of nitrogen oxide, an air pollutant that can be harmful to lungs.

The German government has ordered Volkswagen to recall 8.5 million vehicles in Europe with the software, and the company has said it will repair an additional 500,000 in the United States at no cost to customers. But it remains unclear how the company can make the cars compliant with air quality regulations without also hurting performance and fuel economy.

Any fix that hurts the cars' resale value will provide ammunition to disgruntled customers and their lawyers.

Mr. Müller has raised the possibility of job cuts because of the cost of the scandal and has said Volkswagen will cut spending on new projects. The company employs 614,000 people worldwide.

Analysts say that Volkswagen, which said on Wednesday it had €28 billion in cash on hand, can probably absorb the financial blow of the scandal. But spending on crucial new technologies like self-driving cars could suffer at a time when the industry faces potential new competition from Google and Apple. Both companies have been working on car-related projects.

"The financial burden from the diesel crisis is enormous but manageable," Mr. Witter, the chief financial officer, said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Diesel Scandal Pushes Volkswagen to Its First Loss in Over a Decade. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Volkswagen, Hit by Emissions Scandal, Posts Its First Loss in Years

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FRANKFURT - A remarkable period of growth ended at Volkswagen on Wednesday when the carmaker reported its first quarterly loss in at least 15 years and began the costly process of absorbing the expense of fixing millions of cars designed to cheat on emissions tests.

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October 21st, 2015

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Global temperatures are running far above last year's record-setting level, all but guaranteeing that 2015 will be the hottest year in the historical record - and undermining political claims that global warming had somehow stopped.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American agency that tracks worldwide temperatures, announced Wednesday that last month had been the hottest September on record, and in fact took the biggest leap above the previous September that any month has displayed since 1880, when tracking began at a global scale. The agency also announced that the January-to-September period had been the hottest such span on the books.

The extreme heat and related climate disturbances mean that delegates to a global climate conference scheduled for Paris in early December will almost certainly be convening as weather-related disasters are unfolding around the world, putting them under greater political pressure to reach an ambitious deal to limit future emissions and slow the temperature increase.

The immediate cause of the record-breaking warmth is a strong El Niño weather pattern, in which the ocean releases immense amounts of heat into the atmosphere. But temperatures are running so far ahead of those during the last strong El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, that scientists said the records would not be occurring without an underlying trend caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

"The bottom line is that the world is warming," said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with NOAA, in Asheville, N.C.

She pointed to measurements in several of the world's ocean basins, where surface temperatures are as much as three degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, a substantial increase when calculated over such large areas.

"We're seeing it all across the Indian Ocean, in huge parts of the Atlantic Ocean, in parts of the Arctic oceans," Dr. Blunden said in an interview. "It's just incredible to me. I've never seen anything like this before."

The combined effects of El Niño and greenhouse warming are already roiling weather patterns worldwide, probably contributing to dry weather and forest fires in Indonesia, to an incipient drought in Australia and to a developing food emergency across parts of Africa, including a severe drought in Ethiopia. Those effects are likely to intensify in coming months as the El Niño reaches its peak and then gradually subsides.

Past patterns suggest that El Niño will send unusual amounts of rain and snow to the American Southwest and to California, offering some relief for that parched state but also precipitating floods and mudslides. The California effects are not a certainty, experts said, but if they come, they are likely to be strongest in the latter part of the winter.

Earlier this year, the global warmth contributed to a spring heat wave in India and Pakistan that killed many people, possibly several thousand, with temperatures hitting 118 degrees in parts of India. The effects on the natural world have also been severe, with extreme ocean temperatures bleaching coral reefs around the world, and many of them likely to suffer lasting damage.

Forecasters have been issuing warnings about a strong El Niño. The coming few months will test whether governments, and the global relief agencies that support poor countries, have prepared, particularly to provide food relief for hard-hit regions.

"The warning is out," said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, in New York. "The world has had time to plan for this."

Though worldwide in its consequences, El Niño originates in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, when normal weather patterns shift in a way that allows the ocean to release large amounts of stored-up heat into the atmosphere. That perturbs atmospheric waves that can travel thousands of miles, redistributing heat and moisture around the globe.

The effects can be profound, with some research even suggesting that civil wars become more likely in tropical countries when they are under stress from an El Niño.

The World Food Program, a United Nations relief agency, is preparing for expanded operations across Africa, and appealing for donations. Harvests are down across large stretches of that continent, and the number of people going hungry in Ethiopia is likely to be in the millions in coming months, relief groups have estimated.

Scientists have long wondered whether human-induced global warming would alter the frequency or severity of El Niños, but so far, that does not seem to be the case. "We have no reason at this point to think that El Niño itself is responding to the forcing from greenhouse gases," Dr. Seager said. "You can think of them as independent and adding to each other."

For much of the past decade, people who question established climate science have been claiming that global warming had stopped. Their argument depended on picking a particular base year - almost always 1998, the final year of the last strong El Niño - as their starting point.

But mainstream climate scientists said that was a statistically invalid cherry-picking of the data, and their analysis of the entire record showed that global warming never stopped - at most, the rise of surface temperatures slowed somewhat, even as the oceans continued to warm at a brisk pace.

The record-setting warmth of 2014 and 2015 has undermined the idea that the problem of greenhouse emissions had somehow solved itself, though some Washington politicians continue to repeat the claims. Climate scientists have not wavered in their view that the long-term temperature increase poses profound risks and that emissions must be brought under control.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: 2015 Likely to Be Hottest Year on Record. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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2015 Likely to Be Hottest Year Ever Recorded

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Global temperatures are running far above last year's record-setting level, all but guaranteeing that 2015 will be the hottest year in the historical record - and undermining political claims that global warming had somehow stopped.

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September 11th, 2015

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Burning all the world's deposits of coal, oil and natural gas would raise the temperature enough to melt the entire ice sheet covering Antarctica, driving the level of the sea up by more than 160 feet, scientists reported Friday.

In a major surprise to the scientists, they found that half the melting could occur in as little as a thousand years, causing the ocean to rise by something on the order of a foot per decade, roughly 10 times the rate at which it is rising now. Such a pace would almost certainly throw human society into chaos, forcing a rapid retreat from the world's coastal cities.

The rest of the earth's land ice would melt along with Antarctica, and warming ocean waters would expand, so that the total rise of the sea would likely exceed 200 feet, the scientists said.

"To be blunt: If we burn it all, we melt it all," said Ricarda Winkelmann, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and the lead author of a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

A sea level rise of 200 feet would put almost all of Florida, much of Louisiana and Texas, the entire East Coast of the United States, large parts of Britain, much of the European Plain, and huge parts of coastal Asia under water. The cities lost would include Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Washington, New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm, London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney, Rome and Tokyo.

Nobody alive today, nor even their grandchildren, would live to see such a calamity unfold, given the time the melting would take. Yet the new study gives a sense of the risks that future generations face if emissions of greenhouse gases are not brought under control.

"This is humanity as a geologic force," said Ken Caldeira, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., and another author of the paper. "We're not a subtle influence on the climate system - we are really hitting it with a hammer."

Climate scientists have long assumed that countries would recognize the dangers of continuing to dig up and burn the world's fossil fuels. Yet they have been saying that for 30 years, and political efforts in that time to limit the burning have been ineffectual.

With a major push from President Obama, the nations of the world will convene in Paris in December in another attempt to reach an ambitious deal for reducing emissions. Yet Mr. Obama faces fierce opposition from the Republican Party in putting limits into effect in the United States, which uses more fossil fuels per person than any other large country.

The long-running political gridlock has prompted scientists to start thinking about worst-case scenarios. And recently, major advances have been made in the computerized analysis of the huge ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland.

The researchers involved in Friday's paper decided to use one of these ice-sheet models to attempt the most detailed analysis yet of the potential consequences of burning all fossil fuels. As the first of its kind, the paper is likely to undergo intense scientific scrutiny.

In certain ways, the findings are reassuring. They offer no reason, for instance, to revise the sea-level forecast for the coming century.

A United Nations panel has said that the rise of the sea would not likely exceed three feet in that period, and would probably be less. While some island nations may be wiped out by a rise of that magnitude, experts believe most major cities could be protected from it, though at a likely cost in the trillions of dollars.

The ice sheets respond slowly enough to changes in the climate that it simply takes longer than a century for large-scale melting to begin. But from that point, the paper found, about half the Antarctic ice sheet would melt or fall into the sea in the first thousand years.

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Ricarda Winkelmann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Antarctica. "If we burn it all, we melt it all," she said. Credit Maria Martin/Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

"I didn't expect it would go so fast," Dr. Caldeira said. "To melt all of Antarctica, I thought it would take something like 10,000 years."

The more basic finding that the whole ice sheet could eventually melt is less surprising, at least to scientists who specialize in studying the history of the earth. "As a paleoclimate person, I don't feel like this is necessarily a shock to me," said Robert E. Kopp, a professor of earth system history at Rutgers University, who studies sea level but was not involved in the new research.

Paleoclimatologists have established that Antarctica was once a lush, green continent, icing over only in the past 35 million years, amid a general cooling of the world's climate. Moreover, rates of sea level rise like those outlined in the paper have occurred in the past.

Human civilization is built on the premise that the level of the sea is stable, as indeed it has been for several thousand years. But the deeper history of the earth reveals enormous shifts, on the order of a hundred feet or more within a few thousand years.

Sea levels far higher than those of today have been documented at more than a thousand sites around the world. Along the East Coast, seashells from just 3 million years ago can be dug up by the shovel-full a hundred miles inland from the current shore.

Studying this evidence, scientists concluded long ago that the great ice sheets are sensitive to small changes in the earth's average temperature, caused by wobbles in its orbit around the sun. They believe that human emissions are about to produce a large change.

Though the climate is still in the earliest stages of this shift, the ice sheets in both Greenland and the low-lying, western part of Antarctica are already showing serious signs of instability.

The higher, colder ice sheet in eastern Antarctica, by far the largest chunk of land ice on the planet, had long been assumed to be more stable. But for several years, evidence has been accumulating that at least large parts of that ice sheet are vulnerable, too.

The new study confirms previous findings that how much of the world's ice will melt is closely linked to how much total fossil fuel humans burn. These studies suggest that a rapid shift away from those fuels over coming decades would preserve much of the ice, or at least slow the melting drastically.

On the other hand, if the use of fossil fuels were to continue rising at the same rate it rose over the past century, the estimated deposits would be burned by about the middle of the 22 nd century, Dr. Caldeira said, and complete destruction of the world's land ice would be well underway.

The exact timing is open to question, he said, but "the idea that most of it would melt, I believe, is a robust result."

Scientists focus on melting ice in part because the consequences are relatively easy to visualize. But if anything like the scenario in the paper were to play out in the real world, the problems would go far beyond a rise of the sea and a retreat from the coasts.

In a rough calculation, the scientists found that burning all fossil fuels might raise the average temperature of the planet by something like 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Past research suggests that an increase that enormous would likely render vast stretches of the earth too hot and humid for human habitation, cause food production to collapse, and drive much of the plant and animal life of the planet to extinction.

In interviews, scientists said that such long-term risks raise profound moral questions for people of today.

"What right do we have to do things that, even if they don't affect us, are going to be someone else's problem a thousand years from now?" asked Ian Joughin, an ice sheet expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new research. "Is it fair to do that so we can go on burning fuel as fast as we can?"

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Using Up Earth's Fossil Fuels Would Destroy All Ice, Research Says. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Study Predicts Antarctica Ice Melt if All Fossil Fuels Are Burned

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Burning all the world's deposits of coal, oil and natural gas would raise the temperature enough to melt the entire ice sheet covering Antarctica, driving the level of the sea up by more than 160 feet, scientists reported Friday.